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

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/10/steam-games-will-now-need-to-fully-disclose-kernel-level-anti-cheat-on-store-pages/

by jrepinc • 2 years ago

963 628 2 years ago

gamingonlinux.com

throwaway4847614• 2 years ago

After the crowdstrike disaster 3rd party kernel drivers need to be shunned for non critical applications.

Games publishers have been bad actors in this space for a long time now. The genshin impact anticheat was used in a malware campaign. Rockstar was very misleading trying to imply their kernel driver not being compatible with the steam deck was valves fault.

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

What decides critical or non-critical.

One could argue that a game isn't critical but one could say it's critical to stop hackers.

If you were to take the stance that gaming isn't critical than with that logic you're then claiming multiplayer hacking is a feature of the game.

Doesn't do well for the community or the company. But nor do the rootkits do good for the consumer.

throwaway4847614• 2 years ago

Critical as in "my gpu is a paperweight without a driver".

avery17• 2 years ago

It hasn't stopped hackers though.

Nadya3• 2 years ago

If they worked to any acceptable level of efficacy then they could be tolerated. They're only tolerated by people who think they work as well as they claim to work (security theater) but anyone who knows about the performance impacts and/or are tech-savvy enough to understand it is a rootkit and potential exploit (that would fully pwn your device) hates them.

Some cheats are getting rather sophisticated now. There's an ever-increasing number of Pi-devices where the cheating is done externally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpvwjC1_Luo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=revk5r5vqxA

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

one could say it's critical to stop hackers.

It's never critical to stop hackers in a videogame IMO. We need to stop being so damn serious about gaming.

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

Lets call them what they really are, rootkits.

jrepinc• 2 years ago

This, so much this. Also often spyware.

schmidtleonard• 2 years ago

First party malware.

kulahan2• 2 years ago

Can't wait to find out what China hid in Riot's Vanguard rootkit for all their games. It's 100% a conspiracy theory, but nobody can convince me it's perfectly clean, or if it is, that there isn't an easy way to add some power to it quietly.

tapoxi2• 2 years ago

I mean, they're not rootkits. Rootkits are either to gain root access (thus the name) or to hide something from a user. Anticheats don't do either of these.

They expose a kernel API to allow games to verify the state of the system, and they're knowingly installed by the user.

OtomotO3• 2 years ago

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.

cmxch4• 2 years ago

And in the case of Vanguard, a bootkit.

Thaxll4• 2 years ago

Cheats and bots are ruining online games though.

umvi3• 2 years ago

Yeah life sucks when everything and everyone has to be untrusted (applies not just video games).

The solution is to build trusted spaces again IMO.

For video games assume that each user is trusted by default. As soon as they violate that trust by cheating, they are banned permanently for that copy of the game. If they want to be trusted again they have to buy another copy of the game to get another license. Make it hard to become a member of a trusted community and easy to be kicked out of a trusted community for violating trust. This would eliminate the vast majority of cheating and bots because most gamers are kids and having to buy a fresh copy will hit hard. If they abuse it enough, make them jump through more hoops like ip bans and computer fingerprint bans.

bigstrat20039• 2 years ago

Perhaps, but it's far better to have cheaters and bots than to have games require a rootkit to play them.

evanriley• 2 years ago

And Kernel level anti-cheat isn't stopping them.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7• 2 years ago

Back when communities hosted servers instead of companies, it seemed less common, even though it was easier to do.

YPPH2• 2 years ago

This is why I preferred console gaming. You never encountered cheaters until very late in the console's generation. Crossplay ruined that.

orbital-decay2• 2 years ago

The genshin impact anticheat was used in a malware campaign. Rockstar was very misleading trying to imply their kernel driver not being compatible with the steam deck was valves fault.

I mean, nothing of this is new. ESEA, one of the most influential esports leagues, was caught using its anticheat to mine Bitcoin in 2013. [1] This is long out of control, probably since the days BattlEye switched to ring0 in 2012 due to chronic cheating in the DayZ mod, or maybe earlier. Modern anticheats are full-fledged rootkits with extremely complex and targeted payloads siphoning customer data and hijacking all sorts of stuff, and that's not a theory, they actively abuse players' trust and indifference.

If you care about your data and the control of your devices, you should probably avoid them entirely, or at least use them on dedicated gaming PCs on a clean identity, and keep them separate from your LAN and your non-gaming digital life.

[1] https://play.esea.net/forums/492102

wilsonnb32• 2 years ago

People really need to find a better word than 'rootkit' to describe software that users willingly and intentionally give root access.

hayst4ck• 2 years ago

Crowdstrike isn't even the worst case. The SolarWinds disaster is the worst case scenario.

You have a closed source rootkit designed for finding data in raw memory (like passwords from an unlocked password manager), loaded into many gamer's machines, which many software engineers are. Some anti cheat explicitly support's arbitrary remote code execution by design. Many people mix their personal password vaults with their company's, which means that if you successfully hack an anticheat company and you can read the raw memory of an opened password manager with a program that is already designed to scan all processes memory, you now potentially have extremely valuable credentials. A small portion will even do things like add their 2fac keys into their vaults.

Here is Gabe Newell's thoughts on AntiCheat that are very relevant to this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_an...

Of course the other problem is the 23andMe problem and enshitification. Even if the data uploaded by anti-cheat isn't used right now, the storage of data alone creates incentive for abuse.

Gigachad• 2 years ago

Something slightly related happened recently. A bit of malware that was distributed as a mod for BeamNG was installed by a high up Disney employee, who was also logged in to some internal work stuff. The hackers were able to leak huge amounts of company data.

gauge_field• 2 years ago

I just want to spam skill shot with ranged-heros on Aram 1-2 times a week. No way I am running vanguard for that!!!!

lousken• 2 years ago

Good, the sooner devs realize they need to do server side properly, the better

forgetfreeman• 2 years ago

Aaany day now...

teen• 2 years ago

I think most of these companies do do the server side properly. There are plenty of hacks that just make a client play ungodly well. Like macros, aimbots, cooldown tracking, auto-hex

plopz2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure about that first part, some of the biggest games like gtav is an embarrassment in the concept of never trust the client.

arp2424• 2 years ago

It's impossible to prevent cheating from the server-side only. Something like an aimbot can operate purely on information you need to have as a client (to render the other players on the screen), and still be a huge advantage because it can respond faster than any human can.

baseballdork• 2 years ago

Shouldn't that be detectable?

gpderetta• 2 years ago

On the other hand an aimbot can operate purely on informations you /need/ to send in and out to the physical machine (input peripherals and the screen), so there's that...

plopz2• 2 years ago

I think server side statistical analysis can go a long way to detect stuff like that. Obviously its always a cat and mouse game between devs and cheaters, and there are always workarounds, but theres a lot more the devs could be doing without relying on invasive client side detection.

darknavi• 2 years ago

Client <-> Server architecture can still take you a long way. Culling what you send to the client and relying less on client-side "hiding" of state, server authoritative actions with client-side prediction, etc.

At the end of the day someone could be using hardware "cheats" but you can get down to a pretty good spot to stop or disincentivize cheaters without running rootkits on their devices.

nickphx• 2 years ago

if you have a large enough player base to sample, you can determine who is cheating with math. EA Fairplay is pretty good.. Steam's VAC is good, and not some kernel level nonsense..

zamalek• 2 years ago

There is a startup attempting to use ML to find cheaters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkmIItTrQP4 (this video might be overly optimistic) - https://anybrain.gg

They even claim to be able to fingerprint players according their playstyle, thwarting all methods of ban evasion. Skepticism should be abundant here, but this one of the oldest tricks in ML: categorization/clustering. I'm cautiously hopeful.

This would be server-side by nature.

akira25014• 2 years ago

It makes it way easier to detect it. If a player can pre move their aim to be at the point near where the aimbot would take it by using a wallhack they can hide the action much more clearly. If they're constantly doing 180 no scopes you've got a pretty good indication something is wrong.

Also if your guns aren't _perfectly_ accurate then the aimbot can't actually predict much of anything.

hypeatei4• 2 years ago

What? The current PC gaming model where things run on a machine controlled by the user is fundamentally against solving the issue of cheats. You can't prevent everything server-side.

throwaway4847614• 2 years ago

It's not about prevention, but detection.

Brian_K_White5• 2 years ago

Not our problem.

The problem of cheating in games does not weigh more than the users ultimate ownership of and control over their own property.

No one has a right to a business model.

They can do plenty enough server-side. It's not a blocking problem at all, it's just easier to take over all control of the users pc for your own convenience.

Everything, including all valid goals, is easier if you could just have the power to control whatever you want instead of having to cooperate and respect others and respect boundaries. It's no more valid than saying "Everything would be so much better if everyone would just do what I say.". Using that argument is invalid even if supposedly applied in service to some otherwise valid goal.

veunes7• 2 years ago

It could eliminate a lot of these issues theoretically

0cf8612b2e1e• 2 years ago

I built a dedicated gaming PC a couple of years ago. Too much cowboy coding in the industry for me to feel safe running this code on my main computer. Even games for which I pay have supposedly* been scanning/uploading personal data presumably for some adtech purposes.

