[HN Gopher] Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with...
___________________________________________________________________
Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or
Wine/Proton
Author : doener
Score : 256 points
Date : 2025-12-01 07:05 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (areweanticheatyet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (areweanticheatyet.com)
| stavros wrote:
| Hm, most of these seem updated 3-4 years ago, is this list
| relevant any more?
| Zhyl wrote:
| Do you have examples of where something isn't accurate? If
| something hasn't changed it doesn't need to be updated. As far
| as I'm aware the things that change are updated quickly, hence
| the list is relevant.
| stavros wrote:
| No, I just assumed things would change a lot.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| While some anti cheat supports Linux they're mostly useless as
| you can much more easily bypass them on Linux compared to
| windows. I guess enabling them for competitive games is one way
| to increase Linux users.
| hastily3114 wrote:
| Is there really no way to make anti-cheat on Linux that can't be
| bypassed? I don't know much about this, but it seems very
| difficult to make an anti-cheat for a platform where you can make
| changes in the kernel.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| Linux explicitely allows you to do things that makes cheating
| *really* easy.
|
| There is also complete lack of secure boot and a way to
| validate that your kernel hasn't been compromised.
|
| I mean seriously, making a cheat for a proton supported game
| that no anticheat has any hopes of detecting are in 100 lines
| of a kmod driver and 1 console command: insmod.
|
| On windows you at least need to use scuffed tools like KDU to
| bypass signature verification requirements and every anticheat
| can detect you with a simple physical memory scan.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Linux supports secure boot just fine, it's just happy
| (correctly, IMO) to give the keys to the _user_ and not the
| _developer_.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Unfortunately right now SteamOS does not support secure
| boot or measured boot.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| yah my bad: vendor defined secure boot*
| kalaksi wrote:
| > There is also complete lack of secure boot
|
| That's not true, though?
| kachapopopow wrote:
| well lack of secure boot is bad wording, lack of vendor
| defined secure boot.
| Zak wrote:
| I think the most stringent types of Windows anti-cheat rely on
| remote attestation of the operating system. It's theoretically
| possible to design a Linux-based OS that supports such a
| capability, but the sort of people who choose Linux are
| unlikely to accept a third party having the final say over
| their computer.
|
| I, for one am disappointed that _anyone_ has accepted it. Once
| it 's widespread, service providers can demand it, as we're
| seeing with mobile banking apps and game anticheat.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| I also strongly dislike requiring remote attestation for any
| kind of software I want to run. But what I also dislike is
| cheaters in my online games and I genuinely do not have a
| better suggestion on what to do.
|
| Personally, I run Windows purely for gaming and don't let it
| near any important data. For the latter, I boot into Linux
| with separately encrypted disks.
| progbits wrote:
| I'm doing the same but I worry about windows compromise
| messing with the bootloader so then encrypted linux drive
| won't save me. Probably too paranoid though?
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| If you use secure boot and don't let your keys near
| Windows, you should be fine even if your Windows install
| is compromised. Unless you don't trust Microsoft
| themselves, in which case you'd need to re-enroll keys
| whenever switching operating systems, which is possible,
| but very tedious.
| amiga386 wrote:
| >But what I also dislike is cheaters in my online games and
| I genuinely do not have a better suggestion on what to do.
|
| You can't suggest "run online games as close-knit social
| groups, with social exclusion punishments for cheaters",
| which is how most online games used to be run. How old are
| you?
|
| Game vendors used to be happy letting us host and run our
| own multiplayer games, until they realised they could get
| more money out of us -- "battle passes", microtransactions,
| ability to forcibly turn off multiplayer of older game when
| newer remake comes out -- and now they've made themselves a
| mandatory part of your online experience. You have to use
| their matchmaking and their servers. So now it's down to
| them to solve the problem of cheaters, enabled by their
| centralised matchmaking... and their only solution is
| remote attestation of your machine and yet more data
| collection?
| jsheard wrote:
| A trusted entity (probably Valve) could provide a locked down
| distro where kernel integrity is enforced through secure boot
| and TPM attestation, but that would mean giving up some control
| over your own system. There's no guarantee that anything
| client-side is impossible to bypass of course, but the goal
| would be to more or less match what Windows offers, which isn't
| perfect either.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| > giving up some control over your own system
|
| There could simply be a developer option that disables these
| integrity checks but subsequently breaks online games that
| rely on them. Valve could also offer a module that allows
| signed user-space binaries access to kernel space, which
| would be an improvement over Windows offers in that anti-
| cheat wouldn't need to live in the kernel.
|
| I think that's a fine trade off.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| You don't even need a developer mode. I was looking into
| making my own image based distro/system which has its
| bootchain entirely verified and I intend to make any
| modifications via system extentions[1], which IIRC also get
| measured aswell (or was at least planned somewhere). To be
| fair, this is purely additive or overlaying, so no removing
| of files, at best changing. This all would be signed using
| Secure boot and after the fact using dm-verity.
|
| Secure Boot in theory isn't even necessary, only TPM2.
| Secure boot only ensure that you are actually booting into
| a binary that you expect to boot in this case, so if your
| binary is actually different it would result in different
| PCR values in the TPM indicating something is wrong.
|
| Sadly a lot of end user software (flatpak, ...) isn't
| packaged & signed in a way which would allow for full "only
| run software I allow by importing public keys" (read Linux
| IPE[2]), but what can you do, only your best I suppose...
|
| [1]:
| https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-
| sys...
|
| [2]: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/LSM/ipe.html
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Could reboot into secure mode for these types of games.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You don't need a full distro, you can just run the game in a
| VM sandbox with trusted computing extensions alongside
| whatever distro you want. That breaks cheats that rely on
| network/memory inspection, you can still cheat using the raw
| pixel output to drive faked input, but I don't think the loop
| is closeable there.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Has anyone produced a proof of concept for such a system,
| for gaming or otherwise?
|
| Given that a certain amount of windows gamers have been
| having issues making sure their PCs complied with the
| config requirements for the latest COD/Battlefield, it
| would seem an even higher bar for a consumer targeted bit
| of software that needs to do more to be running securely
| (or add a different mode to your distro install and reboot
| to it), alongside the wider variety of distros/configs.
| Distros advertising themselves for gaming or getting people
| to migrate from windows are also trying to keep barriers to
| entry low or to appear simple.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Running in a VM is not secure by itself. You need something
| similar to what Android is building via protected VMs.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Indeed running a VM is an exploiter's dream, unless the
| VM is essentially run by a hardware hypervisor (akin to
| Android's system).
| Mindwipe wrote:
| That wouldn't be sufficient. You'd need a hardware
| component to verify the OS signature of the specific distro
| with a trusted (by the game company) asymmetric key, and
| that enforced driver signing.
|
| Those things are all possible, but really the only entity
| that has the power to realistically do them is the OEM -
| Valve could do it for SteamOS, but only on it's own
| hardware.
| maccard wrote:
| This is what a console is.
| soloridindan wrote:
| I think the moment you accept data from the client as truth
| you've lost the battle already, everything else is just damage
| control. Loads of games have realized this and kept checking
| game rules on the serverside and reveal data on a need-to-know
| basis. This makes it nearly impossible for cheats to be made
| because anything you know you should know, and everythin you
| act is parsed by the backend according to rules already present
| jsheard wrote:
| _Some_ kinds of cheating can be mitigated that way, but it
| can 't really stop cheats which just play the game more
| optimally than the user is able to, using the same inputs and
| outputs that a legit player would use. Aim assistance in
| shooters, automatic parries in fighting games, economy-
| breaking levels of automation in MMOs, and so on.
|
| There's also practical limits to how much data you can filter
| out in complex 3D games, both due to performance constraints,
| and because culling information too perfectly can cause
| things to pop into existence too late under real-world
| network latency. The effectiveness of ESP cheats can be
| reduced, but not eliminated in practice.
| soloridindan wrote:
| I think anything that relies on reflex alone is flawed
| design. You can design around this, by for example in Dota2
| it doesen't matter how fast you click an entity, because
| the turnrate of your character is limited, so a person
| clicking reasonably fast and a bot clicking in 0.01ms both
| arrive there at the same time. Precision also doesn't
| matter, because a player can click the icon of the enemy
| instead of trying to match the pixels on screen. MMO
| scripts that use information already given by the game just
| seem like the MMO should invest in UX instead of trying to
| ban people for using the tools the game already gives them.
| vkou wrote:
| Unless DOTA2 is running at a ~3 tick rate (Which it's
| not), even taking account processing delays and action
| batching, a bot will _always_ have faster reaction times
| than an actual player. It will also never misclick.
|
| This problem is magnified in a shooter game, which would
| be _unplayable_ with that kind of batching, but where a
| cheater with an aimbot is actually impossible for a
| legitimate player to beat.
| soloridindan wrote:
| After you click, the character will begin to turn, which
| can take several hundred ms. A delta of couple ms
| compared to the time it takes to turn is completely
| negligible and even an inch better positioning of a
| character, or having a character with items or stats that
| makes them turn faster (because picks are asymmetric)
| will make several magnitudes more of an impact.
|
| If your game allows your sights to just teleport on
| people's heads and take that as the winning condition
| then that just sounds like bad design, there's no reason
| to allow infinitely fast movement and omitting strategy
| even from a shooter
| komali2 wrote:
| > If your game allows your sights to just teleport on
| people's heads and take that as the winning condition
| then that just sounds like bad design, there's no reason
| to allow infinitely fast movement and omitting strategy
| even from a shooter
|
| This is interesting, because I feel like the fundamental
| gameplay of an fps is players exposing themselves to each
| other's field of view, and then trying to click the
| other's head first. Skill is a measure of map knowledge
| (so you can try to expose yourself to a possible field of
| view but not where the enemy is actually looking at that
| moment) and speed of clicking head.
|
| How would you design FPSs to remove this "bad game
| design?"
| DJBunnies wrote:
| > How would you design FPSs to remove this "bad game
| design?"
|
| I think we just need to accept that bots will always be
| better at reaction based KPIs & abusing "knowing" too
| much game state, we should just remove those conditions.
|
| 1) Move most of the application logic to the server, the
| client should be a fairly dumb terminal that knows how to
| render and accept inputs, and only receives the state
| that it _needs_. No more spying issues.
|
| 2) Just give everybody auto aim & immediate/auto
| controlled firing, etc. No more aim bot issues.
|
| 3) Improve the quality of gameplay around the types of
| interactions which bots are bad at. Decision making,
| strategy, communication, execution, adaptation.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| > No more spying issues.
|
| This isn't possible. And this explains why:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFw4F2AyaP4
|
| We can only minimize the amount of extra information
| given to the client, not eliminate it. And at high enough
| skill levels, even 1-2ms of extra information will always
| be actionable, even by humans (not just bots).
| vanviegen wrote:
| Sure, feel free to make an entirely different type of
| game that's not as vulnerable to cheating.
|
| But some people just want to play competitive fps
| shooters. And currently obnoxious anticheat toolkits are
| the way to provide that, unfortunately.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| >just give everyone aimbots, no more aimbots issues
| jpadkins wrote:
| what if more people want to play an action shooter game,
| and not a slow strategy game?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| >If your game allows your sights to just teleport on
| people's heads and take that as the winning condition
| then that just sounds like bad design, there's no reason
| to allow infinitely fast movement and omitting strategy
| even from a shooter
|
| From the servers perspective you always kinda do that for
| fast movements as the client send rate usually isn't more
| than 60hz.
| bluecalm wrote:
| There is rampant cheating in online chess and poker as
| well, you know? You can have an opinion about what
| constitutes a better game for humans: should it be about
| making better decisions, arriving at them faster or being
| fast and precise with your mouse but the reality is
| bots/assistance can make you unplayable in all of those
| domains.
| Levitz wrote:
| >for example in Dota2 it doesen't matter how fast you
| click an entity, because the turnrate of your character
| is limited, so a person clicking reasonably fast and a
| bot clicking in 0.01ms both arrive there at the same
| time. Precision also doesn't matter, because a player can
| click the icon of the enemy instead of trying to match
| the pixels on screen.
|
| Even with turnrate, reaction time is very relevant.
| Reaction time allows you to silence enemies midcast, or
| to pop a shield, or a BKB, or some other instant measure.
| Turnrate doesn't mean reaction time doesn't matter, it
| means the direction you are facing matters.
|
| As for precision, yes it does matter, ask any Phoenix
| player who gets hexed mid-flight.
|
| People cheat in Dota in these very terms, it's absurd to
| argue it doesn't matter.
| nkrisc wrote:
| You could probably detect those kinds of cheats
| heuristically on the server. There are limits to human
| ability. It'll take more time to catch the cheaters, but
| I'm sure it's possible.
|
| This player is posting 30 auctions per second. Bot.
|
| This player is turning at a rate of 500 radians per second
| to make perfect headshots. Bot.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Aimbots will just add delay and variance then. Guess its
| a bit fairer but if they're better than shroud level then
| it's still not great.
| jsheard wrote:
| Which they do already, because slamming all of the aimbot
| settings to max is a fast track to getting mass reported
| and escalated to human review, which will immediately see
| what's going on. Any cheater with an ounce of desire to
| preserve their account is going to try and maintain the
| pretense that they're just very skilled, not impossibly
| skilled.
| pityJuke wrote:
| this is already running in production for Counter-Strike
| since 2018 [0][1].
|
| to be honest, it isn't particularly good - all serious
| CS2 games operate on a third party provider with a
| kernel-level anti-cheat. also, the cs2 update banned
| people for spinning their mouse too fast [2].
|
| [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/5u
| 2xly/eli...
