I've played before anticheat was a thing and it is meaningless. Cheaters are going to cheat. The best anticheat systems are voting. The game kicks a winning vote total and then that server sends the rest of the servers it's results. Then that account is flagged as a cheater. The only way a cheater can exist is they hide and don't cheat and are obvious in it
Votekick really doesn’t work as an anticheat, especially without good playback analysis option and even then good gamesense looks like wallhacking in shooters to new players for example when all you are doing is tracking sound and have good crosshair placement. If you can’t review replay and there is no blatant cheating like speedhack or spinbot or teleporting, what are you voting on? The fact that you are getting stomped?
To be clear I’m not saying invasive anti-cheat is the way, but IMO voting is not the way to go.
Never Trust User Input!
Image Transcription: Meme
[The meme shows two fanart images of the character Sayori, from "Doki Doki Literature Club", with text to the right of each image.]
[In the first image, Sayori is wearing sunglasses and scowling, with her hand up in a blocking gesture. The text reads:]
Anti-Cheat
[In the second image, Sayori has her head up high, looking pleased, with a finger pointed to the right, where the text reads:]
Kernel Level Surveillance
I am a human who transcribes posts to improve accessibility on Lemmy. Transcriptions help people who use screen readers or other assistive technology to use the site. For more information, see here.
I wanna know they have to have low level shit making these checks on my device in the first place. Why can't the checks by on the god damn server, checking against what the developer knows is and isn't possible to do without cheating?
Edit: Er... I guess you wouldn't really be able to tell if they used walls or aimbots that way... 🤔
A lot of anticheat methods are not to catch the people with the proper, premium cheating software. It's to stop little Jimmy downloading an exe for Fortnite because he loses too much and making a new account as f2p is now the norm. As such, a lot goes into making it hard to have a cheat hide itself without significant effort from the user, be that running a custom kernel module yourself or some sort of emulation techniques. The kernel level anticheats can naturally be bypassed, but you have to do more than just running an exe most of the time which is about as far as the average kid who downloads their cheats from a YouTube video is capable of. The result is you catch 99.9% of what would be cheaters, and that's a much bigger improvement to your player base than catching the 4 players at the pro level who pay thousands a month for custom software which doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
You can still detect that stuff on the server. It's all about will and competence. The real reason is anticheat allows easy surveillance. The Ven diagram of people with Tencent anticheat and essential IT personnel overlaps a lot. This is a big problem talked about but not solved in sec ops.
Detecting the angle, acceleration and speed at multiple points of a shot in an fps is trivial, and developing a check to see if it's human movement or computer movement is easy after that.
Aimbots are easy too. Is the camera following someone without having vision? Oh no aimbot. A bit more complex than that... But not by much.
It's easy enough to do it right, but then you don't get that sweet sweet surveillance
I've been in discussions regarding anti-cheats, and there's definitely an audience who outright complains if a game does not have anti-cheats.
The arguments usually being willing to deal with the risks, because they don't see a way to make games fair without it.
I definitely get it. Have you seen the state of Team Fortress 2 for the past few years? It's repugnant. I don't know how people are still playing it.
Free to play multiplayer games are at the highest risk of cheaters, since they can just make a new account. I would rather pay for a multiplayer game without microtransactions than a free one which gatekeeps and facilitates cheaters.
What do you propose to make games fair without cheating countermeasures?
overwatch (cs /dota2, not the blizzard game) system is probably the best.
also the best way to avoid cheaters is not to play multi-player games, they are mostly toxic as fuck anyway, who needs that in their life
I'd never noticed before that the bow changes sides
I'm wondering if the reason why it's taken (taking) the anticheat companies so long to implement support on linux is just that they're scared that some linux kid will manage to completely circumvent the entire anticheat with some FOSS sandboxing tool.
They should just start doing more server-based anticheats instead of scanning on the client.
You just can't effectively implement such a thing on Linux bc well you can just use a different kernel or edit it to circumvent the monitoring
Welp... now Im expecting Linux kernel modules for anticheat.
Would be sick if one could get that stuff to work lol
Memes aside, cheats operate at driver level and as a result anti-cheat, if it wants to be effective, has to also.
Up next: Hardware level surveillance powered by Intel ME
Some games have a complicated enough Anti-Cheat that it'd be an absolute pain to get it working with Linux. Honestly, it's not worth it to gain 3% more players. I'd recommend just running a Windows VM in Linux.
Some won't even run in vm
I've spent quite some time setting up KVM with GPU passthrough and modifying qemu and my kernel as to circumvent VM detection of anti cheat software. While it worked in principle, overhead from virtualization and reduced core count meant that some resource-heavy games ran extremely poorly (while they would have run just fine without virtualization).
Running a VM would imply dealing with VFIO. For a recently converted casual Linux gamer it's better for them to dual boot than deal with that headache.
I get your point in dual boot being less of a headache, but learning some libvirt/qemu and running your own virtual machines is a lot of fun.
I went for a virtual Fedora Workstation with VFIO and a dummy plug. Then I use Sunshine/Moonlight to stream my gaming session to whichever device I feel like using.Anytime I wanna try something I feel might crash my Fedora I simply backup the virtual machine files and go to town on it.
If I fail I roll back and try again.
I run my servers the same way, as virtual machines that I can easily backup and experiment with, and I do think it makes learning a lot quicker.
Yup and to top it all off most online gaming communities are really toxic when it comes to any discussion of Anti-Cheat in this regard (it's considered the same as cheating to put down anti-cheat), and will usually defend it and the company behind it. I've even heard some of these chuds try and say linux is evil or used by criminals (you can tell these people are either kids or very immature) and that they should outright ban Linux users altogether.
September 20, You didn't get downvoted yet
I guess people are much more rational on Lemmy and fewer of the fanboys who stick up for those companies (or those people just avoid Linux communities like the plague). Either way it's much better than Reddit was.
The hate is mutual. Though I's hate it even I was a windows user.
KLS for short. Pronounced “kills”.
XD