Why should I ever trust a gaming company to take security seriously? There was a story a few years ago about how one guy at home debugged GTA5’s atrocious loading times without any resources. Loading times which were notoriously bad and surely had a negative impact on revenue, yet nobody in the company could be bothered.

*Never verified it, but I recall the new owners of Kernel Space Program were accused of reporting personal data files to the cloud.

Cthulhu_8• 2 years ago

Oh yeah, that was down to a huge JSON file / slow JSON parser or something wasn't it? That was so bad.

tpxl2• 2 years ago

They wrote their own json parser which used strlen() all over the place, which is O(n), resulting in O(n^2) complexity for json parsing. The guy shimmed the function to return a cached response if it was called with the same string consecutively, which it was for parsing the JSON. The JSON contained the items in the real-money store btw.

mattigames2• 2 years ago

I still hope someday the European Union forces Steam to allow transferring of games "owned", even if it's time-restricted (e.g. can't transfer the same game twice in a month)

Cthulhu_8• 2 years ago

Oh yeah, they did rule that you were legally allowed to transfer / resell digital games... but not that Steam & co had to offer the option.

dark-star4• 2 years ago

...but you don't buy the game anymore, you acquire a license for using (playing) it.

If you want games that you can re-sell, you will have to keep buying them on physical media (or on appstores that don't have DRM like GOG)

mattigames2• 2 years ago

I know, that's why I added quotes around "owned", so in other words what I meant is that the EU should force Steam to create the option to transfer that license among its own users.

AdmiralAsshat• 2 years ago

Do kernel-level anti-cheat measures even work if I'm running Steam as a Flatpak + Using the game under Proton? I (naively, perhaps) assumed the security sandboxing model of flatpak would restrict that level of access.

LelouBil3• 2 years ago

Does any Linux kernel level anti cheat exists ?

If you're running under proton, it can't work. Proton/wine are not virtualizing a windows kernel, they are intercepting syscalls/library calls and running the equivalent linux code.

tdb7893• 2 years ago

Some anti-cheat has clients for Linux (the ones that don't generally just disallow playing on Proton). I don't think the Linux ones are kernel level but don't quote me on that.

butterfly420692• 2 years ago

The biggest giveaway the kernel level anti cheat is stupid is that Easy Anti-Cheat works on Linux without kernel level access.

jsheard5• 2 years ago

It only works on Linux if the developer allows it, because it's not nearly as effective on Linux. Rust (the game not the language) uses EAC but doesn't run on Linux by choice for example. Neither does Fortnite. Apex Legends uses EAC and does run on Linux, and now nearly every public cheat for that game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target.

I don't really like the status quo of installing random kernel-mode crap either, but nobody has a compelling answer for how to not make cheating absolutely trivial without it. Usermode anticheat barely does anything, serverside anticheat can only do so much, and the only other alternative is switching to console platforms which prevent cheating by giving the user zero freedom.

ChocolateGod• 2 years ago

game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target.

I was going to say games on Linux should require secure boot so cheat kernels and modules can't run, but then the kernel could just lie about it being enabled.

NekkoDroid• 2 years ago

Still wondering what kinda special sauce that Blizzard is using in Overwatch. In my literal thousands of hours of playtime I encountered so few blatant cheaters its probably still in the double digit. Are there probably a good amount of cheaters I didn't realize were cheaters? probably, but does it really matter if you don't realize they are cheating?

jolmg2• 2 years ago

I've never seen a game request root privileges, and I would think installation of anything kernel-level would need that. None of the steam binaries have setuid nor capabilities set.

Have anyone seen games that request root privileges?

EDIT: I'm gathering from this[1] and the fact that no wine-related package have kernel modules included and no executable from any of those packages have setuid nor capabilities set, that this isn't really a problem in Linux, just in Windows.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gjzkzk/will_w...

sadeshmukh3• 2 years ago

Everything says "wants to make changes to your device". I accidentally installed EAC that way.

keyringlight5• 2 years ago

It's worth noting that when you first install it, steam asks to install a service to assist with its duties, presumably for most install tasks. Steam has been around long enough and that service is now trouble free that it became part of the furniture most ignore as part of the background. That's aside from how users may be trained to hit 'yes' on any permission box that comes up to swat it away and play the game.

zamadatix• 2 years ago

The kernel level anticheats are almost always written for Windows. They are relevant to gaming on Linux because those games won't work on Linux even if wine/proton run the user space portions fine

bjackman• 2 years ago

Not on Linux. Things are different on Windows, especially if you wanna play competitive games, I'm told.

a21282• 2 years ago

From my understanding, if you play an EAC game on Linux with Proton, you're not really running the same EAC as Windows players. You're running a lite version that runs as a regular user and it tries to provide at least some level of protection like verifying game files or detecting anything clearly out of place that it can detect, but obviously it doesn't have the permissions to see everything running on your system or install a kernel module. This does mean cheaters could probably just cheat on Linux to bypass it more easily, so anticheats like EAC will put Linux support as an opt-in toggle which some developers choose not to enable.

Topfi• 2 years ago

Does anyone know whether disclosure of Denuvo and similarly controversial "add-ons" does negatively affect sales? Maybe I am cynical, but I have come to the conclusion that whether it is always online DRM, rootkit-level anti-cheat or the need to have an account for offline play, community anger is often only maintained when a game had other things going against it from the get-go. Not against disclosing this of course, that is a great move for those who actually are willing to walk-the-walk, just asking whether we should perhaps temper our expectations on the impact of such a measure.

dmonitor• 2 years ago

The most recent study I saw showed that Denuvo significantly helps revenue capture within the first few months of a game's release

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759...

grayhatter• 2 years ago

I can't figure out what that article is trying to prove. "When DRM remains uncracked, we can't detect any losses due to piracy." well duh. Does it otherwise effect sales? Do any small games use it, or just large studios?

righthand• 2 years ago

FYI - Denuvo paid for that study.

bigstrat20039• 2 years ago

Good. I absolutely refuse to compromise my system by using these things. Games should be required to let people know what they are signing up for.

And if that means more companies choose to avoid kernel anti-cheat, so much the better. I'm still mad that I can't play Helldivers 2 - a freaking co-op game where cheaters can't pose a problem - because of this nonsense.

Cthulhu_8• 2 years ago

a freaking co-op game where cheaters can't pose a problem

Winning doesn't give you any permanent rewards?

bigstrat20039• 2 years ago

Why would that matter? If someone gets rewards that they didn't earn, it doesn't negatively impact anyone else.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

This is very much welcomed.

andrewmcwatters4• 2 years ago

I think the population of game developers and their knowledge of multiplayer networking is fundamentally getting worse over time, because I see things that should not be architecturally possible in a lot of newer multiplayer games.

This whole thing anti-cheat thing is just a separate problem entirely, but it's so painfully exacerbated by the first.

juunpp• 2 years ago

The anti-cheat also goes hand in hand with the predatory business models of "always online" and micro transactions. Those things sell because of advantage over other players or just social factors in the case of cosmetics. Wouldn't be as relevant in an offline game. But now, since the game is online (for business, not technical, reasons), we need some way to keep everyone honest.

I'm just hoping this entire business model dies, along with the anti-cheat and everything else with it.

janderland2• 2 years ago

Strange take. These things are being put forward by major companies who hire very good engineers. Riot Games makes the most popular game in the entire world (League of Legends) and they use kernel-level anti-cheating. I interviewed with them and found their test to be one of the more difficult ones I’ve taken. I’m not under the impression they lack the necessary knowledge.

tightbookkeeper3• 2 years ago

Poor networking -> need for anti-cheat

Does not mean:

Using anti-cheat -> poor networking

Ops comment is absolutely true. Engineers in games who are good have high incentive to 5x their salary and lifestyle by doing anything else.

This was not true in 1997. The industry also just attracts a different crowd, more adjacent to film and entertainment than it used to.

andrewmcwatters4• 2 years ago

Your interview experience at one company isn’t representative of the entire industry.

a21282• 2 years ago

I definitely think it's just a business decision being made in some cases.

Your developers have just built and demonstrated a functioning multiplayer prototype. They want to spend 3 months to rewrite some of it for better security, and 3 months to implement the missing features and make it fully functioning. You just got off a call from a sales person for an anticheat vendor who gave you a strong pitch, so you say no to the first 3 months because it's cheaper to just add anticheat than to pay 3 months of salary on this.

bastard_op2• 2 years ago

The problem is since Valve and Proton made windows games viable for Linux and the Steam Deck, most of that anti-cheat vermin does NOT work under Linux. Even if it did, if you run Linux, you likely take some objection to someone wanting to add kernel modules of unknown and/or ill repute to your pretty open-source kernel.

Valve knows this, kernel-level anti-cheat is simply not practical for use with Linux as a consideration. Most game companies care zero for Linux in the first place, which means for us, we just end up inadvertently boycotting those games and bad-mouthing them regardless, but hey, it's only 1%.

lomase7• 2 years ago

I think the end goal of Valve is to support anticheats in Linux. But they want the Kernel to provide an API for it, so you don't need to run the anticheat like a driver.

bastard_op2• 2 years ago

But will a canned, defined api ever be good enough? As soon as someone paints a border, someone will step over it. It's the reason security products in windoze as well as anti-cheats require kernel-level access, and why outages like the crowdstrike one a few months ago occur and why microsoft lets it (for now).

