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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

#101

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Matheus28 wrote: post #43
plopz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that first part, some of the biggest games like gtav is an embarrassment in the concept of never trust the client.

GTA V is an exception because it's so easy to cheat in. I believe it's peer-to-peer with no verification among peers that what happened should actually have happened. It's basically impossible to secure that.

I suppose that was an intentional choice, I can imagine running the amount of worlds that GTA has (iirc you only have up to 32 or so players in a world? Something like that) doesn't scale well cost-wise. IDK if AWS and co were up for the task yet back when. But since you earn in-game currency, not having a central authority check these things is... an interesting choice.

I suspect GTA VI may improve on these things and have centralised/dedicated/anti-cheat-guaranteed servers. Then again, it never impacted their profit margins so idk.

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

#102

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #78

Good. I absolutely refuse to compromise my system by using these things. Games should be required to let people know what they are signing up for. And if that means more companies choose to avoid kernel anti-cheat, so much the better. I'm still mad that I can't play Helldivers 2 - a freaking co-op game where cheaters can't pose a problem - because of this nonsense.

> a freaking co-op game where cheaters can't pose a problem

Winning doesn't give you any permanent rewards?

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

#103

Post by OtomotO »

db48x wrote: post #95
throwaway48476 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you had to install a Linux driver from out of tree?

Most people do install Nvidia’s out‐of‐tree graphics driver. It is definitely a risk.

I am not using Nvidia since 2011. Last nvidia device was bought in 2007.

Back then I migrated to Archlinux and in all these years I only had problems with nvidia. Since then they are dead to me :)

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

#104

Post by throwaway48476 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #85
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but it's far better to have cheaters and bots than to have games require a rootkit to play them.

Well no, because they ruin the online experience making people not play the game. (in theory, GTA online has had / still has huge problems with bots and cheats but still earns the publisher hundreds of millions a year)

They have problems because they're cheap and don't want to pay to host servers. They don't want to let people host their own authoritative server either because of the $billions in fake money.

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

#105

Post by Phrodo_00 »

db48x wrote: post #95
throwaway48476 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you had to install a Linux driver from out of tree?

Most people do install Nvidia’s out‐of‐tree graphics driver. It is definitely a risk.

> Most people do install Nvidia’s out‐of‐tree graphics driver

Most people that use Nvidia. I specifically don't buy Nvidia graphics cards or laptops that use them in my Linux computers because they're not in-tree.

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

#106

Post by throwaway48476 »

keyringlight wrote: post #90
billyoyo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a naive take. Of course these developers already permaban cheaters. Firstly many of these games are free to play so "getting another license" is a non issue. They're doing hardware bans nowadays which are harder to avoid but not impossible. Half the battle is detection though. If you don't detect cheaters quick enough they ruin enough games that genuine players start getting frustrated and leave. Anti cheats…

It's going on a tangent, but one naive take which continues to amuse me when it comes up is community/third party servers and policing of cheating. As though delegating that responsibility is the goal or that it would scale to handle the size of modern playerbases including the ratio of admins to players to be able to monitor and respond to (alleged) cheaters

With community servers an admin only has to police their server, which is a fixed number. More players, more servers, more admins.

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

#107

Post by arp242 »

plopz wrote: post #32
arp242 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to prevent cheating from the server-side only. Something like an aimbot can operate purely on information you need to have as a client (to render the other players on the screen), and still be a huge advantage because it can respond faster than any human can.

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.

You can tune the aimbot to be as good as the server allows, maybe with a bit of variation to throw it off.

And realistically, some real non-cheating players will by chance just have similar statistics to bots, especially since the bots will start doing their best to mimic real players.

Also many players don't need to cheat all the time; just in that critical moment when it really matters. Didn't Magnus Carlsen say he only needs a single move from a chess computer in the right moment to be virtually guaranteed win? Something like that probably applies to a many people and fields. This is even harder to detect with just statistics.

Also also reminds me of the "you can't respond in less than 100ms, and if start the sprint faster than that after the starting pistol then you're disqualified"-type stuff they have in the Olympics – some people can consistently respond faster and there's a bunch of false positives. Not great.

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

#108

Post by Cthulhu_ »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #12

I built a dedicated gaming PC a couple of years ago. Too much cowboy coding in the industry for me to feel safe running this code on my main computer. Even games for which I pay have supposedly* been scanning/uploading personal data presumably for some adtech purposes. Why should I ever trust a gaming company to take security seriously? There was a story a few years ago about how one guy at home debugged GTA5’s atroc…

Oh yeah, that was down to a huge JSON file / slow JSON parser or something wasn't it? That was so bad.

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

#109

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mattigames wrote: post #14

I still hope someday the European Union forces Steam to allow transferring of games "owned", even if it's time-restricted (e.g. can't transfer the same game twice in a month)

Oh yeah, they did rule that you were legally allowed to transfer / resell digital games... but not that Steam & co had to offer the option.

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

#110

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

heromal wrote: post #81
codebje wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rampant cheating will wreck competitive multiplayer games fast, so there are perspectives from which this critical. (I’d still lean towards expecting game houses to find another way, kernel drivers are still client side trust mechanisms).

I think the point is that competitive multiplayer games are not critical. Scripting in e.g. league of legends probably doesn't register on 99% of humanities "top 100 most critical things in my life" radar.

That was my point. We forgot we were gaming, probably due to all the money being thrown around.
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