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

#601

Post by fullspectrumdev » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:29 PM UTC

JohnMakin wrote: post #592

I'm absolutely not a fan of giving a game the level of kernel access these games take without my permission. That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution. What's been frustrating over the years is when kernel anti-cheats, unbeknownst to you, are causing issues with other games entirely unrelated to what you are playing - because some game…

> That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online

I never understood this.

As I mentioned in another thread, maybe I’m just old or something now, but I’ve never given a fuck if another player was cheating.

Back in the day it was pretty normal to run into someone using aimbot or wall hack or whatever shit.

You would just change server or join a different lobby or whatever if it was really bothering your enjoyment.

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

#602

Post by JohnMakin » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #601

JohnMakin wrote: post #592

I'm absolutely not a fan of giving a game the level of kernel access these games take without my permission. That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution. What's been frustrating over the years is when kernel anti-cheats, unbeknownst to you, are causing issues with other games entirely unrelated to what you are playing - because some game…

> That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online I never understood this. As I mentioned in another thread, maybe I’m just old or something now, but I’ve never given a fuck if another player was cheating. Back in the day it was pretty normal to run into someone using aimbot or wall hack or whatever shit. You would just change server or join a different lobby or whatever if it was really…

Games with ranked systems will always be cheated. If you play competitively and attain a sufficiently high rank, you will encounter cheaters inevitably. If cheating hits a certain threshold (or even the perception of cheating), the system collapses because people won't compete in a system they perceive as unfair. It isn't a matter of just changing servers when there are consequences for winning/losing. Even worse, many competitive games offer specific, tangible rewards such as items/skins/etc. for winning, which heavily incentivizes cheaters even further. I have definitely stopped playing games completely because of cheating issues - one dumb one particularly for me are m/kb players on playstation FPS games, which is trivial to stop and detect, but they won't do it. I'd vastly prefer something invasive on my playstation to prevent that experience than the alternative, which is to just not play.

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

#603

Post by alexandre_m » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

JohnMakin wrote: post #592

I'm absolutely not a fan of giving a game the level of kernel access these games take without my permission. That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution. What's been frustrating over the years is when kernel anti-cheats, unbeknownst to you, are causing issues with other games entirely unrelated to what you are playing - because some game…

> and I really don't know of any other solution

Behavior AI-driven anti-cheat system running on the server side.

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

#604

Post by thanzex » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:44 PM UTC

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #601

JohnMakin wrote: post #592

I'm absolutely not a fan of giving a game the level of kernel access these games take without my permission. That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution. What's been frustrating over the years is when kernel anti-cheats, unbeknownst to you, are causing issues with other games entirely unrelated to what you are playing - because some game…

> That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online I never understood this. As I mentioned in another thread, maybe I’m just old or something now, but I’ve never given a fuck if another player was cheating. Back in the day it was pretty normal to run into someone using aimbot or wall hack or whatever shit. You would just change server or join a different lobby or whatever if it was really…

That's not a thing you can do on many games nowadays. I assume this comment is also related to this thread https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/31/24284644/apex-legends-lo...

There's no concept of "server" or "Change lobby" on Apex or other Battle royales.

You just queue up for a game, which lasts ~20 minutes. As you are in a 3 player team if you disconnect from the game you get a temp ban penalty, since that also degrades other players experience. So there's no disconnecting freely once a game has started. Now imagine you're playing for 10-15 minutes just to die without really having any chance. That gets frustrating, really quickly, since winning is close to the only "reward" you get from playing the game.

It's not like a classic COD or Battlefield game, where you can feely leave or join any game/server. Once you're in you're somewhat committed, and you have no control over where or with whom you're playing against.

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

#605

Post by atahanacar » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:50 PM UTC

andyferris wrote: post #274

OtomotO wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I tell my friends. I can't play certain games, because they don't run on Linux and even if they did, I am not gonna install a rootkit to run them.

