8 ms·

First step. Second step? Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat. It is not acceptable on Linux. Apple will also not accept that shit further, that said Apple

First step. Second step? Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat. It is not acceptable on Linux. Apple will also not accept that shit further, that said Apple lost relevance in gaming with Mantle and the M-Processors (both mean a lot of incompatibility). And Microsoft is regretting every choice in this regard: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242947/microsoft-windows-security-kernel-access-features-crowdstrike https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242947/microsoft-window... But that is a usual pattern. Microsoft makes bad decisions and everyone suffers. Even Linux. Their is a reason why closed-source kernel modules mark Linux as tainted, the system is not trustworthy. It is the duty of game developers to secure their games themselves. Not manipulating user devices. Forcefully doing stupid and dangerous things because you cannot achieve your task in a safe why is not a reason.

Arch-TK 2y ago
The reason games companies reach for KLA is not because they're dumb and can't be bothered to secure their network protocols on the server side, it's because they don't want to have to hire an inordinate number of human reviewers to make unreliable decisions on whether someone is cheating or not in their game. While KLA is fundamentally flawed (DMA and even CV based cheats are becoming more popular as a result of KLA and they still give cheaters a significant (but now even harder to detect) advantage) it solves the problem of obvious and even most kinds of subtle cheating. Attempting to detect cheating once inputs are being sent to your server (which is within your domain of control and on which you can implement non-intrusive anti-cheat) is very difficult to do reliably. An inexperienced player will make slow, delayed inputs. A highly experienced player will have reactions which are an order of magnitude faster (and in many cases faster than the speed of thought because of muscle memory). If you want to make a working but no longer detectable cheat, all you need to do is spend a bit of time and effort programming in human limits of reaction time into all your code and making sure all inputs look realistic (again, more limits). At the end of the day, you can make a cheat which gives you a significant advantage without it being actually detectable by any statistical methods on the server. At this point you might attempt to reach for AI but undoubtedly that will require human oversight or you will get false positives. So, in summary, even if you were to design your game around server-side rendering and server-side input processing, forcing your players to effectively play over a remote desktop connection (which is impractical for any fast paced competitive multiplayer game due to latency issues but let's pretend those don't exist for a minute), you will still get cheaters with snap-to-head or recoil compensation or auto-fire making a significant impact on games. Heck, there's even the idea of using sounds (which need to be pretty accurate so human players can utilise them to determine where enemy players are) to implement a rudimentary wallhack. This is just the nature of FPS games and why games companies end up implementing KLA for these games. The way to make an FPS game un-cheatable is to make a different game where cheating is more difficult or impossible just by nature of the format. Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration. Except that "this doesn't scale". Neither does human review. Neither does server side rendering. The core reasons why game companies do KLA is that players will pay for games with KLA but won't pay for games without it. As much as I think Microsoft is one of the worst companies in existence, in this case I don't think they or KLA developers are to blame. KLA developers are simply doing what players want them to do and Microsoft is only allowing what their end-users want them to allow. If Microsoft removes KLA, it will be by replacing it with userspace code with hardware attestation support, it won't be by killing the concept of intrusive anti-cheat. All Microsoft is doing is trying to re-design the tools to cover their own ass. Fundamentally, KLA has pushed cheating further into DMA and CV territory. This means that more obvious and annoying forms of cheating, undetectable by KLA are probably going to soon become more common. At this point the options are to have these games be console-only with blessed hardware and hardware attestation. And even that has flaws (as described). Eventually it will just be impossible to play a game in a public server without cheating. Maybe this will force people away from these types of games, or towards private lobbies. I don't know what the future holds here.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  > Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration. Yes. This is the answer. There is no solution that relies only on technology that will fix human problems at scale. You can make it harder, but once one person figures it out, everyone has access to it. You need to break it into pieces and let people deal with it on the community level, where communities are small enough that people can deal with individuals. The main issue is that 'at scale' you have the fact that a certain percentage of people are sociopaths, a certain percentage of people are really smart, and a certain percentage of people have the time and motivation to do something, and when they all cross you end up with a person who breaks your system.
  - Arch-TK 2y ago
    > Yes. This is the answer. There is no solution that relies only on technology that will fix human problems at scale. You can make it harder, but once one person figures it out, everyone has access to it. You need to break it into pieces and let people deal with it on the community level, where communities are small enough that people can deal with individuals. The issue is that the players themselves seem to think that the convenience of KLA (over running your own community, paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs the privacy risks.
    - shkkmo 2y ago
      > The issue is that the players themselves seem to think that the convenience of KLA (over running your own community, paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs the privacy risks. That's not true and there isn't data to show it. The reasons why support for community run servers have fallen by the wayside are more complicated than "players chose one over the other and companies followed them". Companies also recognized significant downsides for themselves of community run servers. When your online experience is in community run spaces, you expose your player base to experiences outside of your control. When you don't run your own server instances, you can't enforce the cheating rules you want. These, among many other reason, make it harder and more risky to monetize the online experience of your game. A such, the choice was generally taken away from players to protect companies. This wasn't at all a pure reaction to player preference.
dartharva 2y ago
> Second step > "Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat." > "It is the duty of game developers" It's hilarious that people actually think the publishers will ever have two hoots to give about notions like that. FWIW I agree we'd all be better off without those things but the entitlement to believe private businesses should run on your personal whims and that developers have a "duty" to make things only as you prefer is gobsmacking. I am always left in wonder what commenters like this think about themselves.
- LinXitoW 2y ago
  I agree that profit driven companies will never ever care about the morality or the safety or the social impacts of their choices. I don't think, however, that "publishers would use disabled children slave labor if they could" is really an argument you ought to make.
  - rmholt 2y ago
    I would make that argument https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/02/11/child-labor-iowa/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/02/11/child-lab...
- moffkalast 2y ago
  That's right, they won't care. That's why any action will only come if Valve bans the practice from their store, because losing money is all publishers understand. Every publisher that's greedily taken their products off Steam in an attempt to recuperate Valve's fee has sooner or later come crawling back because they weren't able to make a half usable platform to sell their stuff on. Valve holds a really large influence over the industry.
wrren 2y ago
That's an incredibly naive perspective. KLA represents a real risk to companies, as something going wrong can crash player computers instead of just game processes; this is a PR nightmare if/when it happens on a large scale. Not to mention the cost of hiring engineers capable of building kernel components in the first place, it's a niche skillset that's not cheap to hire for. Games companies don't turn to KLA out of laziness, it's out of absolute necessity, especially for games like FPS' where it's impossible to fully secure the game using pure server-side methods. Machine learning has been tried, it's too prone to false positives and misses more subtle cheats that still negativel impact the the player experience. Anti-Cheat used to exist purely in user mode and then, guess what?, cheats moved into the kernel where they couldn't be detected or stopped. Anti-cheat had to follow in order to remain effective. The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and watching games that players love, and that required massive resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.
- ikety 2y ago
  I'd believe this if every multiplayer game that doesn't have KLA was just rife with cheaters. Also, why is EA adding KLA to Battlefield 1 almost a decade after release? I refuse to believe there is only one simple honorable objective when it comes to KLA. I simply do not care if companies can't figure out how to stop cheaters without it. What about our experience? You might complain about cheaters, but what if I can't even play the game because of KLA? Played plenty of recent MP games on Linux just fine and cheating was never experience breaking.
- jakebasile 2y ago
  We had the best alternative decades ago. Let the community run the servers and ban cheaters while allowing individual servers to form their own culture and community. The obsession with matchmaking and games as a service (requiring publisher run servers) is what painted the industry into this corner. Note that I like matchmaking, specifically skill based matchmaking, in some games and at some times but completely ending server browsers and community run dedicated servers was a mistake.
  - 2y ago
devnullbrain 2y ago
> tainted, the system is not trustworthy. I wonder what is worth more: the median installation of a free-to-play multiplayer game, or access to everything they do on that PC? I won't be the first one to wonder this.

