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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

#181

Post by galbar »

sofixa wrote: post #168
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…

> caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere ne…

For a casual CS server the ratio could perfectly be 1:50 and that'd be fine. That's how it used to be with, i.e., CS:Source.

Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which lowered the ratio even further.

IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller forums (be it web communities or game server communities) than to do for huge ones.

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

#182

Post by brendoelfrendo »

kamranjon wrote: post #145

At this point - you would think that cheaters could be detected on the server side by either training a model to flag abnormal behavior or do some type of statistics on the movement patterns over time - is a client-side anti-cheat really required?

This is done, and generally doesn't work as well. Your model will catch people using yesterday's cheats, but the cat-and-mouse nature of cheating means that people will adapt. Funnily enough, cheaters are also training models to play games so that they can evade cheat detection. The kernel-level anticheats are designed to prevent the game from running if they detect you are running any software that interacts with the game. Much simpler for the developer, and circumventing it usually requires running your cheats on a second machine which a) limits what you can do and b) has a higher barrier to entry.

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

#183

Post by krzyk »

embedding-shape wrote: post #116
tete wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are looking completely wrong at this. There is no anti-cheat that cannot be bypassed. Period. You can always run things in a VM, you can always replace your keyboard and mouse with a different device, you can always have your a camera instead of human eyes and have something that recognizes enemies. Even cheat detection in the real physical world (sports, chess, etc.) is not a completely solved topic. You can con…

> The idea that any (currently realistic) cheat prevention is unbypassable is silly. The idea that anti-cheats don't make sense because they don't catch 100% of the cheaters is what's silly, who believes that? Not even the people writing these anti-cheats believe catching 100% of them are possible, why are you under the assumption that others think that's possible? If it removes 80% of the cheaters from the game, the…

> the experience goes from "Holy shit lets leave" to "Ok, bothersome, but fine",

This is making those rootkit anitcheat mechanism work. If people will leave, cheaters will play only with cheaters - problem solved.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

Lalabadie wrote: post #149
kamranjon wrote: post #145

At this point - you would think that cheaters could be detected on the server side by either training a model to flag abnormal behavior or do some type of statistics on the movement patterns over time - is a client-side anti-cheat really required?

That's because the 2025 definition of "anti-cheat" leans heavily towards preventing players from enjoying client-side content that's locked behind microtransactions (for example, EA's new Skate game).

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by nevon »

SirMaster wrote: post #142
shmerl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Client side anti cheats is a lazy excuse why they don't want to spend on server side anti cheats anyway.

How do you stop a client-side wallhack with server side anti-cheat?

Don't send the client information about players they should not be able to see based on their current position.

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

#186

Post by Quimoniz »

wavemode wrote: post #154
kamranjon wrote: post #145

At this point - you would think that cheaters could be detected on the server side by either training a model to flag abnormal behavior or do some type of statistics on the movement patterns over time - is a client-side anti-cheat really required?

Many forms of cheating revolve around modding the game locally so that certain textures can be seen through walls, so you always know where opponents are. So you aren't breaking any laws of physics, you are just able to make much better tactical decisions. The obvious solution would be, just don't send data to the player's client about enemies that are behind walls. But this is a surprisingly hard thing to engineer i…

> So you aren't breaking any laws of physics, you are just able to make much better tactical decisions.

With respect I'd like to disagree on this subtly. A lot of games have the client send their cursor position at relatively frequent updates/packages (i.e. sub-second). So the server knows pretty precisely in which direction and to which object a player is looking.

This in turn can be readily used upon when using wall-hacks, as most players, who use wall-hacks tend to almost faithfully follow objects behind walls with their cursor, which good moderators can usually spot within a few seconds, when reviewing such footage (source: I was involved in recognizing Wall-Hacks in Minecraft, where players would replace textures, to easily find and mine diamonds underground).

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

#187

Post by surajrmal »

theknarf wrote: post #152
hastily3114 wrote: post #4

Is there really no way to make anti-cheat on Linux that can't be bypassed? I don't know much about this, but it seems very difficult to make an anti-cheat for a platform where you can make changes in the kernel.

I mean kernel level anti-cheat doesn't really work on Windows either, its just security theater.

Based on what data do you draw that conclusion? The fact that cheaters can still exist isn't an indictment that it doesn't ever work. Have you ab tested a game with an without anti cheat?

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

#188

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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.

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

#189

Post by squigz »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #177
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…

Even if custom game servers were a preferable experience, which I would argue against, it doesn't really do anything for this problem. By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone. It's kind of like thinking you can forgo anti-bot measure…

> By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone.

The difference is there is usually an existing level of trust between people playing on a private server. Usually your group would know ahead of time if someone is going to potentially be a problem.

Furthermore, even with public dedicated servers, there's a psychological aspect to it - it's no longer just a random matchmaking server; you're almost walking into someone's house. Many people feel a lot more pressure not to misbehave

Then there's the fact that you don't have to wait many days for your cheating report to hopefully be acted on. Our game got interrupted? Well, that sucks, but we can just ban that guy and go again and we likely won't have to worry that our very next game will also contain a cheater

Finally: these defences always have an implicit assumption with it: that the horribly pervasive anti-cheats actually... you know, work. They do, to a rather limited extent, but cheaters are still rampant, so what's the point?

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

#190

Post by surajrmal »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #77
jsheard wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A trusted entity (probably Valve) could provide a locked down distro where kernel integrity is enforced through secure boot and TPM attestation, but that would mean giving up some control over your own system. There's no guarantee that anything client-side is impossible to bypass of course, but the goal would be to more or less match what Windows offers, which isn't perfect either.

You don't need a full distro, you can just run the game in a VM sandbox with trusted computing extensions alongside whatever distro you want. That breaks cheats that rely on network/memory inspection, you can still cheat using the raw pixel output to drive faked input, but I don't think the loop is closeable there.

Running in a VM is not secure by itself. You need something similar to what Android is building via protected VMs.
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