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Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

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Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#311

Post by wizzwizz4 »

maccard wrote: post #243
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stock Minecraft Server hardly tries to prevent many of the hacks. It would require stuff like server-side chunk culling, which doesn't jibe with the way Minecraft is designed. However , there's nothing stopping a new game from being designed like that. I named Minecraft because it's fundamentally flawed for server-side anti-cheat (you're limited by a client that requires a lot of theoretically-unnecessary informati…

> However, there's nothing stopping a new game from being designed like that. Modern games do network culling. UE4 supports it out of the box. The _millisecond_ that information is replicated to the client, (which has to be before the client views it on screen to allow for hardware latency), a cheat will have access to it and will be able to act on that information. Even if you have the fastest monitor known to man,…

So don't let clients react on information until 8ms after they get it? If it's a game where you can't do that, collect probabilistic evidence on players until you have a lot of evidence that a player is cheating, and add them to the “we'll ban later, but let's mitigate the damage for now” list.

Cheating players are statistically distinguishable from really good non-cheating players most of the time – and when they're not, we're at the level of cheating where it's unlikely your anti-cheat will help, because they'd just fork out the €50 for cheating hardware.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#312

Post by Macha »

zaarn wrote: post #307
feanaro wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agreed. Where is this "right not to be cheated in an online game" coming from anyway? Sounds absurd when you put it in proper terms, that is someone else taking control over your computer.

From the same place that real-life competitions tend to have rules about cheating that are enforced. Why do people think that they get a free pass because they can't see the opponent face to face? If you want to play with friends, plenty of multiplayer games offer that without anticheat (Arma lets you even uninstall the anti-cheat and play on anti-cheat disabled servers).

Does my local basketball competition requiring all competitors to submit negative doping tests before competing? Do they get to monitor me for 24 hours before the game?

Because that's the level of seriousness of most gaming and the proportionality of using a rootkit to prevent cheating. Sure, the Olympic athletes (or I guess in this analogy, eSports pros competing online) get the full "we're going to make very sure you're not cheating approach" but "my local basketball league" or "unranked ladder" doesn't justify these measures being routine

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#313

Post by wizzwizz4 »

maccard wrote: post #299
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes - cloud rendering. Only a very small part of the rendering needs to be done on the server; notably, the camera could still move, and the client could still make the usual heuristic predictions about where things are, so it wouldn't feel laggy. > and buying specialist hardware If you have a streaming rig, you already have nearly all the hardware. Just add a Raspberry Pi Zero or something, and you're good to go.…

> Only a very small part of the rendering needs to be done on the server; notably, the camera could still move, and the client could still make the usual heuristic predictions about where things are, so it wouldn't feel laggy. This is just nonsense. The data that the client uses to make those heuristic predictions is the same data the cheats, so once you send that extra data over you've undone the benefit of not send…

> The data that the client uses to make those heuristic predictions is the same data the cheats,

No, it's not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag#Make_clients_extrapolate

> plus youve added an intermediate network hop for your remote rendering

I never said anything about an intermediate network hop. It's not that expensive to cull a few tris, diff the geometry and then send it – especially if you can compress the information, which you can, because you control the client and server. (In fact, you likely don't even need to go down to the tri level to get the effect; all you need to do is turn locating obscured players into a computer vision problem.)

I don't know where this “intermediate network hop” comes from.

> spending thousands of dollars on secondary rigs

Think €60. An HDMI splitter, a USB HDMI capture card, a Raspberry Pi and a USB cable. Not that expensive.

> but right now the cheat vector is people running cheats installed inside the kernel.

It's functionally equivalent. Your “anticheat” is taking control of other people's computers, stopping a lot of people from being able to play the game entirely, because it was easier for the developers.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#314

Post by k12sosse »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #234
squarefoot wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT all depends on how, where and when does this malware run. If they can be installed along with the games under a gaming only account on the Linux machine, that is, with zero permissions on system and other users files around, that's fine with me. However if they require to pollute system directories or, much worse, be installed as kernel modules or system level daemons, then it's way different. Security conscious g…

> If they can be installed along with the games under a gaming only account on the Linux machine, that is, with zero permissions on system and other users files around, that's fine with me. Completely ineffective. It will be trivial to circumvent those protections. Might as well not bother. The truth is cheaters are merely excersising their computing freedom. It's my computer, the game is merely running on it. If I w…

Not that I disagree but if you accept the EULA that states otherwise, doesn't that mean you don't have the prerogative? It sounds like you want to skip over the EULA, isn't respecting licensing models a huge thing for Linuxheads? Honest question.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#315

Post by rglullis »

michaelt wrote: post #275
rglullis wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if another player can run faster or fly or has perfect aim, everyone else is basically playing an unwinnable game. Not a gamer, so forgive me if the proposal is stupid, why not just treat cheaters like they do on (li)chess? If I am playing with someone that I believe to be cheating, I flag/blacklist that user and simply don't play with that user afterwards. That by itself is enough for me to play against only hones…

User reports are indeed a common tranche of anti-cheat systems. But in chess terms "Middling player occasionally made suspiciously good moves" is a pretty weak cheat report. But if you can tell they had stockfish running and changed windows to it several times in the course of the game? Well, now you've got a very clear cheat report. More broadly, many gamers are chasing the dopamine rush of winning, complete with sl…

What if the cheater is just running stockfish on a separate laptop, is the anti-cheat system also going to turn on the webcam and track eye movement?