It's an arms race, and no api will ever be good enough to keep a miscreant from working against logical choices. If I have to play a game that I have to assume someone is cheating, I really don't want to play that game, or at least with others of dubious reputation. This is why I run my own server for games I like to play with others I trust.

If someone wants to play competitively publicly with anti-cheats, they should opt-in to do so, but I'd like the option to not, and simply play local or private instances with my own general TOS. If diplomacy fails, a ban option for the server.

Jnr2• 2 years ago

1.9% already :)

supportengineer• 2 years ago

Not a gamer - Is Steam basically a package manager like 'yum' or 'brew', but for games?

dark-star4• 2 years ago

more like an app store

Jnr2• 2 years ago

Yes, and also a store and a community platform.

PeakKS• 2 years ago

More like flatpak/flathub since it has it's own runtime, with the addition of community features and purchasing.

ranger207• 2 years ago

Similar to Google Play with Google Play Services: both an app store and a set of services for games to use

ukd12• 2 years ago

Yes; but more like the apple App Store - they take a cut, and (to some/varying extent) try to ensure some level of legitimacy / quality.

sunshowers8• 2 years ago

Like 10% of Steam is yum/brew. The other 90% is:

* GUI

* managing installations, including things like Proton to run Win32 games on Linux, and Fossilize to precompile shaders

* bandwidth-saving stuff like being able to transfer games locally

* being able to play remotely in a variety of configurations: LAN, WAN, or having a friend connect to your local session ("Remote Play Together")

* pretty good support for mapping any controller you have to any controller inputs a game wants

* cloud saves

* a bunch of community features like forums and broadcasting

* family sharing

* a VR runtime

* marketing for devs (regular sales, algorithmic recommendations etc)

* an API for devs with various services

* the backend infrastructure for all of the above

It's been around for a long time so it's quite feature-rich at this point. Lots of things that generally make sense to have.

m4633• 2 years ago

and telemetry

red_admiral2• 2 years ago

More like an app store, which is really just a GUI/payments/licence layer on top of a package manager.

fngjdflmdflg3• 2 years ago

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 any case, especially in this case considering that this is not a requirement of law but of a private company.

logical_person• 2 years ago

Prop 65 went great! Let's get a warning out for every game with peer to peer networking while we're at it.

byteknight• 2 years ago

I get the argument, but if that is more than a strawman argument to you, I am bewildered. Making a network connection is infinitely less problematic than having root level access to a kernel (translate to windows language for NT)

akira25014• 2 years ago

Prop 65 went great!

The secondary effect is that business will stop using processes and chemicals which require them to carry this warning. You've effectively created a new market segment.

Are the labels annoying to the point of comedy? Sure, but it's not /your/ behavior we were trying to modify.

Der_Einzige2• 2 years ago

Doesn’t matter in a world of AI powered hacks. Kernel level anti cheat isn’t detecting the yolov8 model fine tuned on the head of my enemies.

ok_dad• 2 years ago

This video suggests you can catch this type of cheater without even a kernel level anti cheat:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA

There’s a lot of other stuff in the video but if you skip the robot building parts at the beginning he talks about an anti cheat system he developed with another person.

andrewmcwatters4• 2 years ago

You don't need kernel-level cheats to bypass VAC, nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters.

fngjdflmdflg3• 2 years ago

nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters.

Do you have some examples of good anti-cheats that are not kernel-level? Do you have any that are as good as Riot's Vanguard? I'd prefer examples of FPS games since these are the most mechanically skill based compared to other genres that have more strategy, but would like to hear any examples you are thinking of. Lastly, if you say server-side, that may work, but many companies don't seem interested in it due to the cost, at least IIUC.

skizm• 2 years ago

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.

dietr1ch• 2 years ago

While I trust valve, I'm not willing to mess up with my workstation to play.

Also, there's hardware cheats, so I don't need a rootkit on my machine, but a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans.

adastra22• 2 years ago

Valve wouldn't purposefully backdoor you for nefarious purposes. But any such code is not nearly reviewed enough to be sure it is free of unintentional backdoors that could be exploited by third parties.

veunes7• 2 years ago

Trust in a company plays a huge role here

anonymousab3• 2 years ago

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.

LinXitoW6• 2 years ago

But you couldn't. After all, there's a lot of hardware based cheats that even KLA can't reliably detect.

If you're "not sure if someones cheating or just good", maybe that's a mental problem with you? Put differently, if all cheaters were perfectly hidden (aka looked exactly like a real player of that skill level), would you still care? If yes, you seem more interested in a morality than actually enjoying the game.

mock-possum• 2 years ago

Do you think a large percentage cares about cheats in general?

ehnto• 2 years ago

Yep. I would call myself a privacy focused person, but given that Windows is the primary platform for PC gaming, and I trust Microsoft about as far as I can throw a their corporate headquarters, the platform is already compromised. Treat it accordingly, play your games. Maybe watch your adult films and write your memoirs on a different system than your gaming rig.

veunes7• 2 years ago

Ideally, players would be given both a choice and a clear breakdown of what’s actually being collected or monitored.

rldjbpin3• 2 years ago

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).

dbrueck5• 2 years ago

The anti-cheat problem is long-running and complicated. If you choose not to run anti-cheat because you understand that these are opaque rootkits, good for you! That's a totally, 100% valid choice. But please keep in mind:

  - you are a tiny minority and not the target customer
  - online multiplayer games are an absurdly big business (i.e. there are huge incentives here)
  - no, you can't completely solve this server side
  - elite players are insanely good - they are by definition outliers, so looking for statistical outliers is not in itself a solution
  - game companies are highly incentivized to work with (or at least not antagonize) the elite players (so just throwing them in matches with cheaters is not a solution)
  - the stakes are high both for the devs and their users, so "pretty good" anti-cheat is usually insufficient

You can sum things up by saying that kernel-level anti-cheat DRM is the worst solution, except for all of the other solutions.

I hope to see more discussion on possible solutions and tradeoffs - this is a challenging technical problem whose solution (if there is one) is fairly valuable.

[edit: hopefully fixed the tone, per feedback]

sadeshmukh3• 2 years ago

Why isn't server-side anticheat a possible solution? Cheats can spoof inputs purely through visual output as well, meaning there cannot be full trust client-side.

ukd12• 2 years ago

Oh it's a solution, it's just worse than kernel-level - as it's much easier to bypass.

burnished3• 2 years ago

Not an expert but I've done a little reading and basically the combination of real time actions and a network makes it intractable, you end up just having to trust the client on some things (or having to make trade offs like a client potentially not having the information needed to display the game state to the player, or choppy/unresponsive gameplay as a function of latency).

phire• 2 years ago

A good anti-cheat solution needs both client side and server side components, they complement each other.

You also need active human involvement, both as moderators and evolving the anti-cheat technology over time.

fireant• 2 years ago

We're mostly talking about FPS here, you've got 2 main cheat categories: aimbots and esps (visibility hacks)

Esps are purely client side, they read actors from game's memory and draw a client side overlay. It's impossible to protect against these on the server. Even if you had perfect culling from the server (didn't send players behind walls for example) you'd still have semitransparent surfaces like foliage and smoke. There are people making good money in PUBG just making enemy textures that are easier to see. You need kernel anticheat to prevent the cheat reading the memory. Also you want to take screenshots periodically and detect overlays.

Aimbots in the olden days could be detected on the server because their movements were instant, precise, unnatural snaps. But these days cheat developers have wisened up. Again the best protection is to prevent the cheat from reading the games memory in the first place, some anticheats go as far as to try to prevent input from any artificial device (so the cheat can't create mouse movement)

There are also movement hacks, but I don't think that these are really common these days. You can detect protect against these on the server side

talldayo• 2 years ago

I'd love to see more curiosity from the HN community on this.

I'd love to see more curiosity from developers - the disappointment is mutual. Instead of attempting to systematically stop all forms of cheating through innovative or competitive methods, it would appear the industry is converging on dangerous half-measures and excusing it with evidence from a clearly failing system.

What should we, the users, expect? Perfect, cheat-free software that surveils us endlessly, or "good enough" security that lets users decide for themselves which servers are suitable? Let me cast my vote, and I know which ideal I consider realistic and attainable.

Levitating3• 2 years ago

I'd love to see more curiosity from developers

Developers spent millions on Anti-Cheat. It's why entire products like EasyAntiCheat and BattleEye exists.

Valve spent a LOT of time and effort on VACNet, a server side machine learning based Anti-Cheat primarily trained only on CS:GO verdicts and it was awful still.

Developers know the common methods used by cheaters. That includes exploiting known vulnerable kernel drivers to run code in the kernel. The only way to monitor for this is to utilize a kernel module loaded before that of the cheater. That's why the current state of Anti-Cheat is the way it is.

The developers of various anti-cheats like Vanguard have been very transparent about this.[1]

[1] https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-null-anti...

sunshowers8• 2 years ago

While all of what you're saying is true, I think it is worth noting that historically a large chunk of this problem was solved by communities hosting servers. I agree that in the matchmaking era, remote attestation via kernel-level anticheat is the inevitable solution that you converge to after a few iterations.

