6 ms·

> But typically these games are not solitaire; you're playing with other people. And using a non-free program together with other people? That's particularly ba

• Arainach 5y ago
  >Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable. [[Citation Needed]]. Trying to play a multiplayer game that doesn't implement effective anticheat is miserable. The arms race is unfortunate but 100% understandable, and I wouldn't play any game that doesn't implement some form of it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • nighthawk454 5y ago
    Bit of a false dichotomy. Detesting anticheat doesn't mean you support none (and therefore enjoy rampant cheating). More probably, the point here is most anticheats are very invasive and harmful to privacy, while also degrading game performance and often being ineffective at preventing cheaters.
    • TulliusCicero 5y ago
      > More probably, the point here is most anticheats are very invasive and harmful to privacy, while also degrading game performance and often being ineffective at preventing cheaters. [Citation needed] at the last part. Of course they're not gonna prevent 100% of cheaters, but I have doubts that they don't do anything.
      • nighthawk454 5y ago
        i think you may have misread it. no one claimed any absolute (in)effectiveness. my point was the % of cheating they do prevent is sometimes not enough to sufficiently improve the user experience, despite the large privacy tradeoffs. for example, queue for ranked in R6 Siege... saying "citation needed" on repeat is kind of lazy. OP's point here was that anticheat - while necessary in practice - is particularly egregious at invading privacy and/or degrading the user's experience, which i think is fair to say goes against the free software ideal. the experience would certainly be worse without any anticheat, but that doesn't mean anticheat couldn't be better or isn't still very non-free.
  • vjk800 5y ago
    This is due to how multiplayer in modern games is orchestrated. In the old days, you would play multiplayer with your friends and their friends on a private server or some kind of community server where cheaters could quickly be recognized and banned by the admins. Now this communal way of playing online games is largely gone and replaced by match making which makes multiplayer basically the same as playing against cleverer bots. Match making is more convenient, especially for lone players, and I don't think the change was done out of malice. Still, it feels like something was lost with the disappearance of private or semi-private community servers, easy policing of cheaters being one of those things.
    • comex 5y ago
      Anticheat was still a thing in the old days, even when it was something the admins had to manually install (PunkBuster for some games, I think?) or at least not opt out of (VAC). So, at least at the time, many admins saw it as desirable despite their own existence.
      • shagie 5y ago
        I recall the signed netrek builds back when I was playing that. Sure, you could read the source - but only signed builds could run on certain servers.
    • alkonaut 5y ago
      Solving the community game problem doesn’t require Anticheat, just groups of people who organize and nominate admins. But that niche doesn’t pay for the development of the games. For a game to attract the amount of people required to finance AAA gamedev it needs console matchmaking (so people can enjoy it from the first minute), it might need to allow trustworthy competitive games bevause competitions are part of marketing. Being able to switch off the anticheats on private/community server that are policed by admins would work. But again it’s a pretty small niche.
    • jdbernard 5y ago
      More and more it feels like one of the central problems of the modern technical is how to effectively scale trust. Anti-piracy: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling the sale of products because technology has radically reduced "manufacture" and distribution costs. Anti-cheat: trying to address the lack of abuse of trust while scaling game coordination because tech. has made massive interconnectivity possible Anti-cryptography: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling communication tools.
• oceanplexian 5y ago
  I think he would just say “I told you so”. To play a game I need to be running non-free hardware, to run a non-free OS (Windows 11) to run closed source software, that connects to a non-free server, that spies on me in proprietary ways to prevent cheating.
  • chmod600 5y ago
    At a certain point it's a game appliance (e.g. Nintendo Switch) rather than a computer. Stallman would probably say that's fine. The problem is mixing purposes to the point where most people don't even have access to a free computing system.
    • shagie 5y ago
      Other than the functionality of the phone itself, what practical difference is there between the iPhone and the Nintendo Switch? What has Stallman said about walled gardens and app stores? Maybe a GCW Zero or an OUYA or similar (and yes, I'm aware of the current status of the system). Fortunately, because these are linux or android based and thus open source, you still have the freedom to compile your own kernels for them.
• danamit 5y ago
  It is possible to have free anticheat software. I do not hate anticheat as a gamer, but I do hate DRMs.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    No it isn’t. Anti cheat is basically DRM/malware. If you could fully understand how it works you could just modify it / work your cheats around it.
