I agree with everything you say here, but I thought the setup-payoff joke structure and the fact I intentionally swapped testing and production for comedic effect made it obvious enough. I guess Poe’s law strikes again.

Every software project, without exception, has a testing environment.

Some even have a separate production environment too.

Absolutely. Linux AMD drivers are rock solid due to them actually participating in the ecosystem and pushing the drivers directly to the kernel team in a proper open source format.

The heroes are vastly different from one another, and are very different in terms of skill ceiling and floor. Meepo and Invoker are considered the two most mechanically demanding heroes, and should never be played by a new player.

Contrast this with Bristleback, whose gameplay consists of right-clicking an enemy and spamming W, then turning around and running away if they fight back too hard. There’s also Sven, whose gameplay consists of using a stun ability, right-clicking an enemy, and they’re probably dead. Axe, whose gameplay consists of running in and hoping people are stupid enough to hit you, and using your taunt ability to force them to do it if they aren’t.

Finally, there’s Sniper. You right-click enemies. That’s about it. He has a slow and a long-range nuke spell, but if you’ve right-clicked an enemy you’re at least helping.

Of course, higher skilled matches change things drastically and more complex teamwork and ability use is needed at those levels, but for a new player, these heroes are all very simple and straightforward to use.

Completely agree that there are a ton of ways around client-side anti-cheat. There have even been cases where pros have been caught with mice with in-built macros that spoofs themselves as a kb+mouse combo in in-person tournament settings where the computers are completely controlled and the players can’t install anything.

I was answering specifically the point about mechanical skill in MOBAs.

At least in Dota 2, macros can give huge advantages. For example, cycling through every meepo to start a poof and blinking takes ~10 inputs in a precise order with an extremely tight timing window. Very mechanically demanding. A macro can execute it perfectly with a single button press instantly. Similar with Invokers Invoke ability for sequenced combos of specific spells.

I honestly have no idea if an equivalently demanding sequence of inputs exists in LoL.

This is specifically a UK problem. The Tories have been trying to do absolutely retarded things with banning encryption for a long time now.