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwU_ejDNC0s
| cortesoft wrote:
| The cheat could just be tuned to play at the level of the
| best humans.
| brettermeier wrote:
| However, this only solves the cheat problem to a minimal
| extent. There is a lot of important data that players should
| not be directly aware of, but which is important for the
| game. For example, it is important for calculating sounds to
| know where enemies are nearby, even though you cannot see
| them, which makes wall hacks possible, etc.
| soloridindan wrote:
| Sounds are core to shooters and very much within the
| expected abilities of the players to hear them. If
| anything, I'd incorporate this kind of indicator in the
| game itself, allowing for deaf people to "hear" footsteps
| as well
| bakugo wrote:
| > I'd incorporate this kind of indicator in the game
| itself, allowing for deaf people to "hear" footsteps as
| well
|
| That's just discount wallhacks. Fortnite has it and
| you're basically forced to use it even if you have no
| hearing issues, because it provides a massive advantage.
| vkou wrote:
| That only solves half of the cheating problem - illegal
| inputs from clients.
|
| The other half is _much harder to solve_. For a simple
| example - my client knows that there is an enemy player
| around a corner. It knows exactly where that player is,
| because that player is walking, and making noise. A cheats
| could allow the cheater to see his opponent 's player's model
| through the wall.
|
| For a more blatant example, consider cheats in a first-person
| shooter that just snap your aim to the nearest enemy's head.
| This involves _zero_ violation of the game 's logic, and also
| makes the game completely unplayable for everyone in a lobby.
| soloridindan wrote:
| You already know where an enemy is if you hear them behind
| the wall, you don't need a cheat to tell you that there is
| noise coming from other side of the wall. The server also
| doesen't need to tell you they are behind it if they're
| sneaking. A game that allows zero home-in time sounds like
| a flaw in the game and something solvable on the
| serverside.
|
| You can replace a playermodel with wider "sound coming from
| around here" if you want to make it even harder for a cheat
| to pinpoint a sound
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| > The server also doesen't need to tell you they are
| behind it if they're sneaking
|
| This requires the server to calculate line of sight
| checks for every player, which is costly, requires
| loading the entire geometry into the server and would be
| horribly prone to latency. Then you're looking at
| potential performance problems on the client due to only
| knowing about a player the second its in view and having
| to stream the assets to the GPU, which if don't happen in
| time for the frame you'll experience as hitching.
|
| > You already know where an enemy is if you hear them
| behind the wall
|
| Yes but this requires using your brain rather than just
| seeing them straight up through a wall.
| Ukv wrote:
| I don't think those performance concerns are really much
| of an issue with any sensible implementation. You'd do
| line of sight checks against simplified geometry first to
| handle the vast majority of cases, and you'd load
| character models/textures in advance (game/match startup)
| rather than only when they first appear on screen.
|
| One non-trivial part seems to me that if you walk around
| a corner you don't want to wait 50ms (your ping) for the
| server to send enemy locations you can now see. Ideally
| every tick the server would be sending all enemies that
| you could potentially see before the next tick depending
| on what your movement packets that it hasn't yet received
| turn out to be. Wouldn't entirely eliminate advantage
| from cheating (e.g: a cheater walking around a corner
| could still see enemies up to a tick/~15ms in advance)
| but would hopefully make this form of cheating
| significantly less worthwhile.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| You have to do line of sight checks based on the players
| entire FOV, which requires the server to know this in
| realtime with little latency.
|
| This is unworkable for fast paced games.
| maccard wrote:
| This is unworkable for even slow paced games.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Cs2 and Valorant does this, but start sending positions
| around corners before they're visible.
| vablings wrote:
| CS2 does not do Vischeck culling anymore. It was ditched
| with the move to source 2. All players are globally
| visible to everyone
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Basic distance checking is doable, but any kind of
| "they're ducking behind a 2 feet wall in front of me" is
| going to be horrible to detect server side.
| vkou wrote:
| > You already know where an enemy is if you hear them
| behind the wall,
|
| You know they are somewhere behind the wall, you don't
| know which _exact_ angle they are behind the wall,
| because headphones and our ears don 't work with that
| degree of accuracy.
|
| The cheater can just swing the corner with his cursor
| already pre-positioned exactly on his target. Between
| peeker's advantage (inherent to any online game with
| latency) and human reaction time, there's not a lot you
| can do to fight that.
| __alexs wrote:
| I feel like you've only played 1 genre of video game or
| something.
| Thaxll wrote:
| This is not how it works, most games that take cheating
| seriously already have a gameserver where most of the
| gameplay logic happen.
|
| Doing everything server side does prevent cheating.
| maccard wrote:
| Eventually you have to send data to the client and they
| have to send you back what they did. Assuming you're
| running a game server with 240hz updates, on a 120hz
| monitor with no buffering, on a low latency connection in
| the same location to your data center, the absolute bare
| minimum amount of latency you can plan for is about 15ms
| from server to on screen, and back again) - 8 ms each way,
| 4ms for the server tick, and 5ms each way for networking.
| Now move 100 km from the server, or add in double
| buffering, and you're closer to 50-60ms. That means at any
| given time you know there's a deviance of between 0 and
| 50ms between your state and the clients - and a client can
| and will exploit that.
| bangaladore wrote:
| > Doing everything server side does prevent cheating.
|
| No. Server side only protects against some types of cheats,
| such as telling the server that your bullet in an FPS is
| actually a grenade.
|
| It cannot prevent snapping your aim to a target on screen.
| 63stack wrote:
| There is no way to make anticheat that can't be bypassed,
| regardless of OS. All of the anticheat games today have
| cheaters.
| mrob wrote:
| Correct. E.g. you can aimbot by routing the video signal to a
| capture card on a separate computer and run image recognition
| software to generate mouse movements spoofed at the hardware
| level. The only way to reliably prevent cheating is with in-
| person tournaments played on hardware provided by the
| organizers.
| tgv wrote:
| As someone said about the lack of a Switch anti-cheat: it's
| a numbers game. If cheating is as easy as downloading a
| .exe for a few $$$, you're going to find cheaters
| everywhere. If it requires a complex, and/or fairly
| expensive setup, the number is going to be very low.
|
| That's assuming there's no money in being a cheater.
| calgoo wrote:
| The best way is to just make private servers, so people can
| play with their friends and not have to worry about random
| players. This also solves the issue of people using....
| language thats not acceptable in games.
| 360MustangScope wrote:
| It doesn't have to be 100%. The point is to make it
| inconvenient. The _majority_ of people will not do it if it
| is inconvenient.
|
| Thats the point to many things in life that you just make it
| more difficult and most people won't be bothered to attempt
| to circumvent whatever it is.
|
| There will still be circumventers but it is will be less than
| if you just said fuck it.
| zeta0134 wrote:
| Sure. That also means it doesn't have to be kernel-level
| rootkits that fundamentally break the security model of my
| operating system and risk my bank account. Most people will
| be stopped by userland anticheat, right? It's inconvenient.
| So ... put it *there.*
|
| And if someone does the kernel bypass thing, well, rely on
| server-side heuristics (which are imperfect, but also
| unknowable to the attacker) and you'll discourage enough of
| that with account bans.
|
| Helpfully eSports players tend to have video captures of
| their gameplay, and most of these "undetectable" cheats are
| _real obvious_ if you actually watch the footage. That
| catches most of the serious stuff at the upper level. It 's
| why video verification has been a thing in the speedrunning
| scene for such a long time.
| trinix912 wrote:
| The problem with userland stuff is that it's trivial to
| download and doubleclick an EXE (that acts as a fake
| anticheat or whatever).
|
| Anyone can do that, but not anyone can simply "patch the
| kernel" and such.
| maccard wrote:
| > Anyone can do that, but not anyone can simply "patch
| the kernel" and such.
|
| Sure they can - download this pre-patched ISO and boot it
| in QEMU. Now you have a modified kernel, _and_ you're not
| running dodgy spyware on your PC.
| alex7734 wrote:
| > Helpfully eSports players tend to have video captures
| of their gameplay, and most of these "undetectable"
| cheats are real obvious if you actually watch the
| footage. That catches most of the serious stuff at the
| upper level. It's why video verification has been a thing
| in the speedrunning scene for such a long time.
|
| There's a subreddit called /r/vacsucks which is full of
| pro players blatantly cheating and getting away with it
| while the rest of the idiots think they're just good
| players.
|
| Or, depending on your point of view, full of idiots
| flagging any player better than they are as cheating.
|
| Aimbots can be "humanized" enough that any such
| determination becomes subjective.
| 63stack wrote:
| Sure, and my point is that making it inconvenient for other
| people to cheat is a way too low bar for us to accept
| rootkits on our systems.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Linux is resistant to rootkits, which is what these things are,
| and allows you to remove them, yes.
|
| The correct solution is to verify everything server side, or
| actually have humans watch replays and ban cheaters, but both
| of those would reduce profits, so will obviously never happen.
| lan321 wrote:
| IMO the real solution is back in community servers and
| votekicking.. It works on old games with no anticheat
| measures..
|
| Maybe add some blatant detection for people teleporting and
| doing other absolutely impossible things serverside, but I
| don't understand why my team has to ruin their 'reputation'
| teamkilling a cheater so he doesn't ruin the game completely
| in most current games when the anticheat only catches free,
| old cheats. Just let people votekick and find someone else in
| the matchmaking queue who's willing to join halfway through..
| Once votekicked enough times you can escalate to the AI
| (always indians) for automated (manual) review.
|
| Also, you don't even have to ban cheaters. Just isolate them
| to play with each other. Some might find it fun and keep away
| from the normal players.
|
| Edit: The 'issue' with community server manual review and
| votekick is you can be kicked for being cracked or garbage at
| the game legitimately, but TBH at this point you're ruining
| the fun of everyone else, so you should probably get in
| another server/match.. Also that premades can have majority,
| but that's easily solved by reducing their vote weight.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| I mean not really, as someone that had been votekicked from
| many games. Servers with admins does solve this, but has
| it's drawbacks. But you also cannot have the matchmaking
| type of game that are popular today.
|
| Back in MW2 if you were the host you could kick players
| from your game using a cli tool that adjusted firewall
| rules.
| lan321 wrote:
| For lobbied ones votekick is great as long as you remove
| majority vote from premades. So in a 5v5, a 3 man premade
| isn't able to kick any of the 2 randoms alone.
|
| I remember the misuse of it but it was better than having
| your only option be teamkilling, which is now punished in
| all games via reputation systems.
|
| The only thing I don't see this as a solution for are
| games like Planetside, with massive lobbies. I know they
| used to have automated detection and manual review by
| admins teleporting and flying around, usually invisible
| to sus players. Once we found a bug and got inside the
| map able to shoot through the ground and in like 15
| minutes an admin came, asked us how we got in there and
| to get out nicely, before he gets us out forcefully :D
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| CSGO has actual humans watch replays to determine whether
| people were cheating, it's called overwatch. As can be seen,
| it doesn't actually stop cheating, at most it ensures that
| blatant ones are banned after the fact already happened.
| Arainach wrote:
| You'll never see cheats banned in real time - that provides
| an enormous amount of data to cheat developers to allow
| them to quickly learn to evade your detection. Bans after
| the fact in large batches are the only sustainable way to
| go.
| jamesnorden wrote:
| You see cheaters banned in real time in Valorant, and the
| match is canceled, at least you used to.
| vablings wrote:
| CS2 Does not have overwatch anymore. VAC Live is completely
| AI and its a known fact that valve have a few buttons and
| sliders to play with to go through ban/boom cycles for
| cheaters to maximize impact
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Server-authoritative games. Basically the client does stuff,
| gives the list of moves to the server along with a checksum/end
| result. Then the server runs the same commands on the same
| starting state and checks if it got the same result.
|
| If a==b, then everything moves on as normal. If not, the client
| gets a synchronisation error and has to rewind back to the last
| known good state.
|
| Completely unfeasible for anything real-time pretty much.
| 0xC0ncord wrote:
| Having done modding for some older shooter games built on the
| server-authoritative model, it's still possible to create a
| "pingless" experience, but it requires more calculations and
| compromises on client/server trust to make it work. For
| shooters specifically, you want the client to provide instant
| feedback when the gun fires, and ideally when they hit an
| enemy. You can achieve this by telling the server "I was at
| position A and shot my gun at position B and hit enemy Bob."
| The server will validate all of this before informing the
| client who fired and the client for "Bob" that Bob was
| killed. The compromise here is that the server must trust
| that the client isn't sending forged data, or the server must
| do additional computations to validate it.
| PetitPrince wrote:
| An elaborated version of this idea is called "rollback"
| where you let the local client predict and execute the game
| state at time t+1 and will "roll back" the state of the
| game if it received another game state than the one
| predicted. Extremely popular and state of the art for 2D
| fighting games (most of the time the prediction is correct
| and it greatly reduce the perceived lag) , but probably
| harder a bit harder to do with 3D games.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| There's just no way to stop cheating client side despite what
| devs love to think. But server side anti cheat is much harder
| and requires more work; it's much simpler to just install
| spyware / rootkits on the client and call it a day.
| 360MustangScope wrote:
| You can't prevent wall hacks with only server side anti
| cheat. The client needs that data locally before the enemy is
| rendered on screen.
|
| As mentioned in another comment, you can't do this on the
| server without expensive checks for every single player that
| is always checking line of sight, because it's not just your
| session running on a single server but multiple sessions.
|
| And let's say you did this, now you have a latency problem
| because most modern games to make them feel fluid has client
| side prediction with server reconciliation. This is what
| makes your modern games feel more responsive, if you put a
| constant server check there you have lost this.
|
| No matter what people say online, it isn't just move all of
| it to the server, there is data the client needs to know and
| can't be spoonfed by the server.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I think it's an organization accountability issue.
|
| Why would a company pay for anti cheat infrastructure when
| they can outsource it to some company and blame them if there
| are cheaters or upset users? Windows is the status quo too,
| so it's very easy to point to everyone else when justifying
| your choice to the execs.
|
| It would be great if steam deck+box start costing studios
| quantifiable amounts of money that can be used to justify
| fixing this instead of outsourcing and hand waving.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You can run a VM using trusted computing extensions for the
| game. If the VM encrypts traffic, that stops network level
| cheats. You can still fake inputs/outputs to the machine if you
| put the work in, but then you can also use a vision model and
| faked input with actual consoles, so that hole is never going
| to get patched.
