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Terms of Service: Monitoring and Anti-Cheat
- DiabloD3 5y agoThat is just telling me that Windows Defender should start flagging Riot executables used as part of this malware injector. This does not, and cannot lead, to an improved user experience.
- dangrossman 5y agoNot having cheaters ruin my online games is an improved user experience.
- jevoten 5y agoAre you being glib, or do you genuinely believe the OS should subvert its user to appease a different group of people? For many artists, not having their art copied would be an improved user experience, so should the OS prevent you from copying files tagged as copyrighted? Windows Defender already removes torrent software and gives scary warnings for LibreOffice [1] so it's not a big step. [1] https://baronhk.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/microsoft-defender-leads-the-user-to-assume-free-and-open-source-software-is-malicious-with-scary-red-warnings/ https://baronhk.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/microsoft-defender-...
- ejj28 5y agoThis is not a case of the OS subverting it's user, the user is installing Riot's anticheat of their own will. If you'd like Windows Defender to stop that, then you should be fine with the warnings it gives with those other apps too.
- jevoten 5y agoBut that's just it - Riot's anti-cheat gets far fewer warnings than FOSS software, because MS has tilted the system to favor corporate entities willing to pay MS for certificates. If a "trusted developer" is one of the heuristics, then any kind of honest anti-virus should trust major free software developers/apps to at least the same degree as someone like Adobe or Riot.
- dangrossman 5y agoI'm choosing to install anti-cheat software into MY OS, on MY hardware, to improve MY gaming experience. The OS isn't subverting anything by allowing me to do that. I can't see how that's anything like your hypothetical. The anti-cheat software isn't being rolled into Windows for everyone in the globe, it's part of a voluntary, user-directed game installation on a specific computer.
- jevoten 5y agoAre you being deliberately obtuse? You can still choose to install a rootkit on YOUR hardware after clicking through the antivirus warning. What is subverted is the expectation that the antivirus won't whitelist rootkits without even informing the user of what is happening. Don't you think users have a right to know, to make an informed decision, instead of Microsoft deciding for them that Riot is so trustworthy they can have root on the user's device, without requiring so much as an "Are you sure?" clickthrough?
- nyuszika7h 5y agoIf it's voluntary, then obviously cheaters are not going to install it. You choosing to install the anti-cheat software on your own computer will not magically stop people you play with from cheating. Therefore your whole argument goes out of the window.
- alkonaut 5y agoIt’s voluntary as installing the game is voluntary. You can’t opt out of the anti cheat tech yet opt into playing the online game. One might disagree with a part of the product (the anticheat part) but then one has to choose not to buy or use the product at all. It’s voluntary.
- onelovetwo 5y agoI'm sure you don't want Apple allowing people to have illegal images on their phones, are you willing to have all your photos constantly scanned to improve that?
- dangrossman 5y agoI don't see how this is related. I'm installing a game with anti cheat software on my computer to improve my experience. This is my choice, my hardware, and is for my own benefit.
- gruez 5y agoIt really isn't when you're forced to install the anticheat software to play the game. The corresponding phone analogy would be saying that it's "your choice" to have your pictures scanned for CSAM, because you made the choice to buy apple instead of a pinephone or whatever.
- dangrossman 5y agoThe anti-cheat code is an integral part of an online game. I can choose not to install and play that game if I don't want the anti-cheat code on my computer. I can't choose not to run iOS on an Apple phone. These are not analogous situations.
- sweetbitter 5y agoWhat about communities of gamers and hackers who get their fun in environments where everyone spends their time hacking away at game code to use against each other? This is pretty common in many Minecraft servers, for example- hundreds of people developing the best cheats to use against opposing factions in said communities.
- ejj28 5y agoThose people don't play on the same servers as regular players.
- judge2020 5y agoMalware is subjective, as everyone who's made any new executable and sent it to a friend knows as Defender immediately destroys the program and quarantines it. Surely many, many people are willing to pay the price of running this anti-cheat that 'runs in the background' (not consuming many resources, mind you - the vgc executable isn't constantly running, only vgtray which is the tray icon and it's sitting at 640K), so this obviously isn't malware to them.