Arch-TK 2y ago

The reason games companies reach for KLA is not because they're dumb and can't be bothered to secure their network protocols on the server side, it's because they don't want to have to hire an inordinate number of human reviewers to make unreliable decisions on whether someone is cheating or not in their game. While KLA is fundamentally flawed (DMA and even CV based cheats are becoming more popular as a result of KLA and they still give cheaters a significant (but now even harder to detect) advantage) it solves the problem of obvious and even most kinds of subtle cheating. Attempting to detect cheating once inputs are being sent to your server (which is within your domain of control and on which you can implement non-intrusive anti-cheat) is very difficult to do reliably. An inexperienced player will make slow, delayed inputs. A highly experienced player will have reactions which are an order of magnitude faster (and in many cases faster than the speed of thought because of muscle memory). If you want to make a working but no longer detectable cheat, all you need to do is spend a bit of time and effort programming in human limits of reaction time into all your code and making sure all inputs look realistic (again, more limits). At the end of the day, you can make a cheat which gives you a significant advantage without it being actually detectable by any statistical methods on the server. At this point you might attempt to reach for AI but undoubtedly that will require human oversight or you will get false positives. So, in summary, even if you were to design your game around server-side rendering and server-side input processing, forcing your players to effectively play over a remote desktop connection (which is impractical for any fast paced competitive multiplayer game due to latency issues but let's pretend those don't exist for a minute), you will still get cheaters with snap-to-head or recoil compensation or auto-fire making a significant impact on games. Heck, there's even the idea of using sounds (which need to be pretty accurate so human players can utilise them to determine where enemy players are) to implement a rudimentary wallhack. This is just the nature of FPS games and why games companies end up implementing KLA for these games. The way to make an FPS game un-cheatable is to make a different game where cheating is more difficult or impossible just by nature of the format. Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration. Except that "this doesn't scale". Neither does human review. Neither does server side rendering. The core reasons why game companies do KLA is that players will pay for games with KLA but won't pay for games without it. As much as I think Microsoft is one of the worst companies in existence, in this case I don't think they or KLA developers are to blame. KLA developers are simply doing what players want them to do and Microsoft is only allowing what their end-users want them to allow. If Microsoft removes KLA, it will be by replacing it with userspace code with hardware attestation support, it won't be by killing the concept of intrusive anti-cheat. All Microsoft is doing is trying to re-design the tools to cover their own ass. Fundamentally, KLA has pushed cheating further into DMA and CV territory. This means that more obvious and annoying forms of cheating, undetectable by KLA are probably going to soon become more common. At this point the options are to have these games be console-only with blessed hardware and hardware attestation. And even that has flaws (as described). Eventually it will just be impossible to play a game in a public server without cheating. Maybe this will force people away from these types of games, or towards private lobbies. I don't know what the future holds here.

