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

https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-anti-cheat-support-for-linux-mac-and-steam-deck

by cactusbee • 5 years ago

333 316 5 years ago

dev.epicgames.com

BeefySwain3• 5 years ago

Some additional context here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/09/epic-games-announce-fu...

tlackemann2• 5 years ago

I literally just posted a comment in an earlier thread that the only reason I dual boot Windows is for EAC support. This is awesome news. We can finally play Fallout Guys on linux!

theandrewbailey• 5 years ago

I assume that affected games need to be patched to include a newer EAC.

BeefySwain3• 5 years ago

This appears to be correct.

francislavoie• 5 years ago

"Fallout Guys" haha, I think you meant Fall Guys.

tlackemann2• 5 years ago

I was so quick to reply, yes Fall Guys. Thank you kindly

halfcreative• 5 years ago

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?

zaptrem• 5 years ago

Only for games that use EAC.

ziml77• 5 years ago

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.

chaorace• 5 years ago

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

peanut_worm2• 5 years ago

I could totally see Linux hitting 5+ percent market share for desktops on the next couple years

sylens3• 5 years ago

I think at this point I just need a Google Drive client. 1Password is already there, Obsidian is there, I'm ready to go

kaladin-jasnah3• 5 years ago

InSync? Not first party, but I heard everywhere it's really good.

wyufro• 5 years ago

Ubuntu supports Google Drive out of the box, it appears in the file manager. Probably it's Gnome doing the actual work, I haven't really bothered to learn it well.

lights0123• 5 years ago

If you want client, not necessarily sync, GNOME has it built-in. It'll mount your Drive using FUSE.

sneak3• 5 years ago

Why would you run Linux and use Google Drive? If you don't care about FAAN(M)G reading your data and activity, Windows is simpler and has better compatibility.

ajsnigrutin• 5 years ago

2022, year of linux on the desktop!

peanut_worm2• 5 years ago

For once it might be!

austinshea• 5 years ago

I doubt it.

Desktop computers haven’t been relevant since 2008ish, and were struggling to maintain relevance after the 4th gen Intel GPU/Power-consumption changes.

Headless servers and consumer electronics are, already, largely using Linux.

symlinkk• 5 years ago

Go to Twitch.tv, everyone there will be on gaming PCs.

throwaway2048• 5 years ago

desktops are effectively the only thing people play PC games on.

stinkytaco2• 5 years ago

If anything, this is the reason Linux could hit that point. Desktops are increasingly for specialized applications: gaming, development, content production, etc. If you just need general consumption, you probably have a tablet or phone. I could absolutely see Linux hitting 5% just because people who would never use Linux have stopped using a computer at all.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 5 years ago

And yet we just went through a massive GPU shortage suggesting Desktop is alive and well. Do we have any recent industry stats on this?

bloqs• 5 years ago

This is a startlingly out of touch comment. Desktop PC gaming, along with self builds are one of lockdowns hottest trends.

nivenkos• 5 years ago

I've been using it at work the last 6 months.

Only issue I've hit was Tableau Desktop has no Linux support (but hopefully we can migrate to Looker, as Tableau sucks anyway).

015a• 5 years ago

I'll go on the record and say above 5% by December 31st 2022.

Depending on who you ask, its at ~2% today. If that feels high to you, remember: it includes Chromebooks.

As it grows, you'll absolutely hear people say "Chromebooks" or "Steam Decks should be their own category, they don't count". These arguments effectively reduce to "Linux cannot be popular, so I'll move the goalposts so it never is." Ignore them, and pour cement around the goalposts: running a distribution of gnu/linux.

Of course, if all we cared about was the "linux" part of gnu/linux, then its already the most popular operating system kernel in use by mankind. Its already won.

faho• 5 years ago

Of course, if all we cared about was the "linux" part of gnu/linux, then its already the most popular operating system kernel in use by mankind. Its already won.

Except the "linux" part matters to the actual user not one bit.

Android is a fairly walled garden no matter what kernel it uses. It's an implementation detail.

kaladin-jasnah3• 5 years ago

I'm curious as to why should the Steam Deck be in its own category. To me, it runs a mainstream, open and not-locked-down Linux distro. I could see an argument for Chromebooks being in their own category, but the Steam Deck, in my eyes, is a legitimate "full" Linux device.

jay_kyburz4• 5 years ago

Woah, I'm a linux gamer but %5 by 23 is crazy. Steam Deck is going to be super niche, and a lot of people over on reddit are already planning how they will install Windows on it.

It's not going to explode. It will creep up very slowly.

