Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

by doener • 8 months ago

323 477 8 months ago

stavros2• 8 months ago

Hm, most of these seem updated 3-4 years ago, is this list relevant any more?

Zhyl• 8 months ago

Do you have examples of where something isn't accurate? If something hasn't changed it doesn't need to be updated. As far as I'm aware the things that change are updated quickly, hence the list is relevant.

stavros2• 8 months ago

No, I just assumed things would change a lot.

Hikikomori8• 8 months ago

While some anti cheat supports Linux they're mostly useless as you can much more easily bypass them on Linux compared to windows. I guess enabling them for competitive games is one way to increase Linux users.

hastily3114• 8 months ago

Is there really no way to make anti-cheat on Linux that can't be bypassed? I don't know much about this, but it seems very difficult to make an anti-cheat for a platform where you can make changes in the kernel.

kachapopopow3• 8 months ago

Linux explicitely allows you to do things that makes cheating *really* easy.

There is also complete lack of secure boot and a way to validate that your kernel hasn't been compromised.

I mean seriously, making a cheat for a proton supported game that no anticheat has any hopes of detecting are in 100 lines of a kmod driver and 1 console command: insmod.

On windows you at least need to use scuffed tools like KDU to bypass signature verification requirements and every anticheat can detect you with a simple physical memory scan.

rcxdude• 8 months ago

Linux supports secure boot just fine, it's just happy (correctly, IMO) to give the keys to the user and not the developer.

kalaksi• 8 months ago

There is also complete lack of secure boot

That's not true, though?

Zak• 8 months ago

I think the most stringent types of Windows anti-cheat rely on remote attestation of the operating system. It's theoretically possible to design a Linux-based OS that supports such a capability, but the sort of people who choose Linux are unlikely to accept a third party having the final say over their computer.

I, for one am disappointed that anyone has accepted it. Once it's widespread, service providers can demand it, as we're seeing with mobile banking apps and game anticheat.

Cu3PO422• 8 months ago

I also strongly dislike requiring remote attestation for any kind of software I want to run. But what I also dislike is cheaters in my online games and I genuinely do not have a better suggestion on what to do.

Personally, I run Windows purely for gaming and don't let it near any important data. For the latter, I boot into Linux with separately encrypted disks.

jsheard4• 8 months ago

A trusted entity (probably Valve) could provide a locked down distro where kernel integrity is enforced through secure boot and TPM attestation, but that would mean giving up some control over your own system. There's no guarantee that anything client-side is impossible to bypass of course, but the goal would be to more or less match what Windows offers, which isn't perfect either.

ChocolateGod5• 8 months ago

giving up some control over your own system

There could simply be a developer option that disables these integrity checks but subsequently breaks online games that rely on them. Valve could also offer a module that allows signed user-space binaries access to kernel space, which would be an improvement over Windows offers in that anti-cheat wouldn't need to live in the kernel.

I think that's a fine trade off.

Hikikomori8• 8 months ago

Could reboot into secure mode for these types of games.

CuriouslyC2• 8 months ago

You don't need a full distro, you can just run the game in a VM sandbox with trusted computing extensions alongside whatever distro you want. That breaks cheats that rely on network/memory inspection, you can still cheat using the raw pixel output to drive faked input, but I don't think the loop is closeable there.

maccard7• 8 months ago

This is what a console is.

soloridindan5• 8 months ago

I think the moment you accept data from the client as truth you've lost the battle already, everything else is just damage control. Loads of games have realized this and kept checking game rules on the serverside and reveal data on a need-to-know basis. This makes it nearly impossible for cheats to be made because anything you know you should know, and everythin you act is parsed by the backend according to rules already present

jsheard4• 8 months ago

Some kinds of cheating can be mitigated that way, but it can't really stop cheats which just play the game more optimally than the user is able to, using the same inputs and outputs that a legit player would use. Aim assistance in shooters, automatic parries in fighting games, economy-breaking levels of automation in MMOs, and so on.

There's also practical limits to how much data you can filter out in complex 3D games, both due to performance constraints, and because culling information too perfectly can cause things to pop into existence too late under real-world network latency. The effectiveness of ESP cheats can be reduced, but not eliminated in practice.

brettermeier• 8 months ago

However, this only solves the cheat problem to a minimal extent. There is a lot of important data that players should not be directly aware of, but which is important for the game. For example, it is important for calculating sounds to know where enemies are nearby, even though you cannot see them, which makes wall hacks possible, etc.

vkou3• 8 months ago

That only solves half of the cheating problem - illegal inputs from clients.

The other half is much harder to solve. For a simple example - my client knows that there is an enemy player around a corner. It knows exactly where that player is, because that player is walking, and making noise. A cheats could allow the cheater to see his opponent's player's model through the wall.

For a more blatant example, consider cheats in a first-person shooter that just snap your aim to the nearest enemy's head. This involves zero violation of the game's logic, and also makes the game completely unplayable for everyone in a lobby.

Thaxll2• 8 months ago

This is not how it works, most games that take cheating seriously already have a gameserver where most of the gameplay logic happen.

Doing everything server side does prevent cheating.

63stack2• 8 months ago

There is no way to make anticheat that can't be bypassed, regardless of OS. All of the anticheat games today have cheaters.

mrob• 8 months ago

Correct. E.g. you can aimbot by routing the video signal to a capture card on a separate computer and run image recognition software to generate mouse movements spoofed at the hardware level. The only way to reliably prevent cheating is with in-person tournaments played on hardware provided by the organizers.

calgoo• 8 months ago

The best way is to just make private servers, so people can play with their friends and not have to worry about random players. This also solves the issue of people using.... language thats not acceptable in games.

360MustangScope2• 8 months ago

It doesn’t have to be 100%. The point is to make it inconvenient. The majority of people will not do it if it is inconvenient.

Thats the point to many things in life that you just make it more difficult and most people won’t be bothered to attempt to circumvent whatever it is.

There will still be circumventers but it is will be less than if you just said fuck it.

RobotToaster• 8 months ago

Linux is resistant to rootkits, which is what these things are, and allows you to remove them, yes.

The correct solution is to verify everything server side, or actually have humans watch replays and ban cheaters, but both of those would reduce profits, so will obviously never happen.

lan3212• 8 months ago

IMO the real solution is back in community servers and votekicking.. It works on old games with no anticheat measures..

Maybe add some blatant detection for people teleporting and doing other absolutely impossible things serverside, but I don't understand why my team has to ruin their 'reputation' teamkilling a cheater so he doesn't ruin the game completely in most current games when the anticheat only catches free, old cheats. Just let people votekick and find someone else in the matchmaking queue who's willing to join halfway through.. Once votekicked enough times you can escalate to the AI (always indians) for automated (manual) review.

Also, you don't even have to ban cheaters. Just isolate them to play with each other. Some might find it fun and keep away from the normal players.

Edit: The 'issue' with community server manual review and votekick is you can be kicked for being cracked or garbage at the game legitimately, but TBH at this point you're ruining the fun of everyone else, so you should probably get in another server/match.. Also that premades can have majority, but that's easily solved by reducing their vote weight.

SkiFire13• 8 months ago

CSGO has actual humans watch replays to determine whether people were cheating, it's called overwatch. As can be seen, it doesn't actually stop cheating, at most it ensures that blatant ones are banned after the fact already happened.

theshrike79• 8 months ago

Server-authoritative games. Basically the client does stuff, gives the list of moves to the server along with a checksum/end result. Then the server runs the same commands on the same starting state and checks if it got the same result.

If a==b, then everything moves on as normal. If not, the client gets a synchronisation error and has to rewind back to the last known good state.

Completely unfeasible for anything real-time pretty much.

0xC0ncord• 8 months ago

Having done modding for some older shooter games built on the server-authoritative model, it's still possible to create a "pingless" experience, but it requires more calculations and compromises on client/server trust to make it work. For shooters specifically, you want the client to provide instant feedback when the gun fires, and ideally when they hit an enemy. You can achieve this by telling the server "I was at position A and shot my gun at position B and hit enemy Bob." The server will validate all of this before informing the client who fired and the client for "Bob" that Bob was killed. The compromise here is that the server must trust that the client isn't sending forged data, or the server must do additional computations to validate it.

JustFinishedBSG• 8 months ago

There’s just no way to stop cheating client side despite what devs love to think. But server side anti cheat is much harder and requires more work; it’s much simpler to just install spyware / rootkits on the client and call it a day.

360MustangScope2• 8 months ago

You can’t prevent wall hacks with only server side anti cheat. The client needs that data locally before the enemy is rendered on screen.

As mentioned in another comment, you can’t do this on the server without expensive checks for every single player that is always checking line of sight, because it’s not just your session running on a single server but multiple sessions.

