Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck • Hacker News Board

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#121

Post by temporarrry0923 » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:38 PM UTC

cooljacob204 wrote: post #117

temporarrry0923 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or worse machine-learning-to-bounding-box that takes the video stream through HDMI, identifies character heads, intercepts the USB HID mouse, and injects movement commands to move the center of the screen towards the nearest "head". Literally (not nearly) impossible to detect, there is no difference between this and just aiming by hand. The video is already out of the box, and the USB HID packets look the same as the…

To be honest I have completely given up on competitive fps games. The cheating situation has only gotten worse and I really don't see anti-cheat makers winning.

I wish I could reply to this with a rallying cry for you to keep trying. But it's true, every 14 year old kid with a keyboard can cheat in competitive now.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#122

Post by temporarrry0923 » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:41 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #118

temporarrry0923 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can't prevent the client from auto-aiming or knowing the enemy player position behind a nearby wall Valorant and Edan.gg's defender [1] has the best fog of war system I've ever seen. CSGO has probably the worst; in fact, at one point, the game had NONE and sent player pos's to everyone at all times. I completely agree, but there are a lot of server-side mitigations that haven't been nearly as explored as I'd hop…

I'm a little skeptical that that's the case. When I cheated in CS:GO years ago (1856 days ago in 2016), I specifically remember being unable to see where people went at the beginning of the round, and sniping double-doors on dust2 showed people only when they were about to pass by the opening. This was on official competitive servers, so maybe you only mean self-hosted servers don't have FOW.

I mean, it has fog of war, yes. It's not as good or strict as it could be. I have seen discussions with the devs and they say that if it is more "strict" (ie hiding player positions until they are closer) would be more taxing on CSGO servers, AND would screw with high ping players (they would experience pop-in).

Check out https://edan.gg/defender to see the comparison between CSGO and a better FoW system.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#123

Post by judge2020 » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

erk__ wrote: post #58

pstrateman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah except he's right, the vast majority of cheaters can be detected server side. Literally no game does this, because ?????

Valve have been doing it with Counter Strike for at least 3 years. And the "VACnet" they have is still far from perfect. Especially with the less obvious cheats. They used to be a talk on youtube, but it seems to have been taken down.

`\dkliksphilip` reuploaded the talk it seems: https://youtu.be/SnRgW54EWwA

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#124

Post by chaorace » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

ziml77 wrote: post #25

halfcreative wrote: post #4

Awesome! So what does this mean for me? Will I be able to launch Apex legends without getting booted right now? How long will i need to wait for my favorite games to start working?

The page specifically says that these new versions of EAC are for native builds. So it's on Respawn now to provide that to players.

psssst Try reading a little more of that page you just quoted. I think you may have missed something important

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#125

Post by eric__cartman » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:45 PM UTC

snthd wrote: post #99

How long till epic brings their store to Linux (or at least native Steam Deck)?

If the Steam Deck gets a large enough user base, Epic will absolutely try to make a native, seamless store for Linux (at least the distribution running on Valve hardware). Hopefully sooner than later because, after all, the more users that have access to their store the more $$$ they make.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#126

Post by swinglock » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:48 PM UTC

malwrar wrote: post #120

jtms wrote: post #61

This is great and all, but I feel like all of these client side cheat detection tools are basically a waste of time. Trying to enforce the trustworthiness of the client is basically an unwinnable arms race between anti-cheat and the cheat makers. A better approach is for the server to treat all clients as hostile and untrustworthy and use a combination of heuristics and statistics to ferret out malicious client behav…

I used to write cheats for various source engine games (running vac), and later more interesting games like pubg which run battleeye. Those are two very different anticheats, and I think comparing them is interesting An important thing to point out is that it requires a lot of reversing work and low level knowledge to make a cheat, and usually at the end of the day cheats all end up with the same core features anyway…

Much like anti-virus software.

What is BE?

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#127

Post by fletchowns » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:49 PM UTC

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #114

fletchowns wrote: post #89

I wish there was some well respected third party reputation service that I could prove my identity to (government id, utility statements, etc) and then all games just integrate with this third party reputation service. Sort of an Olympic committee for gaming. Give me the option to only play with other verified players. Getting caught cheating in one game then impacts your reputation in _all_ games. There's a gazillio…

It doesn't work across multiple games but Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a system where you enter your phone number to verify your account and then can queue only with other verified players.

The phone number is not much of a barrier. I'm a verified player and only queue with other verified players, and I encounter cheaters regularly in CSGO.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#128

Post by fwip » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:50 PM UTC

temporarrry0923 wrote: post #78

jtms wrote: post #61

This is great and all, but I feel like all of these client side cheat detection tools are basically a waste of time. Trying to enforce the trustworthiness of the client is basically an unwinnable arms race between anti-cheat and the cheat makers. A better approach is for the server to treat all clients as hostile and untrustworthy and use a combination of heuristics and statistics to ferret out malicious client behav…

VACnet hurts cheaters, and also probably 25% of legits as well. In low trust this can be verified pretty quickly. Even in the gutter of trust, redder than red, you still have about 50-60% of players cheating. That's nearly half of everyone in the WORST trust factor of the game, who are there while not cheating. Though some are probably griefers/mic-spammers/toxics, it's certainly not all of them.

You mean that 50-60% of players appear to be currently cheating in ways that are detectable by you.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#129

Post by sigotirandolas » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:50 PM UTC

jtms wrote: post #61

This is great and all, but I feel like all of these client side cheat detection tools are basically a waste of time. Trying to enforce the trustworthiness of the client is basically an unwinnable arms race between anti-cheat and the cheat makers. A better approach is for the server to treat all clients as hostile and untrustworthy and use a combination of heuristics and statistics to ferret out malicious client behav…

Perhaps if you want a perfect solution, but in practice most people aren't cheaters, and those that cheat tend to eventually make a mistake and get caught by the anti-cheat. The remaining 1337 you can manage manually.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#130

Post by Pxtl » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 8:50 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #104

jtms wrote: post #61

This is great and all, but I feel like all of these client side cheat detection tools are basically a waste of time. Trying to enforce the trustworthiness of the client is basically an unwinnable arms race between anti-cheat and the cheat makers. A better approach is for the server to treat all clients as hostile and untrustworthy and use a combination of heuristics and statistics to ferret out malicious client behav…

> unwinnable It seems winnable so far if you look at the Xbox One and later, at least. I'm not aware of anyone successfully modifying game code on those consoles. The downside is that it a requires a completely locked down system.

In the cases where end-to-end vendor control over the hardware from the player's fingers to the HDMI out exists, yes that seems possible.

But on a PC? Where the user can install whatever software they like? Much harder.

It feels like stopping aimbots will ultimately fail as eventually we'll see bots that use machine-vision to spot heads and pick them off. You wouldn't even need to run it on the cheating machine, this could be a separate device doing passthrough on the mouse, keyboard, and monitor.