And lets not forget that Microsoft will combat it if it starts to take off. Game pass is already and incredible deal. We have it in our house for the xbox.

legohead• 5 years ago

why would anyone other than programmers/devops/IT pros have anything to do with Linux?

jakogut• 5 years ago

It doesn't spy on you. It gives you freedom of choice when it comes to desktop environment, and what software you run. It's not developed by anti-competitive tech giants.

samtheDamned• 5 years ago

I could see it becoming big with pc gamers for how much you can tweak the OS itself to eek out as much performance as you can get. They also tend to want to personalize their PCs a lot and with linux they'd have a whole new level to that with the customizability of the desktop experience itself.

superkuh• 5 years ago

Not if Epic keeps buying independent video games that support linux, saying they won't change anything, then 6 months later removing linux as a playable platform (rocket league). That they're trying to develop a linux anti-cheat does not indicate they will actually support linux. It doesn't even indicate they won't actively kill linux games as their long history proves.

krastanov• 5 years ago

I am very happy about this, but how is it possible without the typical "root access / rootkits" invasiveness of anticheat software!?

gruez2• 5 years ago

how is it possible without the typical "root access / rootkits" invasiveness of anticheat software!?

It probably does require root/kernel access. If you're not a fan of that, your only option is cloud gaming.

amarshall2• 5 years ago

I run games in a VM to isolate things. Some anti-cheat detect a VM and just assume you’re a cheater and exit the game, but I just don’t play those games.

zdw• 5 years ago

What permissions does this require? A kernel module? Something that watches all processes all the time? Messes with input settings or breaks assistive devices?

On windows, a lot of the actions that "anti-cheat" software takes is indistinguishable from a rootkit.

judge20207• 5 years ago

Arguably necessary when cheats people install themselves are actual rootkits.

10000truths2• 5 years ago

Not 'arguably necessary'. Cheats can just as easily be detected from the server side through statistical analysis.

pstrateman3• 5 years ago

Sure except EAC doesn't work, even on windows with the full kernel rootkit installed.

Money back guarantee SaaS cheats are like $10/month that are undetected by EAC.

Razengan2• 5 years ago

cheats people install themselves are actual rootkits. reply

Examples?

That’s like the “Apple shouldn’t allow third-party stores because of malware” argument.

tablespoon• 5 years ago

Arguably necessary when cheats people install themselves are actual rootkits.

There's a hardware cheat that's actually in the wild that uses a capture card, computer vision, and hardware input devices to run entirely outside the OS: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...

devwastaken3• 5 years ago

Epics anti cheat doesn't even work. flocks of kids get actual aim bots that epic can't deal with. CSGO anti cheat is yet to be matched in quality because it relies on players and statistics. It turns out that you can't control client software and hardware. Good competitive cheaters use hardware aim assist. Any software you make will be modified. The only way to stop cheaters is math, and people.

adapiz• 5 years ago

We need to go deeper! Cheat Makers produce their own kernels that trick the kernel modules by intercepting everything theses modules do. I don't know if there is even cheat software on Linux, but if there's a market, there might be a product.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 5 years ago

Thank you. This makes me very uneasy. Apart from the obvious, it also potentially makes linux a bigger target by increasing exploitable surface a hacker can hold on to. And I am saying this as a happy proton user.

reanimus2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't be shocked if it used BPF probes or something like that. A kernel module is possible, too, especially if they're targeting Ubuntu with DKMS.

m4rtink• 5 years ago

Good luck getting custom kernel modules working with secure boot.

phendrenad23• 5 years ago

The dev page still says "The Anti-Cheat Client interface currently only supports the Windows platform and requires a 64-bit operating system installation. Mac and Linux client support are coming soon." so there's not much info yet. I'm guessing it'll require a specific kernel version and an obfuscated kernel patch that probes everything and calls a web service constantly.

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

Pssst! Don't give them ideas!

Razengan2• 5 years ago

“Think of the cheaters!” is the gaming equivalent of “Think of the children!”

Datenstrom2• 5 years ago

This is why I still use the console model with my gaming PC. It is exclusively for games without exception. I would have it boot directly into steam if I could get steam to boot other games like from Battle Net without so much work.

rodgerd2• 5 years ago

This is why I still use the console model with my gaming PC.

I mean this is why I use a console as my first choice gaming platform.

vetinari• 5 years ago

You can, actually. Steam can add non-steam games to the library, and also can stream them over Steam link. I've used that to play GoG games on Android TV.

zachmetz• 5 years ago

Riot games already made this on their game titled "Valorant." It's irritating because you need to restart your pc every time you encounter some of the game's errors.

phendrenad23• 5 years ago

Valorant doesn't have a Linux port, so whatever you're playing is unofficial.

nitrogen5• 5 years ago

This is cool. Nothing ruins a game like someone cheating. What are the security implications of running an anti-cheat system on Linux? Do I need to give it root access?

danvayn• 5 years ago

Like another said in this thread, yes you would but it's because some cheats are rootkits. It's a little invasive but doesn't seem as problematic as other ACS like Riot's Vanguard, which is always on and China-owned.

yesbut2• 5 years ago

China-owned

State owned is problematic, I'm not in disagreement with you. But so is corporate owned. I'd like to see an industry standard anti-cheat root-kit developed as a publicly reviewable open source project at the very least.

bootloop• 5 years ago

Nothing ruins a game like not being able to play it because some algorithm things your setup is suspicious.

jerf• 5 years ago

What does this involve on Linux? Reading the docs there's a reference to a "client module" for Linux but the link seems to be broken.

