7 ms·

Those games with anti-cheats are anti-player garbage anyway. You don't lose much without them.

by Pannoniae 3y ago

infecto 3y ago
I wish the Linux/OSS communities were less like this and more welcoming.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  DRM is not welcoming by default... sounds like you have double standards
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    DRM is not the same as anti-cheat.
    - arendtio 3y ago
      They are not, but both are symptoms of a consumer-disrespecting mindset. - DRM does not serve the consumer, but the producer. - Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. And if someone cannot design a game, their anti-cheat is often a disservice to the consumer. I don't like either DRM or anti-cheat solutions, not because I am not willing to pay the producers, but because I have been burned too many times by dysfunctional solutions.
      - eropple 3y ago
        > Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. That silly "speed of light" thing? Just design better.
        0x457 3y ago
        There are cheats today that takes your monitor output and act like a hardware mouse. There is nothing you can do with game design about it.
        arendtio 3y ago
        And some cheats happen on a different device. There is no way anti-cheat software can defeat those (even eye trackers are not perfect). The design question is about software that abuses the game state, which is sent to the client, but not displayed to the player (e.g. wall-hacks), and software that sends impossible input (e.g. speed hacks). Anything that manipulates mouse input is very hard to counter. In the end, all the technical solutions have limits and you need other means to solve the issue (e.g. play with friends/live events). However, anti-cheat software tries to counter many cases that can be solved by better implementations (e.g. servers that send very limited information to the client).
        eropple 3y ago
        > However, anti-cheat software tries to counter many cases that can be solved by better implementations (e.g. servers that send very limited information to the client). And now you can't provide client-side prediction between packets, so you get movement stutter all over the place instead of occasional updates and you get somebody popping into existence because they were behind a wall occlusion on your last packet and you've now strafed into line-of-sight. And they got theirs before you did, so you're dead. Winning, winning result. Consider perhaps that the people making this stuff aren't stupid and would try such obvious things if they were practical.
      - IshKebab 3y ago
        > However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days, but anti-cheat technology definitely raises the bar. It's only "unnecessary" if you're willing to accept a large number of cheaters. Some anti-cheat stuff definitely goes to far but to dismiss the idea entirely is just naïve.
        aeonik 3y ago
        Back in the day we had admins and communities of people. You'd get to know people more and establish trust. You could have registered brackets and independent tournaments with manual administration and banning for cheaters. It worked pretty good, but all of that was taken away.
        ekianjo 3y ago
        > Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days on the user side, it's perfectly possible if you only play online with your friends. The whole idea that we should be able to play with random people if we all accept to have a kernel rootkit needs to die. Ultimately that's exactly what the NSA and other agencies want you to support.
        IshKebab 3y ago
        Sure but most people prefer not to have to spend their lives finding enough friends that some are always available when they have 5 minutes free to play one game of Rocket League. I suppose you could argue that games could offer an "anti-cheat free" version that can only be used in private matches. But I think you can imagine how many downloads that would get.
        arendtio 3y ago
        > It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days On that part, we can agree, and if you think I want to 'dismiss the idea' you completely misunderstood the point. My point is, that the cases anti-cheat software tries to solve, are cases that a well-designed game has solved in the beginning (e.g. sending limited game state to clients, discarding impossible input, etc.). On the other side of the coin, I have seen players who cheated even with anti-cheat in place (like you said), for some games I was unable to play games via proton because the anti-cheat didn't work and I was unable to play some games because the developers messed up their anti-cheat implementation. So there are drawbacks to a feature that has limited use and for which many cases can be solved by other means. In the end, there are many cheat cases that anti-cheat software can't solve (e.g. using a secondary device) and which have to be solved by other means (e.g. spectator delays, live events, private servers).
  - infecto 3y ago