Hmm, here’s a thought I’ve never had (but might be obvious to others). Could I run windows as a VM guest under Linux and play Fortnite in that (with good GPU performance)? I don’t mind their rootkit running on some dedicated VM - I’ll just consider it my Fortnite unikernel. (I’m also ok with the host OS being Windows or MacOS).

Yes. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

You basically let your guest OS use your GPU instead of the host.

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

#606

Post by bunderbunder » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:53 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #579

bunderbunder wrote: post #559

So, I'm not really into online multiplayer, but from a distance I keep wondering if this could be more easily mitigated by altering the incentive structure? What if online games track how well people do and sort them into tiers based on skill level? And then put people who are roughly evenly matched together. I am guessing that cheaters will naturally end up clumping together with each other, and maybe a smattering o…

I'm not entirely sure if you're being sarcastic or not. > What if online games track how well people do and sort them into tiers based on skill level? Games have been already doing this for at least a decade. Games that do this are exactly the games where cheating is rampant.

Honest question. Believe it or not, people who aren't into AAA multiplayer games don't necessarily know a whole lot about them.

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

#607

Post by JohnMakin » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

alexandre_m wrote: post #603

JohnMakin wrote: post #592

I'm absolutely not a fan of giving a game the level of kernel access these games take without my permission. That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution. What's been frustrating over the years is when kernel anti-cheats, unbeknownst to you, are causing issues with other games entirely unrelated to what you are playing - because some game…

> and I really don't know of any other solution Behavior AI-driven anti-cheat system running on the server side.

This sounds nice, but it isn't a thing that would really work. This excellent post in this same thread explains why:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42004965

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

#608

Post by ascagnel_ » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:56 PM UTC

tantalor wrote: post #510

veunes wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy shouldn’t feel like the "premium version" of a product...

This is true for watching NFL. Option 1: subscribe to 7 streaming services which each have some unpredictable subset of games Option 2: go to some website that has all the games

The MLS did this with their Apple deal (pay a maximum of $120 for a season and you're guaranteed to get every league match of the season through the "TV" app), and it's been reasonably successful. That said, the league used that money in part to bring in Lionel Messi, and his significant international following came along with him, so it's hard to parse out how much of that is because they made the games easy to access (with the significant asterisk that Linux and Android users are stuck with a web app) versus his singular impact.

The other part of this is that MLS is significantly smaller (~$275m in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023) than other North American leagues (the NHL, the next-largest league, had ~$6.75b in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023), so I don't know how reasonable it is for other leagues to follow the MLS's path.

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

#609

Post by bunderbunder » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:56 PM UTC

stonogo wrote: post #571

bunderbunder wrote: post #559

So, I'm not really into online multiplayer, but from a distance I keep wondering if this could be more easily mitigated by altering the incentive structure? What if online games track how well people do and sort them into tiers based on skill level? And then put people who are roughly evenly matched together. I am guessing that cheaters will naturally end up clumping together with each other, and maybe a smattering o…

KLA isn't about preventing cheaters. It's about protecting the artificial scarcity of products for sale via microtransaction.

Gotcha. So you're saying that it's really about protecting a revenue model with pay-to-win elements?

If that's so, then do we typically only see KLA on games that are mostly funded by microtransactions or live service models?

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

#610

Post by pphysch » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 6:18 PM UTC

JohnMakin wrote: post #592

I'm absolutely not a fan of giving a game the level of kernel access these games take without my permission. That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution. What's been frustrating over the years is when kernel anti-cheats, unbeknownst to you, are causing issues with other games entirely unrelated to what you are playing - because some game…

> cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution.

Cheating is downstream of the trust problem with an anonymous global "community". Anti-cheat is just an arms race, but there are other avenues to addressing it (weak "KYC", like requiring a phone number to play ranked modes).

Deadlock is potentially doing something interesting with its invite-only EA system. They're essentially building a social graph of players, which could be leveraged to identify "cheating rings"/compromised accounts and seed some kind of social reputation system within the community.