Is this going to require a linux kernel module or something to work, or is it pure user space?

b8• 5 years ago

Hmm I wonder how intrusive EAC is on Linux, and Macs. I seem to recall that they look for visiting blacklisted websites in some browsers a while back. Also I wonder how their VM detection is for linux, and macs.

judge20207• 5 years ago

Blizzard's Warden anti-cheat was rumored to collect your process list and/or open window titles at one point, but IIRC they weren't substantiated.

https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Warden_(software)

henhouse• 5 years ago

I know that it can checksum files, search through drivers, scan memory addresses, etc. I think I can read registry keys as well. That’s just what I know of the 2005-2008 era of Warden implementation. See vanilla implementation: https://github.com/vmangos/core/pull/1295

doublerabbit• 5 years ago

I feel that if we can could work on introducing more online cross-play, the gaming community would be a better place.

There should be no reason why I can't play online with Xbox and PlayStation players.

cmeacham98• 5 years ago

At least on Playstation, that is 100% Sony's fault. They refuse to let you have cross-platform play unless your game is huge. Unsure if Microsoft has/had similar policies for Xbox games.

dyingkneepad• 5 years ago

That doesn't make sense. The main reason in favor of letting cross-platform play is exactly unfragmenting the player base. I'm sure I'll never run out of PS4 players to fight against in Fortnite or CoD of whatever, but I simply can't find an opponent when I play Skullgirls on PS4, while on Steam I can. Games with a small population benefit immensely from crossplay.

That said, if I'm on a PS4 (a platform where cheating is much harder than PC) and the game is well populated, maybe I don't want to play against PC players, as I don't want cheaters.

There's also the mouse+keyboard vs pad thing for FPS games.

Cu3PO42• 5 years ago

In the PS3/XBOX 360 days it was Microsoft who were all against cross-platform play whereas Sony was more open to it. In the early days of that console generation, XBOX was arguably more successful than PS. Now PS is more successful.

The pattern is that the player ahead doesn't want cross-platform and the one behind does. That makes sense to me.

bastard_op• 5 years ago

There is no incentive to let you out of the Sony/Xbox walled gardens, unless you're Fortnite where everyone from children to adults love to spend stupid money on IAP's just to dance or clothe themselves and you don't want to miss out.

If they did, and you realized your game runs better on a real pc, you'd just defect and not beg/borrow/scam/hustle for a ps5 or new xbox (maybe for decent gpu still though).

You will take what they give you and be goddamn content with it. Unless you're Epic and even Sony gives up the GI Joe kung fu grip.

eric__cartman2• 5 years ago

The lack of cross-play always bugged me. Usually a friend group settles on a particular platform to buy so they can all play together, which is a pain because in a lot of cases that platform is far from ideal for everyone. For example consoles always seemed quite useless to me because I only casually play games, so when I'm not playing games I have this expensive and powerful x86 computer doing nothing because I can't use it for anything else but playing games and maybe watching movies. I wish Sony had kept the "install another OS" option that they introduced for a while in the PS3.

Fortunately my friends are PC gamers too so no locked down hardware in my house :)

schmorptron3• 5 years ago

Lots and lots of games, and most new big ones coming out, have cross-play. Apex, CoD, Rocket League jus to name a few.

bcrescimanno2• 5 years ago

For context, ProtonDB is a database of Steam games and how well they work on Linux through Wine/Proton. A huge number of the "borked" games are using some kind of anti-cheat and that's the main reason the game doesn't work.

EAC is one of the most-used anti-cheat systems in gaming. Between EAC and BattleEye, you're hitting the Pareto Principle for anti-cheat support.

Four of the top 10 Steam games use anti-cheat and therefore cannot run currently. Two of those four use EAC.

https://www.protondb.com/

judge20207• 5 years ago

Worth noting that the VAC games on that list, CS:GO, TF2, and Dota 2, have effectively given up on actually detecting and preventing cheaters and now rely on server-based or community-consensus methods of finding and punishing cheaters (with TF2 being the exception with how little maintenance Valve performs on it).

Both CS:GO and Dota 2 have a report+overwatch system where users watch a replay to determine if someone is exhibiting suspicious cheating behavior. The server side of this is VACnet where it uses heuristics like mouse movement or [in Dota] clicking out of regular camera bounds to detect these cheaters and expedite them to the Overwatch queue. You can readily download the biggest script client for Dota 2, and VAC ban waves for using it have been unheard of for years now (you only get an in-game ban when enough other players verify the cheating via Overwatch).

https://youtu.be/SnRgW54EWwA

https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/

hpfr• 5 years ago

I can’t quite tell if you think this system is reasonably effective or not. It certainly seems less invasive, so it would be good if it were. Are you able to comment on that?

You can readily download the biggest script client for Dota 2, and VAC ban waves for using it have been unheard of for years now (you only get an in-game ban when enough other players verify the cheating via Overwatch).