| mcv wrote:
| Reliable anticheat is serverside. Clientside anticheat sounds
| like a fool's errand to me. You need to control the client, so
| that means the user cannot be in control of their own computer,
| which is contrary to the idea of Linux.
| kimos wrote:
| It works on Windows by essentially rooting the machine. MS
| holds control of a bunch of stuff because they hold the
| signing keys. It's fundamentally incompatible with open
| source.
| tete wrote:
| And it still doesn't prevent cheating.
| SirMaster wrote:
| No, but it seems to vastly reduce it. Compare VAC2 to
| FACEIT on CS2 for example.
| vablings wrote:
| Comparing VAC2 (released in 2005) to FACEIT in 2025 is
| pretty dumb. There are still absolutely cheaters running
| rampant on FACEIT and FPL.
|
| The real solution is to limit information sent to the
| client, make it harder for cheaters to have reliable
| solutions to get access to critical game information. ARC
| Raiders has Theia anti tamper (very poor performance) but
| right now the number of cheaters is minimal because the
| select few who are smart enough to break the anti-tamper
| are keeping quiet. See other examples; The Finals, Roblox
| (Byfron) and Overwatch
|
| https://codedefender.io/sigbreaker/
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > It's fundamentally incompatible with open source
|
| Yeah, I mean why would they open source their anti-cheats,
| would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?
|
| Not sure why you bring up OSS here, it isn't relevant in
| the least, plenty of non-OSS runs on Linux even though
| Linux and more is OSS.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Because with Windows, MS can put a list of trusted
| rootkit anticheats in the kernel and that cannot be
| changed (without having the source or breaking signatures
| when hex editing etc).
|
| If Linux did the same, anyone could recompile the kernel
| with their fake anticheat's signature. The fake anticheat
| would then present itself as real to the game. One could
| go as far as to rewrite the relevant syscall to falsely
| indicate to the game that the legitimate version is
| running.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| The OEM could control it in hardware and a secure part of
| the chipset could validate the OS integrity and sign the
| relevant key (which is what Apple does with SIP on a
| managed MacOS installation).
| tete wrote:
| Yes and no. I agree the only thing that can be reliable is
| server side.
|
| However that means that anything based on reaction times and
| such is impossible to protect against (under reasonable
| conditions). At the end of the day you can always have a
| robot sitting at your desk. But there is steps to that. You
| can have something that highlights enemies, etc., you can
| have something that controls keyboard and mouse (maybe inside
| a VM, so you don't need hardware) and so on. You can reverse
| engineer packet encryption in a debugger (in most situations)
| and have something on the network messing with stuff and so
| on.
|
| So in that regard, yes you can prevent everything you can
| prevent on the server, but you cannot prevent every sort of
| cheating on the server.
|
| Everything that has rounds basically can be prevented (other
| than again a bot playing).
|
| Everything that is complex to automate is better, but might
| just make cheating more "worthwhile".
|
| The other thing you can do on the server is "dumb cheat"
| detection. Eg. the odds of someone being consistently as good
| at a game and such. Statistics like that is widespread and
| doesn't need any change on the client.
| tete wrote:
| You are looking completely wrong at this. There is no anti-
| cheat that cannot be bypassed. Period.
|
| You can always run things in a VM, you can always replace your
| keyboard and mouse with a different device, you can always have
| your a camera instead of human eyes and have something that
| recognizes enemies.
|
| Even cheat detection in the real physical world (sports, chess,
| etc.) is not a completely solved topic.
|
| You can connect computers to other computers so other computers
| will always be able to control them.
|
| The idea that any (currently realistic) cheat prevention is
| unbypassable is silly.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > The idea that any (currently realistic) cheat prevention is
| unbypassable is silly.
|
| The idea that anti-cheats don't make sense because they don't
| catch 100% of the cheaters is what's silly, who believes
| that? Not even the people writing these anti-cheats believe
| catching 100% of them are possible, why are you under the
| assumption that others think that's possible?
|
| If it removes 80% of the cheaters from the game, the
| experience goes from "Holy shit lets leave" to "Ok,
| bothersome, but fine", this is what they're reaching for, not
| some fantasy utopia that you seem to be under the impression
| is the target.
| saghm wrote:
| I don't think the comment you're responding to is trying to
| claim that. They're responding to the parent comment asking
| if there's any way to actually make a Linux anti-cheat
| method that isn't bypassable and pointing out that this
| framing isn't really useful because there's no way to make
| one on _any_ platform that 's actually impossible to
| bypass. Their point isn't about whether it's useful or not
| to have imperfect anti-cheat but that there's nothing
| fundamental about Linux that changes the fact that the
| anti-cheat is going to be imperfect anywhere.
| krzyk wrote:
| > the experience goes from "Holy shit lets leave" to "Ok,
| bothersome, but fine",
|
| This is making those rootkit anitcheat mechanism work. If
| people will leave, cheaters will play only with cheaters -
| problem solved.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > If people will leave, cheaters will play only with
| cheaters - problem solved.
|
| Yeah, but it's a bit like the ultimately solution to
| climate warming; getting rid of all humans on the planet.
| Fine, it solves the problem, but who is staying to enjoy
| the solution?
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| Yeah. It's an erosion of rights that doesn't solve the problem.
| You only need one cheater to make a game feel bad and DMA
| devices or pixel tracking can't be stopped with these anti-
| cheats.
| theknarf wrote:
| I mean kernel level anti-cheat doesn't really work on Windows
| either, its just security theater.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Based on what data do you draw that conclusion? The fact that
| cheaters can still exist isn't an indictment that it doesn't
| ever work. Have you ab tested a game with an without anti
| cheat?
| droolboy wrote:
| The only game I miss when I moved to Linux was League of Legends.
| Everything else pretty much works. I get that it's not worth it
| for them to deal with more potential cheating, but it's a bummer.
| asmor wrote:
| The worst thing about League was that Riot added it
| retroactively after years of effort to patch Wine to work with
| League's weird quirky code. It was the only game that I always
| remember having a custom Wine build in Lutris even as far back
| as the early 2010s.
|
| It also would be completely unnecessary if they fixed their
| servers.
| asdff wrote:
| I'm playing through wine (kegworks) on OSX but its no fairytale
| over here. TF2 over wine literally performs worse than native
| TF2 on my old dual core 2012 mbp. I'm having to use low
| resolution configs again. CS2 works OK but there are severe
| lagspikes that ultimately ruin the gunplay (a little more
| tolerable when it happens in tf2 but its there too). About the
| only game that works well in this setup for me is Mount and
| Blade: Warband. But I mean its a 2010 game... I can't even play
| bannerlord because of anticheat. Can't play chivalry 2 because
| anticheat. Can't play cities skylines 2. Most games that do
| work seem to struggle to get 40fps even on m max series
| macbooks. I'm not sure where the incompatibility is but its got
| to be in the software layer software given the specs on those
| max macbooks.
|
| I just wish someone actually cared about this stuff at Apple.
| GPTK is not that useful. Rosetta 2 has some serious performance
| throttling going on somewhere in it (why is native macos cities
| skyline fps locked at 40fps...). Former mainstay native macos
| game devs from 10-15 years ago have zero interest publishing
| for the platform today, valve included.
| wiz21c wrote:
| It'd be nice to have the publisher of the games...
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Between Windows being so unbearably bloated and no way to make
| anti-cheat really work on Linux, it looks like the consoles win!
| asmor wrote:
| Or you could miss out on like... 5 games. Competitive games on
| a controller would be a much larger trade off than dual booting
| to me.
| donatj wrote:
| On Xbox at least Keyboard / Mouse support is decent. I played
| Fortnite and Minecraft this way for a while.
|
| Personal preference, but I'd far rather have a separate
| device dedicated to gaming than my kernel hacked by anti
| cheat.
|
| https://www.purexbox.com/guides/all-xbox-games-with-mouse-
| an...
| doener wrote:
| No modding and higher prices of games on consoles though.
| komali2 wrote:
| On my PC I can play basically every game ever made in all of
| human history, minus maybe 7 that use kernel level anti cheat,
| and a couple PS5 and PS4 exclusives.
|
| Other than that I have emulation plus a steam library. I'll
| take that over a locked in console that can only play 2
| generations of games any day!
|
| Edit: I'm not sure why the person who replied to me asking
| about emulators was nuked, emulators are still legal everywhere
| as far as I know. Anyway tldr go check out emudeck's GitHub
| repo to see a good list of emulators for basically every
| platform.
| simoncion wrote:
| > I'm not sure why the person who replied to me asking about
| emulators was nuked...
|
| Wow. They're so nuked, I can't even vouch for them. "Good" to
| know that's possible on HN, I guess.
| drnick1 wrote:
| I used to dual boot, but I that there are so many games on Linux,
| I just don't buy or play incompatible games. So EA lost a BF6
| sale for being assholes.
| teroshan wrote:
| Same situation here. If it were last year, I may have caved.
| But at this point I don't want to bother with dual booting and
| losing my Linux context as I do so.
|
| Instead I'm playing ARC Raiders which works perfectly on Linux
| and I don't regret a thing.
| __alexs wrote:
| It's funny that game makers make a fuss about anti-cheat not
| working on Linux but then publish Switch versions of their games.
| That platform has almost zero security and is commonly emulated
| with cheats even in multiplayer these days.
| j-bos wrote:
| This. Even kernel level anti-c-spyware can't stop a cheap
| vision model hokked to a mouse, see youtube for examples from
| simple auto input up to full on elctromuscular stimulation.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Based on the latest report from Dice/EA/BF6, seems indeed
| like they're detecting hardware-based cheating as well: https
| ://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2807960/view/4972134...
|
| Although who knows, they might be outright lying about that
| just to scare cheaters, but I tend to default to assuming
| what they're saying is more or less true.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Looking at the accessibility alternatives they suggest,
| they were probably detecting XIM users, not the _much_
| nastier PC stuff like DMA cards.
| archerx wrote:
| They can't detect me splitting my hdmi output, feeding one
| of them to a separate machine with a vision model to detect
| what needs to be detected and the same machine moving and
| clicking the mouse. People are already doing this.
| StrLght wrote:
| Could you please share examples of ML-based cheats that
| actually work?
| archerx wrote:
| This one is a good example;
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T4rrcw_oRVs
| StrLght wrote:
| Thanks, interesting! Looks like it works way better than
| I expected.
| archerx wrote:
| Yes the channel "Basically homeless" has a few variations on
| this. Using electrodes to move your muscles to more practical
| a bot that moves your mouse pad for you to give you perfect
| aim. No anti cheat can detect that because there is nothing
| to detect.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| what multiplayer (esports) game that can run on switch ????
|
| fornite???? its not gonna be main playerbase
| amarant wrote:
| From the top of my head: Rocket league, Splatoon.
|
| I'm sure there are others, but those are the 2 I play
| prmoustache wrote:
| mario karts
| lawn wrote:
| Super Smash Bros.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Splatoon is a Nintendo game.
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| Madden and NBA2K
| Levitz wrote:
| It's a numbers issue. How often do people encounter cheaters
| while playing Switch games online?
| __alexs wrote:
| Often because of cross play.
| hollandheese wrote:
| Try playing Pokemon Legends Z-A multiplayer.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| The thing is: the Switch has a clear ToS, and if the user
| breaks it they can get into trouble. OTOH, if you release your
| game in Linux... that's it
| riddley wrote:
| The games have ToS though right?
| Almondsetat wrote:
| The Switch is a closed proprietary platform, so Nintendo
| can give some guarantees, and if the user does something at
| the Switch level, the responsibility of legal action will
| be on Nintendo, saving up headaches to the publisher.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Beaches of a Terms of Service agreement have no inherent
| legal penalties.
|
| Some actions which breach ToS may be illegal, but that
| has nothing to do with them being outlined in a ToS.
| lawn wrote:
| Bad excuse, they could rely on Steam ToS for example.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Creating a steam account is cheap. Needing to buy a new
| switch is not.
| bakugo wrote:
| > is commonly emulated with cheats even in multiplayer
|
| There is no Switch emulator that can play online on official
| servers.
|
| The only way you can cheat online is by hacking a real console,
| but the percentage of people who do it is quite small.
| __alexs wrote:
| AIUI you can do it, but you risk the Switch you got the data
| from being banned.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| If people cheat in the switch, they can blame Nintendo. If
| people cheat in PC, they can blame the anticheat. Without
| anticheat, they have to take the blame.
| archerx wrote:
| I still blame the devs of the games.
| shmerl wrote:
| Client side anti cheats is a lazy excuse why they don't want to
| spend on server side anti cheats anyway.
| SirMaster wrote:
| How do you stop a client-side wallhack with server side anti-
| cheat?
| LanceH wrote:
| run your own servers, an admin watches them track people
| behind walls, player gets banned, move on. Oh, they took
| away player run servers...
