6 ms·

If steam spends some time working with the larger "anti-cheat" vendors, I think they could really bump up the list. Many of the 'borked' games use anti-cheat,

If steam spends some time working with the larger "anti-cheat" vendors, I think they could really bump up the list. Many of the 'borked' games use anti-cheat, like battle-eye.

breakingcups 8y ago
Considering the lengths these anti-cheat vendors go to to detect bad behavior (including but not limited to kernel-mode drivers and kernel-hooks), I doubt they have any incentive to go along with this until a massive amount of momentum for gaming on Linux exists.
- drb91 8y ago
  Valve and steam are large enough to provide incentive themselves if they so choose.
- uranusjr 8y ago
  I remember not being able to play anything BattlEye because it breaks on a Windows Insider version late 2017, and stuck for half a year until the next stable update cycle. It’ll be a loooong time until they even consider to support anything remotely interesting at all.
Klathmon 8y ago
I'd much rather those games just become unplayable. I've had so much trouble with anti-cheat systems that I will now refuse to buy or play any game that uses easyanticheat or battleye. I don't care how much it costs, how many of my friends are playing it, I'm not giving another penny to any company that uses those programs. I get that it's not an easy problem to solve, but i'm so goddamn tired of having to shut down services dedicated to controlling fan speeds in my machine, having to disable network adapters, uninstall vpn software (not just turn it off, uninstall it), and wasting hours trying to figure out why it would crash on startup only to find that it was finding a pcap.dll in a random folder in my downloads from when I was messing with some traffic sniffing stuff on this system like a year before that, and it decided to crash without any warning or error... Cheaters suck in games, and they can ruin it for many others, but there has to be another way other than forcing your paying users to jump through this many hoops. And if there isn't, then i'm happy to be doomed to playing against/with hackers and cheaters rather than not being able to play at all. And I know it's kind of co opting the purpose of Proton, but if they refused to accommodate these anti-cheat systems, then maybe either the game developer or the anti-cheat vendor themselves will see some of the potential paying customers they are excluding and will significantly retool their systems to work.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  I've gotta wonder about your system config. I've got Wireshark, Viscosity, probably a TUN driver or two from another VPN install, fan control, system monitoring and I've had no problem at all. Not saying it doesn't happen - I'm pretty sure there was one that didn't like VirtualBox and I haven't tried again since switching to Hyper V. Maybe I got lucky?
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    Yeah i'm sure i'm one of the outliers, but if I'm not voting with my wallet then why would they ever listen. easyanticheat is by far the worst i've ever experienced. That was the one that would crash if it saw pcap.dll, and I use virtualbox as my VM software of choice so that could be part of it as well. The fan control system is a bit weird since it's a pretty unknown little program, but it took me a while to find because at least easyanticheat wouldn't tell me which program was causing the error, so I had to manually close them until it worked. This is what actually put me over the edge and made it so I'll never buy another game with easyanticheat again unless they significantly rework how much access and power they need. There are so many games out there now, and so many different developers and styles, that I don't need to put up with these kind of problems to play a good game. Especially when that software is almost always beatable by how often I'd still see cheaters in the games, which meant that the only ones being punished by this are the lazy hackers, or paying customers.
    - cortesoft 8y ago
      > Yeah i'm sure i'm one of the outliers, but if I'm not voting with my wallet then why would they ever listen. I mean, if you are an outlier, voting with your wallet is never going to work. That is the problem of being an outlier.
      - Klathmon 8y ago
        It probably won't work, sure, but I'm not going to continue to support games that I can't play without downloading cracks. And I feel they are crossing a line requiring that much control and integration with my system to run. And being an outlier doesn't mean you are insignificant. Sure, the latest Call Of Duty won't miss my income, but a smaller dev that was thinking about using easyanticheat because it was cheap and easy to integrate might think twice when reading comments from me, or if their demographic overlaps with people like me that won't put up with it. I can't in good conscience talk about how much I dislike invasive anti-cheat programs while still buying every game I want that has them.
hiccuphippo 8y ago
Is it possible to do those anti-cheat checks on wine/linux? Valve could work with the vendors to have them work on it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dx87 8y ago
  From what I understand, the anti-cheat checks work, it's just that the permissions model on Linux is so much more coarse than on Windows that there isn't really a good way to tell the difference between a cheat and benign behavior. They end up with so many false positives that it's better to just not let the game run at all. Even something as simple as running "ps" on Linux looks through procfs and can show where in memory different things are loaded, probably getting flagged by the anti-cheat.
bitwize 8y ago
I set up a separate user account for Steam precisely because I don't want anti-cheats sniffing my main account's memory through /proc. Anti-cheat can go fuck itself, doubly hard if it tries to install a kernel module just to play a damn game.
- therein 8y ago
  Unfortunately it probably will want to have itself loaded as a kernel module, if they ever were to decide to even begin supporting it. Anti-cheat has been one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of gaming on Linux for a long time.
CodeArtisan 8y ago
Linux being open source and gpl licensed is a problem for anti-cheats.
- adtac 8y ago
  Why does the operating system's license matter for software running on top of it? The software can still be proprietary.
  - Avamander 8y ago
    You can recompile every component of your system to lie to the s*y anti-cheat.
    - sangnoir 8y ago
      This smacks of "security through obscurity" to me. Windows has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by black-, gray- and white-hats: is there a single windows .dll, .sys or other component whose purpose is remains a mystery or cannot be subverted by a person with physical access?
      - benchaney 8y ago
        It is. Any anti-cheat system that relies on having explicit control of the client is inherently flawed, but it is considered "good enough" by most people.
  - CodeArtisan 8y ago
    An anti-cheat relying on a kernel module would have to provide the source code of that module (the glue part, at least). One could then modify and compile that module as he want. Also, you could easily write a sandbox environment at the kernel level dedicated to a specific anti-cheat.