And yes, servers would often kick out people who were too outside of the general skill level, even if they weren't cheating. As (say) a p80 player, playing against a p99 player feels roughly as bad as playing against a cheater. (But of course the p99 player is doing so honestly.)

ethbr15• 2 years ago

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.

jeff_carr2• 2 years ago

Not at all correct! Nothing of what was said is true. The actual reality is:

* Microsoft makes piles of money from Gaming * Microsoft got involved with Gaming to damage Linux adoption and corporate support (Sony/Linux/Playstation) * Microsoft spends massive amounts of attention on gaming to lock in the general public to Windows * Microsoft continues to lose to Linux * Microsoft uses cheating to lie about open source being 'something something' cheaters

The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has absolutely no interest in an open source solution to these problems and are using these issues to lie, mislead and spread FUD in some absurd fantasy world where only some superior microsoft driven closed source solution is the only possible way this can be solved. All of that is a complete lie. Nothing more.

A smart linux and free software lawyer would be wise to file a class action lawsuit for discovery documents inside Microsoft where one would undoubtedly find piles of emails between the executives hell bent on doing everything to damage Linux adoption have stupidly wielded this unidentified axe which is actually a -4 cursed boat anchor.

Anyone that tells you that computer security or trust can only be done with proprietary software is lying to you for their own benefit.

latexr• 2 years ago

I'd love to see more curiosity from the HN community on this.

These kinds of sweeping comments are as frequent as they are tiring. There are other comments like yours in this thread and yours is currently at the top. It has nothing to do with a lack of curiosity, you’re simply seeing the contrarian dynamic at play.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601

dbrueck5• 2 years ago

I appreciate the feedback - I've edited the comment to hopefully do better. Thank you for taking the time!

cmxch4• 2 years ago

Rejoinder: Blizzard’s Warden. No bootkit, no invasive system configuration required, even plays nice with “niche/enthusiast” platforms like Linux, doesn’t even care if your keyboard isn’t a bit niche too.

Thought: If they expect a console level of lockdown, why do they bother writing for the PC? If I wanted a $game_console, I’d buy the console.

dbrueck5• 2 years ago

Hmm... isn't Blizzard's main FPS title Overwatch though? Cheating seems pretty common in that game (and there are tons of forum threads where people are complaining about it).

Gamemaster1379• 2 years ago

game companies are highly incentivized to work with (or at least not antagonize) the elite players

Actually, this is generally untrue. Companies BELIEVE this but often times, these players are a vocal minority put on pedastal and they often end up making the game worse for the general player base.

dbrueck5• 2 years ago

Sorry for not being more clear, I was referring to the advertising or promotion that comes via the elite players. Take Valorant, for example. Riot Games leveraged their League of Legends user base and gave early access to high-end players and that apparently played a big part in helping its popularity take off. Now it has a robust presence in eSports, again helped by the high-end players.

It's not uncommon now for popular professional streamers to get early access to new features/modes because the game companies know that those players can help build or retain the player base.

FactKnower693• 2 years ago

no, you can't completely solve this server side

This is what every dev who can't be bothered to implement relevancy filters says when their server broadcasts the locations of every hidden player to every other player every tick and wallhacks drop a week later

Exactly what can't be fixed server side? Are you just talking about aimbots and other situations where script kiddies can trivially author bots that generate optimal inputs? Because at a certain point that's more a problem with shitty, boring game design that got stale 20 years ago; if the top of your game's execution ceiling is "can the player click on heads perfectly" you have bigger problems

dbrueck5• 2 years ago

Relevancy filtering is more for network traffic optimization, it doesn't really help with cheating in most cases. In a FPS, for example, the actors the cheater most wants to know about are almost always also network relevant.

But taking a step back, for fast games (like an FPS), the latency requirements drive you to send semi-secret info to the client (like the positions of other players), and so that's where things start to break down. But the traffic in the other direction is a problem too, as you have all of the scenarios in which the messages to the server (e.g. aim info, timing of weapon of firing) can be spoofed or engineered.

The motivation for the client-side anti-cheat systems is to extend as far as possible the envelope of what is considered trustworthy - i.e. if they can't solve the latency problem, then they try to make the client more trusted.

It's impossible to completely solve the problem, so it's about finding a solution that solves as much of the problem as possible. Unfortunately the main thing going for kernel anti-cheat is that most users don't care that they have to let someone root their machines to play a game, though the tide would likely turn if there were a high publicity exploit.

lifeformed6• 2 years ago

"All cheats can be trivially solved server side, as long as I exclude all games I don't like, which are also the games where the problem is hardest to solve and most relevant to the discussion."

Hikikomori8• 2 years ago

Server side can not do anything about ESP or aimbot as they rely only in information that the server must provide the to the client. ESP can be curbed somewhat by obfuscating objects not in their view, but how effective this is depends very much on map geometry as the server must send it at some point. It works okay in games like CS/Valorant (that already has it implemented for years) but does basically nothing in Battlefield/Apex/Escape from Tarkov as they have very open maps. Aimbot can be configured to be pretty much indistinguishable from the best players.

nox101• 2 years ago

Do you think it will escalate to the point that client side checks will be worthless? Say in 5yrs I can let an AI watch the screen and control the mouse and keyboard. From the rootkitted computer, it can't tell I used an external AI to control the USB keyboard and mouse.

zerd• 2 years ago

In 5 years -> hobby project 3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXA7zXVz8A4

127• 2 years ago

Just use local servers and player validation signatures. Faceless matchmaking is bullshit. Local communities win. Don't mix e-sports with casual game-play. Just like you don't need a security detail for the average person, you don't need invasive anti-cheat for the average gamer.

bitsandboots4• 2 years ago

Perhaps true of competitive games. But I find anticheat mainly exists to protect microtransaction games. And generally those games aren't worth playing, so having the little badge on steam can help avoid wastes of time.

agentultra• 2 years ago

Yeah… it’s more that the anti-cheat itself provides surface area for RCE’s than the anti-chest company using it nefariously.

yreg• 2 years ago

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.

neilv• 2 years ago

One of the reasons I run a PS5 instead.

AFAIK, there's fewer cheaters on PlayStation current-gen than on PC, and I don't have to worry about anti-cheat kludges corrupting my "rig".

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

You mean all the anti-cheat options are pre-built into your rig?

pixxel• 2 years ago

You’ve just got Sony watching over you and transcribing your audio conversations with friends.

Woeps• 2 years ago

This is the exact reason why is started with streaming services for games (Gfore/boosteroid/game pass). Next the anti-cheat thing I also spend less waiting for updates. And this way I can still play these games with my buddies.

mrpippy• 2 years ago

Add ‘-nobattleye’ to the Steam command-line launch options and you can play single-player without any installs.

(Rockstar really should’ve made this a separate launch option like other games do)

soderfoo3• 2 years ago

(Rockstar really should’ve made this a separate launch option like other games do)

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.

We, the players, fail to recognize how our gaming experience can be enhanced by using social features like leader boards, guilds, or in game chat. We are not enlightened.

Think about all the fun and exciting connections you'd miss out on if all the social crap was off by default or in an easily accessible place.

I'm honestly surprised it's a command line option. My guess is that the requirement originated externally.

gigatexal• 2 years ago

Call of duty 6 launches the single player campaign from the main launcher and I noticed they advertise the anti cheat stuff being enabled (I forget what it’s called). For a single player game. Smh.

veunes7• 2 years ago

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

johnisgood2• 2 years ago

But the reality is that it often is.

bitsandboots4• 2 years ago

Ownership is the premium version of a product. Turns out piracy is sometimes the only ownership option. Everything else is just a subscription, license, service.

tantalor• 2 years ago

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

k4rli• 2 years ago

What's even worse is with this update they completely cut off Linux users. It had been performing better than on W*ndows but they had to ruin the game.

Surely this is foreshadowing the future of GTA VI and will have the same problems of being unplayable.

dartharva3• 2 years ago

As he said, pirating is the better option. I'm guessing all pirate releases of GTA V will run perfectly on Linux.

account423• 2 years ago

You mean Proton users who have been doing everything they can to shit on the developers releasing native Linux games because "it runs 0.00001% faster on Proton so why bother with a native port". It's not like there haven't been people warning you that no official support means the games can stop working at any time and you won't have any recourse.

lmm• 2 years ago

So why didn't you pirate it? At some point people need to stop complaining and start putting their money where their mouth is.

dspillett• 2 years ago

It had already been bought some time ago, this was stated as a reinstall.

Using a pirate copy now might avoid the rootkit, but it would not send a message to the publisher as they'll not see a difference between not getting any money for this new install and not getting any money for this new install. Any difference in a numbers-playing stat, if the pirate version doesn't call home to be counted in those, is likely not significant.

nottorp• 2 years ago

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.

alwayslikethis• 2 years ago

We need to stop normalizing the idea that businesses can change the offer of a purchased product after the fact.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is “I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it further.”

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed

strogonoff• 2 years ago

Big game publishers will inevitably flex the “we can impose any restrictions we want at any time, go sue us” in your face at some point. Piracy is indeed the superior experience, unfortunately, though I would add a caveat that as a rule it does not apply to indie titles.

