I’m not much of a gamer, but my kids are growing up and will soon want to play the real stuff. Is there any easy way to see whether a game requires anti-cheat to run? I’d hate to spend top dollar on a game only to find it’ll take over their entire computer and I’ll want to make a hard rule “no games with kernel level anti cheat in this house” or something like that.
Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
91–100 of 161 posts
Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cheaters are bad, but it's not worth unreasonably harming everyone else to stop them. I wouldn't advocate for surveillance cameras in everyone's homes to reduce crime.
Valorant took a massive amount of market share from CS:GO, in large part because of a very intrusive but highly effective anti-cheat system. Cheating in online games is a hard problem to solve and can make games completely unplayable. Gamers are generally much more bothered about cheating than about the privacy risks of anti-cheat, whether you agree with them or not. For the paranoid, dual-booting to a games-only OS…
The problem is that games often install rootkits and the hackers are good enough to exploit those for RCE - just look at Apex Legends, they recently had active tournaments canceled because someone took over streamers boxes during live play - absolutely bonkers.
Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valorant took a massive amount of market share from CS:GO, in large part because of a very intrusive but highly effective anti-cheat system. Cheating in online games is a hard problem to solve and can make games completely unplayable. Gamers are generally much more bothered about cheating than about the privacy risks of anti-cheat, whether you agree with them or not. For the paranoid, dual-booting to a games-only OS…
In my experience game engines just suck. How can cheats exist in a server authoritative game engine architecture? But alas, most programmers have apparently no idea what they're doing when it comes to "netcode".
Sounds like in your experience, the time is ripe for you to revolutionise the incompetent game industry and solve all their simple problems!
Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not a fan of anti cheats, but I do like to play video games online and I want to be able to play fair games without cheaters. I am not sure what other options there are.
I remember playing online games in the 90s and early 2000s without lots of cheaters. It was easy: if we thought they were cheating we banned them from our server.
Plenty of server admins even back then thought that wouldn't scale, and it hasn't. Anti-cheats like BattlEye and Easy Anti Cheat started as community developed anti-cheats. Even Starcraft 1 ICCUP (3rd party Battle.net clone) had additional "anti-hack". Counter-Strike still has 3rd party servers with ESEA/FaceIT. They have additional anti-cheat, not less.
Especially with gaming becoming mainstream compared to early 2000s. The majority of players are now casual gamers who are not interested in a job as a server admin/hoster.
Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
not true, BitBlt is still able to access screen content on Win10 & 11
Specifically, it can access screen content, but not window content. As in, passing in the desktop hwnd gets you a picture, passing in a different hwnd gets you a bunch of black. At least as of when I tried it a few months ago on Windows 10.
Does the screen content contain all the windows that are visible, or is it the desktop image?
Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
#96A perk of gamimg on Linux is that none of these invasive anti-cheats work. I consider that a plus since I never care enough about a video game to surrender my privacy or my kernel over to it.
I wouldn't say none.
I got VACd on Linux the other day. Not cos I was cheating, just blocking VAC from network access. And not because I was blocking VAC deliberately, just blocking arbitrary code running from random /tmp steam binaries.
It is a pretty fucked situation that in order to allow anti cheat, you have to abandon securing your machine.
Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
#97>ACE overall is a treasure trove of privacy violations: checking recently used files, uploading files to their servers, banning having reverse engineering tools open, or having used them recently on game files—the list goes on. Microsoft should blacklist these binaries, and revoke developer certificate.
I wonder, how would you design an anti-cheat protection? Would you fight for the privacy of cheaters?
1. The cheaters are a tiny minority, this is violating privacy of millions of people in order to catch a small group.
2. It doesn't even work!
Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, there should only be 1 GPU with a specific signature active at any given time. If multiple user accounts are tainted by the same flagged signatures, than you risk getting everyone on that hardware banned. It is usually clearly stated in the EULA expected fair play section, and it is at the admins discretion... Buy that used cheap rtx3090 at your own risk... ;) "two instances of the game can't run on the same mach…
> Buy that used cheap rtx3090 at your own risk... ;) Which is why this is completely unreasonable.
The admin process differs between companies. Usually if you can verify you are a different person living at a different address, than IT support might remove the flagged signature with proof of sale. I wouldn't count on the admins mercy though, as cheats will often set up shilling-circles or cloud-instances to try to get around bans.
I think 2 strikes is quite reasonable to remove people breaking the game for other users. And I only know of 1 company that bans the hardware signatures on all of their game titles at once.
The probability one will experience problems before a legitimate purchase return window period expires is very low.
Have a wonderful day, and maybe try a card game like MTG. =3
Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
#99I’m not much of a gamer, but my kids are growing up and will soon want to play the real stuff. Is there any easy way to see whether a game requires anti-cheat to run? I’d hate to spend top dollar on a game only to find it’ll take over their entire computer and I’ll want to make a hard rule “no games with kernel level anti cheat in this house” or something like that.
Rule of thumb - if it runs well on steam deck / steamos it probably doesn't have anything too extreme... most multiplayer games won't run on the windows compatibility layer as it allows the client a possible level of control that would look similar to a low level cheat.
Nearly every competitive game game is going to be utilizing some form of anticheat like this, so single player games tend to not have this issue (drm is a separate conversation)
Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valorant took a massive amount of market share from CS:GO, in large part because of a very intrusive but highly effective anti-cheat system. Cheating in online games is a hard problem to solve and can make games completely unplayable. Gamers are generally much more bothered about cheating than about the privacy risks of anti-cheat, whether you agree with them or not. For the paranoid, dual-booting to a games-only OS…
The problem is that games often install rootkits and the hackers are good enough to exploit those for RCE - just look at Apex Legends, they recently had active tournaments canceled because someone took over streamers boxes during live play - absolutely bonkers.
it was the game itself that got exploited, not the anti-cheat that is a "rootkit".