And let’s say you did this, now you have a latency problem because most modern games to make them feel fluid has client side prediction with server reconciliation. This is what makes your modern games feel more responsive, if you put a constant server check there you have lost this.

No matter what people say online, it isn’t just move all of it to the server, there is data the client needs to know and can’t be spoonfed by the server.

data-ottawa• 8 months ago

I think it’s an organization accountability issue.

Why would a company pay for anti cheat infrastructure when they can outsource it to some company and blame them if there are cheaters or upset users? Windows is the status quo too, so it’s very easy to point to everyone else when justifying your choice to the execs.

It would be great if steam deck+box start costing studios quantifiable amounts of money that can be used to justify fixing this instead of outsourcing and hand waving.

CuriouslyC2• 8 months ago

You can run a VM using trusted computing extensions for the game. If the VM encrypts traffic, that stops network level cheats. You can still fake inputs/outputs to the machine if you put the work in, but then you can also use a vision model and faked input with actual consoles, so that hole is never going to get patched.

mcv• 8 months ago

Reliable anticheat is serverside. Clientside anticheat sounds like a fool's errand to me. You need to control the client, so that means the user cannot be in control of their own computer, which is contrary to the idea of Linux.

kimos2• 8 months ago

It works on Windows by essentially rooting the machine. MS holds control of a bunch of stuff because they hold the signing keys. It’s fundamentally incompatible with open source.

tete5• 8 months ago

Yes and no. I agree the only thing that can be reliable is server side.

However that means that anything based on reaction times and such is impossible to protect against (under reasonable conditions). At the end of the day you can always have a robot sitting at your desk. But there is steps to that. You can have something that highlights enemies, etc., you can have something that controls keyboard and mouse (maybe inside a VM, so you don't need hardware) and so on. You can reverse engineer packet encryption in a debugger (in most situations) and have something on the network messing with stuff and so on.

So in that regard, yes you can prevent everything you can prevent on the server, but you cannot prevent every sort of cheating on the server.

Everything that has rounds basically can be prevented (other than again a bot playing).

Everything that is complex to automate is better, but might just make cheating more "worthwhile".

The other thing you can do on the server is "dumb cheat" detection. Eg. the odds of someone being consistently as good at a game and such. Statistics like that is widespread and doesn't need any change on the client.

tete5• 8 months ago

You are looking completely wrong at this. There is no anti-cheat that cannot be bypassed. Period.

You can always run things in a VM, you can always replace your keyboard and mouse with a different device, you can always have your a camera instead of human eyes and have something that recognizes enemies.

Even cheat detection in the real physical world (sports, chess, etc.) is not a completely solved topic.

You can connect computers to other computers so other computers will always be able to control them.

The idea that any (currently realistic) cheat prevention is unbypassable is silly.

embedding-shape4• 8 months ago

The idea that any (currently realistic) cheat prevention is unbypassable is silly.

The idea that anti-cheats don't make sense because they don't catch 100% of the cheaters is what's silly, who believes that? Not even the people writing these anti-cheats believe catching 100% of them are possible, why are you under the assumption that others think that's possible?

If it removes 80% of the cheaters from the game, the experience goes from "Holy shit lets leave" to "Ok, bothersome, but fine", this is what they're reaching for, not some fantasy utopia that you seem to be under the impression is the target.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m3• 8 months ago

Yeah. It’s an erosion of rights that doesn’t solve the problem. You only need one cheater to make a game feel bad and DMA devices or pixel tracking can’t be stopped with these anti-cheats.

theknarf2• 8 months ago

I mean kernel level anti-cheat doesn't really work on Windows either, its just security theater.

surajrmal4• 8 months ago

Based on what data do you draw that conclusion? The fact that cheaters can still exist isn't an indictment that it doesn't ever work. Have you ab tested a game with an without anti cheat?

HALtheWise• 8 months ago

I did a pretty deep dive into this recently, although haven't yet started any implementation work. As far as I can tell, the best strategy that preserves Linux's open-source and user-empowering ideals as much as possible:

- The game obviously needs to run as root, at least until large amounts of this stuff gets upstreamed into the kernel.

- We're going to be leaving the kernel and boot as untrusted, but injecting a hypervisor underneath the running kernel that is responsible for protecting most pages of game memory. This allows users to still run whatever kernel they want.

- The hypervisor sets up two sets of page tables, one that's only active when the game's thread is running and in userspace, one that hides protected pages and is active when the kernel or other threads are running. Note that game code itself needs to get decrypted into protected ram.

- The TPM of the system gets involved when we jump into the hypervisor to attest that the hypervisor is actually running, and the hypervisor then provides attestations to userspace that certain memory regions are protected from kernel or other thread access.

- Any syscalls will fail if they require the kernel to read or write pages that are protected. The game needs to allocate data that should be shared with the kernel into non-protected pages.

- When the game is closed, we can remove the hypervisor and Linux will be back to bare metal operation. This should be unobservable to the rest of the system.

This architecture preserves the ability of users to run arbitrary kernel modules, but does mean a hypothetical attacker can observe data that passes through the kernel (like draw calls/pixels). It's likely that a more complete implementation would also want some way for the hypervisor to attest to the accuracy of keyboard/mouse input and interface with iommu configuration like Windows KAC does.

droolboy• 8 months ago

The only game I miss when I moved to Linux was League of Legends. Everything else pretty much works. I get that it’s not worth it for them to deal with more potential cheating, but it’s a bummer.

_cenw3• 8 months ago

The worst thing about League was that Riot added it retroactively after years of effort to patch Wine to work with League's weird quirky code. It was the only game that I always remember having a custom Wine build in Lutris even as far back as the early 2010s.

It also would be completely unnecessary if they fixed their servers.

asdff2• 8 months ago

I'm playing through wine (kegworks) on OSX but its no fairytale over here. TF2 over wine literally performs worse than native TF2 on my old dual core 2012 mbp. I'm having to use low resolution configs again. CS2 works OK but there are severe lagspikes that ultimately ruin the gunplay (a little more tolerable when it happens in tf2 but its there too). About the only game that works well in this setup for me is Mount and Blade: Warband. But I mean its a 2010 game... I can't even play bannerlord because of anticheat. Can't play chivalry 2 because anticheat. Can't play cities skylines 2. Most games that do work seem to struggle to get 40fps even on m max series macbooks. I'm not sure where the incompatibility is but its got to be in the software layer software given the specs on those max macbooks.

I just wish someone actually cared about this stuff at Apple. GPTK is not that useful. Rosetta 2 has some serious performance throttling going on somewhere in it (why is native macos cities skyline fps locked at 40fps...). Former mainstay native macos game devs from 10-15 years ago have zero interest publishing for the platform today, valve included.

wiz21c• 8 months ago

It'd be nice to have the publisher of the games...

givemeethekeys2• 8 months ago

Between Windows being so unbearably bloated and no way to make anti-cheat really work on Linux, it looks like the consoles win!

_cenw3• 8 months ago

Or you could miss out on like... 5 games. Competitive games on a controller would be a much larger trade off than dual booting to me.

donatj• 8 months ago

On Xbox at least Keyboard / Mouse support is decent. I played Fortnite and Minecraft this way for a while.

Personal preference, but I'd far rather have a separate device dedicated to gaming than my kernel hacked by anti cheat.

https://www.purexbox.com/guides/all-xbox-games-with-mouse-an...

doener• 8 months ago

No modding and higher prices of games on consoles though.

givemeethekeys2• 8 months ago

This is a big, missing piece for sure. I suppose for competitive games though, it's okay to not be able to mod, and for everything else, we have PC's.

komali22• 8 months ago

On my PC I can play basically every game ever made in all of human history, minus maybe 7 that use kernel level anti cheat, and a couple PS5 and PS4 exclusives.

Other than that I have emulation plus a steam library. I'll take that over a locked in console that can only play 2 generations of games any day!

Edit: I'm not sure why the person who replied to me asking about emulators was nuked, emulators are still legal everywhere as far as I know. Anyway tldr go check out emudeck's GitHub repo to see a good list of emulators for basically every platform.

simoncion9• 8 months ago

I'm not sure why the person who replied to me asking about emulators was nuked...

Wow. They're so nuked, I can't even vouch for them. "Good" to know that's possible on HN, I guess.

drnick1• 8 months ago

I used to dual boot, but I that there are so many games on Linux, I just don't buy or play incompatible games. So EA lost a BF6 sale for being assholes.

teroshan• 8 months ago

Same situation here. If it were last year, I may have caved. But at this point I don't want to bother with dual booting and losing my Linux context as I do so.