(At least while they stay indie… Not long ago I was reinstalling Minecraft after a long break and found out that Microsoft has the balls to demand that I verify a phone number to play a game I bought more than 10 years ago. Like with GTA V’s rootkit, they don’t care if you want to play single-player—once you’re locked out of the loader, you’re locked out and no human will help you.)

IG_Semmelweiss• 2 years ago

Honest question.

Would a Windows10-11 user be able to tell there are "rootkits" embedded in installations, without looking at the (optional) disclosures made available now on steam ?

In other words, what guarantee is there that if i'm buying a game from Steam, or say GOG, that there's no quasi-malware riding along with the game install ?

nemomarx2• 2 years ago

in general anti cheat will advertise that it has kernel level access and might need admin permission during install

if you're worried about hidden stuff I'm not sure how you could tell

LinuxBender• 2 years ago

Are these anti-cheats kernel modules? Asking because I only play two games on Linux and they do not use rootkits. If so one could at least prevent the installation using a couple sysctl variables [1]. I do not recommend putting this in /etc/sysctl.conf or in the .d directory as it can break OS updates among other things... I would instead put it in a startup script so that it can easily be disabled and the node rebooted. This would be in the cases the game installer wants elevated privileges and silently tries to install the modules. Obviously it will break the game but maybe that will happen soon enough so that one can request a refund for the games that did not disclose the rootkit. Once these are set to 1 on a running system the only way to set back to 0 is to disable that startup script and reboot as it becomes immutable on a running system. Your OS update tools should also be wrapped to check if this is enabled, warn you and politely abort until it is unset. The failure conditions are not strictly binary and may work, or appear to work until the machine is bricked.

Related to this it may be worth installing something that does checksum snapshots of the filesystems to see if a game has tampered with system files. OSSEC, chkrootkit or even a cron job that just does this manually and runs diffs. While some package managers have this functionality they will usually ignore files outside of the package manifest that may get picked up by the system. Immutable off-system backups are of course good too.

    # do not put in /etc/sysctl.conf, instead use a startup script or a script that is run prior to starting Steam.
    sysctl -w "kernel.modules_disabled=1"
    sysctl -w "kernel.kexec_load_disabled=1"

[1] - https://linux-audit.com/increase-kernel-integrity-with-disab...

Terr_2• 2 years ago

There are two trends in the broader multiplayer game ecosystem which I think are worth highlighting:

1. More games are trying to cut costs with ad-hoc P2P servers, meaning that sometimes important logic is occurring on a not-so-trusted machine.

2. More games are using a revenue model which may be threatened by consumer-side tinkering.

For example, imagine a cooperative game that uses a P2P server, and the host has done something to make it much easier for the squad to get a drop of the Super Special Loot (#1) and the rarity of the loot through gameplay drives many players to purchase it though an in-game store.

mmis10002• 2 years ago

Critical login happen at client machine is how fps games work at all. It's way too late to judge every hit on server due to the latency. A 40ms latency is 3 frame lag even on a 60fps monitor. And It can be a lot worse in a lot of cases. The server may detect some hit that is too far off and impossible. But it have to trust what client says as long as it is on some reasonable range or the game won't even work.

And that reasonable range isn't that small. It is enough to make every bullet that was supposed to shoot on air shoot on the enemies' heads.

Terr_2• 2 years ago

Did you mean to post that to a different subthread?

I'm familiar with FPS networking, however I'm talking about a trend where a customer-machine is designated to act as a game-server, so that the company can avoid paying to host one in a dedicated but more-secure fashion.

If that machines happens to be the attacker's, then their scope for chicanery is so much greater than just wallhacks or aimbots.

For example, they might temporarily or permanently grant everyone equipment that is otherwise locked behind some grind-wall, where the company hopes to make money selling a "level boost". While not totally malicious, it's definitely a "hack" the company will oppose.

nathants25• 2 years ago

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 the server.

i love steam, but won’t be releasing this there.

it’s reboot-to-play, a modified archlinux iso that boots directly into the game from a usb drive.

i control not only the kernel, but the os, and every running program. you don’t get cortana. you don’t get discord. you don’t get spotify. you get the game. for the duration of play, your pc becomes an arcade machine.

still, this is not enough.

to play ranked, you’re going to have to get a handcam over your left shoulder. it will see head orientation, both hands, full mousepad, and screen. you’re also going to use fixed mouse speed, mousepad size, and monitor size. reviewing any players inputs will look familiar, since everyone is playing with identical settings and setup.

kernel anticheat is not enough. we need a reproducible full os setup, down to running programs and network connections.

even that is not enough. we need provenance of user inputs hooked right up to the game replay system, so you or anyone can review engagements from any parties perspective.

obviously this should all be opt in. not everyone wants to play ranked, and whole-os anticheat should help even without input provenance.

have you ever wondered if you died to a cheater or a god? do you wish you could never wonder again? i do. soon, i won’t.

ryankrage77• 2 years ago

I assume this is satire, because nobody would play a game with those requirements.

nathants25• 2 years ago

i would never joke about cheaters, spammers, or other netizens of ill repute.

if this is a challenge, consider it accepted.

link in bio.

bigstrat20039• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure. Life has taught me that people will accept damn near anything in order to get the entertainment they want. If you worked your way up to the point OP describes slowly, over time, I wouldn't be at all surprised if people shrugged and said "it's just what you have to do if you want to play those games".

jokoon3• 2 years ago

could be made necessary for pro players many of them were caught cheating

rxyz• 2 years ago

I opened the website in his profile and joined the discord.

Yes there's a discord for this.

nathants25• 2 years ago

welcome to the team. reboot-to-play is the future.

andrewmcwatters4• 2 years ago

honestly, we have consoles for this dude

nathants25• 2 years ago

exactly! what we need is more power, and more mouse room.

anyone playing fortnite ranked already has the needed hardware, and the motivation.

if you haven’t won a solo build game on 1440p 360hz, you haven’t ever actually played a video game.

dlock17• 2 years ago

All of this, when you can just play on console. I know cheaters theoretically exist there, but in low enough numbers on my PS5 games that they don't impact my user experience.

Kudos to your insane game plan. Gonna be hard to get any marketing from Twitch streamers though.

nathants25• 2 years ago

thanks! if the plan isn’t insane, why bother.

ps5 can’t play 360hz and can’t use performance mode graphics. consoles are great, but esports will always be on pc.

input cheats are common on pc and console, there isn’t a difference anymore.

dual pc streaming will work fine. maybe we include obs in the iso at some point, but probably not.

also, this game is mnk only. next game will be controller only. gotta keep inputs standardized or fair play isn’t possible.

Sceptre6• 2 years ago

What an incredible testament to the lengths men can be driven by spite.

I would like to try your game, sir. But my problem is the people trying to take over my computer. I am not going to solve that by letting you take over my computer.

Let's talk system requirements- could I get away with running it on an old junker laptop?

nathants25• 2 years ago

possibly, depending on the gpu. wickedengine requires modernish gpu.

spite was definitely a part of it. at a certain point while playing and watching fortnite solo build, i wondered why there are so many bugs and if i could fix them. i wanted to understand why ping advantage and storm surge have to exist. this game was my journey to find out. it has been a privilege and a joy every single day.

as far as security, you’re asking the right questions. the typical gamer showing up in my discord doesn’t, so i guide them to them.

if you boot my game, you’ve booted an archlinux iso. what could i do? i could read/wipe your disks, so you should make sure they are encrypted/backedup. i could probe your network. i could maybe even install bios level persistent malware. i could do anything a userspace app with admin can do.

none of this is different from a windows app as soon as you click yes on the admin popup thingy which every multiplayer game needs.

reboot-to-play is better, because assuming you use bitlocker, i can't read every file on you c drive, unlike every game you've installed from steam. i also can't mess up your windows registry, or any other os config.

the reboot-to-play build process is not yet open, but soon will be. even then, the game binary it will download and run is not open.

this and more is explored in the faq on the games site, let me know if you want more answers up there!

the purpose of reboot-to-play is not to corrupt your disks. its purpose is to get all players into an identical state, for fairness, and to avoid finicky windows tweaking for performance. everyone’s pc is a special snowflake. what we want for multiplayer is identical arcade machines. every time you boot, you're in the correct state.

running software is ultimately about trust. you can trust epic, or riot. you can trust steam or apple to vet user provide apps. you can trust me.

do you want to trust me? that's up to you. i would say, wait for launch, watch some streams and videos, and see if it looks fun!

launching soon. working through final matchmaking issues now.

bananamerica• 2 years ago

That was very enjoyable.

nathants25• 2 years ago

welcome to the team.

red_admiral2• 2 years ago

DOS era "insert game disk 1 and reboot to play" vibes.

nathants25• 2 years ago

building an archiso, flashing it, and then booting is very satisfying.

[x670e][~/repos/WickedEngine/Protoverse/reboot-to-play][better-game][us-west-2][-][master]

> bash flash.sh /dev/sda 1224736768 bytes (1.2 GB, 1.1 GiB) copied, 52 s, 23.3 MB/s

rldjbpin3• 2 years ago

very interesting approach here, but i wonder if steam could provide a way to distribute this game in its current form.

maybe a generic steamos image with console-level isolation, and make the game steamos-only perhaps?

no offense, but there might be a sliver of the pie that don't like cheaters but also don't mind running something as invasive.

nathants25• 2 years ago

i might distribute a usb flashing downloading thingy in steam, but it’s not a priority.

the goal is to be minimally invasive. you don’t have to install anything!

i don’t fight your misconfigured pc, you don’t worry about me scanning your c drive.

nothing to install, configure, save, or lose.