Does this mean you think the ban process is too slow and involved?

oliwarner2• 5 years ago

Community moderation with persistent outcomes (eg VAC ban) is great for games you have to pay for, but it's really abrasive to a F2P community if there's am endless stream of cheaters.

philliphaydon• 5 years ago

If I’m bored I can jump into either dota2 or cs:go and play and win and have fun.

If I join warzone modern warfare… omg i sometimes die right after dropping from the plane due to aimbots. Or I could be inside a building not standing next to wall not in line of sight with 1 door. Boom dead from someone shooting outside with wall hack. I didn’t install it on my gaming laptop because it’s filled with hackers now.

moistoreos• 5 years ago

Just to be clear, the rating is NOT how well they work but how easy it is to get the game up and running. That said, in a majority of cases, the quality of the runtime of the game is usually correlated to the rating given on ProtonDB.

BeefySwain3• 5 years ago

Developers will have to opt-in to allowing Wine/Proton users to play.

Pertinent info on this change is in the Unreal dev docs here: https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/services/en-US/GameServices/A...

ajb257• 5 years ago

Today, we extend support to Linux and Mac for developers who maintain full native builds of their games for these platforms.

That sounds like Proton is definitely not supported here. So if an EAC developer only supports Windows, Linux users are SoL.

mullr• 5 years ago

support for the Wine and Proton compatibility layers on Linux is included

WhatIsDukkha• 5 years ago

This is fantastic news.

Now I just need punkbuster.

If I can play Planetside2 on Linux I can just ignore games that don't work well on Linux.

I can't wait to delete windows, it does nothing for me professionally or personally outside of being a gamebox. I find between the spyware, bluescreens when trying to move a boot drive to a new box, explorer.exe is a miserable excuse of a desktop and... I could go on about the papercuts but... yeah.

stinkytaco2• 5 years ago

I find between the spyware, bluescreens when trying to move a boot drive to a new box, explorer.exe

I worry that EAC basically amounts to spyware, however.

Also, and this is off topic, but I think Windows Explorer is the best GUI file manager on any platform. Shoot me.

Macha• 5 years ago

It's better than Finder, but I'd have a hard time picking it over Dolphin.

leppr• 5 years ago

Good to see Epic coming back on their shunning of Linux. I guess their quarrel with Apple opened their eyes about walled gardens...

d23• 5 years ago

Does PUBG not use this, or does it just not work that well?

bcrescimanno2• 5 years ago

It appears to use BattlEye which is another anti-cheat solution

https://www.protondb.com/app/578080

The thing is, part of the challenge is that we don't really know if the game itself will work because people can't get past the anti-cheat to see if the game itself works.

jtms• 5 years ago

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 behavior. Valve has been doing some very interesting stuff with VACnet where they employ deep learning to flag potential cheater accounts in CS:GO and then have humans review and rule on the output. From what I have read and watched, it has been very successful.

donkarma2• 5 years ago

All Valve has done is made it so people cheat and pretend to be legitimate, you can't beat cheaters outside of making it a non-cheatable game, you can just reduce it. Then again, if nobody notices that you're a cheater, are you a cheater?

s_dev• 5 years ago

Then again, if nobody notices that you're a cheater, are you a cheater?

Yes, you're just a successful cheater as all cheaters are deceptive by definition.

Mandatum• 5 years ago

They’ve been doing interesting stuff but have completely failed to succeed with anything. VAC is a joke. VACnet continues to be a pipe dream.

temporarrry092316• 5 years ago

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.

fwip• 5 years ago

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

Thaxll• 5 years ago

Because it's not as trivial as you think it is to get good results if you rely only on the server side, if it was the case everyone would do that.

Server side cheat detection actually don't detect that much, like how do you known someone is wallhacking?

As for manual review it just does no scale, when you see that CoD banned 100k cheaters, imagine if one person from activision would have to review every cases.

Cloud gaming is the solution against cheats.

thaumasiotes• 5 years ago

Cloud gaming is the solution against cheats.

The solution to cheating is to stop playing with strangers.

franknine• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/anticheatpd/status/1412024189561851904?s...

There are cheats doing CV on video stream and they work on consoles. I guess they would also work on cloud gaming services.

SXX• 5 years ago

Uh oh what would stop my ML-based auto-aim from cheating in FPS running on cloud? Cheats now might be fine with just video feed as input.

sneak3• 5 years ago

Simply because a tech arms race is theoretically unwinnable doesn't mean that trying to win a little doesn't deliver value to the company and its ecosystem.

You can emulate an android and run snapchat and screenshot the emulator, but the screenshot reporting inside of snapchat is still valued by millions (and shapes the behavior of millions).

MMS216• 5 years ago

iirc there are modified Snapchat apks that can screenshot snaps without notifying the sender

sevenf0ur• 5 years ago

As someone that has played CSGO recently, it's still normal to come across cheaters. Server side cheat prevention is preferred when possible, but there are just too many opportunities for client side cheating in multiplayer FPSs. You can't prevent the client from auto-aiming or knowing the enemy player position behind a nearby wall. If you do not stay on top of cheating, cheaters will ruin your game.

temporarrry092316• 5 years ago

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 hope.