Instead I'm playing ARC Raiders which works perfectly on Linux and I don't regret a thing.

__alexs4• 8 months ago

It's funny that game makers make a fuss about anti-cheat not working on Linux but then publish Switch versions of their games. That platform has almost zero security and is commonly emulated with cheats even in multiplayer these days.

j-bos• 8 months ago

This. Even kernel level anti-c-spyware can't stop a cheap vision model hokked to a mouse, see youtube for examples from simple auto input up to full on elctromuscular stimulation.

embedding-shape4• 8 months ago

Based on the latest report from Dice/EA/BF6, seems indeed like they're detecting hardware-based cheating as well: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2807960/view/4972134...

Although who knows, they might be outright lying about that just to scare cheaters, but I tend to default to assuming what they're saying is more or less true.

archerx4• 8 months ago

Yes the channel “Basically homeless” has a few variations on this. Using electrodes to move your muscles to more practical a bot that moves your mouse pad for you to give you perfect aim. No anti cheat can detect that because there is nothing to detect.

tonyhart7• 8 months ago

what multiplayer (esports) game that can run on switch ????

fornite???? its not gonna be main playerbase

amarant2• 8 months ago

From the top of my head: Rocket league, Splatoon.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the 2 I play

Q6T46nT668w6i3m3• 8 months ago

Madden and NBA2K

Levitz2• 8 months ago

It's a numbers issue. How often do people encounter cheaters while playing Switch games online?

__alexs4• 8 months ago

Often because of cross play.

hollandheese• 8 months ago

Try playing Pokémon Legends Z-A multiplayer.

Almondsetat2• 8 months ago

The thing is: the Switch has a clear ToS, and if the user breaks it they can get into trouble. OTOH, if you release your game in Linux... that's it

riddley• 8 months ago

The games have ToS though right?

lawn2• 8 months ago

Bad excuse, they could rely on Steam ToS for example.

bakugo2• 8 months ago

is commonly emulated with cheats even in multiplayer

There is no Switch emulator that can play online on official servers.

The only way you can cheat online is by hacking a real console, but the percentage of people who do it is quite small.

__alexs4• 8 months ago

AIUI you can do it, but you risk the Switch you got the data from being banned.

hiccuphippo• 8 months ago

If people cheat in the switch, they can blame Nintendo. If people cheat in PC, they can blame the anticheat. Without anticheat, they have to take the blame.

archerx4• 8 months ago

I still blame the devs of the games.

shmerl2• 8 months ago

Client side anti cheats is a lazy excuse why they don't want to spend on server side anti cheats anyway.

SirMaster3• 8 months ago

How do you stop a client-side wallhack with server side anti-cheat?

Mindwipe6• 8 months ago

The Switch has good security as long as you can check the OS version robustly.

Any Switch game using an anti-cheat solution that can't trivially detect that it's being emulated is... not using a very good anti-cheat solution.

sylware2• 8 months ago

kernel anti-cheat are notoriously inefficient and are weaponized by hackers.

tete5• 8 months ago

In still doesn't prevent a wide array of cheating.

sylware2• 8 months ago

It is more a anti-(non-steamOS)-linux than anything else.

super2562• 8 months ago

Are they? Cheats for games like Fortnite, CS (Faceit), Rust, LoL have become very expensive (100 USD per month are not unheard of) or require you to purchase special hardware.

And I have yet to come across an anti cheat driver of the big publishers (EAC, Faceit, Javelin, Vanguard) being exploited and allow access to r/w kernel memory. It is more likely that the driver of some hardware is being exploited for, rather than anti cheat drivers.

Personally, I only remember the ac driver of Capcom ever being exploited. Compare this to the dozen hardware/av drivers which were exploitable, like the Intel LAN utility driver, ASUS IOMap64, MSI NTIOLIB or that one Razer driver. Oh, and CPU-Z and the Avast Hypervisor driver were exploitable too and allowed r/w on kernel memory. These drivers are way more likely to be weaponized than ac drivers.

vablings12• 8 months ago

The thousands of RGB drivers from the various manufacturers that are just copy+paste jobs on RWEverything is actually disgusting and Microsoft letting that just happen is a serious problem. Ah yes you added AES to your IOCTL very secure! I'd say the only reason that these drivers haven't been exploited is because of the insane bug bounties in place. There are also other big issues in games, see the whole hack with Apex Legends lmao

torginus• 8 months ago

I remember the anti-cheat of Valorant being exploited where basically the hackers could turn a bug in the game code into full kernel-level root access via the anti-cheat.

Video games are not engineered to withstand sophisticated hacking attacks which is fine mostly since the bad guys can only use their access to cheat - in this case they could fully compromise your system thanks to the kernel access of anti cheat

phoronixrly• 8 months ago

Thank you, I prefer my Linux without rootkits.

EasyMark• 8 months ago

Same here, I don't need any game so badly that I compromise my security unnecessarily. I'll just play something else.

Jhsto• 8 months ago

Cheats aside, are there any competitive games that include Uber-like rating system? Meaning that you'd need to provide feedback whether you'd play with your opponents/teammates again after a game.

silvanocerza• 8 months ago

Dota 2 comes to mind, they have the commend system. If I remember correctly they added something like this to CS: GO too.

super2562• 8 months ago

Pretty sure the commendation system in CS is just for looks, as it can be easily gamed.

Insanity2• 8 months ago

Yes to some extent, I believe “The Finals” asked to rate how each match went in earlier seasons. But that stopped now that the game is more mature and feeling well balanced.

Cod MW2019 would occasionally ask, but once every X game IIRC.

kreco• 8 months ago

The idea of someone rating me, or rating someone else makes me anxious.

I'm not sure it would be better than just reporting people with undesired behavior.

Insanity2• 8 months ago

I think it’s more anonymized like “did you enjoy the game with this team (1-5)”

gilrain• 8 months ago

The idea of someone rating me, or rating someone else makes me anxious.

But not enough to avoid, as you’re here.

Rucadi• 8 months ago

Smite used to do that, but long time since I played it.

GCUMstlyHarmls• 8 months ago

Overwatch (1) had something like that. Not sure if Overwatch (2) still has it, or how it functions now.

In higher ELO, people would target good players with "avoid player"^1, effectively soft-banning those people from match making because the pool was small enough. They would still get put in matches eventually but their queues would blow out a lot.

From memory it did not have an explicit "match me with this person" button, but you could thumbs up players in the post-match podium as well as endorse them which may have soft-factored into matching you with them again.

\1 I think it was called this. It was a general "bad attitude" marker, not a "bad team mate" or "bad opponent" marker.

NekkoDroid2• 8 months ago

Overwatch (1 and 2) had/have an avoid system, but it only avoids as teammate. Overwatch 1 use to at the very beginning have a system to avoid a player as a whole and they wouldn't be matched in your game at all, but that was remove really early on, as it is easily abusable against good player (I don't want them on the enemy team, they are too good so just get rid of them entirely) and there was a report system anyway for other kinda bad stuff.

Then there is just the endorsement system, which is just a level from 1-5 and you can endorse people you liked playing with. It doesn't really do much in matchmaking but you can't do certain things if you are below a certain level (I forgot what all it was but you can't make (public?) custom games if you are too low and I think text and voice chat could also get disabled if you are too low).

pynappo• 8 months ago

Overwatch 2 has a simplified endorsement system. It's just an optional thumbs up instead of endorsement for 1 of 3 reasons (roughly something like sportsmanship, good teammate, or good leader).

The avoid system is now more flexible. You have 3 pin slots for people you never really want to see on your team again, plus 12(?) regular avoid slots to avoid people for a week at a time like usual. In situations where too many avoid conflicts occur and the matchmaker struggles to create a match (e.g. high ELO), it will start to ignore people's avoid slots in order of (last regular avoid > first regular avoid > pin slots), i think.

blibble• 8 months ago

Overwatch did have a "prefer this player" option, but not for very long

asdff2• 8 months ago

Not quite like that but plenty of games used to have vote kick mechanisms.

tete5• 8 months ago

Well, that's just silly. Hook up a Raspberry Pi as your keyboard, mouse input and video output and all the anti-cheat fails. Same (largely) for VMs, same for many emulators.

And if nothing works you can always build a robot pushing mouse, buttons, etc.

Of course you can raise the bar, but if anything has been shown it's that cheating is not something that anyone has been able to prevent yet.