- syspec 5y agoAt 640k it's using all the available ram any computer would ever need
- jevoten 5y ago> Malware is subjective Torrent programs get silently deleted, LibreOffice and other FOSS installers get big scary warnings [1], installing an open-source audio package pops up no less than seven warning screens [2], but Riot can install a literal rootkit to only a single "this program will make changes to your computer" notification, in a friendly blue color. It's painfully obvious Microsoft is looking out for its own interests, and those of its corporate partners, instead of their users, when they subjectively determine what is malware. [1] https://baronhk.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/microsoft-defender-leads-the-user-to-assume-free-and-open-source-software-is-malicious-with-scary-red-warnings/ https://baronhk.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/microsoft-defender-... [2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/05/windows_10_microsoft_defender_smartscreen/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/05/windows_10_microsoft_...
- judge2020 5y agoIt's not a rootkit, it's a kernel-level driver. The same goes for any other driver that can be installed via just UAC - for example, Corsair installs their kernel driver[0] and cpu-z as well[1]. 0: https://i.judge.sh/illegal/Tempest/InstalledDriversList_HbYVoId9Nd.png https://i.judge.sh/illegal/Tempest/InstalledDriversList_HbYV... 1: https://i.judge.sh/fickle/Aloe/InstalledDriversList_7NIthyI6dM.png https://i.judge.sh/fickle/Aloe/InstalledDriversList_7NIthyI6...
- tareqak 5y agoIf they really wanted to stop cheating but also preserve privacy, then why not get players to login to a dedicated machine like a game console or a virtual machine service like NVIDIA and Google have? Riot should also get there players to run a Riot-specific VPN too.
- minimaxir 5y agoThis may be tied to Vanguard: https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046160933-What-is-Vanguard- https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...
- thatguy0900 5y agoThis is really the endgame of cheating and anti cheat wars. The anti cheat has to basically become root kits. I wonder if they will eventually offer a unprotected server to people who refuse to install the root kits or not.
- daneel_w 5y agoIt's interesting; their anti-cheat already is a root kit that runs as a ring-0 (or lower?) kernel module in Windows, yet they keep having to ban cheaters every month. But this goes beyond root kits. It's now apparently acceptable to operate arbitrary applications on users' PCs even when not playing the game. Utter spyware.
- fsdjkflsjfsoij 5y ago> yet they keep having to ban cheaters every month It's not perfect but the cheaters generally get banned fairly quickly and it's far better than the alternative. I've played tons of games of Valorant at Radiant (the highest rank) and it's extremely rare to even run into someone that I suspect is cheating. In comparison, I get extremely blatant cheaters in about 25% of my games of CS and far more than that in CoD: Warzone.
- tentacleuno 5y ago> and it's far better than the alternative There is, of course, a substantial issue re: privacy with this approach. A ring-0 driver can essentially do everything the system can (it's running in kernel mode). It's a two-sided coin.
- fsdjkflsjfsoij 5y agoBasically everything of interest on the average user's computer can be obtained without a ring-0 driver. Riot's incentive for the driver is extremely clear and it's not in their financial interest to abuse it.
- NotPractical 5y agoThe operating system should not allow Riot to do stuff like this. Sandboxing on the desktop is badly needed. Flatpak may have its problems but it's probably the best effort so far.
- circularfoyers 5y agoI'm not sure this is even enough, when these anti-cheat systems rely on kernel driver implementations.
- setpatchaddress 5y agoIt’s really unfortunate that Apple’s blown gaming so badly. I built a mid-high range gaming PC during the first year of the pandemic. The awful software that PC gamers have to put up with, from the basic stuff like NVidia’s driver software updates that they seem to want to be a social network to the ASUS labyrinth of random apps + UI just to update various bits of motherboard support where it’s not clear what you actually need and what’s actually cosmetic to the MSI daemons to support RGB lights on RAM modules that cause some games to crash at launch Just Because. Windows gaming is a real shitshow. But that’s where the games are. You can avoid running most of this crap. But you wouldn’t have to put up with it in the first place on the Mac, because there’s an assumed baseline of non-scummy software and vendors would get called out and shunned.
