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Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

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Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#311

Post by mmis1000 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #205
ok_dad wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This video suggests you can catch this type of cheater without even a kernel level anti cheat: https://youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA There’s a lot of other stuff in the video but if you skip the robot building parts at the beginning he talks about an anti cheat system he developed with another person.

Behavioral analysis (the thing he's talking about) doesn't work that well and has a hard precision limit due to the nature of online gaming. What the player sees, what the server sees, and what other players see are entirely different things. I'm not even talking about plausibly deniable things like visual sound location. Nobody's using complicated stuff like this in practice though, as there are easier methods. But…

it's not always easy to tell if it's just a player playing weirdly or a mistuned AI though. Maybe the player just have too low mouse sensitivity so it is always a little lagged, maybe it's actualy AI. There is no easy way to tell, and require manual judgement in a lot of cases.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#312

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #2

After the crowdstrike disaster 3rd party kernel drivers need to be shunned for non critical applications. Games publishers have been bad actors in this space for a long time now. The genshin impact anticheat was used in a malware campaign. Rockstar was very misleading trying to imply their kernel driver not being compatible with the steam deck was valves fault.

[deleted]

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#313

Post by davrosthedalek »

sadeshmukh wrote: post #193
kelnos wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre take. If people consent to installing these invasive anti-cheat systems, then it doesn't matter if anyone has a "right" to a business model or not; in that case their business model is working . > They can do plenty enough server-side. No, they can't. The amount of responses in these threads by people who have no idea what they're talking about is... well, probably not surprising, unfortunately. This i…

DRM is often removed after a little while since it is meant to delay the cracking at launch, where most people are going to buy. Anticheat is not.

DRM does not help me, the honest buyer, to enjoy the game. Anticheat helps me, the honest buyer, to enjoy the game.

Would I prefer a world where kernel-space anticheat is not needed for the games I like to play? Yes. Is that realistic? Probably no.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#314

Post by mock-possum »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #171

I hate to say this but a large percentage (in fact, I believe a majority) of gamers simply do not care about invasive anti-cheats. Right now CounterStrike players are mostly begging Valve for kernel-level anti-cheat since their current solution isn't working at all. If anything, this warning will actually make many player's more impressed with the game. That said, more consumer information is almost always better in…

Do you think a large percentage cares about cheats in general?

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#315

Post by lifeformed »

FactKnower69 wrote: post #269
dbrueck wrote: post #176

The anti-cheat problem is long-running and complicated. If you choose not to run anti-cheat because you understand that these are opaque rootkits, good for you! That's a totally, 100% valid choice. But please keep in mind: - you are a tiny minority and not the target customer - online multiplayer games are an absurdly big business (i.e. there are huge incentives here) - no, you can't completely solve this server side…

>no, you can't completely solve this server side This is what every dev who can't be bothered to implement relevancy filters says when their server broadcasts the locations of every hidden player to every other player every tick and wallhacks drop a week later Exactly what can't be fixed server side? Are you just talking about aimbots and other situations where script kiddies can trivially author bots that generate o…

"All cheats can be trivially solved server side, as long as I exclude all games I don't like, which are also the games where the problem is hardest to solve and most relevant to the discussion."

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#316

Post by mmis1000 »

Terr_ wrote: post #215

There are two trends in the broader multiplayer game ecosystem which I think are worth highlighting: 1. More games are trying to cut costs with ad-hoc P2P servers, meaning that sometimes important logic is occurring on a not-so-trusted machine. 2. More games are using a revenue model which may be threatened by consumer-side tinkering. For example, imagine a cooperative game that uses a P2P server, and the host has do…

Critical login happen at client machine is how fps games work at all. It's way too late to judge every hit on server due to the latency. A 40ms latency is 3 frame lag even on a 60fps monitor. And It can be a lot worse in a lot of cases. The server may detect some hit that is too far off and impossible. But it have to trust what client says as long as it is on some reasonable range or the game won't even work.

And that reasonable range isn't that small. It is enough to make every bullet that was supposed to shoot on air shoot on the enemies' heads.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#317

Post by freeAgent »

dietr1ch wrote: post #272
skizm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter strike player, I definitely shy away from the invasive anti cheat stuff… but I’d let valve inject it into my veins if it meant I could actually play and not suspect everyone of cheating all the time. Mostly because Valve has earned my trust. I won’t install games from other companies using similarly invasive techniques though.

While I trust valve, I'm not willing to mess up with my workstation to play. Also, there's hardware cheats, so I don't need a rootkit on my machine, but a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans.

Yeah, I generally trust Valve but gaming is definitely not important enough to me to give them kernel access to my system. I’m sure many gamers disagree with me though.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#318

Post by lifeformed »

emgeee wrote: post #94
plopz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think server side statistical analysis can go a long way to detect stuff like that. Obviously its always a cat and mouse game between devs and cheaters, and there are always workarounds, but theres a lot more the devs could be doing without relying on invasive client side detection.

I've always wondered about this too. It should be pretty easy to recognize statistical outliers. I'm sure cheaters would start to adapt but that adaptation might start to look more in-line with normal skill levels so at least the game wouldn't be utterly ruined

Good players are statistical outliers. False positives are hard to avoid with this kind of approach.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#319

Post by lifeformed »

alex_lav wrote: post #117
emgeee wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered about this too. It should be pretty easy to recognize statistical outliers. I'm sure cheaters would start to adapt but that adaptation might start to look more in-line with normal skill levels so at least the game wouldn't be utterly ruined

This post is so interesting because it highlights the people that don't know anything about the requirements or state of cheats/anticheat. What you're describing is 10 years out of date. Every modern cheat has a toggle, and (almost) every modern cheater masks augmented behavior with misses/native behavior.

This thread is full of armchair developers who see a problem and immediately think, "Oh, it's easy, just do this simple thing I just thought of," as is there haven't been billions of dollars and decades of research spent on this problem.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#320

Post by WatchDog »

With the way that computer vision and AI continue to improve, I imagine that we will soon have completely external and undetectable cheating peripherals, simply capture the screen direct from the display output, and pass inputs via mimicking a usb human input device.

This won’t provide all the same capabilities as cheats that hook into the game process, such as wall hacks, but it would be possible to build a super human aimbot with such an approach.

We already have external “radar” cheats that use the game stereo sound to give the direction that a certain sound(such as footsteps) came from.

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