Hikikomori8• 2 years ago

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?

nathants25• 2 years ago

not possible to stop modification, but i will be heavily surveilling the system, and i know exactly what it should look like. the process tree is known in advance.

handcam anti-cheat and replays will handle provenance of inputs. non-human inputs are cheating.

you could try to boot in vm, but performance will suffer. the server moved off vms for the same reason.

the only thing i really care about is non-human inputs. if you get really creative with booting the game, and aren’t nefarious, i’ll set phasers to stun.

bitsandboots4• 2 years ago

Hey man I just play games to have fun. I guess fun isn't for everyone.

nathants25• 2 years ago

outlandish. i will get laws passed that require you to play and enjoy my game. how dare you, sir.

CursedUrn• 2 years ago

Making a webcam work on every hardware configuration is very difficult. I don't think this is possible.

nathants25• 2 years ago

really? usb webcams? i suppose it’s possible, but this seems unlikely.

very well, ranked will then require specific hardware. i’m gonna have to build more test pcs. 9800x3d 7700xt b650m looking pretty clean.

valval2• 2 years ago

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?

kjkjadksj6• 2 years ago

For most games these days there is thanks to skill based matchmaking. Your brother will be matched up with people in your skill bracket and will absolutely wreck them. Then whenever you get back on you will have moved up in skill thanks to big bro and will now get wrecked until you get tossed back into the lobbies you belong.

People generally hate this though because for one it makes most games into way too serious sweat fest with everyone so closely matched. And for two it doesn’t even stop the entire reason it was built which was to protect the noobs. The elite players can just tank like an nfl team for a few rounds and go back to stomping noobs.

nathants25• 2 years ago

sbmm wouldn’t fix this, as skill is at the account level and changes slowly.

what does fix this is handcam anti-cheat, which makes it trivial to identify the operator by their hand movement patterns, arm size, etc.

you can review not only the match you are in, but all previous matches. full fidelity replays + handcam = a brave new world.

account sharing is not allowed in ranked. in pubs, go crazy.

tightbookkeeper3• 2 years ago

Cheating is a human problem. The technology just makes us feel in control.

I will not be playing games that make me feel like a prisoner. The experience taking standardized tests is enough for one life.

nathants25• 2 years ago

i respect your feelings and your choice. happiness, privacy and security are important.

there are however legions of fortnite players who would mortgage their lives for a better game. a handcam without audio during gameplay seems a more reasonable and low price to pay. time will tell what gamers think! very exciting.

jokoon3• 2 years ago

Valve now catches cheaters using machine learning, which analyzes the demo. Apparently they catch a lot of cheaters this way, and it's more reliable than player reports.

But to be really honest: it's impossible to prevent cheaters. The only way is to play with friends, or to change the incentives of the game where it becomes less interesting to cheat.

For example, a game like counter strike will have a lot of cheaters because you can earn skins and sell them. There are also a lot of players who will buy cheats, because the game is just so popular.

The game design and engine design can also help to prevent cheating.

Honestly, you cannot solve corruption, you need to change the game or the players.

In my view, the Counter strike community is quite toxic, but very profitable for valve, which is why they don't care if their players behave poorly. CS is a nice game but human nature is what it is. You don't find recommendable people playing CS, most gamers play something else because that community is just so terrible to interact with.

nathants25• 2 years ago

i’m trying to align monetization and all other incentives in the direction of a better game.

yet cheaters will still cheat.

non-human inputs IS cheating. period. there is no information cheating possible in this game.

input provenance is the only anti cheat that has a chance.

full fidelity 120hz server replays with handcam seems a good place to start.

we’ll see how it goes!

Retr0id• 2 years ago

I'm booting your OS in a stealthy hypervisor and operating my cheat logic from there.

nathants25• 2 years ago

and i will award you cash from the bug bounty pool!

then you will be banned from ranked, unless you have a clever way to synthesize perfect handcam video.

in which case, you get the entire bounty pool and 10% profit for 6 months.

then you will be banned from ranked.

the bugs won’t discover themselves. i salute you.

two_handfuls• 2 years ago

They didn't already? O.o I thought Steam was better than that.

steelframe2• 2 years ago

I built a separate Arch Linux box just for Steam gaming. I will never log into any of my sensitive accounts -- email, banking, etc. -- on that machine. It's a Framework laptop so I can physically keep the camera and microphone disconnected. I basically treat it like a public terminal.

j-bos2• 2 years ago

This is the way.

cascades42• 2 years ago

Yep, same here. I have a dedicated gaming machine because I’m afraid to expose my banking information.

nathants25• 2 years ago

dedicated hardware is a good idea, but too expensive for many. dedicated os is a good first step.

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

Do you truly expect any steam games to have anything like a root kit that’d exfiltrate your credentials?

I feel if this were the case literally anything I install on my PC would be suspect. Installing ssh would be a much more scary thing than a random steam game.

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

No, he expects the root kit will open up his machine to automated worms.

m4633• 2 years ago

I thought some games snooped through your system.

Kerbal Space Program comes to mind, I recall it had adware that did this.

westpfelia• 2 years ago

The concern is that malicious actors can take advantage of what is certainly a poorly written rootkit.

gspetr• 2 years ago

Do you truly expect any steam games to have anything like a root kit that’d exfiltrate your credentials?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/steam-game-mo...

"Downfall, a fan expansion for the popular Slay the Spire indie strategy game, was breached on Christmas Day to push Epsilon information stealer malware using the Steam update system.

Once installed on a compromised computer, the malware will collect cookies and saved passwords and credit cards from web browsers (Google Chrome, Yandex, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi), as well as Steam and Discord info.

It will also look for documents containing 'password' in the filenames and for more credentials, including the local Windows login and Telegram."

steelframe2• 2 years ago

root kit that’d exfiltrate your credentials

Yes. I truly believe some janky random anti-cheat kernel module could very well capture telemetry about my keystrokes to a log and then send that log off to a server.

At the very least I don't trust that it's secure enough to be in the kernel of a machine for which I require any degree of trust in its integrity.

LinXitoW6• 2 years ago

I don't expect that. I expect that publicly traded companies will cut corners in developing their kernel extension (like always), turning them into literal root kits waiting for anyone willing to exploit them.

See: https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/h/ransomware-ac...

rldjbpin3• 2 years ago

at that rate why bother using arch for the box? unless you never touch online multiplayer games, i can understand that it probably works for you.

gradientsrneat• 2 years ago

I've heard good things about the Framework laptops from a modularity perspective, but how are the thermals? Can it have a dedicated GPU?

m4633• 2 years ago

so anti-cheat, but not drm?

WatchDog• 2 years ago

With the way that computer vision and AI continue to improve, I imagine that we will soon have completely external and undetectable cheating peripherals, simply capture the screen direct from the display output, and pass inputs via mimicking a usb human input device.

This won’t provide all the same capabilities as cheats that hook into the game process, such as wall hacks, but it would be possible to build a super human aimbot with such an approach.

We already have external “radar” cheats that use the game stereo sound to give the direction that a certain sound(such as footsteps) came from.

declan_roberts• 2 years ago

That kind of stuff is readily available right now with openCV. Image detection has been very good and very fast for a long time!

Nobody really cares because most players are honest and play to have fun.

aenis3• 2 years ago

But why bother with image recognition? And pay a heavy latency penalty which makes it difficult to implement PID-style controls on player's aim? Its a game of milliseconds and opencv is comparably slow, as is the I/O involved.

Far easier to do a MiTM on the network traffic and recreate state in another process.

Still easier to clone memory pages used by the target app, or use hardware that allows dma.

musjleman3• 2 years ago

With the way that computer vision and AI continue to improve, I imagine that we will soon have completely external and undetectable cheating peripherals, simply capture the screen direct from the display output, and pass inputs via mimicking a usb human input device.

This already exists. You can stream your screen to another machine running image recognition and pass your mouse input through a controller that injects auxiliary input (there are off-the-shelf products like kmbox, you can make your own as well).

However, it is very important to understand that only a tiny percentage of cheaters in games end up being determined enough to go through hoops to purchase hardware for it (it's much more expensive and not as simple as getting instant gratification by double clicking on an executable). It's basically considered a win to push people into needing go to such lengths to cheat without getting banned.

Dibby053• 2 years ago

For hacks that don't access program memory directly, would external hardware make things less detectable? I don't know how anti-cheat programs work but I'd be surprised if they banned every skilled player that happens to be running AHK and OBS. More likely they work with heuristics that try to detect super-human mouse movements, precision/speed-wise.

madeofpalk• 2 years ago

And all of that for something that is worse - software cheats usually get access to more information than just the pixels rendered to the screen. Seeing through solid walls and stuff like that.

ackbar03• 2 years ago

are there out-of-the-box software tools to do this?

I thought about something like this before, but its non-trivial to train an image recognition system to do this, let alone the commands to mimic it through hardware, its quite an engineering feat in itself.