In many situations you can also interfere on the packet level. Of course maybe you need to extract some key, but in many situations that's not exactly hard. And then you can hook something into network.

kimos2• 8 months ago

The cheating isn’t just about input speed or accuracy though. It’s about seeing around corners or having knowledge about other things in the game that you can’t see on the screen.

short_sells_poo• 8 months ago

They already do this. Including peripherals which appear as an actual mouse, but they are there only so that cheat software can take control of the input without modifying the game memory. There are cheats which run on a separate machine and access the game memory via a dedicated DMA card (which itself presents itself as an innocent piece of hardware). Note, this can still be detected either via detecting the DMA card itself, or eventually these shenanigans will be killed off by IOMMU.

Unfortunately, there are also plenty of offerings which do not touch the game memory or process at all, and work purely based on image recognition and these days they actually use AI that is trained on specific games. I have no idea how they plan to detect these. All the cheat needs is the video feed and the ability to provide input via mouse and keyboard, and as you say this is trivial to do in a way that is entirely undetectable.

9999000009997• 8 months ago

I'm ordering a new laptop to work on LLM stuff, and while I thought about jumping through the hoops to get Linux running with secure boot...

I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well

I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally hyperinvasive maleware.

I don't need gaming that much.

And if I do I'll stream it with Gamepass or another cloud service.

jmuguy• 8 months ago

All I really do on my Windows system is play games, and because of that I don't mind whatever draconian crap that's required to keep cheaters in check. It sucks, but not sure of a better solution.

i80and• 8 months ago

I'm a pretty prolific gamer, but at the start of the year I finally kicked Windows to the curb.

It's been fine. Surprisingly few games I'm interested in to begin with have anticheat that doesn't work on Linux, and it's comforting to know games aren't allowed to just shove trash into kernel space at will.

ecshafer• 8 months ago

If you play older games, Linux ironically works better than windows now for stability. The only game I have seen any issues with (note I don't really play multiplayer much) is the Harry Potter game, but proton eventually fixed that.

9999000009997• 8 months ago

The thing is I still need Windows for music production.

Linux will never compete here.

commakozzi2• 8 months ago

I dropped my Game Pass sub immediately after they upped the sub price and unplugged my Xbox Series X. I have a Bazzite machine, but I've had issues with the NVidia drivers and not enough patience to deal with it. So i'm currently ONLY using my Steam Deck OLED for gaming. When i want to play big AAA games at my desk (SD in docked mode), i'll use GeForce Now and all of it has been a wonderful experience, even the online "competitive" FPS games like BF6. Much better than my experience on either Windows or Xbox. I'll never go back... and i'm impatiently waiting on my Steam Machine!

hayleox• 8 months ago

Yep same; have had Linux on my laptop for a decade plus, but finally switched my desktop over a few years ago, and I have no regrets. The real magic is that I no longer feel the need to do any research before buying a game; it usually just works. Granted, I don't really play competitive multiplayer games, so YMMV (but even that might be about to change if the Steam Machine sells well enough).

gishh• 8 months ago

Just get a ps5. I went through the same adventure.

Gracana• 8 months ago

I did that for years and I recommend it as well. Pure linux desktop + console for games is a nice combo and a good separation of functions.

Of course... at this point I am back to having a PC with a beastly GPU and I boot Windows for games and CAD. It is hard to resist high framerate 4k gaming once it becomes a possibility, so now I need to figure out the secure boot problem for the occasional game that requires it.

limagnolia• 8 months ago

A PS5 is an even more locked down system! There are vastly more games, many I already own, that work on Linux.

em3rgent0rdr• 8 months ago

I'd much rather invest one powerful machine that cand do work and games instead of two that take up extra space and generate more e-waste.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m3• 8 months ago

I was in a similar situation and ended up buying a PS5. It ended up being exactly what I wanted.

MrDrMcCoy2• 8 months ago

How's the mouse and keyboard story on PlayStation? The few shooters I play would greatly hinder me if I were stuck on a gamepad.

grayhatter• 8 months ago

I don't need gaming that much.

Counter point: gaming is fun, and indy games are worth investing in. Voting with your wallet works better if you vote for behavior that's not user hostile, rather than only abstaining.

theoldgreybeard2• 8 months ago

Lots of games don't need invasive anti-cheat. You can just play those. There are literally too many awesome games on the market to ever be without something great to play.

moltopoco• 8 months ago

Many people have one or more Discord groups where someone will say "let's play Valorant tonight" and then everyone just installs it. Linux is fantastic for local gaming on a handheld or in the living room, not so much when your non-Linux friends pick the game.

weberer• 8 months ago

Just to be clear, the anti-cheat systems that support Linux run at the user level and don't require secure boot. Those kernel-level and secure boot restrictions only apply to a handful of games, and they all explicitly block Linux users anyway. For example, I've been playing Arc Raiders a lot recently in Linux, and the user-level EAC works just fine.

theoldgreybeard2• 8 months ago

The user-level cheats are extremely bad. For example, Elden Ring uses EZ Anti-Cheat and it works on linux and that game is infested with PvP cheaters.

gordonfish• 8 months ago

I honestly don't understand why any game is even checking if secure boot is enabled.

If anything it's for the OS to care about that, not individual programs. Afaik, secure boot doesn't (on it's own) prevent the running of arbitrary software, so how is it actually preventing cheating?

Mindwipe6• 8 months ago

It does mean that a signed OS image is running, so demonstrates that the kernel was unaltered at start-up.

It also demonstrates further levels of driver signing robustness.

bigstrat20032• 8 months ago

What irritates me is when games that don't even benefit from anti-cheat require it. Helldivers 2, for example. My dudes, it's a co-op game. My teammates and I are all on the same side! Moreover, the vast majority of people are gonna play with their friends, not randoms. And if your friend is using a cheat and it bothers you, you just ask him to stop. There's no reason for a game like Helldivers 2 to require anti-cheat at all, let alone the rootkit variety. And yet...

kipchak• 8 months ago

Helldivers might have more to do with preventing people from easily farming super credits versus game integrity.

isk517• 8 months ago

Elden Ring: Nightreign is also a co-op PvE game that has anti-cheating in it. The most common way people cheat is by fudging then items equipped to their character that slightly alter their stats and abilities. Since the game is rouge-like and all of your character information and equipment you can assign before entering the game is handled locally then all it takes is editing your save file which the game and server have no way of (or makes no effort to) detect.

Also, after a brief period, all of the cheaters disappeared because just repeatedly winning a PvE game get boring.

cortesoft6• 8 months ago

The best games with anti-cheat have an option to launch without using it, but just restrict what game types you can play. Playing with friends should be allowed without anti-cheat.

troad• 8 months ago

It's also bad with games that have been sucked into the live service hell-vortex. I can't fire up a quick game of Madden against the CPU because EA has turned Madden into a multiplayer lootbox casino, so they chuck Linux-blocking anti-cheat on the whole damn thing, single-player and all.

jadbox• 8 months ago

What? Helldivers 2 works just fine on linux for me. Is this just a windows thing?

bflesch3• 8 months ago

As most of you know, these anti-cheat systems are functionally equivalent to rootkits. There is zero visibility into how these privileges are used for targeted attacks. Due to geographic location of the large game companies this has a geopolitical angle. Fingerprinting of devices and the networks they are in provides a lot of metadata that is most definitely fed into their intelligence apparatus.

pmarreck2• 8 months ago

I remember trying to install Valorant for the first time, and its ridiculously invasive anticheat kernel mod (or whatever it's called) gave me my first blue (or was it red??) screen I'd seen on Windows in years.

Immediately uninstalled it and haven't ever played Valorant to this day. Fuck that crap, if your community is so toxic that you need a rootkit to keep cheaters at bay, then maybe it's more of a community problem than a technological one. And yes, if this means that you have to block all of China in order to do so, then that is still a community problem. Put your rootkits on your Chinese servers, separate them out, and let the cheaters fight amongst themselves.

xeonmc2• 8 months ago

Is it any coincidence that such state is from the same company behind League of Legends?

philipallstar• 8 months ago

if your community is so toxic that

It's nothing to do with a toxic community.

surajrmal4• 8 months ago

Unpopular opinion, but we would be better off with a single open trusted implementation of anti cheat (aka drm) which can attest whatever requirements are desired by the game is met. The only real problem is that it would likely be limited to approved kernel images and someone would need to own that validation and signing infrastructure, but you could imagine having multiple trusted entities have this role.

bflesch3• 8 months ago

Kernel anticheat is not really effective because it can be circumvented on the hardware level, for example using direct memory access with a second computer and screen to show the hidden game state.