- Barrin92 5y agoI think the operating system should allow users to do whatever they want with it, as long as they consent to it. I'm honestly a little bit baffled how the discussion swings the other end when it comes to software like this, compared to say the Google Manifest V3 debate. If people value having fewer cheaters in their video games and they're willing to accept the trade-off of having software run at a low-level to be effective at detection that's their choice. Flatpak's are a great choice to have but I don't want to have the operating system force them on me.
- NotPractical 5y ago
- PradeetPatel 5y agoIt is apparent that many modern anticheat mechanisms are almost indistinguishable from root kits, which may pose additional security risks of their own. Realistically, as potential consumers of those products, is there anything we can do to make a meaningful change for the positive? Education and raising awareness can only do so much...
- yur3i__ 5y ago>meaningful change not really, the vast majority of players care far more about having less cheaters than they do giving Riot/Activision etc higher levels of access. Personally I play on consoles for the most part to avoid having to install things like Riot Vanguard and whatever the new Call of Duty anti cheat is called.
- jquery 5y agoDon’t play games that install root kits. Most games don’t.
- ev1 5y agoUnfortunately, this only applies to single player games/indies/etc. Almost every major game installs a rootkit of some sort. The only one I can think of that doesn't is FFXIV, but they do fingerprint your devices somewhat aggressively.
- gentleman11 5y agoHow do you know if they do or not? There is no “are you okay with us installing spyware” dialogue
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gentleman11 5y agoI hope so. The Ubisoft terms of service lets them read your browsing history and the doom tos lets them search for medical records and sell what they find
- Kuinox 5y agoFor those complaining here: It's for the anti cheat. The anticheat has to start with the OS, or it cannot trust the current OS instance. This is the (current) price to pay if you want a cheater-less game. I predict it will worsen, and soon, controller, mouse, keyboard and screen will be needed to be trusted to avoid new neural network based cheats.
- errantspark 5y agoThis wasn't near as much an issue when you had actual servers run by actual people. Too bad the technology to implement a server browser has been lost to time. : ( Perhaps one day we will rediscover it.
- ethbr0 5y agoThis. "Favorite servers" with admins generally took care of all of this. You'd have a few public servers hosted by a group. You'd have a few private servers you could be invited to. Generally, everyone was happier. And most importantly, once exploit didn't break the entire game, everywhere. Because you could get arbitrarily banned from servers for being an ass. (And yes, you could hide your IP and redirect. But at some point trolling gets old, and trolls move on)
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoI don't get the past tense used here. The creators of the biggest game in the market are using the same model right now, making the sever available for free, with people creating their own server modifications etc. There is a whole culture around it.
- dieortin 5y agoWhat it the “biggest game in the market” you’re referring to?
- tentacleuno 5y ago
- Permit 5y agoOne thing that may surprise HN readers is the widespread support some of these tactics have among the gaming community. I distinctly remember Shroud (a popular Twitch streamer and former CS:GO professional) asking for this (for PUBG) in 2018. I remember Chocotaco (another popular Twitch streamer) voicing support for South Korean laws[1] that criminalize cheating in video games. It's harder to quantify support among typical players, but I imagine it's much higher than we might expect. People really hate cheating in videogames. [1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/console/south-korea-cracks-down-on-cheaters-with-law-targeting-illicit-game-mods https://www.gamedeveloper.com/console/south-korea-cracks-dow...
- dogma1138 5y agoI actually have no problem with criminalizing cheating to some extent, I’m not actually sure you need new laws for that since it should fall under existing computer misuse legislation and arguably you can also make a case for harassment and public nuisance. Even without it being a full on felony in jurisdictions that have that distinction it should expose you to civil suits because you are degrading a service and costing the company money. If you break into a paintball arena for example and start running around shooting everyone with your own gun you probably will get the cops called on you and they’ll drag you out and charge you with something. And heck even without breaking in if you simply disregard the rules and don’t leave when asked the cops will be called. That said you can support all of this without supporting being forced to install root kits and handing over the control of your devices to the game developer or publisher. The same goes for DRM, I honestly don’t see a problem if someone goes to jail for piracy I do care when companies use terrible DRM to protect their products.
