Thinking about competitive integrity
Essays on trust, evidence, and the technology behind verified play.
Preseason
On the patient wait before the real competition, and what the waiting is for.
There is a kind of waiting every competitor knows. Patient and on fire at the same time. I have been in it most of my life, and I finally understand what it was for.
The League Is Open
Vera has a forum now. It works the way everything here works, on the record.
The League is Vera's forum. One identity, no downvotes, moderation that shows its work in a public log, and four rooms waiting for the people who set the tone. The door is open.
Where cheats hide now
Anti-cheat runs at the deepest level of your PC. So how is anyone still cheating? Because the newest cheats aren't on your PC at all. Here is the plain-words map, and what it costs the honest player.
The best cheats have climbed out of reach of the software built to catch them. They moved from the game's memory, to a second piece of hardware, to a whole separate computer that just watches your screen. Once you can see that ladder, you understand why anti-cheat stopped looking for cheats and started judging your play, and why that lands hardest on the people who never cheated.
Lobby crashing, untangled
A new entry in the Field Guide. One phrase hides three different problems, and once you can tell them apart, the whole topic gets simple and what fixes it gets obvious.
When a game drops your whole lobby, it can mean three completely different things, and only one of them is serious. We built a plain-words reference that sorts them out, shows where the pattern recurs across the biggest games, and ends on the part nobody leads with: the engineering that already stops it.
Played in the open
Play on PlayStation or Xbox? Vera works for you now. One home for your clips, whatever you play on, and the good ones are memories worth keeping.
Console players can build a Vera record now, straight from their gameplay clips. No agent, no app store, public by default. One place to keep, share, and look back on your play, whatever you're on. Here is how it works.
The trust crossplay forgot
Console players are turning off crossplay to dodge cheaters. The platforms finally let us play together. The trust never caught up.
In April, Call of Duty let console players turn off crossplay with PC to escape cheaters. The mechanics united us years ago. The trust never did. Here is the gap, plain, and what closes it.
The image is the proof
How we drew the Field Guide. Every driver, game, and process wears a mark generated from its own verifiable record, on a two-hundred-year-old anti-forgery craft, so the picture is struck from the record itself, and is beautiful anyway.
We could have built the Field Guide as a table. Most security references are. Instead every entry wears a mark struck from its own record: a driver presses a wax seal, a game strikes a coin, a process is mounted as a specimen. Nobody draws them. The drawing is the proof. This is how it works, and why we thought the people who never get the reference made for them deserved one that was also beautiful.
A signature is a receipt, not a verdict
Our process collector is unsigned. Here is why that is not the contradiction it looks like, and how to check us anyway.
Every dangerous driver in our Field Guide has one thing in common. They are all signed. The certificate did not make them safe. So when we shipped our own collector, we had to decide what we actually wanted you to trust. We did not buy the checkmark. Here is what we did instead.
Built With
Imagine a competitive scene where your record exists before anyone needs you to prove anything. We are building toward that world, and we want help figuring out the rest.
We are building toward a competitive scene where your record exists before anyone needs you to prove anything. A handful of records on the site, a new Field Guide, a side-by-side surface for disputes. A long way to go. We are looking for insiders, not customers.
A field guide to your own machine
Look up anything running on your gaming PC: the drivers, the background processes, the anti-cheat that loads before the game does, each in plain words. Because the gate that decides what loads doesn't check what you think it checks, and the people who never get a reference made for them deserve one.
There is a driver on your gaming PC right now that is on a public list of tools used in real intrusions. There are probably several. The same software that reads your GPU temperature, lights your RGB, runs inside your anti-cheat. This is the story of why that is true, why the industry doesn't tell you in plain words, and what we built so that you can finally see for yourself.
A Generation Worth Believing
Two rivals, an accusation, and a war nobody wins. A vision for what competitive play becomes when the proof comes before the fight.
It starts with a clip and ends with two careers under a cloud. The cheating-accusation war was never really about cheating. It was about having no way to know. Here is what changes for a generation of brilliant, doubted young competitors when the record exists before the accusation does.
Keep the Part You Couldn't Reach
A note on the slow, silent work, and on what a failure is actually worth.