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Not scalable
| nevon wrote:
| Don't send the client information about players they should
| not be able to see based on their current position.
| xeonmc wrote:
| And under such system, how do you stop people from
| abusing latency-compensation to make their character
| appear out of thin air on the opponent's perspective by
| fake-juking a corner to trick the netcode into not
| sending the initial trajectory of your peeks?
| vablings wrote:
| Fortnite had this same issue when BR was first released.
| It was promptly fixed after cheaters started abusing it
| by adding more stringent checks.
| maccard wrote:
| Fortnite has a fairly invasive root kit level anti cheat
| too, don't forget.
| vablings wrote:
| The invasive kernel root kit came months after they fixed
| the netcode abuses.
| shmerl wrote:
| Improve your server AI to catch weird behavior. Client side
| approach with this malware idea is simply unacceptable.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| The Switch has good security as long as you can check the OS
| version robustly.
|
| Any Switch game using an anti-cheat solution that can't
| trivially detect that it's being emulated is... not using a
| very good anti-cheat solution.
| sylware wrote:
| kernel anti-cheat are notoriously inefficient and are weaponized
| by hackers.
| tete wrote:
| In still doesn't prevent a wide array of cheating.
| sylware wrote:
| It is more a anti-(non-steamOS)-linux than anything else.
| super256 wrote:
| Are they? Cheats for games like Fortnite, CS (Faceit), Rust,
| LoL have become very expensive (100 USD per month are not
| unheard of) or require you to purchase special hardware.
|
| And I have yet to come across an anti cheat driver of the big
| publishers (EAC, Faceit, Javelin, Vanguard) being exploited and
| allow access to r/w kernel memory. It is more likely that the
| driver of some hardware is being exploited for, rather than
| anti cheat drivers.
|
| Personally, I only remember the ac driver of Capcom ever being
| exploited. Compare this to the dozen hardware/av drivers which
| were exploitable, like the Intel LAN utility driver, ASUS
| IOMap64, MSI NTIOLIB or that one Razer driver. Oh, and CPU-Z
| and the Avast Hypervisor driver were exploitable too and
| allowed r/w on kernel memory. These drivers are way more likely
| to be weaponized than ac drivers.
| vablings wrote:
| The thousands of RGB drivers from the various manufacturers
| that are just copy+paste jobs on RWEverything is actually
| disgusting and Microsoft letting that just happen is a
| serious problem. Ah yes you added AES to your IOCTL very
| secure! I'd say the only reason that these drivers haven't
| been exploited is because of the insane bug bounties in
| place. There are also other big issues in games, see the
| whole hack with Apex Legends lmao
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Thank you, I prefer my Linux without rootkits.
| Jhsto wrote:
| Cheats aside, are there any competitive games that include Uber-
| like rating system? Meaning that you'd need to provide feedback
| whether you'd play with your opponents/teammates again after a
| game.
| silvanocerza wrote:
| Dota 2 comes to mind, they have the commend system. If I
| remember correctly they added something like this to CS: GO
| too.
| super256 wrote:
| Pretty sure the commendation system in CS is just for looks,
| as it can be easily gamed.
| Insanity wrote:
| Yes to some extent, I believe "The Finals" asked to rate how
| each match went in earlier seasons. But that stopped now that
| the game is more mature and feeling well balanced.
|
| Cod MW2019 would occasionally ask, but once every X game IIRC.
| kreco wrote:
| The idea of someone rating me, or rating someone else makes me
| anxious.
|
| I'm not sure it would be better than just reporting people with
| undesired behavior.
| Insanity wrote:
| I think it's more anonymized like "did you enjoy the game
| with this team (1-5)"
| gilrain wrote:
| > The idea of someone rating me, or rating someone else makes
| me anxious.
|
| But not enough to avoid, as you're here.
| Rucadi wrote:
| Smite used to do that, but long time since I played it.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| Overwatch (1) had something like that. Not sure if Overwatch
| (2) still has it, or how it functions now.
|
| In higher ELO, people would target good players with "avoid
| player"^1, effectively soft-banning those people from match
| making because the pool was small enough. They would still get
| put in matches eventually but their queues would blow out a
| lot.
|
| From memory it did not have an explicit "match me with this
| person" button, but you could thumbs up players in the post-
| match podium as well as endorse them which may have soft-
| factored into matching you with them again.
|
| \1 I think it was called this. It was a general "bad attitude"
| marker, not a "bad team mate" or "bad opponent" marker.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| Overwatch (1 and 2) had/have an avoid system, but it only
| avoids as teammate. Overwatch 1 use to at the very beginning
| have a system to avoid a player as a whole and they wouldn't
| be matched in your game at all, but that was remove really
| early on, as it is easily abusable against good player (I
| don't want them on the enemy team, they are too good so just
| get rid of them entirely) and there was a report system
| anyway for other kinda bad stuff.
|
| Then there is just the endorsement system, which is just a
| level from 1-5 and you can endorse people you liked playing
| with. It doesn't really do much in matchmaking but you can't
| do certain things if you are below a certain level (I forgot
| what all it was but you can't make (public?) custom games if
| you are too low and I think text and voice chat could also
| get disabled if you are too low).
| pynappo wrote:
| Overwatch 2 has a simplified endorsement system. It's just an
| optional thumbs up instead of endorsement for 1 of 3 reasons
| (roughly something like sportsmanship, good teammate, or good
| leader).
|
| The avoid system is now more flexible. You have 3 pin slots
| for people you never really want to see on your team again,
| plus 12(?) regular avoid slots to avoid people for a week at
| a time like usual. In situations where too many avoid
| conflicts occur and the matchmaker struggles to create a
| match (e.g. high ELO), it will start to ignore people's avoid
| slots in order of (last regular avoid > first regular avoid >
| pin slots), i think.
| blibble wrote:
| Overwatch did have a "prefer this player" option, but not for
| very long
| asdff wrote:
| Not quite like that but plenty of games used to have vote kick
| mechanisms.
| tete wrote:
| Well, that's just silly. Hook up a Raspberry Pi as your keyboard,
| mouse input and video output and all the anti-cheat fails. Same
| (largely) for VMs, same for many emulators.
|
| And if nothing works you can always build a robot pushing mouse,
| buttons, etc.
|
| Of course you can raise the bar, but if anything has been shown
| it's that cheating is not something that anyone has been able to
| prevent yet.
|
| In many situations you can also interfere on the packet level. Of
| course maybe you need to extract some key, but in many situations
| that's not exactly hard. And then you can hook something into
| network.
| kimos wrote:
| The cheating isn't just about input speed or accuracy though.
| It's about seeing around corners or having knowledge about
| other things in the game that you can't see on the screen.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| They already do this. Including peripherals which appear as an
| actual mouse, but they are there only so that cheat software
| can take control of the input without modifying the game
| memory. There are cheats which run on a separate machine and
| access the game memory via a dedicated DMA card (which itself
| presents itself as an innocent piece of hardware). Note, this
| can still be detected either via detecting the DMA card itself,
| or eventually these shenanigans will be killed off by IOMMU.
|
| Unfortunately, there are also plenty of offerings which do not
| touch the game memory or process at all, and work purely based
| on image recognition and these days they actually use AI that
| is trained on specific games. I have no idea how they plan to
| detect these. All the cheat needs is the video feed and the
| ability to provide input via mouse and keyboard, and as you say
| this is trivial to do in a way that is entirely undetectable.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'm ordering a new laptop to work on LLM stuff, and while I
| thought about jumping through the hoops to get Linux running with
| secure boot...
|
| I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is
| going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest
| multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well
|
| I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally
| hyperinvasive maleware.
|
| I don't need gaming that much.
|
| And if I do I'll stream it with Gamepass or another cloud
| service.
| jmuguy wrote:
| All I really do on my Windows system is play games, and because
| of that I don't mind whatever draconian crap that's required to
| keep cheaters in check. It sucks, but not sure of a better
| solution.
| i80and wrote:
| I'm a pretty prolific gamer, but at the start of the year I
| finally kicked Windows to the curb.
|
| It's been _fine_. Surprisingly few games I 'm interested in to
| begin with have anticheat that doesn't work on Linux, and it's
| comforting to know games aren't allowed to just shove trash
| into kernel space at will.
| ecshafer wrote:
| If you play older games, Linux ironically works better than
| windows now for stability. The only game I have seen any
| issues with (note I don't really play multiplayer much) is
| the Harry Potter game, but proton eventually fixed that.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| The thing is I still need Windows for music production.
|
| Linux will never compete here.
| jszymborski wrote:
| They said this about gaming too... all it takes is Valve-
| esque sponsor
| iknowstuff wrote:
| It takes a stable ABI and a single target for apps. Don't
| expect music production to ever show up for gnu/linux.
| Maybe Android
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Bitwig is available for Linux, but I don't know what the
| limitations are.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| A lot of VSTS aren't going to work even with tricks like
| WINE.
|
| They often have complicated auth systems, etc.
|
| I don't really want to learn a new DAW.
| officeplant wrote:
| A lot of people give high praise to Yabridge, but I
| myself haven't tried using it for my existing VST library
| and just found alternative plugins that work with linux.
| ronsor wrote:
| > They often have complicated auth systems, etc.
|
| The paranoia audio devs have with piracy is insane.
| Ironically I think the worse your DRM is, the more your
| product should be pirated :)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It's often 20% DRM and 80% marketing.
|
| Ohh cool, this plugin is "free". Looks like I have to
| register for an account and install a bunch of unrelated
| crap I really don't want.
|
| The up selling never stops.
|
| Then again. 30 years ago a lot of these trucks were
| straight up impossible without spending tens of
| thousands.
| officeplant wrote:
| The sad thing is linux, like MacOS, is often vastly
| superior for audio routing and latency.
|
| Personally I gave up all my audio productions tools that
| don't support Linux, but since music/audio work is just a
| hobby for me that's easier to do. I do miss my old DAWs
| (Ableton/Reason), and I miss a lot of VST plugins.
|
| Not everyone can just re-base their setup on linux (for me
| Renoise & VCV Rack), but I can get plenty of joy out of a
| complete lack of Windows, license management crapware,
| invasive rootkit level DRM, etc.
|
| Side benefit: it pushes me to get some more external
| hardware, but I have to do investigations on how some
| companies do firmware updates which often require
| MacOS/Windows or Chrome Browser (fucking webmidi looking at
| you Novation)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I've tried switching to hardware sequencers multiple
| times.
|
| I just don't like it. I came of age making beats in
| Fruity Loops. I'll gladly drop another 200$ or 300$ just
| to make things easier.
|
| I do have some dreams of making an open source sequencer
| that runs directly off a raspberry pi. Something like a
| fully open source MPC.
|
| Some projects like this exist, but it's still more
| difficult than I'd like.
|
| Maybe one day in the distant future Apple will make
| affordable laptops. A MacBook that takes a standard 2280
| SSD would be amazing.
|
| Never going to happen though. That's where the money is.
| commakozzi wrote:
| I dropped my Game Pass sub immediately after they upped the
| sub price and unplugged my Xbox Series X. I have a Bazzite
| machine, but I've had issues with the NVidia drivers and not
| enough patience to deal with it. So i'm currently ONLY using
| my Steam Deck OLED for gaming. When i want to play big AAA
| games at my desk (SD in docked mode), i'll use GeForce Now
| and all of it has been a wonderful experience, even the
| online "competitive" FPS games like BF6. Much better than my
| experience on either Windows or Xbox. I'll never go back...
| and i'm impatiently waiting on my Steam Machine!
| oxguy3 wrote:
| Yep same; have had Linux on my laptop for a decade plus, but
| finally switched my desktop over a few years ago, and I have
| no regrets. The real magic is that I no longer feel the need
| to do any research before buying a game; it usually just
| works. Granted, I don't really play competitive multiplayer
| games, so YMMV (but even that might be about to change if the
| Steam Machine sells well enough).
| gishh wrote:
| Just get a ps5. I went through the same adventure.
| Gracana wrote:
| I did that for years and I recommend it as well. Pure linux
| desktop + console for games is a nice combo and a good
| separation of functions.
|
| Of course... at this point I am back to having a PC with a
| beastly GPU and I boot Windows for games and CAD. It is hard
| to resist high framerate 4k gaming once it becomes a
| possibility, so now I need to figure out the secure boot
| problem for the occasional game that requires it.
| limagnolia wrote:
| A PS5 is an even more locked down system! There are vastly
| more games, many I already own, that work on Linux.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I don't personally have a problem with a system being
| locked down in general. I have a problem with _my computer_
| being locked down, or getting rootkits installed on it. So
| for me at least, playing those games on console is a good
| solution.
| RestartKernel wrote:
| That's the seperation of concerns that drives me to a
| Switch alongside my computer. Though I'm by no means a
| "serious" gamer by most people's standards.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| I'd much rather invest one powerful machine that cand do work
| and games instead of two that take up extra space and
| generate more e-waste.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| I still play on my ps2 ... because consoles are linked
| closely to the games of that generation I would guess that
| they are tech that are on relative terms least discarded
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| I was in a similar situation and ended up buying a PS5. It
| ended up being exactly what I wanted.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| How's the mouse and keyboard story on PlayStation? The few
| shooters I play would greatly hinder me if I were stuck on a
| gamepad.
| grayhatter wrote:
| > I don't need gaming that much.
|
| Counter point: gaming is fun, and indy games are worth
| investing in. Voting with your wallet works better if you vote
| for behavior that's not user hostile, rather than only
| abstaining.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| Lots of games don't need invasive anti-cheat. You can just play
| those. There are literally too many awesome games on the market
| to ever be without something great to play.
| moltopoco wrote:
| Many people have one or more Discord groups where someone
| will say "let's play Valorant tonight" and then everyone just
| installs it. Linux is fantastic for local gaming on a
| handheld or in the living room, not so much when your non-
| Linux friends pick the game.
| weberer wrote:
| Just to be clear, the anti-cheat systems that support Linux run
| at the user level and don't require secure boot. Those kernel-
| level and secure boot restrictions only apply to a handful of
| games, and they all explicitly block Linux users anyway. For
| example, I've been playing Arc Raiders a lot recently in Linux,
| and the user-level EAC works just fine.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| The user-level cheats are extremely bad. For example, Elden
| Ring uses EZ Anti-Cheat and it works on linux and that game
| is infested with PvP cheaters.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...Elden Ring uses EZ Anti-Cheat and it works on linux
| and that game is infested with PvP cheaters.
|
| I would question how good Elden Ring's use of EAC actually
| is.
|
| Given that -at launch-
|
| * Players who were using a Japanese locale couldn't play
| the game unless they removed EAC
|
| * Removing EAC _substantially_ reduced the amount of
| _incredibly noticeable_ hitching and stuttering
|
| my hunch is that EAC was hastily slapped on very, very late
| in the process due to demands from some US-based PHB.
| gordonfish wrote:
| I honestly don't understand why any game is even checking if
| secure boot is enabled.
|
| If anything it's for the OS to care about that, not individual
| programs. Afaik, secure boot doesn't (on it's own) prevent the
| running of arbitrary software, so how is it actually preventing
| cheating?