MetaWhirledPeas• 2 years ago

However, it is very important to understand that only a tiny percentage of cheaters in games end up being determined enough to go through hoops to purchase hardware for it

Today. That will change when it's a cheap off-the-shelf product sold on Amazon. I almost wish we were there already to get rid of this KLA nonsense.

Not to mention, every KLA game I've played has had cheaters regardless. Circumventing the software seems to become a game unto itself for those people.

mrtksn• 2 years ago

In other words, tech based solutions to human problems always fails at some point probably because the problem creators can also use tech.

jmorenoamor• 2 years ago

That would make an awesome competition field for AI bots that rely only on video/audio input and mouse/keyboard output.

reginald78• 2 years ago

We already have external “radar” cheats that use the game stereo sound to give the direction that a certain sound(such as footsteps) came from.

Did you just imply my headphones are a cheating device?

More seriously, I've heard these type of devices already exist.

wafflemaker• 2 years ago

I once played some Hunt (difficult, highly competitive game, a little like CS) with people on ex professional level. They obviously had gaming PCs, but they ALL had super expensive 7? Channels headphones. It's apparently a thing among ex pro (or high level) Counter-Strike players to have these super headphones that let you know where people are before regular people can hear them.

They hushed me all the time because "someone's coming". Still a fun experience - to win for a change. Don't have to add that my role was more as a decoy then anything else.

dang• 2 years ago

Related ongoing thread:

Why anti-cheat software utilizes kernel drivers (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42001030 - Oct 2024 (50 comments)

imchillyb• 2 years ago

Locks & picks.

This is the war. It's always been the war. It will always be the war. Digital changed the medium but war, war never changes.

The war in unwinnable in any real sense of the word win. However, security does not need to be impenetrable security only needs to dissuade the attacker.

Kernel level, blah-blah-blah, doesn't dissuade cheaters. Those things dissuade legitimate users. It's never the ideology that dissuades those users though as they don't know or care. What dissuades these users are the difficulties that these systems present to the uninformed user.

The typical end user doesn't know how to 'fix-it' when things go wrong. PC vendors won't support the issue. The game publisher won't support the issue. The game developer rarely supports the issue. Kernel level blah-blah-blah causes a blah-blah-blah. Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to fix it.

And, to top off this defecation-confection, the user is left with software that they paid for and cannot use or access. No refunds. Sorry. And, and, and!!! There are still cheaters on the platform. Every platform. There's your f'n cherry.

This is bad for the entire industry.

jeff_carr2• 2 years ago

This is bad for the entire industry.

This is Microsoft continuing to demonize free software and Linux. If they actually cared, they would support an open source solution to the problem. SOMETHING THEY ABSOLUTELY OPPOSE. That is the core issue. Say it over and over, Microsoft _DOES NOT WANT A SOLUTION TO THESE PROBLEMS_.

juliangmp• 2 years ago

They need to disclose when they want to install malware on my system? About time if you ask me...

wiz21c• 2 years ago

kernel-level anti-cheat

Add UEFI on your PC and DRM in your browser.

And next, your governement will ask you to add its anti pedo-pornography tools.

And then we have a new episode of Black Mirror...

M95D2• 2 years ago

UEFI is here, browser DRM for video is here, browser DRM for text+ads on ordinary web pages is just around the corner, government won't ask anyone - the tools will be added at the ISP level, if they're not already installed and operational.

dartharva3• 2 years ago

government won't ask anyone

Wishful thinking. That government hasn't asked anyone yet (at least in public information) is a miracle in itself.

proaralyst• 2 years ago

What's your problem with UEFI? If your OEM wanted to install malicious firmware they can do that in BIOS no?

ho_schi• 2 years ago

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 bad decisions and everyone suffers. Even Linux. Their is a reason why closed-source kernel modules mark Linux as tainted, the system is not trustworthy.

It is the duty of game developers to secure their games themselves. Not manipulating user devices. Forcefully doing stupid and dangerous things because you cannot achieve your task in a safe why is not a reason.

Arch-TK3• 2 years ago

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 and they still give cheaters a significant (but now even harder to detect) advantage) it solves the problem of obvious and even most kinds of subtle cheating.

Attempting to detect cheating once inputs are being sent to your server (which is within your domain of control and on which you can implement non-intrusive anti-cheat) is very difficult to do reliably. An inexperienced player will make slow, delayed inputs. A highly experienced player will have reactions which are an order of magnitude faster (and in many cases faster than the speed of thought because of muscle memory). If you want to make a working but no longer detectable cheat, all you need to do is spend a bit of time and effort programming in human limits of reaction time into all your code and making sure all inputs look realistic (again, more limits).

At the end of the day, you can make a cheat which gives you a significant advantage without it being actually detectable by any statistical methods on the server.

At this point you might attempt to reach for AI but undoubtedly that will require human oversight or you will get false positives.

So, in summary, even if you were to design your game around server-side rendering and server-side input processing, forcing your players to effectively play over a remote desktop connection (which is impractical for any fast paced competitive multiplayer game due to latency issues but let's pretend those don't exist for a minute), you will still get cheaters with snap-to-head or recoil compensation or auto-fire making a significant impact on games. Heck, there's even the idea of using sounds (which need to be pretty accurate so human players can utilise them to determine where enemy players are) to implement a rudimentary wallhack.

This is just the nature of FPS games and why games companies end up implementing KLA for these games. The way to make an FPS game un-cheatable is to make a different game where cheating is more difficult or impossible just by nature of the format.

Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration. Except that "this doesn't scale". Neither does human review. Neither does server side rendering. The core reasons why game companies do KLA is that players will pay for games with KLA but won't pay for games without it. As much as I think Microsoft is one of the worst companies in existence, in this case I don't think they or KLA developers are to blame. KLA developers are simply doing what players want them to do and Microsoft is only allowing what their end-users want them to allow. If Microsoft removes KLA, it will be by replacing it with userspace code with hardware attestation support, it won't be by killing the concept of intrusive anti-cheat. All Microsoft is doing is trying to re-design the tools to cover their own ass.

Fundamentally, KLA has pushed cheating further into DMA and CV territory. This means that more obvious and annoying forms of cheating, undetectable by KLA are probably going to soon become more common. At this point the options are to have these games be console-only with blessed hardware and hardware attestation. And even that has flaws (as described). Eventually it will just be impossible to play a game in a public server without cheating. Maybe this will force people away from these types of games, or towards private lobbies. I don't know what the future holds here.

Eisenstein2• 2 years ago

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.

aenis3• 2 years ago

And fundamentally, the anti-cheat software is fighting a loosing game because of some quirks of x86:

- hardware breakpoints on memory latch to logical, not physical addresses - one can map the same area of physical memory to different logical addresses thus allowing arbitrary memory reads - simulating inputs through the PnP stack can be made indetectible with polymorphic code doing the injections - detecting the aimbot's core code can be prevented via at least two methods: triggering (and capturing) page faults on memory hosting the bot or, again, with polymorphic code generation

One could create a fully open source cheat engine relying on memory reads and input injection via the pnp stavk and it would be undetectable deterministically (with heuristics, sure).

Games - unless streamed - need to know a bit more about the world they display than the player is allowed to see. Some engines I analysed (years ago) tried to limit propagating data to the local client to only a portion of the map and close proximity (the more recent battlefield games, if memory serves), while lots still have all enemy coordinates at all times in memory, some even with debug symbols to help the poor aimbot community reverse memory structures that more easily.

Its hopeless. The only winning move is not to play :-)

kjkjadksj6• 2 years ago

Realistically if you make a game hack where it behaves exactly as well as a high skilled player, no one should care. The lobby experience is the same as if you got a really good player in there. When people moan about hackers its when they are blatant. Dominating the entire server and obviously hacking when you spectate them. If you take away all this low hanging fruit who cares about the people who are cheating within statistical variance of player skill?

dartharva3• 2 years ago

Second step
"Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat."
"It is the duty of game developers"

It's hilarious that people actually think the publishers will ever have two hoots to give about notions like that. FWIW I agree we'd all be better off without those things but the entitlement to believe private businesses should run on your personal whims and that developers have a "duty" to make things only as you prefer is gobsmacking. I am always left in wonder what commenters like this think about themselves.

LinXitoW6• 2 years ago

I agree that profit driven companies will never ever care about the morality or the safety or the social impacts of their choices.

I don't think, however, that "publishers would use disabled children slave labor if they could" is really an argument you ought to make.

moffkalast• 2 years ago

That's right, they won't care. That's why any action will only come if Valve bans the practice from their store, because losing money is all publishers understand.

Every publisher that's greedily taken their products off Steam in an attempt to recuperate Valve's fee has sooner or later come crawling back because they weren't able to make a half usable platform to sell their stuff on. Valve holds a really large influence over the industry.

wrren• 2 years ago

That's an incredibly naive perspective. KLA represents a real risk to companies, as something going wrong can crash player computers instead of just game processes; this is a PR nightmare if/when it happens on a large scale. Not to mention the cost of hiring engineers capable of building kernel components in the first place, it's a niche skillset that's not cheap to hire for.

Games companies don't turn to KLA out of laziness, it's out of absolute necessity, especially for games like FPS' where it's impossible to fully secure the game using pure server-side methods. Machine learning has been tried, it's too prone to false positives and misses more subtle cheats that still negativel impact the the player experience. Anti-Cheat used to exist purely in user mode and then, guess what?, cheats moved into the kernel where they couldn't be detected or stopped. Anti-cheat had to follow in order to remain effective.