Cheating is a meat space problem and there is no technical solution to it. Thats why in tournaments there are referees standing behind the players. Ultimately it comes down to checking if metrics like reaction speed are humanly possible, but a rootkit is not really needed for that.

von_lohengramm• 8 months ago

Imagine wanting tivoization. Horrifying.

archagon• 8 months ago

This way lies the death of general purpose computing.

chainingsolid• 8 months ago

I'm not sure this is an unpopular opinion. I've seen it suggested multiple times, and IF done correctly (open/transparent) would solve most of the complaints with the ring-zero anti cheats. Still won't solve every cheat, especially hardware, social and perhaps good VMs. I would require the app/game to disclose what it requires to be true.

az09mugen• 8 months ago

Yes, and more than that, the kernel-level-anticheats are unable to spot someone using a Cronus ( hardware aim assist among other stuff [0] ).

I'm never going to play again online on any FPS because that whole incoherent bubble of crap disgusts me.

The multiplayer games community is toxic, and players are focused on success whatever the cost is. And I don't even want to touch the question of match making with a 10-foot-pole. Local, self-hosted or in small community is the best.

[0] https://cronus.shop/

officeplant6• 8 months ago

Local, self-hosted or in small community is the best.

It always makes me happy to fire up Quake via Darkplaces or even ioQuake3 and still see servers up and people playing.

stephen_cagle• 8 months ago

I'm curious, do they have to be? Would it be possible to boot the program + the anti cheat into it's own VM or something? So they know I am running on trusted hardware, but I know that the aren't reading my emails? Genuinely curious and don't know the answer to this.

bflesch3• 8 months ago

The anticheat will try to detect the VM and it will give a warning, so that's not a solution. Ideally keep leisure time devices and work devices separate. Consoles are a good solution because you are never tempted to use your emails on those.

But also you need to think about who your adversary is. Other countries have access to all your icloud mail and photos all the time. Something like dropbox and onedrive is scanned and catalogued in the background.

Hardware supply chain is a difficult topic and each layer of abstraction has their own mini operating system in the firmware, and past has shown many of them have backdoors.

kamranjon• 8 months ago

At this point - you would think that cheaters could be detected on the server side by either training a model to flag abnormal behavior or do some type of statistics on the movement patterns over time - is a client-side anti-cheat really required?

pmarreck2• 8 months ago

I don't believe there's a foolproof way to do this.

It's basically the usual cat-and-mouse game of an arms race.

Lalabadie• 8 months ago

That's because the 2025 definition of "anti-cheat" leans heavily towards preventing players from enjoying client-side content that's locked behind microtransactions (for example, EA's new Skate game).

wavemode• 8 months ago

Many forms of cheating revolve around modding the game locally so that certain textures can be seen through walls, so you always know where opponents are. So you aren't breaking any laws of physics, you are just able to make much better tactical decisions.

The obvious solution would be, just don't send data to the player's client about enemies that are behind walls. But this is a surprisingly hard thing to engineer in realtime games without breaking the player experience (see: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-..., and then notice that even in the final video wallhacks are still possible, they're just more delayed).

Quimoniz• 8 months ago

So you aren't breaking any laws of physics, you are just able to make much better tactical decisions.

With respect I'd like to disagree on this subtly. A lot of games have the client send their cursor position at relatively frequent updates/packages (i.e. sub-second). So the server knows pretty precisely in which direction and to which object a player is looking.

This in turn can be readily used upon when using wall-hacks, as most players, who use wall-hacks tend to almost faithfully follow objects behind walls with their cursor, which good moderators can usually spot within a few seconds, when reviewing such footage (source: I was involved in recognizing Wall-Hacks in Minecraft, where players would replace textures, to easily find and mine diamonds underground).

ThatPlayer4• 8 months ago

That final video is recorded to look better than it is too: the delay is based on position, not time. In a real game you'd be moving slower and have the enemy's data on screen for longer.

Doxin• 8 months ago

In Minecraft one of the common ways to catch people using x-ray hacks or transparent texture packs is to run statistics on the blocks mined. If the ratio of stone-to-diamond gets significantly out of whack it's a sure sign someone is cheating.

In blackjack card counting is (probabilistically) caught by tracking player winnings. If someone is beating the odds a bit too much it's a fairly good indicator they are counting cards. Of course in this case getting it wrong isn't so bad from the casinos perspective either since then they'll just kick out a player that was costing them money anyhow.

When the enigma cypher got cracked they had to be very careful about when to act on information gained. If they started beating the odds too much the Germans would cotton on to enigma being broken.

My point being that cheating will almost by definition improve your odds. There are definitely ways to catch that sort of thing happening without installing rootkits. You just might need to hire a couple mathematicians to figure it out.

brendoelfrendo3• 8 months ago

This is done, and generally doesn't work as well. Your model will catch people using yesterday's cheats, but the cat-and-mouse nature of cheating means that people will adapt. Funnily enough, cheaters are also training models to play games so that they can evade cheat detection. The kernel-level anticheats are designed to prevent the game from running if they detect you are running any software that interacts with the game. Much simpler for the developer, and circumventing it usually requires running your cheats on a second machine which a) limits what you can do and b) has a higher barrier to entry.

lwansbrough2• 8 months ago

What you’ll find is that a subset of players define a behaviour and now you have to prove that that behaviour is cheating. For most behaviours that could be cheating, it will overlap with skilled players.

Examples would be pre-aiming corners and >99th percentile reaction time.

You need a false positive rate well below 1%.

maccard7• 8 months ago

It’s estimated that cod warzone has 45 million players - a 0.1% false positive rate at that player count is 45000 people. That’s a _lot_. It needs to be orders of magnitude less than that.

rasz• 8 months ago

oh but that would mean more computation on the server, cant have that!

LanceH3• 8 months ago

Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers.

It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% solve the problem.

sofixa• 8 months ago

caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers

Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere near enough capacity for both the server and the actual game running at the same time); but it's a minuscule percentage.

afavour• 8 months ago

I never ran a server back in the day but I still benefitted from community run servers where decisions about banning were done by volunteer admins. These days with centralized servers it has to be automated.

galbar• 8 months ago

For a casual CS server the ratio could perfectly be 1:50 and that'd be fine. That's how it used to be with, i.e., CS:Source.

Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which lowered the ratio even further.

IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller forums (be it web communities or game server communities) than to do for huge ones.

squigz6• 8 months ago

Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server?

Let's put it differently: What % of people among those who program are interested in maintaining open source software?

A very low %, and yet it's a thriving ecosystem.

To bring it back to gaming: How many people who game are interested in modding, or creating models/maps/etc? Again, a very low %, and yet...

rererereferred• 8 months ago

There are games I play were one of the players' machines becomes the server. In some it's transparent to them, you just join their world or lobby, in others it's explicit and you even have to input the host's IP to enter.

Standalone servers you need to run separately and care for are much more rare.

hamdingers10• 8 months ago

This isn't a problem because any given server can support hundreds or thousands of weekly players, so only 0.1% of your playerbase needs to run a server.

We had this, it worked, for years. I'm baffled by all the posters saying it won't, because it did.

hparadiz4• 8 months ago

We used to run these servers on machines that today aren't even 20% of the M1 in my MacBook air.

hombre_fatal5• 8 months ago

Even if custom game servers were a preferable experience, which I would argue against, it doesn't really do anything for this problem.

By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone.

It's kind of like thinking you can forgo anti-bot measures because your website's users can just report the bots: by the time it's your users' problem, you've ruined the experience for everyone except the bots.

squigz6• 8 months ago

By the time you have to wait for someone to cheat just to ban a single user, the disruption is already done. Your 4v4 45min game is already disrupted and everyone has already wasted their time now that you have to kick someone.

The difference is there is usually an existing level of trust between people playing on a private server. Usually your group would know ahead of time if someone is going to potentially be a problem.

Furthermore, even with public dedicated servers, there's a psychological aspect to it - it's no longer just a random matchmaking server; you're almost walking into someone's house. Many people feel a lot more pressure not to misbehave

Then there's the fact that you don't have to wait many days for your cheating report to hopefully be acted on. Our game got interrupted? Well, that sucks, but we can just ban that guy and go again and we likely won't have to worry that our very next game will also contain a cheater

Finally: these defences always have an implicit assumption with it: that the horribly pervasive anti-cheats actually... you know, work. They do, to a rather limited extent, but cheaters are still rampant, so what's the point?

chownie4• 8 months ago

I would much rather my 45 minute game be disrupted and the user booted permanently by moderators VS every game be disrupted for months while the developers try and work out which parts of my privacy they can invade to maybe hopefully boot the cheaters.

ratelimitsteve• 8 months ago

counterpoint: my 45 min 4v4 game gets terminally disrupted if I can't run the game on my device

Kuinox11• 8 months ago

Did you played in this era ?

- If you were too good on some server, you'd get banned.

- If the admin doesn't know well cheating, he could tolerate something that was obvious cheating.

- Cheaters could just change server often.