    You are conflating ideas. I don’t think it will be a productive discussion to go down the road of anticheat systems and DRM. We can all have opinions that are different. What is productive is calling out hostile behavior and comments that do nothing but hurt the ecosystem. I see these type of strong negative opinions in a lot of areas of the Linux community. “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      But it's the simple facts. The best possible, most correct, most defensible, most world-improving advice to give for dealing with a user-hostile product or service, is to have the strength of will to reject it and live without it, and live the example to show that it's possible and you won't die. Or at the very least, it is AT LEAST as defensible a stance as "The more pragmatic/adult approach is to give the bully whatever they want than to go without their product or service". That philosophy is not remotely automatically more correct or more adult or nuanced or any of the self-serving words anyone typically uses to try to grant their idea more legitimacy than it deserves. Calling the principled stance "hostile" is itself hostile. You can phrase it in a way that sounds emotional and shortsighted and jeuvenile, and certainly there are many juveniles who are guilty of that. Never the less, rejecting a bad deal is still fundamentally a reaction not an action, a defense not an offense. The publisher promulgating a user-hostile deal is inarguably the offender, the initial hostile actor. You can decide that the bad deal is tolerable for yourself, but that is entirely your weakness and does not make that policy smarter or more correct than that of those that decline.
      - infecto 3y ago
        I genuinely appreciate you proving my point. I am not here debating DRM or anticheat. Simple pointing out that telling someone the game they play is garbage because it uses anticheat does nothing but hurts the Linux ecosystem. You can come up with another essay but I don’t think it disproves what I am saying. Telling someone the game they play is garbage is not increasing the Linux user base. I am sure there will be a retort here, “we don’t want those kind of users or related software”.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    The players of the game are willing to put up with DRM and anticheat in order to get the game. By taking a hardline stance against these, the Linux community is being user-hostile.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Why aren't you saying that the DRM software is the unwelcoming party? That user would happily play that game, but the game publisher doesn't want them. Incredible.
  - infecto 3y ago
    The only thing incredible is how upset people are for pointing out that it’s hostile to tell someone the game they enjoy playing is garbage and is not worth playing because it has anticheat.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      Because it's not an attack, meanwhile the accusation is.
Dalewyn 3y ago
A computer should serve its user. If the user is serving his computer, they're Linuxing right but otherwise doing it wrong.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  Well if cheating is going to make the game almost unplayable the outcome is pretty much the same as you deciding to never install it in the first place due to disliking anticheat systems. So I don't really see the problem.
  - arendtio 3y ago
    Obviously, you haven't been in a position where you had to patch the anti-cheat solution yourself in order to play the game you paid for. Well-designed games offer limited potential for cheaters by design. An anti-cheat software can help to eliminate the little potential that is left, but often games are designed without cheating in mind and some anti-cheat software is put in place to solve all the issues that were produced by the bad design.
    - mainde 3y ago
      I think that there are very few tasks in competitive multiplayer games that humans perform better than machines[1], I don't think your statement holds true unless you exclude a huge amount of game genres or you take all the fun out of them. (E.g. no FPSs or ..FPSs with no aiming?) [1] Unless we're talking about captcha solving competitions, for now, maybe. :)
      - kuschku 3y ago
        You're right in that, if your server rejects inputs that are too fast, too precise, too robotic to be human, bots will emulate the top-playing humans ever more closely. But the question I want to ask is: Is that a problem? If all the bots and cheaters are playing indistinguishable from high-level real humans, where's the harm? Or, to quote Westworld: If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?
daveidol 3y ago
Do you mean the presence of anti-cheat software makes them anti-player? Because I’d disagree. It’s a lot of work and expense to combat cheats, but is very much appreciated by many players (when it works)
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Not every gamer wants an esport experience to have fun
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    I assumed that cheating is way more widespread amongst multiplayer gamers? There is a lot less anonymity in esports and if you get caught and blacklisted.. well you just wasted thousands or tens of thousands of hours. It's pretty hard to have fun when the server is full of cheaters.
    - diggan 3y ago
      > I assumed that cheating is way more widespread amongst multiplayer gamers? I mean, hard to call cheating in a multiplayer game the same as cheating in a singleplayer game. The former ruins the experience of others, the latter just affects your own session. Hard to be against cheating in a singleplayer context.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - Wytwwww 3y ago
        I was thinking about casual and professional online gamers (yet somehow managed to leave out a word in comment...). Of course "cheating" in single player games isn't even a real thing
    - barbariangrunge 3y ago
      Cheating in single player is sort of like modding
tapoxi 3y ago
The Valorant community is incredibly in favor of the Vangard anti-cheat that loads as an early kernel mode driver, and the pro/pro-am Counter-Strike scene plays on FACEIT because they have a strong Kernel-based anticheat. VAC, and server-side VACnet just doesn't cut it.