- rightbyte 5y ago> I actually have no problem with criminalizing cheating to some extent If it is criminal to cheat it is not a game anymore. On the other hand I would welcome hazard game regulations for all games with lottery ticket like products for sale, like "loot boxes".
- 5y ago
- cfcfcf 5y agoI played Valorant for a month until I was banned for no reason. They said it was for running unauthorized software but they wouldn't say which. No recourse.
- foolfoolz 5y agothis will all go away once the client runs in the cloud. we are probably one more generation of consoles away. stadia has not been the moving force it appeared to be. but its only a matter of time
- throwaway744678 5y agoProbably not. Some hacks would not work anymore (eg. wallhacks). Yet, how would you detect, say, an aimbot identifying the pixels on the screen and simulating mouse moves?
- jeroenhd 5y agoHow would you detect that, anyway? Behavioural analysis and neural networks? It's not that hard to point a smartphone at a screen and have it send fake keyboard and mouse commands through USB, the challenge is in interpreting the pixels themselves. This is the analogue loophole all over again, for a different kind of DRM.
- StreamBright 5y agoRiot may not. One more reason to never install anything from them. I understand that cheating is bad but it is pretty easy to create a system that monitors behaviour at Riots infra instead of the gamer's and filter out bad users.
- tentacleuno 5y ago> but it is pretty easy to create a system that monitors behaviour at Riots infra Could you expand on this approach, please? Quite interested in what you have to offer, technically speaking.
- StreamBright 5y agoImagine the two sides of user behaviour, one side you can observe on the client while the other side is observed on the "server" (more like the infra where the servers are running). There are several ways of monitor traffic (that is sent by the client to the server) and identify patterns (good or bad patterns). I have seen machine learning based network intrusion detection projects that quite successfully identified bad user behaviour in HTTP traffic for example. Riot has 100M+ users, it is probably the most statistically significant user base on Earth. You could start to map out user behaviour parameters that you need to monitor to have them as "features" in your machine learning model. There is also a ton of historical data where they identified bad behaviour somehow (reported by other players, etc.) that you can use to train the ML models. Let's say you are trying to catch people with aim bot or in Riot's case farm bot (helping the player last hit, if you know LoL you know what I mean, if you don't nor problem, the example is probably understandable anyways). There is the way to catch this guy by observing what is running on the client and see if there is a last hit bot process or not. Or, you could come up with a number (or multiple numbers) that represent a typical player behaviour (CS / min adjusted by ELO, I am just making this up though) and you could try to build models around this try to see if the data to have is giving you any meaningful accuracy of predicting cheating. I know, this is more work, more resources, probably more challenging, but it does not violate the user's privacy and it does not require the good users also having to install rootkits on their devices. I would be a big surprise for me if it was not possible to achieve ML based user behaviour monitoring when the rest of tech companies implemented this years ago. I know that Amazon done this for sure (probably 10-15 years ago).
- beebeepka 5y agoHaha. Aren't they the same people with the rootkit anticheat bullshit? Freemium. "mium" is Latin for not really. So sad a stupid Warcraft 3 spawned this horrible moba genre. What a horrible group of people
- dieortin 5y agoI don’t think the game genre, or even the game itself, has anything to do with what’s being discussed here.
- beebeepka 5y agoWhat's being discussed here is presenting spying on your user base as a good thing because "it stops cheating". They simply want more dirt on the kids who play their games.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoDo you have any actual evidence of them behaving in bad faith here? Or is this the usual internet hypercynicism?
- beebeepka 5y agoInstalling spyware on people's computers is not enough for you? I guess I am done here if I am being hyper cynical. Dqmn, we have apologists for everything
- potench 5y agoFor anyone looking to jump to the part about background programs: > 9.2. Does Riot run programs on my device while I’m not using the Riot Services? > (We may, for limited anti-cheat purposes.) > In order to prevent cheating and hacking, we may require you to install anti-cheat software. This software may run in the background of your device. The language here implies you will be notified and consent to install the anti-cheat software - it doesn't seem like these programs will install and run without your approval but that's just based on the very brief summary here which might not be accurate.