It used to be easy to just ban peoples yes, and it was as easy to switch servers.

Plus on most competitive game today, you have custom lobbies, which do exactly what you want, and there is a reason why only a minority of players uses it.

hamdingers10• 8 months ago

All true, but of course you're missing the player agency component that renders those issues moot. If any of the above happens, you can simply find another server.

Private games (now called "custom lobbies") were available back then too, they're not equivalent to a public server browser.

OkayPhysicist2• 8 months ago

Custom lobbies don't meet the same need. That's for playing with your friends, or at least, people you vet yourself. Community servers are a sub-community in of themselves: people tend to play on the same servers on a regular basis, allowing you to build rapport, community norms, and have substantially more direct moderation than company-run servers.

Yes, sometimes you run into power-tripping moderators. That comes with the territory of having moderators. But the upsides, of being embedded in a usefully-sized community, and having nearly constant human moderation, not to mention the whole "stop killing games" of it all, far outweigh the need to shop around a bit for a good server.

I think the ideal middle ground is something like Squad's server system: The developers offer a contract to server owners, establishing basic standards that must be met to be a recommended server. Rules forbidding the crazy bigotry that milsims tend to attract, minimum server specs to ensure smooth gameplay, an effective appeals process. If a server meets those requirements, and signs the agreement to keep meeting those standards, they get put on a "recommended" server list (which 90%+ of the playerbase exclusively use). Other servers go on the "custom" server list, which can be modded, or spun up for certain events, or whatever.

jdashg• 8 months ago

I did indeed play in the era LanceH is talking about, and I agree with them! We had many thriving communities with no serious cheating problems because of community moderation.

Yes, there were poorly moderated servers, but you could simply leave and try a different community until you found one that clicked for you. When you require equal moderation everywhere, you throw the baby out with the bath water.

LMYahooTFY10• 8 months ago

This isn't the reason.

The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today.

And cheating is an arms race. It's just hacking. You either preserve game integrity or you're going to have cheaters.

t-writescode• 8 months ago

How did it work in the early Steam (CS 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, CS:S) and GameSpy days?

thomastjeffery3• 8 months ago

People are still playing Battlefield 4 (2013) on user-hosted servers. Right now.

The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping, and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of servers by ping.

Cheating is an arms race that no one needs to participate in. Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.

LanceH3• 8 months ago

We lost a lot of other things as well. Like modding and especially maps.

It doesn't matter how good the game developers are, someone out there is could make a better map.

The studios took control of everything, and their answer is to rootkit our computers, and to buy more DLC if we want another map.

Personally, I don't accept the premise that such studio control is necessary for me to have fun playing a game.

I especially miss custom maps.

jsheard4• 8 months ago

The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today.

Case in point, Counter Strike is a rare example of a popular game which supports both the "modern" matchmaking paradigm and the classic community server paradigm... and for better or worse the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking.

MetaWhirledPeas• 8 months ago

can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today

I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which have less of a cheating problem to begin with.

I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without centralization, if only because centralization is exactly where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense. Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least.

That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.

0x1ch• 8 months ago

UGC Highlander and the countless CS pug servers show otherwise, to some extent.

thayne• 8 months ago

Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat.

Does it though? Unless winning has real-world rewards, does it really matter that much if you are playing against someone who is cheating, if with cheating, they are evenly matched against you? Assuming the matchmaking works well, people who cheat would end up getting matched with either other people who cheat, or people who are good enough to compete against cheaters.

beeflet• 8 months ago

The "players run their own servers" model has worked fine in TF2. If you played community-run servers, you never ran into the bot issue.

There are even ranked, private competitive leagues like TF2Center

salawat• 8 months ago

Matchmaking isn't worth rooting my machine. Give me a dedicated server to host for folks, and we'll work out an equilibrium eventually.

JulianHC• 8 months ago

Not necessary, case in point skill-based-matchmaking got a lot of blow back when studios want to implement it.

vel0city• 8 months ago

It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing

I ran servers for a lot of games. It was often difficult to ban people from playing. First off, someone with ban permissions would have to actually be online at the time. So often nothing would happen at all, you'd just have to leave and find a different server. Second, one could get banned, often just change their IP or use a different CD key or whatever other identifier the game used, and hop back on with a new identity.

Meanwhile discoverability of similarly skilled matches were a challenge, along with actually playing with a group of friends against new people. Its not some perfect panacea, there are a lot of things people disliked about picking private servers to play on.

orbital-decay2• 8 months ago

All of this is hard but solvable at least for some genres, with the help of the platform and game devs. A decade+ ago, I ran servers for several PvP sandbox games, we've been one of the major EU hubs. This was pretty complicated - tons of custom observability tooling, a community with 24/7 mods, investigations, mod transparency, etc. The IDs were partially solved by Steam, the rest was handled by player behavior tracking and reputation.

We also had skill-separated servers. Casual ones had votebans for teams and players that were too organized/skilled/abusive, with case by case mod approval. Anarchy servers had nearly zero rules and were absolutely cutthroat and toxic but fair, you always knew what you were signing up for. They even had mods temporarily banning players for whining.

Cheaters never lasted long in our servers, including returning ones. Running a dedicated server takes some dedication. Know the game and people you're doing this for.

dmayle• 8 months ago

The only actual problem with cheating is leaderboards.

When you have accurate matchmaking, you will be playing against other players of a similar skill level. If you we're playing in single-player mode, it wouldn't bother you that some of the players were better than others.

Whether the person you're playing against is as good as you because they have aim assist, while you have a 17g mouse and twitch reflexes shouldn't matter. You're both playing at equivalent skill levels.

The only reason it matters to anyone is that they want their skills to be recognized as better than someone else's. Take down the leaderboards, and bring back the fun.

I say, let the people cheat.

drdaeman• 8 months ago

Not just single player. Even in competitive multiplayer a lot of the complaints about "cheating" are actually complaints about matchmaking, and "cheating" is a giant red herring (griefing is a different matter, of course, that gets lumped into the umbrella term of "cheating"). But trying to explain this is typically like pissing against the wind, because people already believe in the existing status quo (no matter how irrational it is) and no one wants to change their beliefs unless it obviously and immediately short-term benefits them.

Tadpole9181• 8 months ago

Comments like this just make me upset to the point I can't cohere an appropriate argument. It's so out-of-touch with reality and completely ignores the core problem that I have to believe you're just fucking with us.

No, it is not fun to play against smurf accounts using hacks. They aren't doing it for the leaderboards, they actively downrank themselves to play against worse players!

And no, it's not fun to play against cheaters who are so bad at situational awareness their rank is still low, but who instantly headshot you in any tense 1v1 and ruin your experience.

And no, I actually do care that people are cheating in multiplayer games because it's not fair. Since when do we reward immoral fuckwits who can't or won't get better at the game?

Why don't we just start letting basketball players kick each other and baseball players tar their hands while we're at it. Who cares if the sanctity of the sport or competition is ruined - we're a community of apathetic hacks.

cortesoft6• 8 months ago

This is fine if you are low level, because the cheaters will be too good to play in the low level games.

If you are in the higher skill levels, you might end up playing too many cheaters who are impossible to beat. If the cheat lets you be better than the best human players, the best human player will end up just playing cheaters.

DiogenesKynikos• 8 months ago

At least in the world of chess (which has the OG matchmaking system, ELO), cheating is genuinely a problem.

The problem is that it doesn't matter how good you are. You will not beat a computer. Ever. Playing against someone who is using a computer is just completely meaningless. Without cheating control, cheaters would dominate the upper echelons of the ELO ladder, and good players would constantly be running into them.

babypuncher5• 8 months ago

You're saying it's not a problem when cheaters to completely ruin the experience for top-10% players

nitwit005• 8 months ago

There was plenty of cheating when there were no global leaderboards. People will happily do things just to ruin other people's day.

varnaud• 8 months ago

I play online FPS with friends for fun. I don't care about leaderboards, but I know people that do and don't want to take them away from them.

You can't have accurate matchmaking and allow cheating. People cheat for a variety of reasons, at lot of cheaters are just online bullies that enjoy tormenting other players. In a low ELO lobbies, you would have cheaters that have top tier aim activated only if they lose too much, making the experience very inconsistent.

Top tier ELO would revolve around on how the server handle peeker advantage and which cheater as the fastest cheating software. It's an interesting technical challenge, but not a fun game. As soon as a non cheating player is in view of a cheating player, the non cheating player dies. That doesn't make for a fun game mechanic.

ok_dad3• 8 months ago

Try playing Rust without anti-cheat and you will immediately change your tune. It isn't fun playing a game where you can lose everything to a guy who can cause bullets to bend around objects.

aceazzameen• 8 months ago

I worked at a company once that didn't use any anti cheat. I once asked why, and they said the matchmaking system solved the problem for them. The matchmaking was good enough so cheaters only ever played with other cheaters, and it kept the numbers up.

