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

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

#351

Post by jpadkins »

DJBunnies wrote: post #53
komali2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your game allows your sights to just teleport on people's heads and take that as the winning condition then that just sounds like bad design, there's no reason to allow infinitely fast movement and omitting strategy even from a shooter This is interesting, because I feel like the fundamental gameplay of an fps is players exposing themselves to each other's field of view, and then trying to click the other's head…

> How would you design FPSs to remove this "bad game design?" I think we just need to accept that bots will always be better at reaction based KPIs & abusing "knowing" too much game state, we should just remove those conditions. 1) Move most of the application logic to the server, the client should be a fairly dumb terminal that knows how to render and accept inputs, and only receives the state that it needs . No mor…

what if more people want to play an action shooter game, and not a slow strategy game?

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

#352

Post by HaZeust »

ok_dad wrote: post #339
dmayle wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Try playing Rust without anti-cheat and you will immediately change your tune. It isn't fun playing a game where you can lose everything to a guy who can cause bullets to bend around objects.

>"Try playing Rust [...] and you will immediately change your tune."

In general, really.

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

#353

Post by HaZeust »

varnaud wrote: post #331
dmayle wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I play online FPS with friends for fun. I don't care about leaderboards, but I know people that do and don't want to take them away from them. You can't have accurate matchmaking and allow cheating. People cheat for a variety of reasons, at lot of cheaters are just online bullies that enjoy tormenting other players. In a low ELO lobbies, you would have cheaters that have top tier aim activated only if they lose too m…

>"Top tier ELO would revolve around on how the server handle peeker advantage and which cheater as the fastest cheating software. It's an interesting technical challenge, but not a fun game"

Fun fact, this does exist. There used to be old CS:GO servers that were explicitly hack v hack, would make it abundantly clear to any new visitors that stumbled upon the servers that you would NOT have any fun without a "client", and it was a bunch of people out-config'ing each other. It was actually kinda cool for those people, it would NEVER be fun for anyone else.

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

#354

Post by beeflet »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #235
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…

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.

The "players run their own servers" model has worked fine in TF2. If you played community-run servers, you never ran into the bot issue.

There are even ranked, private competitive leagues like TF2Center

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

#355

Post by ItsMonkk »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #312
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.

> can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be th…

Yeah, this is pretty clear. The community for any competitive game if you are a member of the top 100 players is always amazing. These players play the most, they end of seeing each other over and over, and you build up a rapport with the other players and can start to play against specific peoples play-styles.

However, for the vast vast majority of the player-base who is top 50% in skill, the fat normal distribution nearly guarantees that most of the people they play against will never be seen again. And therefore there is no harm for them not to be toxic to them, so most people only ever experience toxicity in online competitive games.

Server browser games solve this because players end up with "home" servers where they come back to over and over, and over time build communities who do the same. This was taken away from the players when we moved to matchmaking, and many in the player-base have a bias against matchmaking because of it.

But this is in no way required, and merely a result of gaming companies to do any work on this front. It would be extremely easy for these games to add an arbitrary community tag to the matchmaker that would attempt to put people in games with players that they have not previously reported. The matchmaker might take a little bit more time, but since these players are in the fat normal distribution, their average matchmaking times will still be incredibly low.

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

#356

Post by ItsMonkk »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #345
thayne wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Does it though? Unless winning has real-world rewards, does it really matter that much if you are playing against someone who is cheating, if with cheating, they are evenly matched against you? Assuming the matchmaking works well, people who cheat would end up getting matched with either other people who cheat, or people who are good enough to compete against cheaters.

Not sure how to understand these questions. Have you ever played in a competitive game of any type, virtual or real? A cheater isn't evenly matched against you. No one is good enough to compete against wallhacks/aimbots, never mind that it shouldn't matter. It ruins the experience, ruins games, ruins the spirit of competition and sport.

This argument is that the match-making software is incompetent. If what you say is true, and the match-maker could determine skill with any ability, then the cheaters would quickly find that the only people they match-make with is other cheaters. The non-cheaters don't care that the cheaters exist if they never play against them.

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

#357

Post by ok_dad »

HaZeust wrote: post #352
ok_dad wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try playing Rust without anti-cheat and you will immediately change your tune. It isn't fun playing a game where you can lose everything to a guy who can cause bullets to bend around objects.

>"Try playing Rust [...] and you will immediately change your tune." In general, really.

Yea, that's one game that's more fun to watch than play I will admit, so mostly I'm a "pro rust watcher with over 300 hours watching rust" (this is a bit of an in-joke, sorry) who sees the annoyance and lack of fun people have when they get destroyed by cheaters. I did play one wipe, and spent 25 hours over 3 days in the game, so I chose to quit right there instead of doing that on a regular basis.

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

#358

Post by stephen_cagle »

bflesch wrote: post #131

As most of you know, these anti-cheat systems are functionally equivalent to rootkits. There is zero visibility into how these privileges are used for targeted attacks. Due to geographic location of the large game companies this has a geopolitical angle. Fingerprinting of devices and the networks they are in provides a lot of metadata that is most definitely fed into their intelligence apparatus.

I'm curious, do they have to be? Would it be possible to boot the program + the anti cheat into it's own VM or something? So they know I am running on trusted hardware, but I know that the aren't reading my emails? Genuinely curious and don't know the answer to this.

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

#359

Post by dtdynasty »

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.

For some games like dota 2 cheats only make them marginally better at the game but much more frustrating to play against. The most common cheats are map hacks and instant action scripts both of which can be useless without the game knowledge for correct play. But both of these cheats make playing against them frustrating but they wouldn't rise to the top.

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

#360

Post by bee_rider »

dtdynasty wrote: post #359
bee_rider wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For some games like dota 2 cheats only make them marginally better at the game but much more frustrating to play against. The most common cheats are map hacks and instant action scripts both of which can be useless without the game knowledge for correct play. But both of these cheats make playing against them frustrating but they wouldn't rise to the top.

Again I think there’s a better way if we push through the concept of a fair game, and just focus on fun. It should be possible and accepted to block (and never match with going forward) players who are just… unfun. Annoying, poor sports, or cheaters. Heck, maybe player-curated and shared matching and blocking lists could become a thing.

Games are a social thing we do to have fun, there’s no obligation to spend your limited social free time hanging out with annoying people.

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