| Mindwipe wrote:
| It does mean that a signed OS image is running, so
| demonstrates that the kernel was unaltered at start-up.
|
| It also demonstrates further levels of driver signing
| robustness.
| krelian wrote:
| I'm not really familiar with Secure Boot too much.
| Researching suggests that users can add their own keys so
| they are trusted by UEFI. Won't this resolve for linux
| users that must have secure boot on?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| What irritates me is when games that don't even benefit from
| anti-cheat require it. Helldivers 2, for example. My dudes,
| it's a _co-op_ game. My teammates and I are all on the same
| side! Moreover, the vast majority of people are gonna play with
| their friends, not randoms. And if your friend is using a cheat
| and it bothers you, you just ask him to stop. There 's no
| reason for a game like Helldivers 2 to require anti-cheat at
| all, let alone the rootkit variety. And yet...
| kipchak wrote:
| Helldivers might have more to do with preventing people from
| easily farming super credits versus game integrity.
| simoncion wrote:
| Yep. I've seen quite a few free-to-play gacha games of the
| "Dress up your pretty princess in cool clothes and do cute
| activities in a relaxing, no-stress world." variety that
| have _serious_ anticheat. There 's no leaderboard, no
| multiplayer, it's totally singleplayer.
|
| Why the serious anticheat? To try to prevent you from
| cheating your way to possession of all the cool clothes for
| your pretty princess.
| isk517 wrote:
| Elden Ring: Nightreign is also a co-op PvE game that has
| anti-cheating in it. The most common way people cheat is by
| fudging then items equipped to their character that slightly
| alter their stats and abilities. Since the game is rouge-like
| and all of your character information and equipment you can
| assign before entering the game is handled locally then all
| it takes is editing your save file which the game and server
| have no way of (or makes no effort to) detect.
|
| Also, after a brief period, all of the cheaters disappeared
| because just repeatedly winning a PvE game get boring.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The best games with anti-cheat have an option to launch
| without using it, but just restrict what game types you can
| play. Playing with friends should be allowed without anti-
| cheat.
| troad wrote:
| It's also bad with games that have been sucked into the live
| service hell-vortex. I can't fire up a quick game of Madden
| against the CPU because EA has turned Madden into a
| multiplayer lootbox casino, so they chuck Linux-blocking
| anti-cheat on the whole damn thing, single-player and all.
| jadbox wrote:
| What? Helldivers 2 works just fine on linux for me. Is this
| just a windows thing?
| simoncion wrote:
| Not all anticheat fails to work in Wine/Proton.
|
| The _super invasive_ kernel-mode variants (that is, the
| sort that 's in Valorant) flat out fail, and surely always
| will. It's my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that with
| some others (like Easy Anti Cheat), it's a choice made by
| the game dev as to whether running in Wine/Proton will be
| permitted or not.
| bflesch wrote:
| As most of you know, these anti-cheat systems are functionally
| equivalent to rootkits. There is zero visibility into how these
| privileges are used for targeted attacks. Due to geographic
| location of the large game companies this has a geopolitical
| angle. Fingerprinting of devices and the networks they are in
| provides a lot of metadata that is most definitely fed into their
| intelligence apparatus.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I remember trying to install Valorant for the first time, and
| its ridiculously invasive anticheat kernel mod (or whatever
| it's called) gave me my first blue (or was it red??) screen I'd
| seen on Windows in years.
|
| Immediately uninstalled it and haven't ever played Valorant to
| this day. Fuck that crap, if your community is so toxic that
| you need a rootkit to keep cheaters at bay, then maybe it's
| more of a community problem than a technological one. And yes,
| if this means that you have to block all of China in order to
| do so, then that is _still a community problem_. Put your
| rootkits on your Chinese servers, separate them out, and let
| the cheaters fight amongst themselves.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Is it any coincidence that such state is from the same
| company behind League of Legends?
| philipallstar wrote:
| > if your community is so toxic that
|
| It's nothing to do with a toxic community.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Unpopular opinion, but we would be better off with a single
| open trusted implementation of anti cheat (aka drm) which can
| attest whatever requirements are desired by the game is met.
| The only real problem is that it would likely be limited to
| approved kernel images and someone would need to own that
| validation and signing infrastructure, but you could imagine
| having multiple trusted entities have this role.
| bflesch wrote:
| Kernel anticheat is not really effective because it can be
| circumvented on the hardware level, for example using direct
| memory access with a second computer and screen to show the
| hidden game state.
|
| Cheating is a meat space problem and there is no technical
| solution to it. Thats why in tournaments there are referees
| standing behind the players. Ultimately it comes down to
| checking if metrics like reaction speed are humanly possible,
| but a rootkit is not really needed for that.
| maccard wrote:
| > Cheating is a meat space problem and there is no
| technical solution to it
|
| Cheating is an arms race - the number of people who are
| willing to run a second computer with DMA connected to a
| single machine is _vastly_ smaller than the number of
| people who are wiling to download a dodgy file from the
| internet and run it.
|
| > Ultimately it comes down to checking if metrics like
| reaction speed are humanly possible, but a rootkit is not
| really needed for that.
|
| If it was that easy, cheating would be a solved problem. An
| awful lot of play is "I know the reload time is 0.75s, so
| they're going to appear when they've reloaded" - that's way
| beyond human reaction time. And that's at "mid level" play
| - at gold/sliver levels in league of legends knowing
| cooldowns is considered base knowledge. At higher levels of
| play, _all_ of your players are statistical outliers.
| cortesoft wrote:
| This is theoretically possible, but I don't think most
| cheaters would have the equipment or skill to do this.
| Cheating is only rampant in games where people can just buy
| and download cheats... if it requires a lot of skill and
| hardware, it won't be a big issue.
| bangaladore wrote:
| > Kernel anticheat is not really effective because it can
| be circumvented on the hardware level, for example using
| direct memory access with a second computer and screen to
| show the hidden game state.
|
| Incorrect. DMA (direct memory access) is and can be
| prevented [1] and detected [2].
|
| [1] https://www.faceit.com/en/news/faceit-rollout-of-tpm-
| secure-...
|
| [2] https://community.osr.com/t/detecting-pcie-dma-based-
| cheatin...
| von_lohengramm wrote:
| Imagine wanting tivoization. Horrifying.
| az09mugen wrote:
| Yes, and more than that, the kernel-level-anticheats are unable
| to spot someone using a Cronus ( hardware aim assist among
| other stuff [0] ).
|
| I'm never going to play again online on any FPS because that
| whole incoherent bubble of crap disgusts me.
|
| The multiplayer games community is toxic, and players are
| focused on success whatever the cost is. And I don't even want
| to touch the question of match making with a 10-foot-pole.
| Local, self-hosted or in small community is the best.
|
| [0] https://cronus.shop/
| officeplant wrote:
| >Local, self-hosted or in small community is the best.
|
| It always makes me happy to fire up Quake via Darkplaces or
| even ioQuake3 and still see servers up and people playing.
| stephen_cagle wrote:
| I'm curious, do they have to be? Would it be possible to boot
| the program + the anti cheat into it's own VM or something? So
| _they_ know I am running on trusted hardware, but _I_ know that
| the aren 't reading my emails? Genuinely curious and don't know
| the answer to this.
| kamranjon wrote:
| At this point - you would think that cheaters could be detected
| on the server side by either training a model to flag abnormal
| behavior or do some type of statistics on the movement patterns
| over time - is a client-side anti-cheat really required?
| pmarreck wrote:
| I don't believe there's a foolproof way to do this.
|
| It's basically the usual cat-and-mouse game of an arms race.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| That's because the 2025 definition of "anti-cheat" leans
| heavily towards preventing players from enjoying client-side
| content that's locked behind microtransactions (for example,
| EA's new Skate game).
| wavemode wrote:
| Many forms of cheating revolve around modding the game locally
| so that certain textures can be seen through walls, so you
| always know where opponents are. So you aren't breaking any
| laws of physics, you are just able to make much better tactical
| decisions.
|
| The obvious solution would be, just don't send data to the
| player's client about enemies that are behind walls. But this
| is a surprisingly hard thing to engineer in realtime games
| without breaking the player experience (see:
| https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-
| wallhacks-..., and then notice that even in the final video
| wallhacks are still possible, they're just more delayed).
| Quimoniz wrote:
| > So you aren't breaking any laws of physics, you are just
| able to make much better tactical decisions.
|
| With respect I'd like to disagree on this subtly. A lot of
| games have the client send their cursor position at
| relatively frequent updates/packages (i.e. sub-second). So
| the server knows pretty precisely in which direction and to
| which object a player is looking.
|
| This in turn can be readily used upon when using wall-hacks,
| as most players, who use wall-hacks tend to almost faithfully
| follow objects behind walls with their cursor, which good
| moderators can usually spot within a few seconds, when
| reviewing such footage (source: I was involved in recognizing
| Wall-Hacks in Minecraft, where players would replace
| textures, to easily find and mine diamonds underground).
| squigz wrote:
| You very, _very_ quickly learn not to look like you use
| wall-hacks.
| vablings wrote:
| The biggest heuristic is that you suddenly get much more
| consistent. Valorant uses this to ramp up how intrusive
| its kernel anticheat becomes and often forcing you to
| turn on more intrusive features to continue playing the
| game
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| This is done, and generally doesn't work as well. Your model
| will catch people using yesterday's cheats, but the cat-and-
| mouse nature of cheating means that people will adapt. Funnily
| enough, cheaters are also training models to play games so that
| they can evade cheat detection. The kernel-level anticheats are
| designed to prevent the game from running if they detect you
| are running any software that interacts with the game. Much
| simpler for the developer, and circumventing it usually
| requires running your cheats on a second machine which a)
| limits what you can do and b) has a higher barrier to entry.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| What you'll find is that a subset of players define a behaviour
| and now you have to prove that that behaviour is cheating. For
| most behaviours that could be cheating, it will overlap with
| skilled players.
|
| Examples would be pre-aiming corners and >99th percentile
| reaction time.
|
| You need a false positive rate well below 1%.
| maccard wrote:
| It's estimated that cod warzone has 45 million players - a
| 0.1% false positive rate at that player count is 45000
| people. That's a _lot_. It needs to be orders of magnitude
| less than that.
| rasz wrote:
| oh but that would mean more computation on the server, cant
| have that!
| LanceH wrote:
| Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like
| to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the
| game companies that took away the standard method of playing
| multiplayer -- players running their own servers.
|
| It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now
| we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-
| cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% solve the
| problem.
| sofixa wrote:
| > caused by the game companies that took away the standard
| method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own
| servers
|
| Let's be real, what % people among those who game are
| interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one
| of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a
| CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable
| to play myself because the computer had nowhere near enough
| capacity for both the server and the actual game running at the
| same time); but it's a minuscule percentage.
| afavour wrote:
| I never ran a server back in the day but I still benefitted
| from community run servers where decisions about banning were
| done by volunteer admins. These days with centralized servers
| it _has_ to be automated.
| galbar wrote:
| For a casual CS server the ratio could perfectly be 1:50 and
| that'd be fine. That's how it used to be with, i.e.,
| CS:Source.
|
| Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which
| lowered the ratio even further.
|
| IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller
| forums (be it web communities or game server communities)
| than to do for huge ones.
| squigz wrote:
| > Let's be real, what % people among those who game are
| interested in running their own game server?
|
| Let's put it differently: What % of people among those who
| program are interested in maintaining open source software?
|
| A very low %, and yet it's a thriving ecosystem.
|
| To bring it back to gaming: How many people who game are
| interested in modding, or creating models/maps/etc? Again, a
| very low %, and yet...
| keyringlight wrote:
| Running/renting hardware and connectivity and
| administrating a service and development are slightly
| different.
| squigz wrote:
| It's not the 2000s anymore - you don't have to run/rent
| "hardware" and worry about "connectivity" and whatnot.
| For most games that offer dedicated servers, there are
| services with easy to use panels with fancy colored
| buttons and everything.
|
| As another example: how about hosting a website?
| rererereferred wrote:
| There are games I play were one of the players' machines
| becomes the server. In some it's transparent to them, you
| just join their world or lobby, in others it's explicit and
| you even have to input the host's IP to enter.
|
| Standalone servers you need to run separately and care for
| are much more rare.
| hamdingers wrote:
| This isn't a problem because any given server can support
| hundreds or thousands of weekly players, so only 0.1% of your
| playerbase needs to run a server.
|
| We had this, it worked, for years. I'm baffled by all the
| posters saying it won't, because _it did_.
| hparadiz wrote:
| We used to run these servers on machines that today aren't
| even 20% of the M1 in my MacBook air.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Even if custom game servers were a preferable experience, which
| I would argue against, it doesn't really do anything for this
| problem.
|
| By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a
| single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min
| game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their
| time now that you have to kick someone.
|
| It's kind of like thinking you can forgo anti-bot measures
| because your website's users can just report the bots: by the
| time it's your users' problem, you've ruined the experience for
| everyone except the bots.
| squigz wrote:
| > By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to
| ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4
| 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already
| wasted their time now that you have to kick someone.
|
| The difference is there is usually an existing level of trust
| between people playing on a private server. Usually your
| group would know ahead of time if someone is going to
| potentially be a problem.
|
| Furthermore, even with public dedicated servers, there's a
| psychological aspect to it - it's no longer just a random
| matchmaking server; you're almost walking into someone's
| house. Many people feel a lot more pressure not to misbehave
|
| Then there's the fact that you don't have to wait many days
| for your cheating report to hopefully be acted on. Our game
| got interrupted? Well, that sucks, but we can just ban that
| guy and go again and we likely won't have to worry that our
| very next game will also contain a cheater
|
| Finally: these defences always have an implicit assumption
| with it: that the horribly pervasive anti-cheats actually...
| you know, work. They do, to a rather limited extent, but
| cheaters are still rampant, so what's the point?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| If I already have a preformed 4v4, then I don't need
| anticheat.
|
| The question is what to do about the rest of the time for
| everyone else. Shopping around private servers and dealing
| with individual server admin quirks is a regression from
| matchmaking UX that Starcraft had in the late 90s or that
| Halo 2 had in the early 2000s.
