Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by jonathantf2 » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

anonymousab wrote: post #471

skizm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter strike player, I definitely shy away from the invasive anti cheat stuff… but I’d let valve inject it into my veins if it meant I could actually play and not suspect everyone of cheating all the time. Mostly because Valve has earned my trust. I won’t install games from other companies using similarly invasive techniques though.

I take it community moderation tools like voteban/votekick aren't sufficient anymore? They worked pretty well for pub matches back in CSS and 1.6, where it was pretty trivial for anyone to cheat or bot for free with minimal effort. I wonder what changed.

In a normal 5v5 match, you need everybody else on the team to vote yes to kick the cheater. If they're queued with someone else (which is very likely) then you've got no chance

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

#512

Post by valval » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

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…

Is there a system in place for when my identical brother who is leagues better at your game than me hops on my account and proceeds to mop the floor with the competition?

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

#513

Post by elashri » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:44 PM UTC

lifeformed wrote: post #389

elashri wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the latest study [1] estimating how much money cheat developers make annually it is an upper limit of ~ $75M. I would say that the very liberal estimation of anti cheating efforts will cost maybe $100M annually. That does not include only research efforts but actual cost of tackle them (extra compute, reviewers...etc). This is unrealistic but even through to reach the point of billions (2-3 billions) you…

That's only looking at western audiences. In 2020, Tencent said that the cheating market in China is worth $293M annually [1]. In China there are many individual games making billions in annual revenue. PUBG bans over a hundred thousand cheaters every week. I don't think adding up to billions is too farfetched, if you count globally over the decades, although it'd be close. There are also the costs of the opportuniti…

Thanks for bringing that up to me. I did not include the largest gaming market and it seems more plausible now this the OP estimations make sense.

Edit: I missed that you are the same commenter that I replied. sorry about that

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

#514

Post by keyringlight » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:48 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #506

keyringlight wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering is how long before we get a 'PC-console' dedicated gaming device, there's certain aspects where PC is falling into the gravity well of the console model. Whether that's the technical aspects like how far you can lock down for security (and who's security) or DRM, whether people only want a nice front end, whether everything should be managed by a defacto 'good' platform holder versus allowing comp…

Speaking for myself, I would never buy such a thing. The reason I game on PC is because I need a decent PC for work anyway, so building one that can also game is cheaper than buying a console. If I was really concerned about security I'd sooner dual boot into a second OS that had nothing on it, than buy a second box just to game on.

Yep, a lot of this comes down to "who's security" and what everyone can take as a foundation to build trust upon, or what their thresholds are

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

#515

Post by SXX » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:48 PM UTC

paledot wrote: post #464

WithinReason wrote: post #407

Hope there will be a tag. I wish they also had a tag for "requires third party account" so I could just filter those games out so I never see them.

Tags are crowdsourced. I was tagging games with "always-online DRM" before they declared it on the store page, but only the top few tags are displayed, so there's no point.

They also editable by developers / publishers and it's by design. Any sane developer prune their tags from time to time since Steam recommendations depend on them.

So it's not exactly a reasonable place to put something like that.

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

#516

Post by shkkmo » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:50 PM UTC

Arch-TK wrote: post #473

Eisenstein wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 communit…

> 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 issue is that the players themselves seem to think t…

> The issue is that the players themselves seem to think that the convenience of KLA (over running your own community, paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs the privacy risks.

That's not true and there isn't data to show it.

The reasons why support for community run servers have fallen by the wayside are more complicated than "players chose one over the other and companies followed them".

Companies also recognized significant downsides for themselves of community run servers. When your online experience is in community run spaces, you expose your player base to experiences outside of your control. When you don't run your own server instances, you can't enforce the cheating rules you want. These, among many other reason, make it harder and more risky to monetize the online experience of your game. A such, the choice was generally taken away from players to protect companies. This wasn't at all a pure reaction to player preference.

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

#517

Post by NeoTar » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:53 PM UTC

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 a boomer millenial, or whatever we're called now, and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this segment.

