Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

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I have mixed feelings about anti-cheat, especially in the last few years. A lot of them are getting rather intrusive. Take Player Unknown's Battlegrounds for instance, which uses BattlEye. It actually injects a kernel mode driver into Windows that spies on whatever else your system is doing and exfiltrates unknown data in the name of "guaranteeing a fair game experience." I didn't even realize that this is what it was doing until my system crashed one day and the cause was some .sys file in PUBG.

It'll also randomly kick you from games for having various programs installed or running. Programs such as VMware. You have to disable all VMware services or PUBG will kick you randomly for using "unauthorized applications." God forbid you have any VMs running, that might amount to a ban (seriously).

Worse still is that when you take your complaints to their social media, or in anyway speak ill of it, you get hordes of fanboys saying that you shouldn't install anything other than games on your PC or you're a dirty cheater. "Oh you want to do things _other_ than gaming on your PC? You should buy another PC then."

Don't even get me started about trying to run games in a virtual machine w/ GPU passthrough. The communities will tear you a new one telling you to do things "normally" and by attempting to use anything other than the "normal" setup makes you a cheater. Just google anything like "steam vac kvm" or "battleye kvm" and you'll get hordes of people claiming they heard some guy say virtualization is the future of game cheating therefore VMs are cheating tools and should be banned.

Seriously, if I could get a refund for every game that uses BattlEye, I would try.

/rant

> You have to disable all VMware services or PUBG will kick you randomly for using "unauthorized applications."

If any game dis this to me, I would be having a refund, through credit-card charge-back if necessary.

Unless of course it is made obvious up-front that the game will not work with certain common legitimate software, in which case I'd have not paid for it in the first place and would play something else instead.

> which uses BattlEye. It actually injects a kernel mode driver

Sounds like something I need to avoid. A game is a user-land program and has no business touching kernel-space (with the possible exception of direct communication with the graphics hardware for performance reasons, but in this decade that to me would be a huge code smell...)

Having said that: I've not bought much by way of games aside from a few small ones in Steam of HumbleBundle sales, other parts of life are just too busy for me to have the time ATM, and I've never really bothered with PvP/online gaming (when I play games I do so to escape the unwashed masses, not invite them into my living room!), so I might be so far from the target audience that my thoughts on the subject count for nothing.

Be careful, if you do a chargeback on Steam or similar platforms you will be banned.

It shouldn't be necessary: if it wasn't made clear that the product was incompatible with common standard software and that stops it working for me, then it is not fit for purpose and if they are following the law a refund should be easy to obtain.

If it gets to the point where a chargeback is necessary then they are being a bad actor and I wouldn't be spending any more money with them in future anyway. If any banning means I lose access to content I've already paid for, then I can re-obtain that by other means. I currently chose to pay for their games but that doesn't mean I'm not capable of obtaining them by other means and would feel no moral compunction not to if I'd already paid for them but been locked off unfairly.

One more reason not to use Steam and friends..

I agree with everything you say. It's ironic because game companies themselves use virtual machines with obfuscated instruction sets in their games as a copy protection mechanism. It's pretty hard to feel any sympathy for them once hackers get around their pathetic countermeasures.

To add to your post, here's an example of why game developers can't be trusted to run code in kernel mode:

https://mobile.twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/7793978407622...

What would be a better option?

GOG is doing just fine, including AAA titles as Witcher3. It's the only place I buy games from.

GOG is run by a subsidiary of the developer of the Witcher games (CD Projekt), so that may not be the best example to make this point.

Why? They have other games too, by definition drm free: what's awesome if you use wine.

I've been out of gaming for some years but this reminds me of similar issues with PunkBuster. I'd spend hours pulling my hair out trying to figure out why I was being booted from games. The worst bit was, it didn't actually stop cheaters.

Oh god... I forgot punkbuster even existed, what an absolute pile of garbage. So many hours wasted on dealing with that shit and reading redundant and useless forum posts where everyone just copy pasted the same shit over and over.

> The worst bit was, it didn't actually stop cheaters.

These things usually don't, unfortunately, at least not for any considerable length of time.

It is the age-old arms race scenario. There are small number of developers and an army of potential cheaters. The developers have to get it right 100% and the cheaters only have to get their part right once: once a viable method is found it can be reused by themselves or sold, or passed on gratis.

And cheaters can be very determined, either because success in the game world by any means gives them some real form of affirmation or in the case of "professionals" some form of profit.

Heck, for some working out how to cheat the system is the game!

I wouldn't take PUBG as a compelling example. Most of what they do is WTF IMHO. The game is famous for being laggy, buggy, crashy, and the servers down often. They also have a history of making very strange technilogical and features choices.

There is a reason the hype has gone down quite a bit...

Still sounds very wrong what they are doing though.

I'm not entirely sure how this works but I would think the developers of BattlEye decides and develops what it reacts to and not the PUBG developers? Why else would you use a third party solution?

Ha yes, that sounds likely indeed.

I see they are used in quite a few games as well : https://www.battleye.com/ (including PUBG's main rival).

Interesting. Maybe my disappointment in PUBG got me to be a bit more biased than I should :).

Also since games are owned by Companies there is literally nothing you can do for all the decisions they take. You just have to get on with it.

You may also avoid such games and demand fair labeling of such titles by platforms like stream.

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