- ev1 5y agoFor valorant (FPS), Vanguard starts at boot, and you can disable it from userland/tray icon. Disabling it blocks your ability to play the game until the next reboot. For lol, Packman/stub is not kernel mode and starts with the game and exits with the game.
- squarefoot 5y agoIf that's what is needed to fight against cheating, then it will only escalate. The bottom line then is don't do anything else with your gaming machine: no work related stuff, no banking, no email, no social networking, no personal data or any access to the home NAS, no projects, nothing but games. Connect it to a low latency firewalled network plug on the router that would let it see only the outside and that's it. Use then a lower power machine for everything else, and treat the gaming machine as already compromised out of the box.
- Arcsech 5y agoThe shortcut to implementing this technique is buy a gaming console. Gaming companies seem very committed to their desire to root your box, so might as well just get one pre-rooted and use it for nothing else.
- DangitBobby 5y agoGames on PC are very cheap, though. I spend less for more games now than when I used consoles growing up.
- kbenson 5y agoThere's lots of cheap indie games and game pass services on the consoles too, from what I understand. I'm not sure games on PC are much cheaper. Do you have examples of what you're talking about? Are big titles like $10 more on consoles for licensing fees or something?
- stnikolauswagne 5y agoI think there are three arguments to be made for PC being overall cheaper 1) XBox Gamepass offers a huge library of often new games for a cheap rate. That service is also available on Xbox consoles but those are much less popular than their competition. 2) Epic Games offers a bunch of games for free to entice people into switching over from steam, not sure about the current situation though. 3) Steam often offers very deep discounts on games and due to the relative ease you can buy keys from resellers you can get games for super cheap. As an annectode I was able to get my girlfriend 250€ worth of expansions for sims for less than 40€, discounts this deep are hard to get on console.
- NtGuy25 5y agoOne thing to remember, is just like AV's, it's the norm for them to literally upload random archives, documents and whatever else to "Scan". There's a reason pretty much every Anglo country doesn't recommend Kaspersky for this reason. It makes you wonder the risk of China owning 100 % of Riot and the data gathering potentials. And since it's the standard industry practice, the American engineers won't even blink an eye when designing it. It's truly a national security and IP risk that alot of people don't realize. Now I will say as someone who makes tools for and reverses their products(All in fairy land in the kingdom of tacobell in my dreams). They have pretty unobtrusive anticheat in League of Legends and mainly only hammer a whitelist. For example if you install Itunes, they will get really obtrusive with anything related to Bonjour. As well as with anything that injects into the module list. With Vanguard, they get EXTREMELY intrusive and scan network drives, and I found VM memory pages being scanned, but i'm unsure if it's intentional or not as I didn't go to deep into it, since I don't really play shooters and mainly did it as a quick audit, unlike League of Legends. They do shut it off when you say shut it off though. EDIT: One thing to keep in mind. Is if they make a kernel driver which subverts the OS's control schemes(For example making a CreateFile, ReadFile, Memory write primitive, Memory read primitive. If you see this, REPORT IT. Microsoft bans these types of implementation and you can do that here. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/driversubmission https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/driversubmission . It's a MASSIVE security risk and they will REVOKE the driver certification and deny loading it on Windows! Do not let them rootkit your system, know what Microsoft allows and doesn't. They do care, they've fucked over AV products before, and they will do it again. The OS Security team at Microsoft is extremely good and genuinely cares about you as a user.
- mikeiz404 5y agoSo it’s been a long, long while since I’ve explicitly run AV software but doesn’t signature, heuristic, and behavior based detection all run locally on the machine? I suppose the exception might be sandbox but from what I understand this is usually in a corporate environment where connections are MitM’d any way and potentially harmful files are run in a sandbox. Am I missing something? That being said I’m not sure very many would even notice files being exfilled by an AV especially if it were user targeted.
