Never Trust the Client — MoreRight Paper 6

Three Games. One Structure.

CS2, StarCraft 2, and Dota 2 each provide independent Pe measurements across different game mechanics — and all three confirm the same prediction: information asymmetry drives engagement outcomes.

CS2 — Positional Pe

4.4×

Clean kills show 4.4× higher Pe than contested kills (N=2,299, p < 0.0001). Information asymmetry — not aim — predicts the decisive kill.

SC2 — Temporal Pe

2×

Tournament winners have 2× lower Pe than losers (N=474, p < 0.0001). Better scouting — lower information asymmetry — predicts match outcomes.

Dota 2 — Visual Pe

82.9%

82.9% of teamfight deaths occur in or near fog of war (N=3,682). The void produces the decisive moment — overwhelmingly.

Relative Pe across genres (clean/fog vs contested/scouted baseline):

Dashed line = Pe=1 boundary. All three game samples are supercritical. Chess is the control.

The Four-Void Coupled System

Multiplayer gaming isn't one void — it's four, coupled through the observer. Suspicion of an opponent feeds distrust of anti-cheat, which feeds conspiracy about matchmaking, which feeds hostility toward all opponents. Click each void to expand.

V1 The Opponent — Player-to-Player Opacity D1 → hackusation

You cannot see the opponent's screen, inputs, software, or intent. Skill and cheating are indistinguishable by observation alone — every death could be legitimate or not. The term "hackusation" — accusing a skilled player of cheating — is D1 applied directly. The opponent is opaque, responsive, and commands your full attention. All three conditions met.

V2 The Client — Server-to-Client Opacity never trust the client

The server cannot see what software the client is running — only what the client reports. This is the void that "never trust the client" addresses. Three independent networking architectures (FPS client-server, RTS lockstep, fighting game rollback) each discovered the same constraint specification through failure, without awareness of each other's theoretical implications.

V3 The Anti-Cheat — Player-to-Anti-Cheat Opacity Vanguard controversy

The system built to fight a void has become one. Anti-cheat must be opaque (revealing detection methods enables evasion), responsive (ban waves update in response to new cheats), and players attend to it intensely. Kernel-level access, ring-0 drivers, and invasive scanning generate their own drift cascade — Riot's Vanguard and GameGuard are case studies. The framework predicts this: fighting opacity with opacity cannot converge. The arms race has no interior fixed point.

V4 The Matchmaking System — Player-to-System Opacity SBMM conspiracy cycle

MMR values and matching algorithms are hidden by design. The system responds to player performance. Players obsess over perceived patterns. EA's 2017 Engagement Optimized Matchmaking research — optimizing for retention rather than fairness — provides enough evidence to fuel L3 attribution while the opacity prevents falsification. Activision secretly reduced SBMM for 50% of players; over 90% played less. The system worked — but its opacity prevented players from seeing that it worked.

Three Architectures. Three Independent Derivations.

FPS, RTS, and fighting games each independently converged on the constraint specification — transparent, invariant, independent — through engineering failure. The framework predicts which cheat each architecture produces.

FPS — Client-Server

RTS — Lockstep

Fighting — Rollback

Property	Implementation	What breaks when missing
Transparent	Server sees all game state	ESP / wallhack — client reads hidden state
Invariant	Server rules don't change per client claim	Speed hacks — client reports false position
Independent	Server runs on dedicated hardware	Host advantage — peer host controls authority

Pe floor at 128-tick: Pe_floor = Δt_pa × tick_rate ≈ 18. The peeker's advantage is an irreducible architectural constraint — it cannot be tuned to zero under physics. Higher tick rates lower the floor, which is exactly why they "feel more fair."

Property	Implementation	Cheat surface
Void flips	Every client has the complete game state	Maphack — fog of war is a rendering filter only
Constraint	Deterministic lockstep + desync detection	AoE2 shipped with an accidental built-in maphack on day one
Control case	aoe2.net publishes visible Elo	AoE2 community: minimal "rigged matchmaking" conspiracy vs hidden-MMR FPS

SC2 winners show 2× lower Pe than losers because better scouting dissolves the fog-of-war void. Chess.com publishing Elo ratings is the matchmaking-transparency control: visible MMR eliminates the matchmaking conspiracy cascade.

Property	Status	Consequence
Transparent	Complete — both peers see all state	No state-reading cheats possible
Invariant	Complete — rules are local and shared	Desync = immediate detection
Independent	Missing — no external authority	No structural anti-cheat possible

Rollback achieves transparency and invariance but cannot achieve independence without a server. The predicted cheat surface: input manipulation — automated frame-perfect inputs, hitbox overlays, reaction-time assists. Nothing about reading hidden state (nothing is hidden).

Platform Scores — Multiplayer Games

Void index across 7 platforms (0–12). Chess.com is the constraint control: visible Elo dissolves two of the four voids.

FIFA Ultimate Team 11/12

Gacha Mobile Games 11/12

Call of Duty (SBMM) 9/12

Fortnite / Battle Royale 8/12

League of Legends / VALORANT 8/12

CS2 (Competitive) 7/12

Chess.com (Constraint) 3/12

Read the Full Paper

Complete derivations — Pe floor theorem, arms race non-convergence proof, four-void coupling matrix, seven falsifiable predictions.

Full Paper on Zenodo ← Paper 5: Ground State Gaming Domain

Paper 6 · v2.5 · February 2026 · MoreRight License v1.1 · 10.5281/zenodo.18738828