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The whole "super intrusive anti-cheat" thing is really annoying to me as a non-competitive player, who just plays games like CoD, CS, etc occasionally with frie

The whole "super intrusive anti-cheat" thing is really annoying to me as a non-competitive player, who just plays games like CoD, CS, etc occasionally with friends. And not just academically annoying, but practically too. I used to run Windows virtualised under Linux with a PCIe passthrough GPU. I remember having to re-install windows directly on my machine at a LAN party once because CS:GO couldn't be run in a VM anymore :( I think there's a solution that would let wood-tier players like myself avoid this kind of intrusive software, whilst keeping higher-level play clean though. - Implement server-side anticheat detection, that will ban things that look like bots. As other commenters have noted, bots are indistinguishable from good humans from the outside. So, the server-side detection would ban both bots and good humans - Have _opt-in_ client side anticheat detection. If you have this enabled, then you're exempted from the server-side detection. So, you enable this if you're actually good. Could even make this part of the ranking mechanics. Maybe you _can't_ enable the client-side anticheat until the server-side one thinks you're sus. Then you get prompted to turn on the client-side support and get a cool badge or something.

simooooo 5y ago
Why am I not surprised the top comment is complaining that GPU pass through to a VM isn’t supported
cletus 5y ago
This isn't a high-level gameplay problem. I'm not sure what you play but in (CoD) Warzone, for example, just based on Twitch streams at least, almost every lobby has one or more cheaters/hackers in it now. This is a bad enough problem that it actually threatens the integrity of the game and the continued support from more casual gamers such as yourself. As for your particular case (running a Windows VM with PCI-e GPU passthrough), that's... such a niche corner case that you're you just don't factor in. We can agree that cheating will never be truly eliminated. It's a question of degree and it requires a multi-level solution ie both client-side and server-side.. The server-side detection has to allow for checking by a human with all that entails. It sounds like this is what they're rolling out with CoD Vanguard (Ricochet). It'll be interesting to see how effective this is. Probably the biggest problem for the likes of Warzone and Fortnite is that the game is free. It means getting banned and having to create a new account is essentially zero cost. What about paid-for and earned cosmetics I hear you ask. Well, those are hacked too so it doesn't really matter.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Why don't they just have a special lobby for people who don't want to use anti-cheat? Protect the people who want to play fair games, and let the people who want to play with their friends and aren't worried about cheating (or hell, want to play with cheaters) play without anti-cheat? Seems like a win win?
  - xerxes901 5y ago
    Because the only people in this lobby will be cheaters lol. Most people don't care about running garbage-tier CoD kernel code on their machines... so I wind up having to because they do, because it's the default. Although I concede that basically what I'm asking for here is for the default to be _my_ usecase...
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      Well this guy only wants to play with friends, so he doesn’t care if everyone else in the lobby are cheaters. He isn’t playing with anyone besides his friends. And why do you care if a lobby exists that you are never going to go to? Why does it bother you if cheaters want to use cheats against each other? As long as you don’t interact with them, I don’t understand why you would care.
      - foota 5y ago
        You may not have played in a lobby with cheaters, but they ruin the game for anyone else there. Warzone matchmakes you with ~a hundred people, so you can't play with just your friends, so if you have an anti-cheat off lobby your game will be ruined.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - smiths1999 5y ago
        In my experience, people that cheat in games like this typically do it to get an edge over everyone else in the lobby. It's not the cheating itself they enjoy but the winning. If everyone in the lobby has the same advantage I doubt they would be content just enjoying the game like the rest of us.
junon 5y ago
"Wood-tier" is a new one for me, had to laugh. Thanks.
somerando7 5y ago
Server-side anticheat catches no cheaters...? What is even the point of developing it lol
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Hint: game companies don't actually give a shit about cheaters, especially if they're giving them money. The only point at which a company cares about cheaters is when the community starts to really get riled up about them and revenue drops. COD Warzone has a full stats API and cheaters leap off the page. We're talking people with K/D ratios of, say, 10-20:1 or more. All they'd have to do is zap or flag those accounts automatically. But they don't care. Just about any sort of public online game involving shooting has long stopped being fun for me because cheating is so rampant and blatant, and companies care more about policing talk on their discords and subreddits about problems with cheaters, than they do about addressing the cheaters.
  - darkwizard42 5y ago
    Given that the solution provided here is actively trying to root out cheaters, I don't know how your initial "hint" statement even holds water. The issue with any kind of wave of ban style action like you are suggesting is that the users can just create new accounts for free and continue to cheat. It greatly reduces the integrity of the overall matchmaking and game experience for everyone else. If you think there is a better solution to ban repeat bots and cheats please provide it or at least offer a creative response to what COD is trying. full disclosure, I don't like this solution, but having seen anti-cheat measures in a number of games, this seems to be the only one with real teeth for shooters
    - tempestn 5y ago
      Not to mention, prefacing an opinion with "Hint:" is rather obnoxious.
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      I also said: > The only point at which a company cares about cheaters is when the community starts to really get riled up about them and revenue drops. My point is not contraindicated by Activision releasing new anti-cheat software a year and a half after a game came out. Activision likely saw falling player signups/playtime/cosmetics spending, did some surveys, and decided improving their anti-cheat was the way to go. > If you think there is a better solution to ban repeat bots and cheats please provide it or at least offer a creative response to what COD is trying. In another comment I pointed out that the games are full of cheaters so blatant their K/D ratios are better than the top pros in the game, sometimes by a factor of ten. It would be trivial for Activision to automatically ban them simply on that alone, or at least auto-flag them for a manual review. A K/D ratio of 1.0 is considered "good" for an average player. 2-3 would be world-class. The top player on one of the CoD:WZ trackers has a K/D ratio of twenty six.
rav 5y ago
> I used to run Windows virtualised under Linux with a PCIe passthrough GPU. I remember having to re-install windows directly on my machine at a LAN party once because CS:GO couldn't be run in a VM anymore :( Have you tried running CS:GO on Linux through Steam on Linux? It's officially supported and for me it runs as well as I expect on low-end hardware. Are there any performance reasons to want to run in a Windows VM instead?
- xerxes901 5y ago
  This was a few years ago at least, not sure it was an option back then? Or maybe the idea of futzing around trying to get the binary nvidia drivers working properly on Linux in the middle of a LAN party didn't appeal to me :D I do worry that this push to ever-more-intrusive forms of anti-cheat will mean that games are less likely to run on Linux. If the source to your anti-cheat kernel module needs to be released under the GPL it's probably not going to be that effective for very long..
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
flohofwoe 5y ago
> - Have _opt-in_ client side anticheat detection. If you have this enabled, then you're exempted from the server-side detection. So, you enable this if you're actually good. This is how it works in ARMA for instance (not sure if opt-in or opt-out though), the players can decide whether to install/uninstall the game's anti-cheat solution on their machine, and the people running the servers can decide whether they require the anti-cheat-solution to be installed. Since I almost never venture into multiplayer anyway, the decision for me was simple (uninstall the anti-cheat software). > - Implement server-side anticheat detection, This only works for "real" client/server games, not peer-to-peer games which usually only use centralized servers for matchmaking and some other non-gamplay-services.
mithusingh32 5y ago
Vanguard, riots anti-cheat, was one of the worst kernel anti-cheats system I had the displeasure if being forced to use. My buddies started to play Valorant and they asked me to give it a try. I downloaded and installed it. First major issue: Must start on boot and has to be running at all times. If you close it, you have to reboot the entire machine to play Valorant. Second issue: (This has been fixed) All my VMs stopped working. I couldn't start any of them in my VMware Workstation. Uninstalled Vanguard and Valorant shortly after. There should no reason an anti-cheats needs to run on boot.
gs17 5y ago
> Could even make this part of the ranking mechanics. Maybe you _can't_ enable the client-side anticheat until the server-side one thinks you're sus. Then you get prompted to turn on the client-side support and get a cool badge or something. That's somewhat similar to how FACEIT did it when I tried it for TF2. The serverside detection decided if you needed the client side detection.