- einarfd 5y agoSomewhere at the end of last century, start of this one. I personally gave up on playing games on non dedicated hardware. One of the main reason I did that, was that it was becoming clear that games, was shipped with something that looked a lot like a root kit or a virus, and if you didn't want that on you computer, you couldn't play games on it. So for me, I went with a console for games, but a dedicated PC works as well. But from my point of view, a PC with games on it, that is security hazard, and should never run anything you want to keep private.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI made the exact same choice about 10 years ago. For security and privacy reasons. Also every couple of years I get the need for a new rig when obviously I didn’t really need one. It’s definitely better over here in the dedicated hardware world
- stjohnswarts 5y agoIt’s definitely a lot calmer and safer using dedicated hardware. I made the exact same decision about 10 years ago
- gitgud235 5y agoEAC does this already which is among the most popular anti-cheats. How are you supposed to make an effective anti-cheat without accessing the kernel? wait this is also old-news? Terms of service: Last Modified: April 30, 2021
- phantom_oracle 5y agoCounter-intuitively, I wonder what gaming would be like if everyone ran the same cheats/mods? Would it be the same as "if everyone is rich, then nobody is" or would it devolve into such a state where cheating/modding gets so boring that people just go back to casual play ... On the other hand, gaming is now a big commercial entity, including 'pros' and 'streamers'. With money involved, fraud and cheating ain't far behind.
- seoaeu 5y agoIf you look at what's happened to certain games without anti-cheat you can actually answer that question! It turns out that it mostly devolves into a bunch of AIs playing against each other with the actual humans just passively watching. Perhaps exciting to see your aim bot beat the others, but overall not much of an interactive experience anyone
- sweetbitter 5y agoHere's an example from Minecraft, in which duplication exploits enable the emergent gameplay of 'crystal PvP'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYMd2sIBlDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYMd2sIBlDU And a hell of a lot more where that came from. There was one instance where players had exploited a popular no-rules server to spawn in items that dealt 32,000 damage, the administrator attempting to patch it and the players playing the cat-and-mouse game of trying to keep using them for as long as possible. The creativity is really something else. As for their music choice in that video- par for the course when dealing with the 4chan of Minecraft.
- chrischen 5y agoHow do anti-virus software differ?
- wnevets 5y agoCould be a rumor but I recall reading a story that claimed Valve monitors their user's DNS connections looking for known cheat host.
- scrose 5y agoI understand that this probably isn't popular opinion, but I believe we need hackers/exploiters in games, and we need recognized communities for them in those games. People cheat in games for almost an endless amount of reasons. But many times, I've seen that it usually comes down to wanting to 'be the best' or just a general interest in understanding how things work. Creating a 'safe space' for people to cheat in games becomes a net plus for everyone because it keeps a lot of the non-malicious cheaters out of legitimate player's games. It also helps developers understand where some flaws are in their systems that they wouldn't ordinarily catch because they'll end up with communities openly discussing their latest exploits, or specific servers where they can look to see what bugs or hacks people are coming up with now. It also means the people who are cheating so they can 'be the best' will get bored of it very fast once they finally have everything and move to the next game. A cheater that's in a designated server is someone that is not interrupting a legitimate game. There will, of course, always be malicious hackers and trolls that won't want to stick to designated servers or openly discuss exploits so they don't get patched. But this is going to happen regardless of whether or not there's a recognized community, and it doesn't make sense to punish everyone because of this. Popular cheating communities also tend to be self-enforcing. It's not uncommon for people to get blacklisted from these groups or reported in games by other cheaters if they cross a line(ie. Caught cheating in non-designated servers, DOSing servers, etc..). Disclaimer: I was an admin and regular on a couple popular cheating/exploit communities over 15 years ago at this point. It was my first introduction to how computers actually work but also should put in perspective how this is a never-ending battle
- TulliusCicero 5y agoIIRC some games do this with “low trust” users. But yeah the sticking point is that cheaters wanna “be the best”, even if that requires cheating, and if they’re surrounded by other cheating users that doesn’t really work anymore, so why would they stick to those servers?
