Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

Post by babypuncher » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 7:43 PM UTC

hamdingers wrote: post #214

Kuinox wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you played in this era ? - If you were too good on some server, you'd get banned. - If the admin doesn't know well cheating, he could tolerate something that was obvious cheating. - Cheaters could just change server often. It used to be easy to just ban peoples yes, and it was as easy to switch servers. Plus on most competitive game today, you have custom lobbies, which do exactly what you want, and there is a re…

All true, but of course you're missing the player agency component that renders those issues moot. If any of the above happens, you can simply find another server. Private games (now called "custom lobbies") were available back then too, they're not equivalent to a public server browser.

Post by nitwit005 » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

dmayle wrote: post #262

LanceH wrote: post #151

Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers. It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% s…

The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards. When you have accurate matchmaking, you will be playing against other players of a similar skill level. If you we're playing in single-player mode, it wouldn't bother you that some of the players were better than others. Whether the person you're playing against is as good as you because they have aim assist, while you have a 17g mouse and twitch reflexes shouldn…

Post by ndriscoll » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #292

ndriscoll wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the stakes not still zero? Aren't like 99.9% of players not at all competitive in any meaningful sense basically by definition? Like if Counter-Strike has 1M active players, and you are in the 99.9%-ile, you are still only in the top 1,000. Do people watch the rank 1000 players? Are they making a career out of it? What fraction of the player-base thinks they are actually competitive vs. is just playing a game?

I actually think a big part of this anti-cheat push is just developers wanting their players to think something real is at stake. Yes we put a ton of effort into protecting your very important Elo score from hackers so you confidently sink hours into improving it. If they would just let the cheaters win their way up the ranks, they could have their own little cheater lobbies and we wouldn’t have to deal with them.

Post by officeplant » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 7:58 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #188

Buttons840 wrote: post #166

The only multiplayer game I currently play is Beyond All Reason (a RTS game). It's a free and open-source game, so creating a cheat client would be especially easy. But I've never encountered cheating. I think there's a few reasons for this: 1) The playerbase is small and there is no auto-matchmaking, just a traditional list of servers. This results in the same group of people always playing together. People don't wa…

Seems more likely that the cause is that RTS isn't a popular genre among gamers and Beyond All Reason is obscure[1] even among RTSes. There's no fame or money to make it worth investing in cheating. [1] Among the general public, not RTS aficionados. Which is unfortunate; Total Annihilation and its spiritual descendants like BAR deserve more love.

Post by pnw » Mon, Dec 01, 2025, 8:00 PM UTC

LanceH wrote: post #277

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the reason. The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today. And cheating is an arms race. It's just hacking. You either preserve game integrity or you're going to have cheaters.

We lost a lot of other things as well. Like modding and especially maps. It doesn't matter how good the game developers are, someone out there is could make a better map. The studios took control of everything, and their answer is to rootkit our computers, and to buy more DLC if we want another map. Personally, I don't accept the premise that such studio control is necessary for me to have fun playing a game. I espec…