simooooo 5y ago

Why am I not surprised the top comment is complaining that GPU pass through to a VM isn’t supported

cletus 5y ago

This isn't a high-level gameplay problem. I'm not sure what you play but in (CoD) Warzone, for example, just based on Twitch streams at least, almost every lobby has one or more cheaters/hackers in it now. This is a bad enough problem that it actually threatens the integrity of the game and the continued support from more casual gamers such as yourself. As for your particular case (running a Windows VM with PCI-e GPU passthrough), that's... such a niche corner case that you're you just don't factor in. We can agree that cheating will never be truly eliminated. It's a question of degree and it requires a multi-level solution ie both client-side and server-side.. The server-side detection has to allow for checking by a human with all that entails. It sounds like this is what they're rolling out with CoD Vanguard (Ricochet). It'll be interesting to see how effective this is. Probably the biggest problem for the likes of Warzone and Fortnite is that the game is free. It means getting banned and having to create a new account is essentially zero cost. What about paid-for and earned cosmetics I hear you ask. Well, those are hacked too so it doesn't really matter.

cortesoft 5y ago
Why don't they just have a special lobby for people who don't want to use anti-cheat? Protect the people who want to play fair games, and let the people who want to play with their friends and aren't worried about cheating (or hell, want to play with cheaters) play without anti-cheat? Seems like a win win?
- xerxes901 5y ago
  Because the only people in this lobby will be cheaters lol. Most people don't care about running garbage-tier CoD kernel code on their machines... so I wind up having to because they do, because it's the default. Although I concede that basically what I'm asking for here is for the default to be _my_ usecase...
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Well this guy only wants to play with friends, so he doesn’t care if everyone else in the lobby are cheaters. He isn’t playing with anyone besides his friends. And why do you care if a lobby exists that you are never going to go to? Why does it bother you if cheaters want to use cheats against each other? As long as you don’t interact with them, I don’t understand why you would care.
    - foota 5y ago
      You may not have played in a lobby with cheaters, but they ruin the game for anyone else there. Warzone matchmakes you with ~a hundred people, so you can't play with just your friends, so if you have an anti-cheat off lobby your game will be ruined.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - smiths1999 5y ago
      In my experience, people that cheat in games like this typically do it to get an edge over everyone else in the lobby. It's not the cheating itself they enjoy but the winning. If everyone in the lobby has the same advantage I doubt they would be content just enjoying the game like the rest of us.

