2 ms·

Not really true, just look at the Valorant community. Vanguard (Riot's anti-cheat) has an extremely positive reception, the only real way around it is to use Wi

by tapoxi 2y ago

Not really true, just look at the Valorant community. Vanguard (Riot's anti-cheat) has an extremely positive reception, the only real way around it is to use Windows 10 to bypass the secure boot requirements, and they're removing support for that soon. Vanguard is an early kernel mode driver, meaning it's signed by Microsoft and ensures a secure boot using remote attestation, and loads before any cheat kernel driver would be able to. Some cheaters (I believe the article was recently on HN) use PCI TPM modules that they can modify, but Vanguard is detecting and banning these as well. Hell most of the Counter-Strike competitive community has abandoned Valve's own VAC anti-cheat for FaceIT, a Windows-only kernel anticheat. Edit: Since I'm getting downvotes on here, these anti-cheat systems work. Maybe the OS vendor should be responsible for them, but the people that play these games overwhelmingly support kernel-based anti-cheat. If you don't believe me, check out r/valorant, r/globaloffensive (CS2) or just look up any "CS2 Cheating" video on YouTube for long angry rants about Valve's ineffective anti-cheat solution when compared to the competition.

Shank 2y ago
Custom arduino (or equivalent) cheats and spoofed-identity DMA devices have, and continue to be a factor in the cat-and-mouse game. I think the reality is that kernel level anticheats can be effective at stopping low effort cheaters, but they’re completely ineffective at stopping all cheats. I think the success with FaceIT comes from the fact that they offer a kernel level anticheat with multiple heuristics and a paid version that makes creating new accounts hard. In-contrast, TF2 has nothing and the game is free-to-play.
viraptor 2y ago
It's just an arms race. Give it time and all parts will be virtualised or defeated through the analog hole. But the parent has a point about neglect. This is not some ambitious operation where you have to take care of hardware verification. Valve is being asked to ban spam and stupid aimbots. They have all the information they need for that on the server side already.
snailmailman 2y ago
In my small friend group of 6-7 people we used to regularly play league of legends almost every night. Since vanguard came out we play significantly less. And some of us are trying to switch to Dota instead. The anticheat causes more problems for us than it solves. Playing is such a hassle now. We never noticed cheaters in our games. Last time I tried to play, my PC bluescreened on the loading screen with an error about vgk.sys. (Vanguard) Then on reboot I get into the game late. It also bluescreened once with the same error while I wasn’t even playing too. This anticheat causes so many problems on my computer. It always pops up saying it killed some driver. I still haven’t been able to figure out what or why. And it frequently makes all of us reboot in order to play. Other games with kernel level anti-cheat don’t have these issues. There are definitely ways around these kernel level cheats too- it’s almost certainly just a matter of time. Vanguard specifically is just so invasive and not stable. Looking forward to finally being done with League. Enjoying Dota more anyway.
- bitwize 2y ago
  Well, the good news is, once Pluton catches on, remote attestation will be built into the hardware and OS, so game companies won't need to install squirrely little kernel modules to implement effective anticheat. Yes, it will suck for techies and hackers, but it'll be a better world for the ordinary consumers out there.

by tapoxi 2y ago

Shank 2y ago

Custom arduino (or equivalent) cheats and spoofed-identity DMA devices have, and continue to be a factor in the cat-and-mouse game. I think the reality is that kernel level anticheats can be effective at stopping low effort cheaters, but they’re completely ineffective at stopping all cheats. I think the success with FaceIT comes from the fact that they offer a kernel level anticheat with multiple heuristics and a paid version that makes creating new accounts hard. In-contrast, TF2 has nothing and the game is free-to-play.

viraptor 2y ago

It's just an arms race. Give it time and all parts will be virtualised or defeated through the analog hole. But the parent has a point about neglect. This is not some ambitious operation where you have to take care of hardware verification. Valve is being asked to ban spam and stupid aimbots. They have all the information they need for that on the server side already.

snailmailman 2y ago

In my small friend group of 6-7 people we used to regularly play league of legends almost every night. Since vanguard came out we play significantly less. And some of us are trying to switch to Dota instead. The anticheat causes more problems for us than it solves. Playing is such a hassle now. We never noticed cheaters in our games. Last time I tried to play, my PC bluescreened on the loading screen with an error about vgk.sys. (Vanguard) Then on reboot I get into the game late. It also bluescreened once with the same error while I wasn’t even playing too. This anticheat causes so many problems on my computer. It always pops up saying it killed some driver. I still haven’t been able to figure out what or why. And it frequently makes all of us reboot in order to play. Other games with kernel level anti-cheat don’t have these issues. There are definitely ways around these kernel level cheats too- it’s almost certainly just a matter of time. Vanguard specifically is just so invasive and not stable. Looking forward to finally being done with League. Enjoying Dota more anyway.

bitwize 2y ago
Well, the good news is, once Pluton catches on, remote attestation will be built into the hardware and OS, so game companies won't need to install squirrely little kernel modules to implement effective anticheat. Yes, it will suck for techies and hackers, but it'll be a better world for the ordinary consumers out there.