| squigz wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| If you wanna matchmake, great, go ahead.
|
| If you want to run a private server, you can do that too.
| chownie wrote:
| I would much rather my 45 minute game be disrupted and the
| user booted permanently by moderators VS every game be
| disrupted for months while the developers try and work out
| which parts of my privacy they can invade to maybe hopefully
| boot the cheaters.
| isgb wrote:
| Problem is that requires moderators, that get paid, with
| money.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| more likely volunteers when they're running their own
| servers
| Kuinox wrote:
| volunteers which aren't necessarly pro player and cant
| distinguish good players from smart cheaters.
| chownie wrote:
| The developers aren't pro players either, the cutting
| edge for anti-cheats still require that non-cheaters play
| with cheaters for months. I would not be shocked if
| simple vote-kick outperforms every anti-cheat on the
| market.
| Kuinox wrote:
| A simple vote-kick will kick, will kick so much players
| that doesn't cheat. It's already used to troll in games
| like CS.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Not really. In mostly player-run lobbies, one of the
| players would kick any found cheaters. It's not exacts
| science, but it's what people did.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| What about everyone else?
| chownie wrote:
| Re-read the comment but with generosity in your heart? I
| don't think you need it explained.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| counterpoint: my 45 min 4v4 game gets terminally disrupted if
| I can't run the game on my device
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Sure, but that's a trade-off everyone already enjoying the
| game might be fine with if it means a better experience.
| That's how bad cheating is.
| squigz wrote:
| > Sure, but that's a trade-off everyone already enjoying
| the game might be fine with if it means a better
| experience.
|
| Does it mean a better experience though? This isn't like,
| a theoretical GP is talking about. We don't have to
| imagine if
|
| > That's how bad cheating is.
|
| Seems like the answer is no?
| Kuinox wrote:
| Did you played in this era ?
|
| - If you were too good on some server, you'd get banned.
|
| - If the admin doesn't know well cheating, he could tolerate
| something that was obvious cheating.
|
| - Cheaters could just change server often.
|
| It used to be easy to just ban peoples yes, and it was as easy
| to switch servers.
|
| Plus on most competitive game today, you have custom lobbies,
| which do exactly what you want, and there is a reason why only
| a minority of players uses it.
| hamdingers wrote:
| All true, but of course you're missing the player agency
| component that renders those issues moot. If any of the above
| happens, you can simply find another server.
|
| Private games (now called "custom lobbies") were available
| back then too, they're not equivalent to a public server
| browser.
| Kuinox wrote:
| They are functionally equivalent for the player. The
| problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard
| to get a fair and balanced competitive match, where now
| it's extremely common with matchmaking on servers hosted by
| the game company.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Back then at least you could do something about it. Now
| if there's an obvious cheater you just kinda sit there
| and take your L, and ask people to make reports.
| Kuinox wrote:
| > Back then at least you could do something about it.
|
| Back then, the most common option taken was leaving the
| server to find another one.
| hparadiz wrote:
| This is drudging up some formative memories. In the
| counter-strike / TF2 communities you'd have servers that
| would grant vote kick rights with more playtime and some
| of those regulars would then apply for mod rights. It
| worked quite well.
| Kuinox wrote:
| It still doesn't solve the unfair votekick problem.
| People with more play time, doesn't have necessarly the
| abilities nor tools to judge if someone is cheating. Take
| a look at the trackmania community, some cheaters are
| caught years later, because they played it smart. Some
| cheating can't only be observed by looking at the
| statistics, or hard proof of cheating being ran.
| hparadiz wrote:
| It's a pub. It doesn't matter as long as it's not obvious
| aim bots and people are having fun. Besides when it's a
| 32 player instant respawn death match server you have
| like 200-300 regulars. That type of cheating was never an
| issue in those because the servers were always full
| during peak times and everyone kinda knows each other.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Something you are explicitly punished for in modern
| matchmaking. Unless you want to be downranked or even
| temp banned you must suffer the cheater.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| If you were playing on a server you owned or for which
| you had ban permissions, you could do something about it.
| Otherwise, you had to hope that an admin was online to
| ban the cheater. If no one was around to take action,
| your option was to... sit there, take your L, and ask
| people to make reports (to the admins). You had the
| option to hop around between servers until you found one
| that didn't have cheaters, but is that all that different
| from just quitting back to matchmaking and hoping you
| find a match without cheaters?
|
| Edit to add: I'm not disputing that kernel-level
| anticheat is bad; I agree that it is. I don't think it
| helps to try and hearken back to a golden age of PC
| gaming that didn't really exist. Maybe it was easier for
| server admins to manage because player populations were
| smaller back then, but that's about all that would have
| made things "better."
| hamdingers wrote:
| You were not helpless if the admin wasn't on, votekick
| has existed for 25+ years.
|
| Believe it or not us old folks who played during this
| time had ways to address these issues.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Votekick still exists in modern games, too.
| hamdingers wrote:
| They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are
| games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are
| published in a list for strangers to join. Normally a
| custom lobby implies invite only.
|
| Not everyone is interested in a "fair and balanced
| competitive match" where you're guaranteed to win no more
| and no less than 50% of the time. I actually find that
| intolerably boring.
| Kuinox wrote:
| > They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are
| games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are
| published in a list for strangers to join.
|
| Lots of the mosts played competitive games have that, or
| third party websites/discords that have links to custom
| lobbies.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Being able to make friends off-platform and then play
| with them is obviously not what we're talking about.
|
| I have to conclude you're unfamiliar with what
| multiplayer gaming was like when servers were the norm.
| Kuinox wrote:
| > I have to conclude you're unfamiliar with what
| multiplayer gaming was like when servers were the norm.
|
| Did you even played a single game competitively ? The
| fact you keep pushing for server browser tell me that no,
| you need communities on something else. You likely forgot
| the hassle that server browser were, and forgot that lots
| of games didn't had a server browser.
|
| LFG communities were important and excluding this shows
| you were only playing casually, forgot all the problems
| servers browser had.
|
| Do you even remember, that you could get malware by
| joining servers in a server list ?!?
| hamdingers wrote:
| No, I used to play multiplayer games for fun, which was
| the norm until that option was removed and replaced with
| derisive "casual" and "competitive" modes.
|
| 99% of people who played CS1.x/tf/Q3A/bf1942/cod/etc
| booted up the game, found a server in the browser with
| low ping to play on, and if they liked it they favorited
| it. They came back the next day, and the next, and
| started to recognized other players. That is the server
| browser experience.
|
| If you were in the tiny minority of players trying to be
| "competitive" back then, you're right I don't know what
| it looked like for you. Sounds like it sucked, honestly,
| and maybe competitive matchmaking solved some of those
| problems, but in the bargain we lost a lot of what made
| those games fun for "casuals" as you smugly call us.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Again, it looks like you forgot all the issues there was,
| and only remember the good aspect of it. You didnt find
| the server on the first try.
|
| Your favorite server was not always online
|
| Some people were too good on the server you like and it
| wasn't fun.
|
| Countless other problems, and you needed to sink in a lot
| of time to get the few quality time you wrote about.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...you needed to sink in a lot of time to get the few
| quality time you wrote about.
|
| Sounds like you've got a skill issue. That doesn't match
| my experience, like, at all.
|
| But a really, _really_ easy shortcut was to find servers
| that indicated that they were furry-friendly. This all
| but guaranteed that
|
| 1) The folks on there would be fairly even-keeled and
| reasonable, and folks who weren't would be rapidly banned
| forever.
|
| 2) The folks on there would generally be good at the
| game. [0]
|
| 3) If you're lucky -and the game is one that permits
| custom "sprays" (as HL1 and Source engine did)- you might
| get to see some high-quality-but-thumbnail-sized furry
| porn.
|
| [0] Seriously, at least back when both server browsers
| and user-hosted game servers were commonplace, I found a
| 1:1 correlation between "Are they a furry?" and "Are they
| particularly good at the game?". It was wild.
| josefx wrote:
| > The problem with player hosted servers is that it was
| very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match
|
| Playing against overwhelming odds has its own kind of
| charm. I once spend days just sabotaging the top players
| on some gun game servers, only wining myself once or
| twice. Games against friends with various fun handicaps
| and flat out abuse of any knowledge you could gain from
| playing against the same people repeatedly - what good is
| a hidding spot when everyone knows you will be there 50%
| of the time.
|
| "Fair and balanced" games against completely random
| people are just missing something for me.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This is something matchmaking games totally miss which
| keeps them from being truly competitive in the way sports
| or old games were: a competitive community. You need
| other players with known identities to compare yourself
| against on a consistent basis.
|
| Of course, classic competitive institutions had problems
| as well ("he's very competitive" is not necessarily a
| nice description of a person!), but they seemed more
| enjoyable that this matchmaking stuff.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I hated wasting a whole half hour server hopping until I
| found one that didn't suck
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Custom lobbies don't meet the same need. That's for playing
| with your friends, or at least, people you vet yourself.
| Community servers are a sub-community in of themselves:
| people tend to play on the same servers on a regular basis,
| allowing you to build rapport, community norms, and have
| substantially more direct moderation than company-run
| servers.
|
| Yes, sometimes you run into power-tripping moderators. That
| comes with the territory of having moderators. But the
| upsides, of being embedded in a usefully-sized community, and
| having nearly constant human moderation, not to mention the
| whole "stop killing games" of it all, far outweigh the need
| to shop around a bit for a good server.
|
| I think the ideal middle ground is something like Squad's
| server system: The developers offer a contract to server
| owners, establishing basic standards that must be met to be a
| recommended server. Rules forbidding the crazy bigotry that
| milsims tend to attract, minimum server specs to ensure
| smooth gameplay, an effective appeals process. If a server
| meets those requirements, and signs the agreement to keep
| meeting those standards, they get put on a "recommended"
| server list (which 90%+ of the playerbase exclusively use).
| Other servers go on the "custom" server list, which can be
| modded, or spun up for certain events, or whatever.
| Kuinox wrote:
| two or three months ago, I played a game that did exactly
| what you proposed, V-Rising, it have a server browser, I
| played a week with friend on a busy server. Then the server
| was gone for two weeks. When it was back, mosts of the
| bases were gone due to inactivity.
|
| That's the kind of things that were common too, maybe you
| forgot about it.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| All the multiplayer games I play today are either
| community server based, or I exclusively interact with
| private lobbies.
|
| My negative experiences with community servers represent
| a pretty short list. Sometimes servers die, but games die
| sometimes, too. That's obviously only an issue with
| persistent-state games, like Minecraft, but it's
| unfortunate when it happens. Can't say it was so frequent
| that it impacted my enjoyment of any games as a whole.
| jdashg wrote:
| I did indeed play in the era LanceH is talking about, and I
| agree with them! We had many thriving communities with no
| serious cheating problems because of community moderation.
|
| Yes, there were poorly moderated servers, but you could
| simply leave and try a different community until you found
| one that clicked for you. When you require equal moderation
| everywhere, you throw the baby out with the bath water.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| This isn't the reason.
|
| The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to
| play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking
| requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as
| admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking
| that players enjoy today.
|
| And cheating is an arms race. It's just hacking. You either
| preserve game integrity or you're going to have cheaters.
| t-writescode wrote:
| How did it work in the early Steam (CS 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, CS:S)
| and GameSpy days?
| organsnyder wrote:
| I think a big part of it is the stakes were just lower.
| There wasn't money and careers in it the same way there is
| with egaming now.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it's streaming in particular. With actual
| competitive games, like, tournaments and whatnot, the
| players are well known and they are competing in actual
| tournaments, right? The play is broadcast and all the
| players have their professional game-player reputation at
| stake, so there's a strong incentive to not cheat (it is
| a very cushy and high-skill job with almost no
| transferable skills, so like, better not get booted). It
| is just that streamers might bump into cheating and
| that's annoying for their viewers I guess.
|
| When people play in these "competitive" matchmaking
| queues, it is more like a pickup game. If somebody shows
| up to a pickup baseball game with a corked bat, they are
| just kind of a loser and it isn't a big deal, right?
| There's no actual reward for hitting "platinum rank" or
| whatever in most games, other than skins or something.
| Nothing real is on the line.
|
| IMO: we really should just have let these people cheat
| their way out of the normal matchmaking population.
| Smurfing is a much bigger problem. I don't actually care
| if the guy dominating the match with some 60:0 kill-
| death-ratio is cheating or a semi-pro beating up on
| casuals, haha.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Are the stakes not still zero? Aren't like 99.9% of
| players not at all competitive in any meaningful sense
| basically by definition? Like if Counter-Strike has 1M
| active players, and you are in the 99.9%-ile, you are
| still only in the top 1,000. Do people watch the rank
| 1000 players? Are they making a career out of it? What
| fraction of the player-base thinks they are actually
| competitive vs. is just playing a game?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I actually think a big part of this anti-cheat push is
| just developers wanting their players to _think_
| something real is at stake. Yes we put a ton of effort
| into protecting your very important Elo score from
| hackers so you confidently sink hours into improving it.
|
| If they would just let the cheaters win their way up the
| ranks, they could have their own little cheater lobbies
| and we wouldn't have to deal with them.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Right, this is also my suspicion. It's all ultimately a
| way to psychologically manipulate people into buying more
| microtransactions. It's then important to always point
| out how silly and obvious the whole thing is. It's like
| if your local sports organization at the park insisted on
| drug testing everyone so they can try to convince you
| your beer league volleyball game is actually very serious
| and you should buy Air Jordans or fancy shorts to up your
| game. These people are a joke.
| dtdynasty wrote:
| For some games like dota 2 cheats only make them
| marginally better at the game but much more frustrating
| to play against. The most common cheats are map hacks and
| instant action scripts both of which can be useless
| without the game knowledge for correct play. But both of
| these cheats make playing against them frustrating but
| they wouldn't rise to the top.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Again I think there's a better way if we push through the
| concept of a fair game, and just focus on fun. It should
| be possible and accepted to block (and never match with
| going forward) players who are just... unfun. Annoying,
| poor sports, or cheaters. Heck, maybe player-curated and
| shared matching and blocking lists could become a thing.
