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I wish you to play a competitive multiplayer game filled with cheaters. You don't know if your opponent is good or cheating. It simply kill all the fun. I

• izacus 5y ago
  > Great, now you are stuck with a closed standard, with a closed OS, where you can't run the programs you want. The DRM anticheat drivers turn Linux PCs into a closed standard, closed OS platforms where your software kills itself (even if it's single-player) when you step out of the locked down platform. You're trying to picture a difference where there is none.
  • danuker 5y ago
    This gets me thinking. They could strike deals with AMD and Nvidia to bundle some anticheat mechanisms in their proprietary Linux drivers.
    • judge2020 5y ago
      If I’m not mistaken, SGX was/is available to programs on Linux.
  • sbarre 5y ago
    There is a huge difference between one narrow-purpose component of your system being closed and a whole system being closed. Come on.
    • izacus 5y ago
      What DRM anticheat measures do is to monitor your whole system for modifications and kill the app if they detect changes. For example, they will make sure that your nVidia (or AMD) driver is one of the whitelisted hashes and hasn't been modified with a wallhack. This is why Linux users using Wine keep being banned from these platforms - they detect "unusual" runtime environment and ban the players because it doesn't fit into their narrow hash of an "acceptable" system. It is an outright definition of sealing off your OS from modification.
• Rooster61 5y ago
  I have. Many times. Yes, its a bit of a bummer. No, it still doesn't justify Tencent being able to see more about what is going on in my machine better than I can. Video games are a hobby for 99% of people out there, including myself. I can do without a plaything if it means not handing over the keys of the computer I built with my own hands to nefarious actors. That is FAR AND AWAY more important to me, and I'd hope most people.
  • cinntaile 5y ago
    Why does it matter if you built the computer with your own hands? It's sad that we need invasive anticheat but if that's what it takes to get a somewhat cheater free gaming environment I am ok with that. I'll take that over ruined games by cheaters any day of the week.
    • zentiggr 5y ago
      Until some overly agressive anti-cheat that has kernel level access, decides to blacklist your machine, and because of whatever black boxed bugs, blocks your machine's Ethernet connections, all of them, and now you're stuck until you reimage and remove that borked kernel, except that they implemented an IME level code chunk that immediately downloads the anti-cheat code on the IME channel, and now your machine can never connect to the internet again until you replace the motherboard. Convince me that won't happen...
      • cinntaile 5y ago
        It sounds like you know more about how these work than I do so I'll assume it can happen. It's a risk to consider for sure. I obviously don't want this to happen to me, but I'll still take this major inconvenience that a few individuals might suffer from over cheaters in game that everyone playing the game suffers from. I'm talking cheating in multiplayer games to be clear. I guess I'll get downvoted again, but I'll take those downvotes in stride.
  • sbarre 5y ago
    Wild how this turned from "I don't want a game-related kernel-level driver in my system" to "I don't want China spying on me" in one reply. You lost me there to be honest, if you think the "true" purpose of anti-cheat drivers is for a foreign power to spy on us boring ordinary uninteresting people. But you are correct in saying that it's a personal choice for everyone to make for themselves, based on how much they value fair play in their hobby of choice. Particularly for anyone who puts hundreds (thousands?) of hours into getting good at their competitive multiplayer game of choice, the trade between installing an anti-cheat, suffering cheaters, or giving up on their hobby, is probably not the same math you're doing.
• zozbot234 5y ago
  Stream gaming is inherently safe from cheating too, because the game logic and rendering is not computed directly by the player so there's no way they can 'cheat' in a conventional sense.
  • oefrha 5y ago
    What? You can totally build an aimbot using nothing but image recognition.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      But it does eliminate whole classes of cheats like ESPs and wallhacks. It also allows for servers to trust the clients. There's no issue with letting a client determine if they've killed someone instead of needing on the server to rollback and check for kills.
      • Kuinox 5y ago
        You can still wallhack based on directional sound, and or minimap.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      Image recognition is way too slow to help with aiming.
