201–210 of 327 posts
This is cool. Nothing ruins a game like someone cheating. What are the security implications of running an anti-cheat system on Linux? Do I need to give it root access?
I still hold that many of our anti-cheat systems are based on a flawed starting premise for multiplayer games and how competitive and how "fair" they should be. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21949201 I have softened on this a bit. I don't think that global/regional ladders are universally bad, I don't have anything against competition as a motivator, and I concede that for some games this is important. But I s…
I don't think many cheaters themselves actually care about ladders and rankings. They just derive personal entertainment from ruining other peoples fun. This is why cheating was always a significant problem in online shooters long before they introduced ranking systems. It's also why entirely non-competitive games (like Minecraft) have problems with griefers.
If your design allows you to shift your focus towards trying to fight toxic behavior itself rather than just cheats, you can use the same detection methods as you would for any other toxic behavior that doesn't involve cheats. And you should have those detection methods anyway; whether or not a cheat is involved in the abuse shouldn't be the deciding factor between banning or allowing toxic behavior.
The shift here is in realizing that for a significant number of your players, playing against someone who legitimately snipes them from across the map over and over while camping at a spawn point because they're just that good, and playing against someone who uses an aimbot to accomplish the same behavior -- both of those experiences are equally game-ruining for a lot of players. The legitimacy isn't the problem for those players, the resulting experience is. So trying to detect subtle aimbots kind of misses what the real game-ruining problem is for a lot of players.
Where a number of player archetypes are concerned, you can look for overt toxic behavior and ban it regardless of how that behavior is accomplished. Similarly, if you're not prioritizing ladder integrity over everything else, there's a case to be made that you can just ignore any cheating that's too subtle for people to notice or that doesn't result in overt toxic behavior.
A nontrivial number of your players don't actually care about ladder integrity, they want a number to go up and they want rewards released on a variable schedule as they get better at the game. For those players, it's not clear that playing against cheaters is actually a problem unless the cheaters ruin the difficulty curve or ruin the matches, and... again, you should think about banning people who do that stuff even if they're not cheating.
Hmm I wonder how intrusive EAC is on Linux, and Macs. I seem to recall that they look for visiting blacklisted websites in some browsers a while back. Also I wonder how their VM detection is for linux, and macs.
Blizzard's Warden anti-cheat was rumored to collect your process list and/or open window titles at one point, but IIRC they weren't substantiated. https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Warden_(software)
I am very happy about this, but how is it possible without the typical "root access / rootkits" invasiveness of anticheat software!?
>how is it possible without the typical "root access / rootkits" invasiveness of anticheat software!? It probably does require root/kernel access. If you're not a fan of that, your only option is cloud gaming.
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Correct, VAC is very different than EAC. But it's absolutely not true that there are not open source cheats that bypass EAC, FaceIT, and ESEA. The more popular ones get patched, but I've seen a bunch of smaller ones that do not get detected – you just have to know how to find them. They may eventually get detected, but cheaters generally will just create a new account and start cheating again. When my platform launch…
> They may eventually get detected, but cheaters generally will just create a new account and start cheating again. Typically games will either avoid putting low play count players in the pool with established or paying players. Both because they don't want the guy playing for the first time to be constantly creamed by heavily invested players which would drive them off but also because real time and real dollars are…
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why would anyone other than programmers/devops/IT pros have anything to do with Linux?
It doesn't spy on you. It gives you freedom of choice when it comes to desktop environment, and what software you run. It's not developed by anti-competitive tech giants.
What permissions does this require? A kernel module? Something that watches all processes all the time? Messes with input settings or breaks assistive devices? On windows, a lot of the actions that "anti-cheat" software takes is indistinguishable from a rootkit.
Arguably necessary when cheats people install themselves are actual rootkits.
There's a hardware cheat that's actually in the wild that uses a capture card, computer vision, and hardware input devices to run entirely outside the OS: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...
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It would also be nice if people were able to use cheats in a game against other people with cheats. It would be very enjoyable to watch battle of the bots in games and have people pit their programming skills against each other like this.
I seem to recall a certain game that had a shadowban system that just put all the cheaters in the same lobbies together. Might be misremembering that though.
For context, ProtonDB is a database of Steam games and how well they work on Linux through Wine/Proton. A huge number of the "borked" games are using some kind of anti-cheat and that's the main reason the game doesn't work. EAC is one of the most-used anti-cheat systems in gaming. Between EAC and BattleEye, you're hitting the Pareto Principle for anti-cheat support. Four of the top 10 Steam games use anti-cheat and t…
Worth noting that the VAC games on that list, CS:GO, TF2, and Dota 2, have effectively given up on actually detecting and preventing cheaters and now rely on server-based or community-consensus methods of finding and punishing cheaters (with TF2 being the exception with how little maintenance Valve performs on it). Both CS:GO and Dota 2 have a report+overwatch system where users watch a replay to determine if someone…
I wish there was some well respected third party reputation service that I could prove my identity to (government id, utility statements, etc) and then all games just integrate with this third party reputation service. Sort of an Olympic committee for gaming. Give me the option to only play with other verified players. Getting caught cheating in one game then impacts your reputation in _all_ games. There's a gazillio…
Some cheats run outside the OS and are basically indistinguishable from regular players. So anti-cheat won’t work. Good matchmaking + still catching cheats for impossible stuff + real tournaments requiring in-person attendance or heavy monitoring, should still work pretty well.