|
| Games are a social thing we do to have fun, there's no
| obligation to spend your limited social free time hanging
| out with annoying people.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The problem is the reverse of what is being argued here.
| The stakes are high because of how much money these
| companies are making off of DLCs/in-app purchases. The
| game operator thus has an incentive to ensure that high
| value _customers_ can 't be banned by third parties.
| Instead of just being banned, the player is suspended 24
| hours or something, and then they come back.
| commakozzi wrote:
| Came here to find this comment. It is NOT about
| matchmaking and/or "protecting the incomes" of
| competitive players AT ALL! It is solely about protecting
| these games' in-game shops and associated economies. The
| real comp scenes are all done on LAN anyway, with
| entirely different anti-cheat setups.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| More distributed and more manual. More administrative
| overhead. More localized culture we all get nostalgic for.
| Much more effort to play against peer competitors.
|
| It's the same phenomenon you see in many sectors.
|
| Access is democratized and the friction/barrier to play is
| dramatically lowered/free, and the localization is diluted
| or non existent and just a monoculture.
| babypuncher wrote:
| PunkBuster and later VAC were commonplace. Anti-cheat
| middleware is not new by any stretch.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| People are still playing Battlefield 4 (2013) on user-hosted
| servers. Right now.
|
| The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping,
| and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of
| servers by ping.
|
| Cheating is an arms race that _no one needs to participate
| in_. Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major
| game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| What, 2000 players? 5000?
|
| Moderating that game is multiple orders of magnitude off of
| major titles.
|
| No Battlefield game is even in the top 100 of esports
| earnings.
| guizadillas wrote:
| I wouldn't measure anticheat success by esports earning
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| It's clearly one significant measure. What do you think
| is going to happen to tournament money if every other
| tournament has a cheater? How many esports fans want to
| go play League after watching Faker decimate another team
| if they have cheaters in their match every other day?
|
| What it tells you most of all is popularity and incentive
| to cheat. Cast a big enough net and you'll inevitably
| find cheaters. The bigger the net, the more cheaters
| you'll collect.
| LanceH wrote:
| We lost a lot of other things as well. Like modding and
| especially maps.
|
| It doesn't matter how good the game developers are, someone
| out there is could make a better map.
|
| The studios took control of everything, and their answer is
| to rootkit our computers, and to buy more DLC if we want
| another map.
|
| Personally, I don't accept the premise that such studio
| control is necessary for me to have fun playing a game.
|
| I especially miss custom maps.
| Rohansi wrote:
| This has nothing to do with anti-cheat. I work on Rust and
| most servers are hosted by the community and there is a
| good modding+custom map scene. The game has an anti-cheat
| because it's a big target for cheaters.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| Do you work on community maps?
|
| Rust remains maybe the last true community game that's
| just solid all the way through where the studio is good
| to its players and doesn't patronize and betray them. I
| can have the sort of fun I would have had 20 years ago in
| Rust, and everything else feels like monocultural slop by
| comparison.
|
| I wish more of my friends wanted to play it, and wish I
| had more time for it.
| s0ss wrote:
| Too bad rust isn't playable on linux due to anticheat.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Rust is playable on Linux on servers that disable
| anticheat
| Rohansi wrote:
| No, I don't work on maps, I work for Facepunch. Thanks :)
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| I agree with you in sentiment and am very nostalgic for the
| pre-monoculture days, but I also acknowledge that
| competitive games are a multi-billion dollar industry, and
| trying to moderate a game with millions of players in a
| distributed environment is just a non-starter.
|
| You reject the premise that such control is necessary for
| your idea of fun.
|
| But millions of players enjoy ranked matchmaking enough
| that without aggressive anti cheat you will wind up with
| cheaters.
|
| I hate the root kits as well, but if you spend any time
| playing Valorant vs CS, you will see the difference. If I
| play CS consistently I'll get cheaters once or twice a
| week. In Valorant it's almost unheard of by comparison. It
| sucks, but that's just what's happening.
|
| Do I wish I at least had the option in Valorant or whatever
| to host a server? Absolutely. Do I think they use the
| rootkits maliciously? No, generally not. Do I think studios
| are disincentivized to provide server hosting due to DLC or
| microtransactions? Definitely. But I also think there's
| often also a game integrity component. All of these things
| can be true simultaneously.
| pnw wrote:
| There are hundreds of popular games with mod support. See
| https://mod.io/g
|
| If anything, we are in a golden age of mods!
| jsheard wrote:
| > The reason it's necessary is because players want to be
| able to play with/against other players around the world.
| Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your
| own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive
| global ranking that players enjoy today.
|
| Case in point, Counter Strike is a rare example of a popular
| game which supports both the "modern" matchmaking paradigm
| _and_ the classic community server paradigm... and for better
| or worse the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking.
| hamdingers wrote:
| > and the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking
|
| The server browser is buried under a couple layers of
| obtuse menus (and, at present, is completely broken on my
| SteamOS machine) while matchmaking is obvious and
| straightforward. You cannot come to any reasonable
| conclusions about player preference given the way the UI
| drives players towards matchmaking and away from servers.
| If they were presented on equal footing you might have a
| point.
|
| Consider also TF2. It launched as a server-based game, and
| in the years after matchmaking was added Valve went through
| many UX iterations designed to drive traffic to it before
| it was more popular.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking
| that players enjoy today
|
| I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings
| truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately
| measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular
| the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small
| fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The
| games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which
| have less of a cheating problem to begin with.
|
| I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without
| centralization, if only because centralization is exactly
| where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense.
| Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing
| money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get
| blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a
| lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least.
|
| That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on
| Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know
| it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of
| a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a
| bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.
| duskwuff wrote:
| WRT player stats and rankings: I'm inclined to disagree.
| Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be
| pretty noisy. Matchmaking often ends up constrained by the
| number of online players searching for a game at the same
| time, so the teams may not be well balanced, and the
| outcome of the match can be decided by the presence of a
| single highly skilled player who happened to be searching
| for a match at the right moment. The resulting rankings
| aren't necessarily a good measure of player skill.
|
| Larger games have the luxury of being able to place players
| into teams consisting entirely of other players of similar
| skill levels, against teams of similar composition. The
| results of those games are a better reflection of those
| players' skill.
| simoncion wrote:
| > Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to
| be pretty noisy.
|
| PP wasn't talking about ranking stability. PP was talking
| about the "Why should I give a shit about the leaderboard
| when ten million people play the game, and I'm someone
| with life obligations that aren't 'playing this game,
| exclusively', so I'm always in the middle of a sea of
| strangers because I can never git particularly gud?".
|
| You might argue that the solution to _that_ is to have
| separate rankings for folks in your friends ' (or
| whatever) list, and I agree... but I'd get the same thing
| as filtered-to-friends-only leaderboards with
| leaderboards that are restricted to the population of
| players on the private servers on which I play. Plus,
| private servers give you the option to benefit from
| active admins who ban cheaters and other shitheels
| forever. [0]
|
| [0] Or _encourage_ them to cheat and be godawful, if that
| 's the sort of server that they want to run. All-cheats-
| all-the-time and/or vent-your-spleen-24/7 servers are
| fun, too... just so long as folks are informed of what
| they're getting into by joining.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Yeah, this is pretty clear. The community for any
| competitive game if you are a member of the top 100 players
| is always amazing. These players play the most, they end of
| seeing each other over and over, and you build up a rapport
| with the other players and can start to play against
| specific peoples play-styles.
|
| However, for the vast vast majority of the player-base who
| is top 50% in skill, the fat normal distribution nearly
| guarantees that most of the people they play against will
| never be seen again. And therefore there is no harm for
| them not to be toxic to them, so most people only ever
| experience toxicity in online competitive games.
|
| Server browser games solve this because players end up with
| "home" servers where they come back to over and over, and
| over time build communities who do the same. This was taken
| away from the players when we moved to matchmaking, and
| many in the player-base have a bias against matchmaking
| because of it.
|
| But this is in no way required, and merely a result of
| gaming companies to do any work on this front. It would be
| extremely easy for these games to add an arbitrary
| community tag to the matchmaker that would attempt to put
| people in games with players that they have not previously
| reported. The matchmaker might take a little bit more time,
| but since these players are in the fat normal distribution,
| their average matchmaking times will still be incredibly
| low.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| UGC Highlander and the countless CS pug servers show
| otherwise, to some extent.
| thayne wrote:
| > Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat.
|
| Does it though? Unless winning has real-world rewards, does
| it really matter that much if you are playing against someone
| who is cheating, if with cheating, they are evenly matched
| against you? Assuming the matchmaking works well, people who
| cheat would end up getting matched with either other people
| who cheat, or people who are good enough to compete against
| cheaters.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| Not sure how to understand these questions. Have you ever
| played in a competitive game of any type, virtual or real?
|
| A cheater isn't evenly matched against you. No one is good
| enough to compete against wallhacks/aimbots, never mind
| that it shouldn't matter. It ruins the experience, ruins
| games, ruins the spirit of competition and sport.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| This argument is that the match-making software is
| incompetent. If what you say is true, and the match-maker
| could determine skill with any ability, then the cheaters
| would quickly find that the only people they match-make
| with is other cheaters. The non-cheaters don't care that
| the cheaters exist if they never play against them.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Two reasons this doesn't work
|
| Most competitive games these days are free to play. A
| cheater gets banned, makes a new account, and gets placed
| on the competitive ladder level of a new player, and
| stomps their way up the ladder against unskilled players
| until they get banned, and repeat.
|
| For players that cheat less egregiously and don't get
| banned, it's still obvious many times when someone has no
| skill but is using cheating as some form of assistance.
| It's not fun to play against a player who has a similar
| K/D ratio as you because they suck at aiming but can see
| through walls, or because they can instantly headshot
| people but have bad positional awareness or understanding
| of other game objectives like capture points etc.
|
| It's like telling a high level chess player that playing
| against a child with poor chess knowledge but they're
| allowed to just ignore checks and flick your pieces off
| the board is similar to playing against an equally
| skilled non-cheating player just because they're capable
| of beating you only 50% of the time. A victory doesn't
| feel earned, a loss doesn't feel like an actionable
| learning experience.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| The problem here appears to be the banning. If the
| cheaters are never banned then they will continue to only
| play with other cheaters, and everyone is happy. And in
| fact, to a normal player I doubt they care very much if
| the player is legit and smurfing or if they are not legit
| and cheating. That player ruins the game they are in.
|
| The ranking system needs to be a better determinate of
| skill, especially early in a new accounts life, so that
| they can stop harming normal players games. This might
| mean changes to the rules of a game to allow this to be
| done better. The match-maker should take this into
| account, so that if a player does go up against a player
| that was far from the skill level that they end up at, it
| should protect that account from being placed with new
| players for a time so that they can forget about it.
|
| For the example you choose for Chess, you might force
| players to do Chess Puzzles before they can queue for
| their first match. A normal player would then never see
| any cheaters.
| beeflet wrote:
| The "players run their own servers" model has worked fine in
| TF2. If you played community-run servers, you never ran into
| the bot issue.
|
| There are even ranked, private competitive leagues like
| TF2Center
| vel0city wrote:
| > It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing
|
| I ran servers for a lot of games. It was often difficult to ban
| people from playing. First off, someone with ban permissions
| would have to actually be online at the time. So often nothing
| would happen at all, you'd just have to leave and find a
| different server. Second, one could get banned, often just
| change their IP or use a different CD key or whatever other
| identifier the game used, and hop back on with a new identity.
|
| Meanwhile discoverability of similarly skilled matches were a
| challenge, along with actually playing with a group of friends
| against new people. Its not some perfect panacea, there are a
| _lot_ of things people disliked about picking private servers
| to play on.
| dmayle wrote:
| The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards.
|
| When you have accurate matchmaking, you will be playing against
| other players of a similar skill level. If you we're playing in
| single-player mode, it wouldn't bother you that some of the
| players were better than others.
|
| Whether the person you're playing against is as good as you
| because they have aim assist, while you have a 17g mouse and
| twitch reflexes shouldn't matter. You're both playing at
| equivalent skill levels.
|
| The only reason it matters to anyone is that they want their
| skills to be recognized as better than someone else's. Take
| down the leaderboards, and bring back the fun.
|
| I say, let the people cheat.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Not just single player. Even in competitive multiplayer a lot
| of the complaints about "cheating" are actually complaints
| about matchmaking, and "cheating" is a giant red herring
| (griefing is a different matter, of course, that gets lumped
| into the umbrella term of "cheating"). But trying to explain
| this is typically like pissing against the wind, because
| people already believe in the existing status quo (no matter
| how irrational it is) and no one wants to change their
| beliefs unless it obviously and immediately short-term
| benefits them.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Comments like this just make me upset to the point I can't
| cohere an appropriate argument. It's so out-of-touch with
| reality and completely ignores the core problem that I _have_
| to believe you 're just fucking with us.
|
| No, it is _not_ fun to play against smurf accounts using
| hacks. They aren 't doing it for the leaderboards, they
| actively downrank themselves to play against worse players!
|
| And no, it's _not_ fun to play against cheaters who are so
| bad at situational awareness their rank is still low, but who
| instantly headshot you in any tense 1v1 and ruin your
| experience.
|
| And no, I actually _do_ care that people are cheating in
| multiplayer games because _it 's not fair_. Since when do we
| reward immoral fuckwits who can't or won't get better at the
| game?
|
| Why don't we just start letting basketball players kick each
| other and baseball players tar their hands while we're at it.
| _Who cares_ if the sanctity of the sport or competition is
| ruined - we 're a community of apathetic hacks.
| cortesoft wrote:
| This is fine if you are low level, because the cheaters will
| be too good to play in the low level games.
|
| If you are in the higher skill levels, you might end up
| playing too many cheaters who are impossible to beat. If the
| cheat lets you be better than the best human players, the
| best human player will end up just playing cheaters.