And you are not alone - apparently 53% of gamers (total) prefer single-player games, [although this falls to only 30% in the 16-19 years age-group]. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/most-gamers-prefer-single...

I wonder how much of this is familiarity (i.e. I play games in the style I did when I was sixteen) versus people in older age-groups having less sustained time for gaming (i.e. grabbing twenty minutes while the baby sleeps) and single-player being inherently better for that use-case.

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

#518

Post by flessner » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:56 PM UTC

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #264

flessner wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that plays CS2 and Valorant regularly... Vanguard hasn't been effective for a while now. The cheating situation is a lot worse than CS in my experience, but every discussion gets shutdown because... well... it's Vanguard. With CS2 I have talked to many players about this and everyone says the same thing: "There's a very noticeable decline in cheaters above 10k Elo."... personally I have pushed beyond 15k a…

I have a very hard time believing that the rate of cheaters go down in high elo. IIRC the new CS2 leaderboard still regularly features cheat companies on it (eg. config by [cheat dev] as the leaderboard name.) I myself do not have any data to back up that claim, but yours completely goes against what I have experienced. I think the point about wallhack being more common in higher elo is more likely. I would add that…

I absolutely support your claims about the leaderboards, it's an obvious show of cheating in CS2. There's also a strong incentive for cheating companies to be there so it might not be descriptive of the average experience. However, I can't speak for that level as my peak was barely over 25k (top 1%?) and the leaderboards are simply orders of magnitude away from that.

Regarding cheaters announcing they're cheating - I haven't encountered that in a long time, but I have heard of it often enough from new players... so it might be an issue with trust factor, but who knows?

I have actually been playing CS off and on since around 2017 - at least in my experience the current cheating situation isn't worse than it was back then, but it's also not better. The only time it was meaningfully better was when prime released around 2021.

However, it's also true that I started playing more after the release of CS2... and the aforementioned 10k Elo mark was a real pain point for me and my friends. Every time we were due to pass it we ran into cheaters, smurfs and even a server crash once (incredible luck?). After over 3 months we made it past 10k and climbed above 15k Elo within 2 weeks. - This is my experience and I have heard similar stories from other players. (Although ranks have been massively imbalanced at that time as well, which partly explains this?)

Nevertheless, it's good to have a discussion about cheating - in CS2's case the experience can be so different depending on the region, ELO, trust factor, ... with Valorant the discussion simply gets shutdown way to often because of "Vanguard" and without a replay system you're just left to your own devices.

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

#519

Post by shkkmo » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

keyringlight wrote: post #498

remnantdiving wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

patched: https://hackerone.com/reports/470520 https://hackerone.com/reports/1070835 https://secret.club/2021/04/20/source-engine-rce-invite.html https://secret.club/2020/10/30/alien-swarm-rce.html https://threatpost.com/dark-souls-servers-down-rce-bug/17789... https://blog.thalium.re/posts/achieving-remote-code-executio... https://www.pcgamer.com/garrys-mod-cough-virus-is-cured-but-... you can buy these games in thei…

I've been wondering is how long before we get a 'PC-console' dedicated gaming device, there's certain aspects where PC is falling into the gravity well of the console model. Whether that's the technical aspects like how far you can lock down for security (and who's security) or DRM, whether people only want a nice front end, whether everything should be managed by a defacto 'good' platform holder versus allowing comp…

That's what "steam deck" is. A dedicated gaming device that is still also a general purpose computer that you have full control over.

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

#520

Post by crest » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #499

_factor wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government regulation of toxic waste dumping negatively impacts profit margins. We have the data to prove this, very frustrating situation.

To be fair, the societal harm from deciding to play multiplayer instead of single player is probably a few orders of magnitude less than toxic waste in the water.

Granted, but how about the societal harm from an exploitable bug in one or more of these rootkits? Millions of gaming computers could wreck some havoc in the hands of an even slightly creative attacker not restrained by moral or economic considerations…