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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

#451

Post by rldjbpin »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #171

I hate to say this but a large percentage (in fact, I believe a majority) of gamers simply do not care about invasive anti-cheats. Right now CounterStrike players are mostly begging Valve for kernel-level anti-cheat since their current solution isn't working at all. If anything, this warning will actually make many player's more impressed with the game. That said, more consumer information is almost always better in…

valve has their own ethos in this topic, which i wholeheartedly accept. you can guess which end of the spectrum they lie from the original news article.

faceit for the longest time has had their own way around this. so did esea, before they ruined the trust forever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5636233). some highly-motivated players still found ways around it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352331).

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

#452

Post by Lanolderen »

WithinReason wrote: post #414
croes wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training data for AI

Sony is training the AI drones for the battlefields of the future from gamer conversations

Can't wait to hear "Who you challin lil bro" as I get shot in the ass by a drone.

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

#453

Post by romwell »

soderfoo wrote: post #440
parl_match wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what happens when a producer's/product manager's cherished KPIs come before UX. > In their mind, adding a toggle in the launcher would lead to lower engagement and player acquisition. Not "in their mind". It does and they have the data to show it. Very frustrating situation.

Yeah, it's just me being an idealist and projecting. I acknowledge what the analytics show, but always allude to the hypothetical casual loner segment who we lack data on because we pushed them away or we don't measure things relevant to them. I'm a boomer millenial , or whatever we're called now, and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this segment. Casual loners are irrelevant to the monetization and in gam…

I'm disagreeing with everything you're saying here.

Not because you're wrong.

But because I'm in this picture and I don't like it, and I just found out that "boomer millennial" is a fitting descriptor.

Goddamit.

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

#454

Post by Eisenstein »

soderfoo wrote: post #440
parl_match wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what happens when a producer's/product manager's cherished KPIs come before UX. > In their mind, adding a toggle in the launcher would lead to lower engagement and player acquisition. Not "in their mind". It does and they have the data to show it. Very frustrating situation.

Yeah, it's just me being an idealist and projecting. I acknowledge what the analytics show, but always allude to the hypothetical casual loner segment who we lack data on because we pushed them away or we don't measure things relevant to them. I'm a boomer millenial , or whatever we're called now, and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this segment. Casual loners are irrelevant to the monetization and in gam…

Yet we are the people who started gaming on PCs -- we made consumer 3D accelerators profitable and spent the time writing about them on forums in the 90s and 2000s. We certainly have the power to move markets.

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

#455

Post by nottorp »

yreg wrote: post #195

I've just reinstalled GTA V last week and I was very surprised to find out that I now have to install a rootkit to run it. They had the balls to add a mandatory kernel extension into a game that I've bought 10 years ago and that I wish to play in single player only. I find it utterly ridiculous. As usual, piracy would have been the superior experience.

I stopped getting Rockstar games for PC when the Steam store page for Max Payne 3 was lying that a rockstar club account was only required for multiplayer. Turns out it was mandatory for single player too instead.

I did get GTA V for playstation, and indeed you can play single player without the rockstar account. Probably Sony forcing them to allow that, I don't think they did it out of the goodness of their hearts.

However, every time you start the game you get a screen pushing you towards multiplayer. And the single time I did click on some multiplayer related options, they spammed my playstation system notifications with 'there are new events in GTA online' even in weeks I didn't start their title at all.

So... good bye, rockstar. Your games are getting too big for their own good anyway.

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

#456

Post by maccard »

nathants wrote: post #439
maccard wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thanks! if the plan isn’t insane, why bother. This is the only reason you need to keep going. > ps5 can’t play 360hz and can’t use performance mode graphics. This [0] is your game. Without running it (because I'm not installing your OS on my machine, no offence) there's no reason that wouldn't run at 360Hz on a PS5. A PS5 is an 8 core machine with a dedicated GPU; it's going to be vastly more powerful (and has the…

i mean, i haven't built an os. it's just standard archlinux with minor conf. my binaries will run, but they would regardless of the platform. i can't tell users to go into bios and turn off smt. i can tell them to boot an iso, and have it preset to do that via kernel cmdline. owning the os means i can tune the network stack, the os, the kernel, anything that helps performance. the game itself has minimal config, only…

> can tell them to boot an iso, and have it preset to do that via kernel cmdline. owning the os means i can tune the network stack, the os, the kernel, anything that helps performance. the game itself has minimal config, only keybinds.

I think this is an interesting idea. Lots of things we do are done the way they are because they've always been done like that. "Turn off Antivirus" has been common advice for PC players for as long as I can remember, this is a neat way to handle all of that stuff by default (nobody needs windows search indexing a scratch folder for a video game).

> most importantly, it doesn't let you set graphics to the settings every pro uses. on console you have default high graphics. all serious players migrate to pc.

One of the reasons people migrate to PC is _because_ of the customization that you're locking down.

> reads video from hdmi, mitm controller outputs. multiple generations of that, some of it works on pc too, and then pc has a whole new host of similar tech.

How does your system defend against a HDMI capture device and a USB device that pretends to be a keyboard?

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

#457

Post by Eisenstein »

Arch-TK wrote: post #415
ho_schi wrote: post #404

First step. Second step? Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat. It is not acceptable on Linux. Apple will also not accept that shit further, that said Apple lost relevance in gaming with Mantle and the M-Processors (both mean a lot of incompatibility). And Microsoft is regretting every choice in this regard: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242947/microsoft-window... But that is a usual pattern. Microsoft makes…

The reason games companies reach for KLA is not because they're dumb and can't be bothered to secure their network protocols on the server side, it's because they don't want to have to hire an inordinate number of human reviewers to make unreliable decisions on whether someone is cheating or not in their game. While KLA is fundamentally flawed (DMA and even CV based cheats are becoming more popular as a result of KLA…

> Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration.

Yes. This is the answer. There is no solution that relies only on technology that will fix human problems at scale. You can make it harder, but once one person figures it out, everyone has access to it. You need to break it into pieces and let people deal with it on the community level, where communities are small enough that people can deal with individuals.

The main issue is that 'at scale' you have the fact that a certain percentage of people are sociopaths, a certain percentage of people are really smart, and a certain percentage of people have the time and motivation to do something, and when they all cross you end up with a person who breaks your system.

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

#458

Post by shultays »

WithinReason wrote: post #414
croes wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training data for AI

Sony is training the AI drones for the battlefields of the future from gamer conversations

Not only future drones will get better at killing you, they will also learn to shit talk after doing that

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

#459

Post by ethbr1 »

sunshowers wrote: post #338
ethbr1 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> historically a large chunk of this problem was solved by communities hosting servers Yes and no. I lived through that era too, and there are serious scaling problems: at some point, trying to banhammer griefers with rotating IPs becomes a full time job, and then the public servers turn into a dumpster fire.

Yeah, having written that I was thinking about this as well. There's a lot of unpaid labor involved in that model. Maybe, between rootkits and that kind of exploitation of humans, rootkits are the less unjust option.

I'd be curious how many anti-cheat rootkit vendors that there are out there, though. It seems like the sort of industry that consolidation to 3-4 larger, more well-funded vendors would be beneficial in terms of security.

Versus everyone rolling their own or using smaller / cheaper solutions.

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

#460

Post by Hikikomori »

nathants wrote: post #236

kernel level anticheat is not enough. client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the kernel has no visibility of inputs. i’m shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and nosmt on all clients and th…

How do you stop anyone from modifying the image?

Can you stop them from using DMA hacks?

Can I boot the image in a VM?

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