> Being awarded a win by e-mail a day

That is only half of the story. The other half would be in banning the cheater and making them lose access to their account, i.e, impute a real monetary cost to being caught cheating. Make it expensive for those caught cheating and equally expensive for those making false reports and I'd venture that we would see some sort of equilibrium where cheating is not worth it.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#316

Post by Zhyl »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #245
zaarn wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the needs of other players to have a fair game are also irrelevant then? After all, you're the top rank in CS:GO not because of your skill but because you simply exercise your freedom to have everyone else play against your computer.

Correct, they're completely irrelevant. Of all the affronts to computing freedom, anti-cheating is the worst. The truth is the online gaming model where we play with untrustworthy strangers is completely broken. We should all be playing with friends we can trust instead.

"Online games are bad" is a hot take.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#317

Post by maccard »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #311
maccard wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, there's nothing stopping a new game from being designed like that. Modern games do network culling. UE4 supports it out of the box. The _millisecond_ that information is replicated to the client, (which has to be before the client views it on screen to allow for hardware latency), a cheat will have access to it and will be able to act on that information. Even if you have the fastest monitor known to man,…

So don't let clients react on information until 8ms after they get it? If it's a game where you can't do that, collect probabilistic evidence on players until you have a lot of evidence that a player is cheating, and add them to the “we'll ban later, but let's mitigate the damage for now” list. Cheating players are statistically distinguishable from really good non-cheating players most of the time – and when they're…

> So don't let clients react on information until 8ms after they get it?

This just delays the problem by 8ms - you still have all the same problems, except you've introduced 8ms latency. The cheats are still perfectly accurate, and are responding to perfect information. If you could only delay the information to the cheat, then you wouldn't need to do any of this because you could reliably just boot out the cheaters.

> ollect probabilistic evidence on players until you have a lot of evidence that a player is cheating, and add them to the “we'll ban later, but let's mitigate the damage for now” list.

That's what anticheat providers already do already, and yet we still have that problem.

> We're at the level of cheating where it's unlikely your anti-cheat will help, because they'd just fork out the €50 for cheating hardware.

Hard disagree here.

1) if you have an algorithm which can statistally distinguish cheating players from non-cheating players enough of the time, I'm guessing you have an algorithm or model that you can point to that does that? Because as far as I'm aware, they _help_, but don't fix.

2) People aren't forking out for dedicated hardware to spoof mice en masee, but they _are_ forking out for kernel level cheats to bypass the userland detection.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#318

Post by fuzxi »

rglullis wrote: post #251
michaelt wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of some online-only games - such as Fall Guys - being basically killed sales-wise by insufficient anti-cheat protection. After all, if another player can run faster or fly or has perfect aim, everyone else is basically playing an unwinnable game. This isn't helped by the current fashion for automatic match-making and 100-player battle royale games - which make one cheater impact a lot more players.

> if another player can run faster or fly or has perfect aim, everyone else is basically playing an unwinnable game. Not a gamer, so forgive me if the proposal is stupid, why not just treat cheaters like they do on (li)chess? If I am playing with someone that I believe to be cheating, I flag/blacklist that user and simply don't play with that user afterwards. That by itself is enough for me to play against only hones…

Overwatch briefly had a system like this, where you could mark players in your matches positively or negatively, so they'd be more or less likely to show up in your future matches. They had to remove it after a top level player could no longer find fair matches. He was waiting 10-20 minutes before getting matched with much lower skilled players. He was by all accounts a pleasant person, but he was so good at the game that many people would mark him negatively simply so they would never have to play against him.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#319

Post by fuzxi »

rglullis wrote: post #315
michaelt wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User reports are indeed a common tranche of anti-cheat systems. But in chess terms "Middling player occasionally made suspiciously good moves" is a pretty weak cheat report. But if you can tell they had stockfish running and changed windows to it several times in the course of the game? Well, now you've got a very clear cheat report. More broadly, many gamers are chasing the dopamine rush of winning, complete with sl…

What if the cheater is just running stockfish on a separate laptop, is the anti-cheat system also going to turn on the webcam and track eye movement? > Being awarded a win by e-mail a day That is only half of the story. The other half would be in banning the cheater and making them lose access to their account, i.e, impute a real monetary cost to being caught cheating. Make it expensive for those caught cheating and…

>Make it expensive for those caught cheating and equally expensive for those making false report

Well now you've tipped the scales too far. Nobody is going to make a report, even when it's justified, if they're risking their account to do so.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#320

Post by GekkePrutser »

krageon wrote: post #152
junon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trade-off is that you have literal malware on the machine that is controlled by a third party company that most likely doesn't have their security practices up to snuff.

The malware is there regardless, this is about Linux marketshare. You can dislike it (and I do) without gatekeeping your favourite operating system because people want to run software on it that you don't approve of.

The problem with anti-cheat software is that it needs extremely high permissions. It wants to inspect every process, take screenshots etc. It's pretty extreme stuff.

And the stupid thing is that a lot of games install this software regardless of whether you actually play online or not! I've even had some games that insisted I enable Valve Anti Cheat and refuse to launch otherwise, even though I just wanted to play single player (I rarely play online). That check should obviously come into play only at the multiplayer menu.

But this is actually why I still game on Windows. I just have one Windows box which I use for gaming and gaming alone. I don't want this crap on my Linux and FreeBSD computers I do serious work on. So I won't be one of those Linux users in the stats :) Even though I use it daily.

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