- scrose 5y ago> But yeah the sticking point is that cheaters wanna “be the best”, even if that requires cheating, and if they’re surrounded by other cheating users that doesn’t really work anymore, so why would they stick to those servers? There's so many different games so there's no single answer. But from my own experience, in FPS games, people love building better aimbots, or augmenting different abilities to get a better edge, or adding overlays to their visuals to better calculate trajectories. Being a better cheater becomes its own competition. The end-goal of this wouldn't be to move all cheaters to designated servers, that will never happen, it's to make it more obvious and easier to take action when there's a cheater in a legit match.
- gkhartman 5y agoI can't bring myself to install their client with these practices in place. Even if I trust Riot not to abuse their root privilege, how long will it take before their anti cheat service running on my machine is hijacked by a third party? I'd love to play their games again, but it's way more risk than I'm willing to take.
- nyuszika7h 5y agoWhen I read the title I thought this was about the Matrix client at first.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoMany comments in this thread are of the form: > I don’t play this game and I don’t approve of the anti-cheat measures! This seems to be a common pattern. People who actually play the game hate cheaters and are okay with more extreme measures, while outsiders tut-tut that acceptance. Don’t you know that’s bad for you, gamers?
- ok_dad 5y agoI just use consoles now, because cheating is annoying and it's harder on a console. I only play games on my PC that are single player or where I only have to play with friends. I don't like anti cheat software like this on my PC.
- dang 5y agoThe submitted title was "Riot may run programs in the background on your PC when not using the service". We might have let that pass if it were a quote from the article (even though that is already editorializing and against the site guidelines - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). But it's not a quote from the article and it's too hard to assess whether it's strictly accurate or not. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's.
- authed 5y agoAnti-cheat should be on the server... not on the client. Otherwise, it will never work (probably still won't because no one figured out perfect software, but it would be a start).
- georgyo 5y agoA lot of comments are talking about cheating, but there are so many "free" games that have launchers that auto start at boot. Several of my friends recommended genshin impact. It registered a background service that starts at boot and runs as Administrator. This is a PvE game! Uninstalled quickly. It's to the point that I will _only_ install games from steam, however that even that is not solid as it used to be with many games installing their launcher service at first run (origin, epic, etc) Android games also regularly install services well, the games are always running _something_ in the background. Free games, even those with many in game purchases, seem to not care at all about running their software even when you are not playing their game.
- slothtrop 5y agoI wonder if console use with a mouse and keyboard will grow in popularity owing to this issue. People hate cheaters, but also don't want to run anticheat on their primary OS. At this point it seems like Sony, MS and Valve machines are pretty locked-down and aren't as easily tampered with.
- barnabee 5y agoI don’t care about playing games online against strangers, I should be able to opt out of this crap. No access to multiplayer servers would not be a problem for me.
- EastSmith 5y agoAnyone tried to run games in Windows Sandbox?
- somebodythere 5y agoThe reason anti-cheat penalties don't really do anything is because people can just create a new account (on a free-to-play game) or play 20-60 dollars when they get detected. Video game developers usually won't ban cheaters for several weeks because it makes it harder to tell what program caused the ban. But it also gives you basically a guaranteed period of time to ruin other people's games. I think in the future we might have a shared player registry for competitive video games, where people link their BrightID, basically proving that they are an individual without disclosing any additional personal information about themselves. And when they are banned for cheating, the ban is applied to their BrightID account, so they can't evade by changing IP/game account/etc. And other games by other companies can choose to look at this registry and reciprocate the ban as well. It seems like an effective, but less dystopic solution than throwing people in jail for in-game cheating.
- SixDouble5321 5y agoIf there is no personal information, what is to stop me from creating a new ID? I personally find this idea at least as worrying. I don't want to be having to put my name on a list for every given community I belong to.
- somebodythere 5y agoYour friends verify you as a unique human, generating a web of trust and a cryptographic fingerprint you can use to identify yourself as such. This fingerprint doesn't contain any more info about you other than you are a unique human, and you can provide a different fingerprint to each app you use.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIt would be funny if this is the software that ends up finding all the nation state botnets dormant on our computers.