The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and watching games that players love, and that required massive resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.

ikety• 2 years ago

I'd believe this if every multiplayer game that doesn't have KLA was just rife with cheaters. Also, why is EA adding KLA to Battlefield 1 almost a decade after release?

I refuse to believe there is only one simple honorable objective when it comes to KLA. I simply do not care if companies can't figure out how to stop cheaters without it. What about our experience? You might complain about cheaters, but what if I can't even play the game because of KLA?

Played plenty of recent MP games on Linux just fine and cheating was never experience breaking.

jakebasile2• 2 years ago

We had the best alternative decades ago. Let the community run the servers and ban cheaters while allowing individual servers to form their own culture and community. The obsession with matchmaking and games as a service (requiring publisher run servers) is what painted the industry into this corner.

Note that I like matchmaking, specifically skill based matchmaking, in some games and at some times but completely ending server browsers and community run dedicated servers was a mistake.

LinXitoW6• 2 years ago

Until the obviously detectable cheaters like spinbots get INSTANTLY banned, I don't believe for a second they've "tried everything".

If hackers have to limit themselves to behaviour that looks like real skill, it's kind of unimportant to the games community if they're cheating. Cheaters only ruin the experience if they're obvious to the player.

Finally, something like Overwatch in CS, together with paid employees and PUBLIC bans of high paying cheater accounts (including hardware bans) would create a chilling effect, further forcing cheaters into hiding.

montagg• 2 years ago

The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and watching games that players love, and that required massive resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.

This was a key reason for Valorant's success. Anti-cheat is a necessary evil to make online games fair. I think if someone wants to suggest otherwise, they would need to demonstrate a superior solution. Companies truly do not want to be in the business of messing with your kernel, so if another solution exists—one that is actually superior in cheat detection and prevention—without a kernel extension, they'll do it.

I'll provide another example of why companies would rather not do it unless they have to. Kernel extensions usually require a system restart. Requiring a restart adds a huge drop off point to a conversion funnel and costs the game some amount of players who may have stuck around, and some players, like the ones here who are upset about it, won't even bother because they are outright opposed. Games would gobble up a solution that worked and didn't have that baggage.

devnullbrain• 2 years ago

tainted, the system is not trustworthy.

I wonder what is worth more: the median installation of a free-to-play multiplayer game, or access to everything they do on that PC?

I won't be the first one to wonder this.

WithinReason2• 2 years ago

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.

paledot• 2 years ago

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.

SXX• 2 years ago

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.

sphars• 2 years ago

I use the Augmented Steam extension[0], which shows a more prominent banner if a game has DRM, anti-cheat, requires a third-party account, or other gotchas. Plus a bunch of other useful features

[0] https://github.com/IsThereAnyDeal/AugmentedSteam

nithssh2• 2 years ago

Makes sense considering Valve has maintained that kernel level AC is not required and has not included one in their own games, but let's be honest, unfortunately you have to often wonder if your enemy is having a good day or if he's hacking in CS but not so in valorant for a reason.

ixwt• 2 years ago

I'm also hearing a bunch of grumblings and speculation that Valve is developing a non kernel level anti cheat.

nithssh2• 2 years ago

They have VAC and the newer version that they promised would save CS2 hasn't exactly changed much from CSGO days in terms of results.

I would love for Valve to prove it is possible but so far they haven't shown it can be done without leaving a bad experience for legit players (due to delayed ban waves, etc) despite the repeated claims.

gnuser• 2 years ago

Im annoyed at all the servile responses in defense of these bad companies.

Wanna hear my conspiracy theory?

Three letter agencies are using games as an intel gathering tool, and KLA is part of that. What if the CEOs are getting NSLs, etc?

jokoon3• 2 years ago

what if they do? does that bother you?

donatj• 2 years ago

Has anyone made a game where cheating is not just explicitly allowed but is in fact the game? It really seems like there could be something there.

figgis• 2 years ago

Unsure if anyone has made a game specifically for that. But there are plenty of intentionally unsecure servers (no VAC, or other anti-cheat) in games like counter strike for Hacker vs Hacker.

6SixTy• 2 years ago

Whenever there's community servers, hack v. hack servers are bound to follow. For integral game mechanics? There's almost always a mechanic balancing anything hack adjacent.

bunderbunder4• 2 years ago

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 of elite players who are good enough that they can hold their own, and maybe even benefit from the added challenge. And also, casual and less-skilled players can play together and not get dominated so much.

I don't think it would end cheating. But perhaps it would mitigate it by reducing a lot of the potential upside. Assuming the upside for many cheaters is that they enjoy feeling like they can dominate a server full of non-cheaters.

JambalayaJimbo• 2 years ago

Skilled players will NOT benefit from playing with others who are cheating, because their games will adapt to cheaters and not other skilled players.

Cheaters will also easily adapt to ranking systems by creating new accounts or intentionally de-ranking themselves.

bunderbunder4• 2 years ago

Are the skilled players plugged into communities enough that they can just make their own servers? It would be some extra work, but I assume time spent getting to know each other wouldn't feel like a total waste, and might be greatly preferable to dealing with all these rootkits.

stonogo2• 2 years ago

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

bunderbunder4• 2 years ago

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?

wigl• 2 years ago

As someone who plays a lot of online multiplayer, there's a few issues. A lot of games do have skill based matchmaking systems (aka SBMM) in place.

Ideally, this would lead to people having a 50% win rate which is just unacceptable to some. Those people resort to smurfing or cheating to get their fix--they don't really want a fair and equal match. Just look to the Call of Duty community crying about SBMM. Those people want to farm clips and play with those worse than them--not people at or above their skill level.

Additionally, many multiplayer games at all but the highest skill levels have most matches determined by the side that plays the fewest number of mistakes. This is especially true of team based games. At most skill levels, both teams will be making many obvious (and less obvious) mistakes. This can frustrate some who believe that they're held back by their team and just need to play with higher ranked teammates. So people will boost or buy accounts or resort to cheating.

raincole2• 2 years ago

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.

bunderbunder4• 2 years ago

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

steveklabnik• 2 years ago

This is called "Skill based matchmaking" and it is absolutely something that many games already do. Studies have shown that it increases player retention significantly. But also, there's a chunk of people who absolutely hate on it at every opportunity.

Cheating happens regardless.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

I haven't been a hardcore gamer in nearly 2 decades (think Half-Life, original CS), so forgive the ignorance; but why do game publishers care whether users cheat? I mean it's not like it costs them money--you're buying the game either way. I guess maybe in a MOOG it ruins the experience for other players if you show up with a gazzilion resources, but other than those games, so what if you leveled up quickly? why spend dev effort on trying to stop it?

ultrafez• 2 years ago

People might not buy a game if they don't think they'll get a fair play experience.

plutoh28• 2 years ago

A game that is overrun by cheaters makes it less fun to regular players. If regular players don’t want to play your game, it ends up being a hacker circle jerk before the servers stop getting consistent players at which point the game is dead. And a dead game is not interesting to potential buyers which affects the publishers revenue stream.

Kapura• 2 years ago

I know there are large multiplayer shooters that have or are going to be moving off of Linux soon. Anecdotally, the percentage of linux users running cheat software is significant, north of 50% in some cases.

Ultimately, I sympathize with game developers trying to create a good, _consistent_ experience for players across multiplayer titles. The reason players accept anticheat software in large mp games is because the alternative is worse.

LelouBil3• 2 years ago

I think I saw on HN a while ago someone suggesting that Valve could make a "clean kernel" build that anti cheats could whitelist for Linux/Proton games.

athrowaway3z• 2 years ago

The plan to control what a persistent cheater does to their own device is more than 5 decades of straight failures.

Just one more client anti-cheat measure bro. Just one ring lower bro.

I'm not sure what I find more terrifying: the persistence of the NSA & Disney lobby for subverting root control in all devices, or that so many people mindlessly agree its the right direction to go and their world will be a better place for it.

JohnMakin4• 2 years ago

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 developers had a bad habit of leaving them running/idle even if you were not playing.

I have a dedicated laptop for gaming that I do absolutely nothing else on, not even logging into email accounts. Just steam + games + whatever video software I might need. This is my sane compromise as someone who participates in a lot of competitive games. it sucks, but I see no better solution than to disclose it (insane this wasn't the standard already). Even that is hard, because if you disclose too much, cheaters can take advantage.

fullspectrumdev• 2 years ago

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.

JohnMakin4• 2 years ago

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.

thanzex• 2 years ago

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.

arcxi• 2 years ago

until very recently TF2's servers were infested by bots which kill you in one shot across the map. changing the server wouldn't help because they were on every server. this quite literally made the game unplayable for years.

alexandre_m• 2 years ago

and I really don't know of any other solution

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

JohnMakin4• 2 years ago

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

pphysch2• 2 years ago

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.

JohnMakin4• 2 years ago

This is a really interesting and potentially great idea, but I am fundamentally against the KYC thing because it puts me in a position where I'm at the whims of whatever BS automated moderation systems they put in place these days, which is usually quite terrible.

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

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