10 Video Game Developer Roles You Didn't Know Exist
5. Anti-Cheat Engineer
Oh. OH. I didn't realise that, in addition to having an M14 and two grenades, the assault character class could also fly, walk through walls, and shoot me with a pistol from the other side of the map! How powerful!
Cheating in online games is as ubiquitous as swearing is in... well, online games. So, in the endless game of whack-a-mole against those talentless, cheating little cretins, many development teams deploy their anti-cheat task force... the anti-cheat engineer!
A mixture of proactive research and reactive fixes, this specialised programmer's job is to find susceptibilities to an online game's code and to fix it before too many players' games are ruined irreparably.
This means that the anti-cheat engineer will always be on the move; the job requires the engineer to scan the game's design (to try to predict areas where a cheater might attempt to try to slip a cheat past the dev team), and to react to unfolding cheat types, building fixes to be deployed rapidly. Part psychologist, part fixer!
If you like the idea of being the super-cool anti-hacker-man, the counter-operative stopping the baddies badding, then get a pair of rad reflective shades and start applying for jobs as an anti-cheat engineer.