Eisenstein 2y ago
> Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration. Yes. This is the answer. There is no solution that relies only on technology that will fix human problems at scale. You can make it harder, but once one person figures it out, everyone has access to it. You need to break it into pieces and let people deal with it on the community level, where communities are small enough that people can deal with individuals. The main issue is that 'at scale' you have the fact that a certain percentage of people are sociopaths, a certain percentage of people are really smart, and a certain percentage of people have the time and motivation to do something, and when they all cross you end up with a person who breaks your system.
- Arch-TK 2y ago
  > Yes. This is the answer. There is no solution that relies only on technology that will fix human problems at scale. You can make it harder, but once one person figures it out, everyone has access to it. You need to break it into pieces and let people deal with it on the community level, where communities are small enough that people can deal with individuals. The issue is that the players themselves seem to think that the convenience of KLA (over running your own community, paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs the privacy risks.
  - shkkmo 2y ago
    > The issue is that the players themselves seem to think that the convenience of KLA (over running your own community, paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs the privacy risks. That's not true and there isn't data to show it. The reasons why support for community run servers have fallen by the wayside are more complicated than "players chose one over the other and companies followed them". Companies also recognized significant downsides for themselves of community run servers. When your online experience is in community run spaces, you expose your player base to experiences outside of your control. When you don't run your own server instances, you can't enforce the cheating rules you want. These, among many other reason, make it harder and more risky to monetize the online experience of your game. A such, the choice was generally taken away from players to protect companies. This wasn't at all a pure reaction to player preference.

dartharva 2y ago

> Second step > "Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat." > "It is the duty of game developers" It's hilarious that people actually think the publishers will ever have two hoots to give about notions like that. FWIW I agree we'd all be better off without those things but the entitlement to believe private businesses should run on your personal whims and that developers have a "duty" to make things only as you prefer is gobsmacking. I am always left in wonder what commenters like this think about themselves.

LinXitoW 2y ago
I agree that profit driven companies will never ever care about the morality or the safety or the social impacts of their choices. I don't think, however, that "publishers would use disabled children slave labor if they could" is really an argument you ought to make.
- rmholt 2y ago
  I would make that argument https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/02/11/child-labor-iowa/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/02/11/child-lab...
moffkalast 2y ago
That's right, they won't care. That's why any action will only come if Valve bans the practice from their store, because losing money is all publishers understand. Every publisher that's greedily taken their products off Steam in an attempt to recuperate Valve's fee has sooner or later come crawling back because they weren't able to make a half usable platform to sell their stuff on. Valve holds a really large influence over the industry.

wrren 2y ago

That's an incredibly naive perspective. KLA represents a real risk to companies, as something going wrong can crash player computers instead of just game processes; this is a PR nightmare if/when it happens on a large scale. Not to mention the cost of hiring engineers capable of building kernel components in the first place, it's a niche skillset that's not cheap to hire for. Games companies don't turn to KLA out of laziness, it's out of absolute necessity, especially for games like FPS' where it's impossible to fully secure the game using pure server-side methods. Machine learning has been tried, it's too prone to false positives and misses more subtle cheats that still negativel impact the the player experience. Anti-Cheat used to exist purely in user mode and then, guess what?, cheats moved into the kernel where they couldn't be detected or stopped. Anti-cheat had to follow in order to remain effective. The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and watching games that players love, and that required massive resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.

ikety 2y ago
I'd believe this if every multiplayer game that doesn't have KLA was just rife with cheaters. Also, why is EA adding KLA to Battlefield 1 almost a decade after release? I refuse to believe there is only one simple honorable objective when it comes to KLA. I simply do not care if companies can't figure out how to stop cheaters without it. What about our experience? You might complain about cheaters, but what if I can't even play the game because of KLA? Played plenty of recent MP games on Linux just fine and cheating was never experience breaking.
jakebasile 2y ago
We had the best alternative decades ago. Let the community run the servers and ban cheaters while allowing individual servers to form their own culture and community. The obsession with matchmaking and games as a service (requiring publisher run servers) is what painted the industry into this corner. Note that I like matchmaking, specifically skill based matchmaking, in some games and at some times but completely ending server browsers and community run dedicated servers was a mistake.
- 2y ago

devnullbrain 2y ago

> tainted, the system is not trustworthy. I wonder what is worth more: the median installation of a free-to-play multiplayer game, or access to everything they do on that PC? I won't be the first one to wonder this.