| babypuncher wrote:
| > If you are in the higher skill levels, you might end up
| playing too many cheaters who are impossible to beat.
|
| It's almost kind of worse than this. If you are in higher
| skill levels, you end up getting matched with cheaters who
| lack the same fundamental understanding of the game that
| you do and make up for it with raw mechanical skill
| conferred by cheats.
|
| So you get players who don't understand things like
| positioning, target priority, or team composition, which
| makes them un-fun to play _with_ , while the aimbots and
| wallhacks make them un-fun to play _against_.
|
| And as a skilled player, you are much better equipped to
| identify genuine cheaters in your games. Whereas in low
| skill levels cheaters may appear almost indistinguishable
| from players with real talent so long as they aren't flat
| out ragehacking with the aimbot or autotrigger.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| At least in the world of chess (which has the OG matchmaking
| system, ELO), cheating is genuinely a problem.
|
| The problem is that it doesn't matter how good you are. You
| will not beat a computer. Ever. Playing against someone who
| is using a computer is just completely meaningless. Without
| cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons
| of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be
| running into them.
| babypuncher wrote:
| You're saying it's not a problem when cheaters to completely
| ruin the experience for top-10% players
| nitwit005 wrote:
| There was plenty of cheating when there were no global
| leaderboards. People will happily do things just to ruin
| other people's day.
| varnaud wrote:
| I play online FPS with friends for fun. I don't care about
| leaderboards, but I know people that do and don't want to
| take them away from them.
|
| You can't have accurate matchmaking and allow cheating.
| People cheat for a variety of reasons, at lot of cheaters are
| just online bullies that enjoy tormenting other players. In a
| low ELO lobbies, you would have cheaters that have top tier
| aim activated only if they lose too much, making the
| experience very inconsistent.
|
| Top tier ELO would revolve around on how the server handle
| peeker advantage and which cheater as the fastest cheating
| software. It's an interesting technical challenge, but not a
| fun game. As soon as a non cheating player is in view of a
| cheating player, the non cheating player dies. That doesn't
| make for a fun game mechanic.
| HaZeust wrote:
| >"Top tier ELO would revolve around on how the server
| handle peeker advantage and which cheater as the fastest
| cheating software. It's an interesting technical challenge,
| but not a fun game"
|
| Fun fact, this does exist. There used to be old CS:GO
| servers that were explicitly hack v hack, would make it
| abundantly clear to any new visitors that stumbled upon the
| servers that you would NOT have any fun without a "client",
| and it was a bunch of people out-config'ing each other. It
| was actually kinda cool for those people, it would NEVER be
| fun for anyone else.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Try playing Rust without anti-cheat and you will immediately
| change your tune. It isn't fun playing a game where you can
| lose everything to a guy who can cause bullets to bend around
| objects.
| HaZeust wrote:
| >"Try playing Rust [...] and you will immediately change
| your tune."
|
| In general, really.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Yea, that's one game that's more fun to watch than play I
| will admit, so mostly I'm a "pro rust watcher with over
| 300 hours watching rust" (this is a bit of an in-joke,
| sorry) who sees the annoyance and lack of fun people have
| when they get destroyed by cheaters. I did play one wipe,
| and spent 25 hours over 3 days in the game, so I chose to
| quit right there instead of doing that on a regular
| basis.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Absolutely!
|
| The entire narrative of "cheating" is a giant misdirect. People
| don't actually care about cheating, they care about _fun_. If a
| player is making the game less fun, _it does not matter how_.
|
| The real problem is that ~10 years ago major game studios
| decided to monopolize server hosting. This means that the
| _responsibility_ of moderation is now in their hands. The only
| way this problem can ever be resolved is by giving the
| authority to moderate servers back to players. Until then, the
| responsibility to moderate will be unmet, no matter how fascist
| and authoritarian game studios become. Fascism cannot guarantee
| fun!
| cortesoft wrote:
| There are still plenty of games that use community hosted
| servers for multiplayer. I play some of them (Rust, for
| example).
|
| First, cheating is absolutely still an issue in Rust. Sure,
| server admins can kick them out... once they have been
| discovered, verified by an admin, and kicked. The damage is
| usually done by then, and that is the best case scenario...
| often, the admins aren't available at that moment, because they
| are normal people who are not online all the time.
|
| Plus, this means you have to search and find a good server to
| play on. That isn't always easy, and limits your ability to
| find a good game.
|
| Second, lots of games I love to play don't make sense in the
| 'server hosted by a community member' model.
|
| I love playing sports games... Madden, FIFA (now called FC),
| NBA2k, etc. The best way to play those games is often 1on1
| against someone who is close to your skill level. It isn't fun
| to play against people way worse or way better than you.
|
| The only way to do this in a way that lets me get a good game
| whenever I want to play is to have some sort of matchmaking
| system, that keeps track of how good i am and finds players who
| are about the same skill level. There is no way this would work
| on user hosted servers, and even if it did, why would a user
| hosted server be better at solving this problem than a company
| hosted one? You need a TON of players to be able to do good
| skill based matchmaking 24 hours a day.
|
| I have been playing multiplayer online games for over 30 years.
| I started playing when I had to call my friend on the phone,
| tell him to tell his family not to answer the next call because
| it was my modem calling, and then hope to god my sister didn't
| pick up the phone during our game and break the connection. We
| had to develop a code to signal if I was actually trying to
| call him to talk about an issue; if I called and hung up
| immediately it meant I was voice calling and the next call he
| should answer with the phone.
|
| I have played every iteration of multiplayer gaming. I played
| Warcraft II when you had to pay $20 to subscribe to Kali to use
| their virtual IPX service. I played local Counterstrike games
| at the college dorms on the local network (which was not even a
| switched network!) I run Minecraft servers for my kids on my
| local network. I have written multiplayer games for both peer-
| to-peer and server based multiplayer.
|
| No, you can't recreate the modern convenience and pleasure of
| company provided matchmaking by going back to community hosted
| servers.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Interesting thing I noticed trying to play old versions of Call
| of Duty a year or two ago -- the oldest ones which supported
| hosted servers, there are still players, but once they switched
| to matchmaking either no one is playing or its so tiny you
| never get connected.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Not really true. For years you had both co-existing. Anti-cheat
| and people running their own servers where they could ban
| people.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Community-run servers weren't a magic bullet, and they had a
| lot of other problems that modern matchmaking systems solve
| more effectively.
| nolroz wrote:
| It's so disappointing that the halo master chief collection still
| doesn't support split screen. Nothing compared to the joy of
| playing halo with friends in the same room.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The only multiplayer game I currently play is Beyond All Reason
| (a RTS game).
|
| It's a free and open-source game, so creating a cheat client
| would be especially easy. But I've never encountered cheating.
|
| I think there's a few reasons for this:
|
| 1) The playerbase is small and there is no auto-matchmaking, just
| a traditional list of servers. This results in the same group of
| people always playing together. People don't want to cheat when
| they're playing with acquaintances they see frequently.
|
| 2) Spectators are allowed in every game. The top-ranked games
| usually have several spectators.
|
| You might think this would result in even more cheating, but in
| practice the spectators would prefer to watch a sneak attacks
| succeed, because it's funny. It's boring to be whispering the
| enemy secrets to you buddy on a private Discord, it's more fun to
| watch your buddy die in a surprising and funny way.
|
| Also, the spectators can spot if a player does something that
| suspiciously well timed or lucky. The spectators see all, so they
| have the information needed to spot suspicious behavior.
|
| 3) Official servers create an official record of what happened in
| every game. The entire community has access to all the
| recordings. If someone thinks cheating is happening they can link
| to the official game recording on Reddit (or whatever) and
| everyone can see what happened.
|
| 4) An active moderator team reviews every report of cheating.
| There are official moderators that do the banning, but also
| volunteer moderators which can watch the recordings and create a
| trusted written account of what happened; this makes the official
| moderators have an easier job.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Seems more likely that the cause is that RTS isn't a popular
| genre among gamers and Beyond All Reason is obscure[1] even
| among RTSes. There's no fame or money to make it worth
| investing in cheating.
|
| [1] Among the general public, not RTS aficionados. Which is
| unfortunate; Total Annihilation and its spiritual descendants
| like BAR deserve more love.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| People have been banned for cheating, so cheats exist.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| I don't think they're saying cheating doesn't exist for the
| game, they're saying the popularity/incentive is too low to
| attract many cheaters compared to esports games.
| officeplant wrote:
| Even as an RTS player I've never heard of it, but I have
| learned recently that I've missed out on an entire niche
| scene based off of TA. Been playing RTS's since 1994ish and
| only recently bought TA to go back and play through it. Never
| owned it back in the day.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| Its unfair to compare other games to BAR. BAR is to good
| freedomben wrote:
| Thanks for this, BAR looks really great and open source is very
| important to me. Definitely gonna try this out!
|
| Link for others: https://www.beyondallreason.info/download
| MisterTea wrote:
| But can it run Crysis? No. Not on Linux :-(
|
| I actually really liked Crysis for its open maps where you can
| approach a goal using different tactics. It had a lot of flaws
| and I hated the alien ship along with everything after as it was
| way too linear. Though I really want to play it again but alas,
| no more Windows for me.
| ooterness wrote:
| Actually, ProtonDB indicates Crysis runs just fine on Linux.
|
| https://www.protondb.com/app/17300
| cornichon622 wrote:
| I don't understand why multiplayer games don't run more on the
| server. If the server runs the game, then sends to client only
| what it needs to display the game and play sounds, the client
| doesn't have more information than necessary and a whole class of
| cheats is eliminated. There is no need for a client to know where
| an enemy player is if the player won't be shown on screen (wall
| hacks). I think World of Tanks runs this way, and I've never
| encountered much cheating on there.
| ttimebomb wrote:
| Some do, but its much more expensive for game companies and
| adds latency to some elements. Its generally a much harder
| problem for first-person shooter games - an enemy might be
| hiding behind a wall but the game needs to know the position of
| that enemy anyway because the player might move around the
| corner and see that enemy before the server updates or their
| game client might need to play noise that enemy is making
| faintly even if they are far away.
|
| Players of these games are sometimes running their games at
| high framerates like 240fps which is much higher than the tick
| rates of these games too.
|
| Plus it doesn't solve all the possible cheats that are out
| there, as there are some like aim-hacks that don't need any
| server information to work.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how this evolves. It used to be
| that game developers could safely ignore Linux. But with a
| growing number of Steam OS, Steam Deck, and Linux + Steam users
| gaming, it's going to get increasingly more painful in terms of
| revenue to be telling those users "our game only works on
| Windows" and just miss out on the revenue and deal with the angry
| users, forums full of users complaining the game doesn't work,
| etc.
|
| It might only be a few percent of overall users. But a few
| percent of a billion $ is a couple of tens of millions. That's a
| steep price to pay for anti-cheat code.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Most game devs can continue to ignore linux and trust that
| proton will work it out.
|
| It's only the highly competitive online games that have this
| issue. While they make up a lot of playtime, they're worked on
| by a tiny minority of developers.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They are still ignoring Linux, hence why Valve is using Proton,
| the validation they failed to convince studios to care, studios
| that happen to target systems like Android NDK, or use platform
| agnostic engines.
| simoncion wrote:
| > They are still ignoring Linux, hence why Valve is using
| Proton...
|
| Eh, maybe?
|
| I'd put forth the notion that game devs might be caring how
| their game works on both Windows _and_ Proton. That is, that
| they 're still using the Microsoft-provided APIs to build
| their game, but care about how it runs on Linux just as much
| as how it runs on Windows.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Anti-cheat is a necessity for an enjoyable game experience. If
| you are a casual who doesn't care about game integrity, you
| probably aren't the target audience.
|
| I don't want any cheaters in my games. I don't care if a rootkit
| is required. Riot has a kernel level anti-cheat and it's _really_
| good. It's so good in fact that it deters most cheaters from even
| trying. This is the dream for anyone who wants fair games.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I agree with you, but I think the best solution is just to let
| people run the game without anti-cheat, but they can only play
| with other people who also opt-out of anti cheat (or choose to
| allow themselves to be matched with people who opt-out).
|
| Then people can choose to either accept they have to install a
| rootkit anti-cheat, or want to risk facing cheaters in return
| for not having to install the anti-cheat.
| nottorp wrote:
| > If you are a casual who doesn't care about game integrity,
| you probably aren't the target audience.
|
| Friendly reminder. 90% of games are not competitive multiplayer
| and don't need any anti cheat to be enjoyable.
|
| My main entertainment is video games and books (no TV) in equal
| proportions so I'm far from "casual". I play zero competitive
| multiplayer due to the "communities" being invariably toxic.
|
| Last time I played something like that it was Starcraft 2 when
| it was new. Enjoyed being called a stupid noob when I won.
| simoncion wrote:
| Yeah. I've found a nearly 1:1 correlation between "Does it
| try hard to be 'competitive' or an 'e-sport'?" and "Is a huge
| section of the playerbase just godawful toxic assholes?".
|
| As the years ground on, I've learned to avoid games billing
| themselves as an "e-sport" or indicating that they are
| extremely focused on the "competitive" scene, unless there's
| something _very_ compelling to offset the asshole players
| that will inevitably be pulled in.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I wouldn't be able to enjoy life with the knowledge there's a
| rootkit installed on my machine, developed by the same people
| that make video games, and hate all levels of accountability,
| riddled with vulnerabilities that could grant an attacker the
| same ridiculous level of permissions.
| nicman23 wrote:
| nah thanks. i remember my vista install getting destroyed by
| securom
| kgwxd wrote:
| It's a perfect litmus test as far as I'm concerned. If a company
| believes it's ok to put things like that on my machine, I don't
| want them anywhere near it, even if they were to "compromise" to
| work on Linux. Relying on a users machine to snitch on them is
| dumb at every level. Fix your hearts or die.
| miroljub wrote:
| I cant believe some people still insist calling it GNU/Linux.
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