Honest players never really complained, so I guess it worked for them.

thomastjeffery3• 8 months ago

Absolutely!

The entire narrative of "cheating" is a giant misdirect. People don't actually care about cheating, they care about fun. If a player is making the game less fun, it does not matter how.

The real problem is that ~10 years ago major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting. This means that the responsibility of moderation is now in their hands. The only way this problem can ever be resolved is by giving the authority to moderate servers back to players. Until then, the responsibility to moderate will be unmet, no matter how fascist and authoritarian game studios become. Fascism cannot guarantee fun!

throw109205• 8 months ago

fascist

How are game studios "fascist"?

cortesoft6• 8 months ago

There are still plenty of games that use community hosted servers for multiplayer. I play some of them (Rust, for example).

First, cheating is absolutely still an issue in Rust. Sure, server admins can kick them out... once they have been discovered, verified by an admin, and kicked. The damage is usually done by then, and that is the best case scenario... often, the admins aren't available at that moment, because they are normal people who are not online all the time.

Plus, this means you have to search and find a good server to play on. That isn't always easy, and limits your ability to find a good game.

Second, lots of games I love to play don't make sense in the 'server hosted by a community member' model.

I love playing sports games... Madden, FIFA (now called FC), NBA2k, etc. The best way to play those games is often 1on1 against someone who is close to your skill level. It isn't fun to play against people way worse or way better than you.

The only way to do this in a way that lets me get a good game whenever I want to play is to have some sort of matchmaking system, that keeps track of how good i am and finds players who are about the same skill level. There is no way this would work on user hosted servers, and even if it did, why would a user hosted server be better at solving this problem than a company hosted one? You need a TON of players to be able to do good skill based matchmaking 24 hours a day.

I have been playing multiplayer online games for over 30 years. I started playing when I had to call my friend on the phone, tell him to tell his family not to answer the next call because it was my modem calling, and then hope to god my sister didn't pick up the phone during our game and break the connection. We had to develop a code to signal if I was actually trying to call him to talk about an issue; if I called and hung up immediately it meant I was voice calling and the next call he should answer with the phone.

I have played every iteration of multiplayer gaming. I played Warcraft II when you had to pay $20 to subscribe to Kali to use their virtual IPX service. I played local Counterstrike games at the college dorms on the local network (which was not even a switched network!) I run Minecraft servers for my kids on my local network. I have written multiplayer games for both peer-to-peer and server based multiplayer.

No, you can't recreate the modern convenience and pleasure of company provided matchmaking by going back to community hosted servers.

AJ0072• 8 months ago

Interesting thing I noticed trying to play old versions of Call of Duty a year or two ago -- the oldest ones which supported hosted servers, there are still players, but once they switched to matchmaking either no one is playing or its so tiny you never get connected.

rowanG077• 8 months ago

Not really true. For years you had both co-existing. Anti-cheat and people running their own servers where they could ban people.

babypuncher5• 8 months ago

Community-run servers weren't a magic bullet, and they had a lot of other problems that modern matchmaking systems solve more effectively.

ThatPlayer4• 8 months ago

This ignore actual history: anti-cheats started on community run servers. Because the majority of admins are not dealing with cheaters it because they enjoy it, but rather out of necessity. I see everyone here appreciating good admins, not many people are going to be volunteering themselves.

Punkbuster for Team Fortress. BattleEye for Battlefield. EasyAntiCheat started for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft Brood War ICCUP's anti-hack client. You can see this in modern community servers too. Face-IT and ESEA for CS2 have more anti-cheat, not less. FiveM, which modded GTA V for community servers, never worked for Linux even before they added anti-cheat to the full game, because they had their own anti-cheat, adhesive.

Admins for modern game servers are not going to be interested in turning off their anti-cheat. That just gives them more unpaid work for little gain.

skeaker• 8 months ago

This is the exception that proves the rule. When you host your own community server, you control how much anti-cheat is built into it, like GP said. That usually meant about none but manual admin bans, but it could also mean lots, like you said.

arp242• 8 months ago

Back in the "small communities on their own servers" people also cheated. It was never entirely clear who cheated and who was just good and/or lucky with plenty of false positive bans also. Nothing about this was "easy" in any way. Which is why anti-cheat tools like PunkBuster have been around for 25 years.

misswaterfairy• 8 months ago

Instead of anti-cheat on the client side, which 'kernel level' anti-cheat still gets beaten, why not look at a wholly server-side statistical analysis of player stats?

Make the anti-cheat follow one of the key tenets of cybersecurity: never trust user input.

Should work reasonably well for first-person shooters.

You're ranked based on the game's inner metrics, calculated on the server, rather than player-visible ones:

- time from observation to target contact with crosshairs (inc. standard deviation, standard error)

- % of time successfully striking specific hit boxes

and so on (depending on the game).

These rankings don't affect your public rankings but do affect who you're match-made with, or games that don't have private server options. Eventually you'll only be match-made with other cheaters, or players so good they give cheaters a genuine run for their money.

For games that do have private server options it could be configurable to:

- flag the player to admins as 'suspicious' for investigation

- Start ignoring hits that would've otherwise been successful for statistical outlier behaviours (where the statistical analysis indicates a significant disparity between observed and known-human-like reaction times and behaviours).

Even if cheats were used on the server, their

nolroz• 8 months ago

It's so disappointing that the halo master chief collection still doesn't support split screen. Nothing compared to the joy of playing halo with friends in the same room.

Buttons8403• 8 months ago

The only multiplayer game I currently play is Beyond All Reason (a RTS game).

It's a free and open-source game, so creating a cheat client would be especially easy. But I've never encountered cheating.

I think there's a few reasons for this:

1) The playerbase is small and there is no auto-matchmaking, just a traditional list of servers. This results in the same group of people always playing together. People don't want to cheat when they're playing with acquaintances they see frequently.

2) Spectators are allowed in every game. The top-ranked games usually have several spectators.

You might think this would result in even more cheating, but in practice the spectators would prefer to watch a sneak attacks succeed, because it's funny. It's boring to be whispering the enemy secrets to you buddy on a private Discord, it's more fun to watch your buddy die in a surprising and funny way.

Also, the spectators can spot if a player does something that suspiciously well timed or lucky. The spectators see all, so they have the information needed to spot suspicious behavior.

3) Official servers create an official record of what happened in every game. The entire community has access to all the recordings. If someone thinks cheating is happening they can link to the official game recording on Reddit (or whatever) and everyone can see what happened.

4) An active moderator team reviews every report of cheating. There are official moderators that do the banning, but also volunteer moderators which can watch the recordings and create a trusted written account of what happened; this makes the official moderators have an easier job.

ThrowawayR2• 8 months ago

Seems more likely that the cause is that RTS isn't a popular genre among gamers and Beyond All Reason is obscure[1] even among RTSes. There's no fame or money to make it worth investing in cheating.

[1] Among the general public, not RTS aficionados. Which is unfortunate; Total Annihilation and its spiritual descendants like BAR deserve more love.

Buttons8403• 8 months ago

People have been banned for cheating, so cheats exist.

officeplant6• 8 months ago

Even as an RTS player I've never heard of it, but I have learned recently that I've missed out on an entire niche scene based off of TA. Been playing RTS's since 1994ish and only recently bought TA to go back and play through it. Never owned it back in the day.

AuthAuth• 8 months ago

Its unfair to compare other games to BAR. BAR is to good

freedomben• 8 months ago

Thanks for this, BAR looks really great and open source is very important to me. Definitely gonna try this out!

Link for others: https://www.beyondallreason.info/download

ZephyrSkies• 8 months ago

Hi, one of the BAR devs here. Glad to hear the tall praise for the project and even happier to hear you've been having a great time playing it!

One of the additional safeguards against cheating within BAR is the shared simulation that all machines connected to any given match have to perform. As the entire process is synced between all these machines, any mismatch is immediately picked up by other machines and the server hosting the match itself and results in an automatic booting of that player with the desynced game. If 15 machines can agree on an event happening in the simulation, and 1 can't, why should the 1 be trusted? This includes things like the economy reserves for a given player or the behaviour of their units, not just the physical simulation of the projectiles and their trajectories and hit registers.

PtaQQ• 8 months ago

Hello, CM for BAR here, nice to see it mentioned :)

As Zephyr says state manipulation cheats are impossible since they would lead to desyncing any online battle.