Those games with anti-cheats are anti-player garbage anyway. You don't lose much without them.

infecto 3y ago

I wish the Linux/OSS communities were less like this and more welcoming.

ekianjo 3y ago
DRM is not welcoming by default... sounds like you have double standards
- IshKebab 3y ago
  DRM is not the same as anti-cheat.
  - arendtio 3y ago
    They are not, but both are symptoms of a consumer-disrespecting mindset. - DRM does not serve the consumer, but the producer. - Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. And if someone cannot design a game, their anti-cheat is often a disservice to the consumer. I don't like either DRM or anti-cheat solutions, not because I am not willing to pay the producers, but because I have been burned too many times by dysfunctional solutions.
    - eropple 3y ago
      > Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. That silly "speed of light" thing? Just design better.
      - 0x457 3y ago
        There are cheats today that takes your monitor output and act like a hardware mouse. There is nothing you can do with game design about it.
        arendtio 3y ago
        And some cheats happen on a different device. There is no way anti-cheat software can defeat those (even eye trackers are not perfect). The design question is about software that abuses the game state, which is sent to the client, but not displayed to the player (e.g. wall-hacks), and software that sends impossible input (e.g. speed hacks). Anything that manipulates mouse input is very hard to counter. In the end, all the technical solutions have limits and you need other means to solve the issue (e.g. play with friends/live events). However, anti-cheat software tries to counter many cases that can be solved by better implementations (e.g. servers that send very limited information to the client).
        eropple 3y ago
        > However, anti-cheat software tries to counter many cases that can be solved by better implementations (e.g. servers that send very limited information to the client). And now you can't provide client-side prediction between packets, so you get movement stutter all over the place instead of occasional updates and you get somebody popping into existence because they were behind a wall occlusion on your last packet and you've now strafed into line-of-sight. And they got theirs before you did, so you're dead. Winning, winning result. Consider perhaps that the people making this stuff aren't stupid and would try such obvious things if they were practical.
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      > However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days, but anti-cheat technology definitely raises the bar. It's only "unnecessary" if you're willing to accept a large number of cheaters. Some anti-cheat stuff definitely goes to far but to dismiss the idea entirely is just naïve.
      - aeonik 3y ago
        Back in the day we had admins and communities of people. You'd get to know people more and establish trust. You could have registered brackets and independent tournaments with manual administration and banning for cheaters. It worked pretty good, but all of that was taken away.
      - ekianjo 3y ago
        > Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days on the user side, it's perfectly possible if you only play online with your friends. The whole idea that we should be able to play with random people if we all accept to have a kernel rootkit needs to die. Ultimately that's exactly what the NSA and other agencies want you to support.
        IshKebab 3y ago
        Sure but most people prefer not to have to spend their lives finding enough friends that some are always available when they have 5 minutes free to play one game of Rocket League. I suppose you could argue that games could offer an "anti-cheat free" version that can only be used in private matches. But I think you can imagine how many downloads that would get.
      - arendtio 3y ago
        > It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days On that part, we can agree, and if you think I want to 'dismiss the idea' you completely misunderstood the point. My point is, that the cases anti-cheat software tries to solve, are cases that a well-designed game has solved in the beginning (e.g. sending limited game state to clients, discarding impossible input, etc.). On the other side of the coin, I have seen players who cheated even with anti-cheat in place (like you said), for some games I was unable to play games via proton because the anti-cheat didn't work and I was unable to play some games because the developers messed up their anti-cheat implementation. So there are drawbacks to a feature that has limited use and for which many cases can be solved by other means. In the end, there are many cheat cases that anti-cheat software can't solve (e.g. using a secondary device) and which have to be solved by other means (e.g. spectator delays, live events, private servers).
- infecto 3y ago
  You are conflating ideas. I don’t think it will be a productive discussion to go down the road of anticheat systems and DRM. We can all have opinions that are different. What is productive is calling out hostile behavior and comments that do nothing but hurt the ecosystem. I see these type of strong negative opinions in a lot of areas of the Linux community. “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    But it's the simple facts. The best possible, most correct, most defensible, most world-improving advice to give for dealing with a user-hostile product or service, is to have the strength of will to reject it and live without it, and live the example to show that it's possible and you won't die. Or at the very least, it is AT LEAST as defensible a stance as "The more pragmatic/adult approach is to give the bully whatever they want than to go without their product or service". That philosophy is not remotely automatically more correct or more adult or nuanced or any of the self-serving words anyone typically uses to try to grant their idea more legitimacy than it deserves. Calling the principled stance "hostile" is itself hostile. You can phrase it in a way that sounds emotional and shortsighted and jeuvenile, and certainly there are many juveniles who are guilty of that. Never the less, rejecting a bad deal is still fundamentally a reaction not an action, a defense not an offense. The publisher promulgating a user-hostile deal is inarguably the offender, the initial hostile actor. You can decide that the bad deal is tolerable for yourself, but that is entirely your weakness and does not make that policy smarter or more correct than that of those that decline.
    - infecto 3y ago
      I genuinely appreciate you proving my point. I am not here debating DRM or anticheat. Simple pointing out that telling someone the game they play is garbage because it uses anticheat does nothing but hurts the Linux ecosystem. You can come up with another essay but I don’t think it disproves what I am saying. Telling someone the game they play is garbage is not increasing the Linux user base. I am sure there will be a retort here, “we don’t want those kind of users or related software”.
- bitwize 3y ago
  The players of the game are willing to put up with DRM and anticheat in order to get the game. By taking a hardline stance against these, the Linux community is being user-hostile.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
Why aren't you saying that the DRM software is the unwelcoming party? That user would happily play that game, but the game publisher doesn't want them. Incredible.
- infecto 3y ago
  The only thing incredible is how upset people are for pointing out that it’s hostile to tell someone the game they enjoy playing is garbage and is not worth playing because it has anticheat.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    Because it's not an attack, meanwhile the accusation is.