[1] https://edan.gg/defender

CapsAdmin• 5 years ago

I thought the idea of this deep learning cheat detection was looking for subtle cueues?

Like how someone wall hacking would behave differently from someone who is not. Maybe by reacting before the player is actually seen.

Maybe I'm just thinking it's more impressive than what it actually is.

rasz• 5 years ago

You can track statistics of players aiming at same spot in enemy model every time, looking directly at other players behind obstacles outside sound range, you can send probes with bogus player position data behind a wall from suspect player and analyze reaction.

slezyr• 5 years ago

From what I have read and watched, it has been very successful.

Let me guess, you have not played CS:GO? There is an insane number of obvious cheaters, more than in other games I played.

Also, there is TeamFortress 2 that's just has been abandoned and they can not an anti-cheat to it, it seems.

Unklejoe• 5 years ago

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.

Pxtl• 5 years ago

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.

half-kh-hacker3• 5 years ago

Cheat dev here. Check out this prior art of someone utilizing PS4 jailbreak exploits to modify GTA V's scripting VM at runtime:

https://github.com/2much4u/PS4-GTA-V-Native-Caller

vkou• 5 years ago

It's an unwinnable arms race if your goal is zero cheating.

It can work well enough if your goal is 'ban/hellban cheaters relatively quickly'. If the time/money cost of creating a new account is non-trivial, this can very well get cheating down to some acceptable level.

Server-side statistics can be used in addition to this kind of client-side monitoring, but there's only so much that can be inferred from statistics. It may not be too difficult to determine if someone is using, say, an aimbot from statistics, but it's very difficult to determine if they are using a radar - because the cheater still has to make fuzzy, human decisions, based on the information that radar gives them - and because its difficult to tell radar apart from good gamesense.

malwrar• 5 years ago

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 anyways. This means that there’s a huge stigma amongst cheat developers around knowledge sharing, which makes a lot of that initial work all the more arduous. Anticheats further increase that initial work, and incur an ongoing maintenance cost since each update can break your cheat (especially of you specifically work to break the public methods that everyone is using).

Last time I looked at VAC, it was doing stuff like looking for stuff like modifications to the .text section to detect hooks implemented by writing e.g. jmps to some injected code, but never actually adapted when people started just modifying vtable entries (most source engine constructs are exposed to developers as pure virtual cpp classes). Since they stagnated, it got easier and easier to cheat over time as more and more people spread knowledge on how to hook in an undetected way. Hell, in gmod some lua anticheat developer (gmod is a sandbox game with a lua scripting interface) found a vuln in the clientside lua implementation that allowed arbitrary memory io and used that primitive to implement checks for injected dlls when people started cheating at that level in that game, which was far more effective than VAC ever was.

BE was another universe, it felt extremely prohibitive to touch the game in usermode & even in the kernel I started to feel cramped. You can still totally get past it, but it felt more like writing a very specific rootkit than actually making a cheat.

So, from the other side, anticheats raise the cost of initially developing and maintaining a cheat. If used effectively, they can also kill paysites. I think they have value, even if they aren’t achieving a 99.99999% success rate.

swinglock• 5 years ago

Much like anti-virus software.

What is BE?

frakkingcylons• 5 years ago

This is a fascinating perspective to read, thank you.

sigotirandolas• 5 years ago

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.

rastafang• 5 years ago

Cheating in CS:GO's casual mode is still very common, not sure about competitive. But yes, server-side detection would make more sense.

fletchowns13• 5 years ago

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 gazillion details that would need to be hammered out to get this right (appeal process, account hijack recovery, etc) but I think the idea has merit. I feel something like this is the only way to end cheating once and for all. Would be so nice if developers never had to think about anti-cheat again, and we didn't have to run all this super invasive anti-cheat software on our machines.

beebmam• 5 years ago

This is probably the best solution I've seen around anti-cheat solutions. I also think this is the best approach to prevent abuse on social media.

I can't be the only one sick of what a sewer the internet, like multiplayer gaming and especially social media, has become.

neoromantique2• 5 years ago

So, like that black mirror episode?

fletchowns13• 5 years ago

Being able to play Call of Duty without people screaming the N word into my ears regularly would be amazing. Intolerance to hate speech could be something enforced by this hypothetical service as well.

