At the end of the day I don't care whether anticheat methods are kept secret are not, whether we let the players detect other cheaters or whether we let a third party software company do it.
I do see, however, that games like BF3, SC2, CSS etc have nowhere near the problems with cheating going on that CoH does. Sure, there has been the occasional maphack incident in SC2, but in CoH1 you will run into a cheater within an hour of automatching guaranteed.
Based on that I do believe in third party software to battle cheating. Since Relic already let Coh1 get overrun by cheaters and basically does nothing to stop it hearing them say "we won't disclose our methods but we will get them" doesn't exactly give me a lot of confidence CoH2 will indeed be cheat free.
All in all it kinda feels like they don't really care all that much. At least, not enough to shell out the cash to get decent Punkbuster support I suppose...
@Crawler: Yep, there will always be cheats. Now go and compare BF3 cheatuse with CoH1 cheatuse. It's night and day.
I contacted Noun about Relics view on anticheat. His answer was somewhere along the lines of "We have some stuff planned but were not telling the crowd so potential cheaters cant try to work around it"
Now this answer is surprisingly similar to the answer Relic always gave concerning CoH1. Unfortunately, we all know what that meant: the manual review of replays being sent to Relic to see if maphacking/drophacking/other shit was going on. Basically it meant one person was dedicating his time to track down cheaters and ban them (who could then buy a new key for 2 or 3 dollars, but thats another subject entirely).
Supposedly CoH2 once again working with P2P also pretty much rules out any decent form of anticheat software, since for that you apparently have to run the game on your own servers. This essentially means that a Punkbuster or a VAC will never be possible for COH2.
It's just so sad cause I really LOVE CoH2. Unfortunately, as soon as the first maphack cheat is released I'll probably refrain from playing it just as I did with CoH1. The feeling of starting a new game, and knowing that your opponent MIGHT just see everything you're doing is excruciating to say the least.
So I beg you Relic: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give this game some form of proper Anticheat software. If you don't, it's dead in the water.