Most of the work that matters leaves no trace. We spent a quiet day on the kind no one will ever see, and found a smaller truth waiting in it. The thing you couldn't reach is not nothing. It's often the most honest part of the record.
Present Is Not Proof
We built a check that can spot genuinely dangerous things on a PC. The first thing it taught us was when not to raise the alarm.
A vulnerable driver showed up on one of our own machines, from a tool millions of gamers run. The easy move was a red flag. We didn't make it. Here is why, and what it means if you have ever been good enough to get accused.
Smell the Flowers
We got a golden retriever named Maeve. Raising her is a reminder that wanting something is only stage one, and the work of how is the only magic there is.
A puppy, the instincts we are all born with, and why the patient work of helping a powerful creature become gentle is the same work behind everything worth trusting.
The Horse Who Waved Me Over
Some mornings ask you to slow down and pay attention. This one did, and I am still turning over what it showed me.
A quiet morning on a neighbor's farm, a horse that asked for help, and what an hour of actually paying attention had to say about being seen, being believed, and whether the work was ever for nothing.
You Can't Score Curiosity
It may be the truest signal a mind gives off, and it never shows up in the answer. Which is exactly why Vera keeps evidence instead of handing down a score.
Curiosity is nearly impossible to measure, because it lives in the path, not the result. The things most worth trusting all share that trait, and it's the reason proof has to be something you can inspect, not a verdict you're told to accept.
You're Early
If you just found Vera, here's what you walked into, and why being early is the whole point.
A welcome for the people just arriving. What Vera is, why it's built for you specifically, and why the record you start today is worth more than the one you'll wish you had later.
On What It Takes
What the milestones actually cost, written down plainly.
I expected the hard part of building Vera to be the code. It almost never was. This is about the rest of it, the work nobody sees, and why the milestones cost what they do.
A Solution Looking for a Market
We know. Here's why we're building anyway.
Vera doesn't have product-market fit. We're aware. This is about why we're building it anyway, what we've learned, and what comes next.
The Same Kind of Brave
A music page, and the courage it takes to be seen.
We built a music page this week. It turned into a reflection on the artists, competitors, and builders bold enough to put the real thing in front of the world, and why proof exists to protect them.
272%
AI-driven cheats tripled this season. The industry is building bigger walls. We think that's the wrong question.
AI-based cheat detections surged 272% in a single competitive season. The detect-and-ban model is breaking. The question isn't how to detect better. It's what trust looks like when detection alone isn't enough.
Neutrality Is a Product Decision
Everyone wants us to issue verdicts. Here's why we never will.
The most common question Vera gets: does it tell you if someone's cheating? The answer is no. And it will always be no. The neutrality is the product.
The Accusation Economy
Why doubt sticks faster than defense, and what infrastructure for being believed could look like.
In competitive gaming, being accused of cheating is functionally the same as being caught, because there's no mechanism to prove innocence. The accusation is the verdict.
The Ghost of Al Mazrah
DMZ was the best game mode I've ever played. Cheaters killed it. Activision buried it. And every leak says it's coming back.
DMZ wasn't just a game mode. It was a promise that extraction shooters could feel like home. Then cheaters crashed the servers, Activision pulled the plug, and a community was left in the rubble. With every leak now pointing to DMZ's return in the next Call of Duty, this is a love letter to what we lost, and a case for why the return demands something the original never had: proof.
The Quiet Season
What happens when you stop building and start listening.
Vera's blog has been quiet. Not because the project stopped mattering, but because the person building it needed to get better at the things that matter most.
What Your Setup Says About You
Vera now records system profiles. Here's what we see, and what we don't.
Vera recently shipped system information collection as part of every session's evidence. Here's what that means in practice, what we redact, and why the distinction matters for trust.
Reputation Shouldn't Need a Publicist
Why we built Vera, and why it matters more than we expected.
Competitive gaming has a trust problem. Not because cheaters are winning, but because innocent players are losing. Vera exists to change the math.
What If Your Inputs Could Vouch for You?
Vera records what's running. The deeper question is whether the inputs themselves carry a signature, and what it would actually take to read it.
System-state proof tells you no cheat was running. Behavioral proof tells you the human behind the inputs is who they say they are. This is a technical look at what that second layer would measure, how it would survive an adversary, and why the verification story matters more than the detection one.