Sure I can turn off the death mic, but there's been some really amazing interactions though it as well. For those not aware, the death mic in CoD is a feature where the instant you frag somebody in game, it turns their mic on, so you can hear their very candid reaction. Lots of times it's things like "no way what a shot how'd that guy get me!". Such a fun feature, if it wasn't for people that just utter the most offensive things imaginable on it.

iratewizard• 5 years ago

It would also be nice if people were able to use cheats in a game against other people with cheats. It would be very enjoyable to watch battle of the bots in games and have people pit their programming skills against each other like this.

fletchowns13• 5 years ago

I seem to recall a certain game that had a shadowban system that just put all the cheaters in the same lobbies together. Might be misremembering that though.

sudosysgen6• 5 years ago

Those exist. They're called HvH. You can search it on youtube, and for some games there are HvH servers you can spectate :)

MMS216• 5 years ago

CSGO cheaters actually do this it’s called HvH (hack vs hack)

jbman223• 5 years ago

Sending away all of your PII to be verified in games isn’t much better (in terms of intrusiveness) than running anti-cheat software in the first place.

Additionally, will it be any harder to get around a system like this than a traditional anti-cheat system? Theoretically - for the average player at least, it might make cheating worse - assuming the cheater runs their cheats in a realistic way, in your world, there is now no detection software pinpointing the cheaters!

fletchowns13• 5 years ago

Sending away all of your PII to be verified in games isn’t much better (in terms of intrusiveness) than running anti-cheat software in the first place.

In my mind it's much better than running N number of different anti-cheat software on my machine, assuming that this reputation management entity is very well respected. Again, it'd be very hard to get a system like this right, but I think it is certainly possible.

dpedu• 5 years ago

Getting caught cheating in one game then impacts your reputation in _all_ games.

This sounds pretty similar to Steam's VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) system aside from how widespread you want the system to be. IIRC, owners of Source-based game servers can set a flag to allow/deny users with a VAC ban. I don't think this is available to non-source games, which would be needed for your idea.

How do VAC bans relate to phone numbers?
VAC bans are applied to all accounts sharing a phone number at the time of the infraction.
Can I move my items and games to a different Steam account?
No.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/647C-5CC1-7EA9-3C...

f0e4c2f7• 5 years ago

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.

fletchowns13• 5 years ago

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.

MMS216• 5 years ago

Cheaters already purchase verified accounts.

dfxm12• 5 years ago

You want to open up yourself to risk for your identity being stolen and normalize handing out personally identifiable information just to maybe make it harder for cheaters to get in on some of your games?

I don't think the idea has merit. See how long it is taking the Real ID act to become enforced. People barely trust the government with this info, with the ability to get on a plane (among other things) at stake.

bqmjjx0kac2• 5 years ago

Thanks to the magic of cryptography, it's possible to prove your identity to someone else without enabling them to impersonate you.

For instance, the third party gives you a nonce, you sign it with your private key, and they verify it with your public key.

fletchowns13• 5 years ago

If you get financing on purchasing a car you have to give financial institutions your personal information, I don't see this as being any worse. Even companies that I'd prefer not to do business with have all my personal details, because there isn't really any alternative. My identity was stolen as part of the Equifax breach. Certain organizations are more reputable than others, and I want this gaming reputation service to be well respected and trustworthy, since that's the only way something like this can work. It's hard to get right, but it can be done.

The alternative is having to run third party closed source anti-cheat software on my computer that is written by god knows who, that has the potential to do an enormous amount of damage if a bad actor were to sneak in a backdoor.

lmm• 5 years ago

You want to open up yourself to risk for your identity being stolen and normalize handing out personally identifiable information just to maybe make it harder for cheaters to get in on some of your games?

If you look at how much how much time and effort and money people put into these games, it doesn't seem so unreasonable. Another commenter pointed out that you have to give a similar amount of personal information to get a car loan, or, as you say, to get a plane ticket. I suspect a lot of people spend comparable amounts of money and effort on gaming, and probably see it as a bigger part of their lives.

armchairhacker• 5 years ago

As a casual player another way to alleviate cheating is good matchmaking, so cheaters all rank up to other cheaters. This doesn’t help higher-level players though.

Some cheats run outside the OS and are basically indistinguishable from regular players. So anti-cheat won’t work. Good matchmaking + still catching cheats for impossible stuff + real tournaments requiring in-person attendance or heavy monitoring, should still work pretty well.

fletchowns13• 5 years ago

In a world of free to play games, cheaters just keep making new accounts. I don't think it can be solved simply by matchmaking.

max46• 5 years ago

this type of solution sounds good until you get hit by a false positive in a game.

happened to me on pugb and the only way I could get my account back was with a paypal charge back. It's very typical that game companies refuse to tell users what triggered it or how to avoid it in the future. For all I know, it could have been a scam from the devs.

I can live with a 40 - 60$ loss on a game, but losing the ability to play all games on protected servers forever would be really bad

fletchowns13• 5 years ago

Yup it's a valid point, that's why I made sure to call out in my original comment. So many little details that would need to be done right in order to make it work.

It's an impossible task for every game studio to get all those details right, that's why I think it needs to be centralized. That way game studios can just worry about making cool games, and not having to waste resources on this endless arms race of cheating.

Kaze4044• 5 years ago

I had someone invade the League of Legends account I used for almost a decade after me not using it for a year or so and cheat to their hearts content. That caused the account to get permanently banned with absolutely zero help from Riot Games' support on how to get it revised.