    • Morgawr 5y ago
      I don't think this is really a given. I admit I'm not familiar with whether or not there exist some free and open source anti-cheat software out there but I can definitely imagine a world where if people put enough resources in developing such software it'd be totally possible to be as good as current proprietary anti-cheat techniques. Claiming that knowing how the code works lets you break the code is basically advocating for security by obscurity which I'm fairly sure we're all aware it's not the holy grail of a secure system. If you will allow me a bit of a hyperbole, it'd be like saying that since I have access to the entire code of my SSH client, that gives me the capability of modifying it so it lets me connect to every server (even those that I do not own) without a password. That's simply not how it works.
      • charcircuit 5y ago
        It'd be simple to develop stealth code to hide your cheats. >advocating for security by obscurity There is nothing wrong with this as long as you understand what you are doing. The goal of anticheat is to prevent cheat makers from being able to make cheats for your game for as long as possible. Increasing the time and skill needed to reverse engineer your anticheat increases the time it takes for someone to develop a cheat. >it'd be like saying that since I have access to the entire code of my SSH client, that gives me the capability of modifying it so it lets me connect to every server (even those that I do not own) without a password With this kind of problem of authentication it is simple to design the code such that the time it will take for an attacker to break the security to be impractical. Anticheat on the other hand is not a problem that has a solution like that. If you want to check if a click came from a mouse or a cheat program and you trust the client to tell you where it came from it's impossible to prevent the client from lying. Since it's trivial to lie you need to find a way to slow down attackers to make it harder to lie.
• duxup 5y ago
  > Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable. I don’t want to play a game with a bunch of cheaters, and I don’t want to have to filter down to “friends I know won’t cheat “ to play a game with others.
  • Kinrany 5y ago
    You could play with friends of friends of friends. We can make software for making these checks automatically and transitively, and automatically distribute responsibility when someone is found cheating.
    • ahtihn 5y ago
      How can you know someone is cheating if you don't have anti-cheat software? How can you tell it's not simply a very very good player? Also what if I don't have friends who play the same game and I'm not interested in making any?
• TulliusCicero 5y ago
  > Even people who don't care in the slightest about free software think anticheat is detestable. Generally the people who are actually into multiplayer games accept anticheat software as a necessary evil. Yes, they're not exactly enthused about what amounts to game-supporting spyware, but playing a game that's rife with hackers is a miserable experience.
  • klabb3 5y ago
    Grifters, trolls, asshats always find their way into communities that are centrally moderated. That includes most online games and social media today. This problem isn't solved with anti cheat and government ID checks. In fact this problem was solved years ago, simply by letting each community create their own spaces with their own rules. This means some spaces are private. Others may be semi-open. And some will be fully open, and yes that will always be chaotic. The only multi-player games I play are with friends or their friends, ie people I already trust. The only social media i use is group chats with friends. Of course, you can have more open and anonymous spaces like we have here on HN, but you need more moderation and the moderators need to feel some sense of pride/ownership to keep on working for free.
    • zzo38computer 5y ago
      This I agree. Furthermore, you should be able to do such a community by a local network (LAN) instead of using the internet, if you wish. (Free software has this advantage, too; if it does not already do that, you could change it to work.) (Also, some tournaments might be set up in a room in a building; there, they can have dedicated computers.)
    • doikor 5y ago
      Private walled gardens would pretty much kill the competitive scene of most games. I used to play competitive dota (the original wc3 map) back in the day and the inhouse leagues were a massive pain in the ass. Same with all the various leagues for counter strike (1.6 at the time). UX was terrible, the moderation sucked and you still had to have anti-cheat as people would cheat even in private spaces. Usually the easiest way to get up the ladder was do something dubious and be good friends with the mods so they would rule in your favor. People use cheats even at LAN events too. So yeah for competitive multiplayer anti-cheat is pretty much required.
• andrewclunn 5y ago
  I wonder What Stallman would think of ROM hacking, and other mod communities that reverse engineer proprietary games, and fundamentally transform (either through direct hacks or rebuilding from decompiled source) them into something more akin to open culture. Legally? No, which is why I doubt he'll ever comment on it, but I imagine he might say that this is a distopian notion where people have to break laws to take ownership of culture because everything is fundamentally non-free.
  • d_tr 5y ago
    He made a comment about reverse engineering in response to a question. Someone asked about reverse engineering something (I think it was about some teleconferencing application), and his response was basically "it's hard work, go for it, but make sure you are not breaking the law in your country".
• moonchild 5y ago
  > without [anticheat], there's a client-side arms race against the server code This exists with anticheat, too.