junon 5y ago

"Wood-tier" is a new one for me, had to laugh. Thanks.

somerando7 5y ago

Server-side anticheat catches no cheaters...? What is even the point of developing it lol

KennyBlanken 5y ago
Hint: game companies don't actually give a shit about cheaters, especially if they're giving them money. The only point at which a company cares about cheaters is when the community starts to really get riled up about them and revenue drops. COD Warzone has a full stats API and cheaters leap off the page. We're talking people with K/D ratios of, say, 10-20:1 or more. All they'd have to do is zap or flag those accounts automatically. But they don't care. Just about any sort of public online game involving shooting has long stopped being fun for me because cheating is so rampant and blatant, and companies care more about policing talk on their discords and subreddits about problems with cheaters, than they do about addressing the cheaters.
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  Given that the solution provided here is actively trying to root out cheaters, I don't know how your initial "hint" statement even holds water. The issue with any kind of wave of ban style action like you are suggesting is that the users can just create new accounts for free and continue to cheat. It greatly reduces the integrity of the overall matchmaking and game experience for everyone else. If you think there is a better solution to ban repeat bots and cheats please provide it or at least offer a creative response to what COD is trying. full disclosure, I don't like this solution, but having seen anti-cheat measures in a number of games, this seems to be the only one with real teeth for shooters
  - tempestn 5y ago
    Not to mention, prefacing an opinion with "Hint:" is rather obnoxious.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    I also said: > The only point at which a company cares about cheaters is when the community starts to really get riled up about them and revenue drops. My point is not contraindicated by Activision releasing new anti-cheat software a year and a half after a game came out. Activision likely saw falling player signups/playtime/cosmetics spending, did some surveys, and decided improving their anti-cheat was the way to go. > If you think there is a better solution to ban repeat bots and cheats please provide it or at least offer a creative response to what COD is trying. In another comment I pointed out that the games are full of cheaters so blatant their K/D ratios are better than the top pros in the game, sometimes by a factor of ten. It would be trivial for Activision to automatically ban them simply on that alone, or at least auto-flag them for a manual review. A K/D ratio of 1.0 is considered "good" for an average player. 2-3 would be world-class. The top player on one of the CoD:WZ trackers has a K/D ratio of twenty six.

rav 5y ago

> I used to run Windows virtualised under Linux with a PCIe passthrough GPU. I remember having to re-install windows directly on my machine at a LAN party once because CS:GO couldn't be run in a VM anymore :( Have you tried running CS:GO on Linux through Steam on Linux? It's officially supported and for me it runs as well as I expect on low-end hardware. Are there any performance reasons to want to run in a Windows VM instead?

xerxes901 5y ago
This was a few years ago at least, not sure it was an option back then? Or maybe the idea of futzing around trying to get the binary nvidia drivers working properly on Linux in the middle of a LAN party didn't appeal to me :D I do worry that this push to ever-more-intrusive forms of anti-cheat will mean that games are less likely to run on Linux. If the source to your anti-cheat kernel module needs to be released under the GPL it's probably not going to be that effective for very long..

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

flohofwoe 5y ago

> - Have _opt-in_ client side anticheat detection. If you have this enabled, then you're exempted from the server-side detection. So, you enable this if you're actually good. This is how it works in ARMA for instance (not sure if opt-in or opt-out though), the players can decide whether to install/uninstall the game's anti-cheat solution on their machine, and the people running the servers can decide whether they require the anti-cheat-solution to be installed. Since I almost never venture into multiplayer anyway, the decision for me was simple (uninstall the anti-cheat software). > - Implement server-side anticheat detection, This only works for "real" client/server games, not peer-to-peer games which usually only use centralized servers for matchmaking and some other non-gamplay-services.

mithusingh32 5y ago

Vanguard, riots anti-cheat, was one of the worst kernel anti-cheats system I had the displeasure if being forced to use. My buddies started to play Valorant and they asked me to give it a try. I downloaded and installed it. First major issue: Must start on boot and has to be running at all times. If you close it, you have to reboot the entire machine to play Valorant. Second issue: (This has been fixed) All my VMs stopped working. I couldn't start any of them in my VMware Workstation. Uninstalled Vanguard and Valorant shortly after. There should no reason an anti-cheats needs to run on boot.

gs17 5y ago

> Could even make this part of the ranking mechanics. Maybe you _can't_ enable the client-side anticheat until the server-side one thinks you're sus. Then you get prompted to turn on the client-side support and get a cool badge or something. That's somewhat similar to how FACEIT did it when I tried it for TF2. The serverside detection decided if you needed the client side detection.