      • oefrha 5y ago
        Maybe check out some existing ones before confidently making such a claim? E.g. https://github.com/petercunha/Pine https://github.com/petercunha/Pine. IIRC there are even high quality image recognition-based aimbots for sale; can’t find them right now.
      • wnoise 5y ago
        Used to be. Moore's law isn't quite dead yet, nor are algorithmic computer vision improvements.
    • 5y ago
• LanceH 5y ago
  First, anti-cheat software doesn't guarantee anything of the sort. There are still plenty of cheats out there. Second, this was already a solved problem since we could run our own servers and kick whoever we wanted. But this has largely been taken away, to the point that people don't know it ever existed.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    most regular players want MMR and matchmaking so they can play against similarly-skilled teams and can see themselves improve by winning against better opponents over time. They don’t want to have to weed through a lobby list to maybe get into an evenly-matched game, or maybe get destroyed by someone leagues better than them.
    • LanceH 5y ago
      So letting people run their own servers where the kernel doesn't need to be compromised for all the players will have minimal impact. Gotcha. So we agree, let them run their own servers and the minority who are security conscious can game away happily.
  • maccard 5y ago
    > First, anti-cheat software doesn't guarantee anything of the sort. There are still plenty of cheats out there. It's not a binary thing. There will always be cheats. It's about raising the bar to be difficult enough for enough people to not bother. If you want an example of the effect cheating can have on games, look at Fall guys. It shipped as a unity game, was immediately reverse engineered and the game was effectively unplayable on PC [0]. They added easy anti cheat, and the problem effectively disappeared overnight. > this was already a solved problem since we could run our own servers and kick whoever we wanted. Banning someone from your server isn't solving the problem, it's pushing it onto another person. Abuse of these systems was rampant too, I have distinct memories of being kicked from battlefield and counter strike servers on the early 00's because I killed someone and they didn't like it. Having community run servers also has its one share of problems when combined with live service games. At best, you force community servers to keep up to date, or more than likely you end up with dozens of fragmented versions of games that are incompatible with each other, and if I want to play on server A with this group and server B with another, I need multiple copies of the game installed. [0] https://www.gamerant.com/fall-guys-massive-cheater-problem/ https://www.gamerant.com/fall-guys-massive-cheater-problem/
• rglullis 5y ago
  > It simply kill all the fun. Then it is up for game developers to find a better solution to the problem, not for us to accept a violation of our privacy.
• danShumway 5y ago
  Evergreen, but the incentive/enforcement structures for this in games are often very wrong. If you're playing against someone who's sniping you across the map every thirty seconds, it (usually) does not matter whether or not they're cheating or doing it legitimately. Both outcomes aren't fun for players, and both outcomes make the game less competitive. The idea that toxic behavior saps the fun out a game only when it's automated is just silly -- cheating doesn't really change anything about that dynamic. Yes, this is admittedly more complicated than I'm making it sound, and yes, there is a valid conversation to be had about players wanting to feel that multiplayer games are fair, even when they mostly aren't. But while that player instinct around fairness does exist, it is also true that for a huge portion of your playerbase if someone is cheating convincingly enough that other players are still having fun then (outside of esports leagues) it often doesn't really matter. Let them, especially if they're convincing enough that players can't tell the difference. And if someone is purposefully creating a bad/toxic experience for other players, they should be either matched differently or banned anyway, even if they're just that good entirely out of their own skill. Good players who legitimately win can still be toxic and annoying to play against. This isn't a universal hard rule, but in general you should optimize for the outcomes you want, not for the way that people get there. It is better to have a game with cheaters/bots where people are still constantly playing at the edge of their skill level, where there are consequences for griefing, and where players are trying to create competitive/fun matches, than a game where all of your energy is devoted to just figuring out whether or not a match was miserable for "legitimate" reasons. And for a lot of games, probably >90% of your playerbase is in this group where they care more about competitive, interesting matches that help them grow as a player and get better at the game than they care about the extreme low-level integrity of the game. Most of your playerbase is frankly not good enough or competitive enough at your game at the global levels where it matters whether or not everybody on the global ladder deserves their win count. So why are we collectively optimizing everything around such a small percentage of players?