Since every user technically has access to the whole game state there are user side cheats possible, like LoS hack, but these are easily detectible (as well as spectator cheating) and very active moderator team makes sure anyone using them is perm'ad so it's not worth for people to try them and it's been super rare so far.

Smurfing (using alt accounts with lower ELO to get weaker opponents/avoid moderation) is probably the most prevailent type of "cheating" but there is a lot of active and passive countermeasures implemented so most players will rarely experience issues with that.

MisterTea2• 8 months ago

But can it run Crysis? No. Not on Linux :-(

I actually really liked Crysis for its open maps where you can approach a goal using different tactics. It had a lot of flaws and I hated the alien ship along with everything after as it was way too linear. Though I really want to play it again but alas, no more Windows for me.

ooterness• 8 months ago

Actually, ProtonDB indicates Crysis runs just fine on Linux.

https://www.protondb.com/app/17300

MisterTea2• 8 months ago

I have never gotten it to run on Linux, even with tweaks. However I gave up years ago so maybe I should give it a go and see if anything changed.

cornichon622• 8 months ago

I don't understand why multiplayer games don't run more on the server. If the server runs the game, then sends to client only what it needs to display the game and play sounds, the client doesn't have more information than necessary and a whole class of cheats is eliminated. There is no need for a client to know where an enemy player is if the player won't be shown on screen (wall hacks). I think World of Tanks runs this way, and I've never encountered much cheating on there.

ttimebomb• 8 months ago

Some do, but its much more expensive for game companies and adds latency to some elements. Its generally a much harder problem for first-person shooter games - an enemy might be hiding behind a wall but the game needs to know the position of that enemy anyway because the player might move around the corner and see that enemy before the server updates or their game client might need to play noise that enemy is making faintly even if they are far away.

Players of these games are sometimes running their games at high framerates like 240fps which is much higher than the tick rates of these games too.

Plus it doesn't solve all the possible cheats that are out there, as there are some like aim-hacks that don't need any server information to work.

jillesvangurp• 8 months ago

It will be interesting to see how this evolves. It used to be that game developers could safely ignore Linux. But with a growing number of Steam OS, Steam Deck, and Linux + Steam users gaming, it's going to get increasingly more painful in terms of revenue to be telling those users "our game only works on Windows" and just miss out on the revenue and deal with the angry users, forums full of users complaining the game doesn't work, etc.

It might only be a few percent of overall users. But a few percent of a billion $ is a couple of tens of millions. That's a steep price to pay for anti-cheat code.

hamdingers10• 8 months ago

Most game devs can continue to ignore linux and trust that proton will work it out.

It's only the highly competitive online games that have this issue. While they make up a lot of playtime, they're worked on by a tiny minority of developers.

pjmlp3• 8 months ago

They are still ignoring Linux, hence why Valve is using Proton, the validation they failed to convince studios to care, studios that happen to target systems like Android NDK, or use platform agnostic engines.

simoncion9• 8 months ago

They are still ignoring Linux, hence why Valve is using Proton...

Eh, maybe?

I'd put forth the notion that game devs might be caring how their game works on both Windows and Proton. That is, that they're still using the Microsoft-provided APIs to build their game, but care about how it runs on Linux just as much as how it runs on Windows.

lwansbrough2• 8 months ago

Anti-cheat is a necessity for an enjoyable game experience. If you are a casual who doesn’t care about game integrity, you probably aren’t the target audience.

I don’t want any cheaters in my games. I don’t care if a rootkit is required. Riot has a kernel level anti-cheat and it’s _really_ good. It’s so good in fact that it deters most cheaters from even trying. This is the dream for anyone who wants fair games.

cortesoft6• 8 months ago

I agree with you, but I think the best solution is just to let people run the game without anti-cheat, but they can only play with other people who also opt-out of anti cheat (or choose to allow themselves to be matched with people who opt-out).

Then people can choose to either accept they have to install a rootkit anti-cheat, or want to risk facing cheaters in return for not having to install the anti-cheat.

nottorp3• 8 months ago

If you are a casual who doesn’t care about game integrity, you probably aren’t the target audience.

Friendly reminder. 90% of games are not competitive multiplayer and don't need any anti cheat to be enjoyable.

My main entertainment is video games and books (no TV) in equal proportions so I'm far from "casual". I play zero competitive multiplayer due to the "communities" being invariably toxic.

Last time I played something like that it was Starcraft 2 when it was new. Enjoyed being called a stupid noob when I won.

simoncion9• 8 months ago

Yeah. I've found a nearly 1:1 correlation between "Does it try hard to be 'competitive' or an 'e-sport'?" and "Is a huge section of the playerbase just godawful toxic assholes?".

As the years ground on, I've learned to avoid games billing themselves as an "e-sport" or indicating that they are extremely focused on the "competitive" scene, unless there's something very compelling to offset the asshole players that will inevitably be pulled in.

kgwxd2• 8 months ago

I wouldn't be able to enjoy life with the knowledge there's a rootkit installed on my machine, developed by the same people that make video games, and hate all levels of accountability, riddled with vulnerabilities that could grant an attacker the same ridiculous level of permissions.

wetpaws• 8 months ago

I have a simple answer for you - just don't play games that require any significant level of anticheat. 100 times of 100 you are not missing anything.

nicman23• 8 months ago

nah thanks. i remember my vista install getting destroyed by securom

kgwxd2• 8 months ago

It's a perfect litmus test as far as I'm concerned. If a company believes it's ok to put things like that on my machine, I don't want them anywhere near it, even if they were to "compromise" to work on Linux. Relying on a users machine to snitch on them is dumb at every level. Fix your hearts or die.

miroljub• 8 months ago

I cant believe some people still insist calling it GNU/Linux.

waterTanuki• 8 months ago

One would hope that Microsoft will eventually revoke kernel access to these companies (see, Crowdstrike incident) eventually forcing game developers to support Linux for many popular online service games and actually stop being so lazy with anticheat. Somehow a smaller studio like Embark managed to make Arc Raiders compatible with Linux. I have 95 hours into the game and have not encountered 1 cheater. Yet a mega corp like EA can't possibly afford to support BF6 on Linux because of kernel anticheat. I put only 10 hours into bf6 and got killed by aimbots three times.

zeroq• 8 months ago

Main problem with highly competitive games is that you can run them inside a container and have full access to memory.

Most games will share all the data with every client which makes it trivial to display positions of every enemy on the map. It's just convenient for developers.

In games like Tarkov, once you spawn in, your client gets all the information that possible - positions of players, their names, equipment, contents of every single container on the map.

Tarkov is not the best example, because the netcode is terrible, and the architecure is a joke - you can loot everything on the map with a keystroke, and kill anyone with another, but other games are not better.

Even in Valorant, which makes an extra effort to only send data relevant to the player - ie. data about player that you are about to see - you can use that to see around the corners.

rolandog• 8 months ago

The framing of this is, in my opinion, wrong. I'd like to be able to play unranked matches in spite of the anti-cheat system (which is probably a an anti-piracy enforcer) not working. I play games to have fun; yes, cheaters suck the fun out of matches, but so does anti-consumer "anti-cheat" software that impedes playing the actual game.

mock-possum• 8 months ago

As someone who never plays online games with randos - mostly single player, or multiplayer with friends -

I cannot stress enough how much I do not give a shit about anti-cheat, and how thoroughly fed up I am with poorly conceived and ill executed malware being installed on my computer, holding games I own hostage in the name of stopping cheaters that I don’t care about it.

Anti-cheat should be opt-in.

immibis• 8 months ago

Fundamentally anti-cheat is made to ensure you're running the game in genuine Microsoft Windows. If you're using Wine, you're not. They could check for genuine Linux, except that isn't actually a real thing, so they can't. Maybe on SteamOS.

mindcrash• 8 months ago

If you really want to play games with anti-cheat with a Linux machine right now you could also try cloud gaming, or to be exact Nvidia's Geforce Now - because most of the smaller cloud gaming services like Shadow PC and Boosteroid simply run Windows Virtual Machines with GPU passthrough on which kernel level anti cheat... you guessed it... does not work.

Nvidia is publically advertising that five games from the Call of Duty series (notoriously known for their kernel level anti cheat) and Battlefield 1, 4, 5, 2042 and the very recent Battlefield 6 (same) are able to run on Geforce Now (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/).

There's even a native client for Linux thanks to their recent Steam Deck support (you only need to hack a bit since it's basically optimized to run on SteamOS KDE and Steam Big Picture mode which is quite easy thanks to Google search, and you should be pretty much good to go).

Another option would be Moonlight/Sunshine (https://moonlight-stream.org/, https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine) but that option requires you to have a pretty beefy game PC or server w/ decent GPU next to your Linux machine to host the games.

Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

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