Dalewyn 3y ago

A computer should serve its user. If the user is serving his computer, they're Linuxing right but otherwise doing it wrong.

Wytwwww 3y ago
Well if cheating is going to make the game almost unplayable the outcome is pretty much the same as you deciding to never install it in the first place due to disliking anticheat systems. So I don't really see the problem.
- arendtio 3y ago
  Obviously, you haven't been in a position where you had to patch the anti-cheat solution yourself in order to play the game you paid for. Well-designed games offer limited potential for cheaters by design. An anti-cheat software can help to eliminate the little potential that is left, but often games are designed without cheating in mind and some anti-cheat software is put in place to solve all the issues that were produced by the bad design.
  - mainde 3y ago
    I think that there are very few tasks in competitive multiplayer games that humans perform better than machines[1], I don't think your statement holds true unless you exclude a huge amount of game genres or you take all the fun out of them. (E.g. no FPSs or ..FPSs with no aiming?) [1] Unless we're talking about captcha solving competitions, for now, maybe. :)
    - kuschku 3y ago
      You're right in that, if your server rejects inputs that are too fast, too precise, too robotic to be human, bots will emulate the top-playing humans ever more closely. But the question I want to ask is: Is that a problem? If all the bots and cheaters are playing indistinguishable from high-level real humans, where's the harm? Or, to quote Westworld: If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?

daveidol 3y ago

Do you mean the presence of anti-cheat software makes them anti-player? Because I’d disagree. It’s a lot of work and expense to combat cheats, but is very much appreciated by many players (when it works)

ekianjo 3y ago
Not every gamer wants an esport experience to have fun
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  I assumed that cheating is way more widespread amongst multiplayer gamers? There is a lot less anonymity in esports and if you get caught and blacklisted.. well you just wasted thousands or tens of thousands of hours. It's pretty hard to have fun when the server is full of cheaters.
  - diggan 3y ago
    > I assumed that cheating is way more widespread amongst multiplayer gamers? I mean, hard to call cheating in a multiplayer game the same as cheating in a singleplayer game. The former ruins the experience of others, the latter just affects your own session. Hard to be against cheating in a singleplayer context.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Wytwwww 3y ago
      I was thinking about casual and professional online gamers (yet somehow managed to leave out a word in comment...). Of course "cheating" in single player games isn't even a real thing
  - barbariangrunge 3y ago
    Cheating in single player is sort of like modding

tapoxi 3y ago

The Valorant community is incredibly in favor of the Vangard anti-cheat that loads as an early kernel mode driver, and the pro/pro-am Counter-Strike scene plays on FACEIT because they have a strong Kernel-based anticheat. VAC, and server-side VACnet just doesn't cut it.