If steam spends some time working with the larger "anti-cheat" vendors, I think they could really bump up the list. Many of the 'borked' games use anti-cheat, like battle-eye.

breakingcups 8y ago

Considering the lengths these anti-cheat vendors go to to detect bad behavior (including but not limited to kernel-mode drivers and kernel-hooks), I doubt they have any incentive to go along with this until a massive amount of momentum for gaming on Linux exists.

drb91 8y ago
Valve and steam are large enough to provide incentive themselves if they so choose.
uranusjr 8y ago
I remember not being able to play anything BattlEye because it breaks on a Windows Insider version late 2017, and stuck for half a year until the next stable update cycle. It’ll be a loooong time until they even consider to support anything remotely interesting at all.

Klathmon 8y ago

I'd much rather those games just become unplayable. I've had so much trouble with anti-cheat systems that I will now refuse to buy or play any game that uses easyanticheat or battleye. I don't care how much it costs, how many of my friends are playing it, I'm not giving another penny to any company that uses those programs. I get that it's not an easy problem to solve, but i'm so goddamn tired of having to shut down services dedicated to controlling fan speeds in my machine, having to disable network adapters, uninstall vpn software (not just turn it off, uninstall it), and wasting hours trying to figure out why it would crash on startup only to find that it was finding a pcap.dll in a random folder in my downloads from when I was messing with some traffic sniffing stuff on this system like a year before that, and it decided to crash without any warning or error... Cheaters suck in games, and they can ruin it for many others, but there has to be another way other than forcing your paying users to jump through this many hoops. And if there isn't, then i'm happy to be doomed to playing against/with hackers and cheaters rather than not being able to play at all. And I know it's kind of co opting the purpose of Proton, but if they refused to accommodate these anti-cheat systems, then maybe either the game developer or the anti-cheat vendor themselves will see some of the potential paying customers they are excluding and will significantly retool their systems to work.

voltagex_ 8y ago
I've gotta wonder about your system config. I've got Wireshark, Viscosity, probably a TUN driver or two from another VPN install, fan control, system monitoring and I've had no problem at all. Not saying it doesn't happen - I'm pretty sure there was one that didn't like VirtualBox and I haven't tried again since switching to Hyper V. Maybe I got lucky?
- Klathmon 8y ago
  Yeah i'm sure i'm one of the outliers, but if I'm not voting with my wallet then why would they ever listen. easyanticheat is by far the worst i've ever experienced. That was the one that would crash if it saw pcap.dll, and I use virtualbox as my VM software of choice so that could be part of it as well. The fan control system is a bit weird since it's a pretty unknown little program, but it took me a while to find because at least easyanticheat wouldn't tell me which program was causing the error, so I had to manually close them until it worked. This is what actually put me over the edge and made it so I'll never buy another game with easyanticheat again unless they significantly rework how much access and power they need. There are so many games out there now, and so many different developers and styles, that I don't need to put up with these kind of problems to play a good game. Especially when that software is almost always beatable by how often I'd still see cheaters in the games, which meant that the only ones being punished by this are the lazy hackers, or paying customers.
  - cortesoft 8y ago
    > Yeah i'm sure i'm one of the outliers, but if I'm not voting with my wallet then why would they ever listen. I mean, if you are an outlier, voting with your wallet is never going to work. That is the problem of being an outlier.
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      It probably won't work, sure, but I'm not going to continue to support games that I can't play without downloading cracks. And I feel they are crossing a line requiring that much control and integration with my system to run. And being an outlier doesn't mean you are insignificant. Sure, the latest Call Of Duty won't miss my income, but a smaller dev that was thinking about using easyanticheat because it was cheap and easy to integrate might think twice when reading comments from me, or if their demographic overlaps with people like me that won't put up with it. I can't in good conscience talk about how much I dislike invasive anti-cheat programs while still buying every game I want that has them.

hiccuphippo 8y ago

Is it possible to do those anti-cheat checks on wine/linux? Valve could work with the vendors to have them work on it.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dx87 8y ago
From what I understand, the anti-cheat checks work, it's just that the permissions model on Linux is so much more coarse than on Windows that there isn't really a good way to tell the difference between a cheat and benign behavior. They end up with so many false positives that it's better to just not let the game run at all. Even something as simple as running "ps" on Linux looks through procfs and can show where in memory different things are loaded, probably getting flagged by the anti-cheat.

bitwize 8y ago

I set up a separate user account for Steam precisely because I don't want anti-cheats sniffing my main account's memory through /proc. Anti-cheat can go fuck itself, doubly hard if it tries to install a kernel module just to play a damn game.

therein 8y ago
Unfortunately it probably will want to have itself loaded as a kernel module, if they ever were to decide to even begin supporting it. Anti-cheat has been one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of gaming on Linux for a long time.

CodeArtisan 8y ago

Linux being open source and gpl licensed is a problem for anti-cheats.

adtac 8y ago
Why does the operating system's license matter for software running on top of it? The software can still be proprietary.
- Avamander 8y ago
  You can recompile every component of your system to lie to the s*y anti-cheat.
  - sangnoir 8y ago
    This smacks of "security through obscurity" to me. Windows has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by black-, gray- and white-hats: is there a single windows .dll, .sys or other component whose purpose is remains a mystery or cannot be subverted by a person with physical access?
    - benchaney 8y ago
      It is. Any anti-cheat system that relies on having explicit control of the client is inherently flawed, but it is considered "good enough" by most people.
- CodeArtisan 8y ago
  An anti-cheat relying on a kernel module would have to provide the source code of that module (the glue part, at least). One could then modify and compile that module as he want. Also, you could easily write a sandbox environment at the kernel level dedicated to a specific anti-cheat.