In your system I'd never be able to play an online game again, only because a single account of mine used an email / password combination that leaked god knows where. Needless to say I'm not a fan.

fletchowns13• 5 years ago

Yes this is a very real issue that would need to be solved by the service I proposed, I specifically called out the appeals process and account hijacking resolution in my original comment due to their importance. It needs to be centralized because it's an impossible task to ask every game studio to get all these things right.

phone86753093• 5 years ago

That sounds like a great way to get lots of non-cheating players to give up online gaming once it becomes mandatory for the majority of online play (which it would if it took off).

esyir2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if you actually believe that. If the population I've observed is any way representative, we'd be more than happy to give full root level access if it means the cheaters actually vanish.

You might be severely underestimating how much comp gamers hate cheaters.

xd• 5 years ago

Anyone remember PunkBuster? If anything took more out of the soul of gaming in them days I'd love to know what. It never managed to keep on top of "hackers" but some how managed to destroy the legitimate gamer communities - I got kicked so much I just gave up in the end playing publicly.

Does anyone even bother anymore with online gaming without using hacks? I've never strayed far from private servers for over a decade now.

babypuncher4• 5 years ago

Punkbuster was a nightmare and I still have flashbacks to botched updates ruining my Friday evenings in Quake 3 and Battlefield 2.

I've yet to personally encounter any issues with more modern solutions like EAC or BattleEye, though I know they've caused issues with some exotic device drivers like RGB controllers.

Does anyone even bother anymore with online gaming without using hacks? I've never strayed far from private servers for over a decade now.

Don't listen to the haters, cheating isn't as widespread as people seem to think it is, as long as you stay out of APAC matchmaking servers. Smurf accounts are the bigger problem in the games I play regularly (Overwatch, Apex Legends).

snthd• 5 years ago

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

eric__cartman2• 5 years ago

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.

SCHiM• 5 years ago

A long time ago, before my frontal lobe had completely developed, I used to develop multiplayer game cheats. I now recognize that behavior as abhorrent, but in those days I thought it was l33t.

In any case, no mater how good your protection is, how deep in the system you go, the cheaters can go deeper. Like anti-virus and DRM evasion will always win from detection. The cheaters have complete insight into any/all client side protection mechanisms, more importantly, the cheater owns the machine and the environment where your code runs. There is not a checksum that can not be faked, and no way to measure if any of your protections have been circumvented, because the code you use to measure can (and will) be patched.

SixDouble5321• 5 years ago

You mean like they do on windows? It's like gay marriage. Linux users just want a chance to have that thing that everyone else has. Regardless of its merits.

hparadiz• 5 years ago

Does this mean I can finally play Apex legends on my Linux box?

danShumway2• 5 years ago

I still hold that many of our anti-cheat systems are based on a flawed starting premise for multiplayer games and how competitive and how "fair" they should be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21949201

I have softened on this a bit. I don't think that global/regional ladders are universally bad, I don't have anything against competition as a motivator, and I concede that for some games this is important. But I still think that current multiplayer games place way too much emphasis on global rankings, to the point of ignoring other very common player archetypes. And I still think for most games, the application of player psychology in multiplayer ranking systems and reward systems is shockingly primitive. Multiplayer games are doing a lot of advanced research and complicated work, but they're directing the majority of that work into optimizing in a very narrow direction that nobody ever questions.

Could be a longer conversation, but I am again reminded of the XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/810/

Completely fair games where players across an entire region are stuffed together into a single ladder system -- this is a legitimate design space, but it is a very, very narrow design space catering to what is honestly a kind of niche playerbase, and a lot of games would benefit from taking a broader, more creative view of why the majority of their playerbase is attracted to in the first place.

There are other ways that players could be rated and sorted that would (if not eliminate) at least significantly lessen the need for a lot of these rootkits. In short, if cheaters aren't noticeable, and if the reward structures of a game are such that creating an enjoyable match for all players is more highly rewarded than "winning", then a lot of motivation for the kind of destructive cheating that ruins current experiences would go away. But more importantly, a lot of the kind of cheating that would remain: griefing, hacking, and generally destructive, mean-spirited behavior -- that kind of cheating would become much easier to detect and its detection could be better grouped together with moderation of other destructive player behaviors that may not constitute cheating, but that are still annoying enough that you already should be searching for and banning them anyway.

Of course in some situations you have to try and guarantee completely fair experiences, and in some situations the purely competitive aspect of the game is the only part of the experience that matters. But the games industry currently treats it like it's a given that purely fair, region-wide competition should be the primary motivator for almost everyone playing multiplayer games, and honestly I just don't see it. The games industry is obsessed with something that is niche, most players don't want to try and work their way up a global competitive ladder beyond the impulse they have to unlock rewards and see a number increase. Many of those players want to win >50% of their matches, they want to be matched up against people who play interesting strategies rather than purely competitive ones, they want to play against people who force them to think and experiment, they want a constantly shifting meta where a dominant strategy doesn't very quickly become the only strategy, they want difficulty spikes to come in waves rather than randomly, when trying out new strategies they want to be able to slowly ramp into them, they want opponents to be playful and to try "fun" things during games.

