Just how difficult is hacker security on a competitive game?

I've been planning co-op only for quite a while, assuming that if I went competitive, the ensuing hacker arms-race would drown me.

Honestly though, I don't seriously know the landscape from a tech perspective. What are we looking at here?

 

It's a very broad question. Essentially you want your client to be super-dumb and all of the game logic and state management to happen on the server side where hackers should not have access.
Depending on what features your game supports you will have to deal with basically any possible game mechanic or in-game economy exploit that people can possibly think of. What can be abused will eventually be abused. Especially if the game becomes very popular and it provides rewards that players find interesting.

And then there's also DDos-ing. I don't know how popular it is for online games these days, hopefully not too much. Maybe this is something that happens mostly to the big names, although services like Cloudflare seem to be growing more and more in the field of online gaming.

 

You may want to take a look at the "SmartFoxServer 2X Security" white paper, available on this page: http://docs2x.smartfoxserver.com/Overview/white-papers (the third one)
As the name suggests, it discusses security in SmartFoxServer, but the concepts explained should apply to most client-server multiplayer contexts. Hope this gives an insight into the topic.

 

Thanks very much, both of you, that helps! Good to have something to orient myself to.

MrsPiggy - Yeesh. Sounds like quite a task.

 

The issue will likely only become one once your game gets a certain amount of popularity. Hacking can take many forms though. As already mentioned, a "super dumb" client is ideal, where the server does everything and the client just sends inputs to the server and displays the game.

Sometimes forgotten though you need to be concerned about sending too much data to the client. If your game relies on any stealth elements, but you're sending position updates for things the player shouldn't be aware of, they can be used for cheating.