Exactly… Source code or not, it doesn’t make much of a difference UNLESS: You publish your entire game as source code too…
Other than that you have to be either quite naive to think that not having server side protection will get your far or you are just inviting the wolfves to your home.
There are no games that can be made reasonably safe without server side protection. For games like Battlefield 3, adding server side protection can be quite tricky & too complex. In that case you need to fallback on sanity checks. For instance you should be worried if a player manages to move with the speed of light across your map. That’s just impossible. Also you should be worried if a player:
- Can kill people through walls, unless allowed by game mechanics
- Other players repeatedly type “report cheater” into the console
- Players are on top of the leaderboard => make “ghost view” possible to allow admins to actually follow such a player when he plays and see if he can do anything unusual which means he is probably cheating.
- use other statistics & heuristic to identify potential cheaters and then use ghost view to validate your claims…