Ladder systems for most games are not designed to encourage those behaviors or outcomes.

I am seriously skeptical that the majority of players in most multiplayer games today actually care about the integrity of ladders more than the other issues I raise above, and I wonder if this focus on fairness at all costs is a mentality that the games industry is going to eventually grow out of and look back on with the same kind of embarrassment as we already do with many other generally accepted practices in the past that were never questioned.

babypuncher4• 5 years ago

I don't think many cheaters themselves actually care about ladders and rankings. They just derive personal entertainment from ruining other peoples fun. This is why cheating was always a significant problem in online shooters long before they introduced ranking systems. It's also why entirely non-competitive games (like Minecraft) have problems with griefers.

danShumway2• 5 years ago

If you're able to shift cheat detection systems to primarily focus on griefers, that's a significant win, since griefing by its nature can't be subtle enough that other people don't notice it. The whole point of griefing is to be noticeably toxic to other players and to get a reaction out of them. Griefers have a harder time hiding than other cheaters do.

If your design allows you to shift your focus towards trying to fight toxic behavior itself rather than just cheats, you can use the same detection methods as you would for any other toxic behavior that doesn't involve cheats. And you should have those detection methods anyway; whether or not a cheat is involved in the abuse shouldn't be the deciding factor between banning or allowing toxic behavior.

The shift here is in realizing that for a significant number of your players, playing against someone who legitimately snipes them from across the map over and over while camping at a spawn point because they're just that good, and playing against someone who uses an aimbot to accomplish the same behavior -- both of those experiences are equally game-ruining for a lot of players. The legitimacy isn't the problem for those players, the resulting experience is. So trying to detect subtle aimbots kind of misses what the real game-ruining problem is for a lot of players.

Where a number of player archetypes are concerned, you can look for overt toxic behavior and ban it regardless of how that behavior is accomplished. Similarly, if you're not prioritizing ladder integrity over everything else, there's a case to be made that you can just ignore any cheating that's too subtle for people to notice or that doesn't result in overt toxic behavior.

A nontrivial number of your players don't actually care about ladder integrity, they want a number to go up and they want rewards released on a variable schedule as they get better at the game. For those players, it's not clear that playing against cheaters is actually a problem unless the cheaters ruin the difficulty curve or ruin the matches, and... again, you should think about banning people who do that stuff even if they're not cheating.

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

So... how many games suddenly started to run now on wine?

OtomotO• 5 years ago

Finally Bill Gates evil plan with COVID-19 makes sense! ;)

Epic move from epic :)

__turbobrew__• 5 years ago

Has there ever been any attempts to construct a “credit score” for online gaming? At the end of the day anti-cheat measures can always be bypassed because the cheater owns the hardware which the game runs upon. On top of that I don’t trust game developers with installing an anti-cheat rootkit on my device. I would much rather have an online credit score which takes into account the number of games you own, how old your account is, the number of high credit friends you have on your friends list, etc… to calculate a “online gaming credit score” which matches you with others who have a similar “online credit score”. Getting caught cheating causes all of your friends to lose credit score therefore incentivizing online groups to self police and cheaters to be ostracized.

There are issues where new players will tend to get shafted by the scoring system but there can be certain routes to boost your score quickly such as providing some personally identifying information or spending more money within the game.

Avery3R• 5 years ago

Yes, valve did this with their "trust score" in cs:go

MMS216• 5 years ago

Trying to automate these types of systems always runs the risk of targeting innocent players. Because of the TF2 bots I stick to community servers located in my country and add regular players on there to my friends list. That’s the problem with valve owned servers; you cannot visit the same lobby regularly and have a rapport with other players.

0xFreebie• 5 years ago

You know, PvE is really underrated. I find playing against bots to be more fun, easier to gauge skill progress, and a better time with friends than playing against overmatched humans, whether cheating or not.

Losing 50% of your matches isn't fun. The alternative of losing 90% for months before winning 90% isn't inviting either.

AnIdiotOnTheNet3• 5 years ago

I agree. I don't really play multiplayer online games at all anymore, but when I do they are explicitly not competitive. As the world switched from community servers to matchmaking I felt that it only made everything even more toxic than it already was, and I was not liking the person it was turning me into.

I will only play competitive now if it is couch, or lan party, or otherwise with people I know.

BirdPlusPlus• 5 years ago

Many of you haven't noticed yet, but contemporary AAA devs realized years ago how much easier to make something compulsive than compelling and substituted addiction for fun, taking inspiration from slot machines and abandoning past masterpieces.

Shooters aren't enjoyable enough to justify this shit. Other genres are more respectful of your time, money, and efforts than to dribble content you purchased at a rate just slow enough that you'll keep playing. Your time and attention are valuable non-renewable resources. Consider how well you're spending them.

Havoc• 5 years ago

Great! Now I just need Netflix to work at decent res in Linux and then it’s almost usable for day to day

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

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