If steam spends some time working with the larger "anti-cheat" vendors, I think they could really bump up the list. Many of the 'borked' games use anti-cheat, like battle-eye.
I've had so much trouble with anti-cheat systems that I will now refuse to buy or play any game that uses easyanticheat or battleye. I don't care how much it costs, how many of my friends are playing it, I'm not giving another penny to any company that uses those programs.
I get that it's not an easy problem to solve, but i'm so goddamn tired of having to shut down services dedicated to controlling fan speeds in my machine, having to disable network adapters, uninstall vpn software (not just turn it off, uninstall it), and wasting hours trying to figure out why it would crash on startup only to find that it was finding a pcap.dll in a random folder in my downloads from when I was messing with some traffic sniffing stuff on this system like a year before that, and it decided to crash without any warning or error...
Cheaters suck in games, and they can ruin it for many others, but there has to be another way other than forcing your paying users to jump through this many hoops. And if there isn't, then i'm happy to be doomed to playing against/with hackers and cheaters rather than not being able to play at all.
And I know it's kind of co opting the purpose of Proton, but if they refused to accommodate these anti-cheat systems, then maybe either the game developer or the anti-cheat vendor themselves will see some of the potential paying customers they are excluding and will significantly retool their systems to work.
Not saying it doesn't happen - I'm pretty sure there was one that didn't like VirtualBox and I haven't tried again since switching to Hyper V. Maybe I got lucky?
easyanticheat is by far the worst i've ever experienced. That was the one that would crash if it saw pcap.dll, and I use virtualbox as my VM software of choice so that could be part of it as well.
The fan control system is a bit weird since it's a pretty unknown little program, but it took me a while to find because at least easyanticheat wouldn't tell me which program was causing the error, so I had to manually close them until it worked. This is what actually put me over the edge and made it so I'll never buy another game with easyanticheat again unless they significantly rework how much access and power they need.
There are so many games out there now, and so many different developers and styles, that I don't need to put up with these kind of problems to play a good game. Especially when that software is almost always beatable by how often I'd still see cheaters in the games, which meant that the only ones being punished by this are the lazy hackers, or paying customers.
I mean, if you are an outlier, voting with your wallet is never going to work. That is the problem of being an outlier.
And being an outlier doesn't mean you are insignificant. Sure, the latest Call Of Duty won't miss my income, but a smaller dev that was thinking about using easyanticheat because it was cheap and easy to integrate might think twice when reading comments from me, or if their demographic overlaps with people like me that won't put up with it.
I can't in good conscience talk about how much I dislike invasive anti-cheat programs while still buying every game I want that has them.
Maybe, but then surely the cheaters will just set their cheats to be 2.99 sd above the mean. Probably best to use it as a signal rather than a fixed limit.
Assuming normal distribution, 0.1% should be; with top games reaching 1+ million active players, that'd be on the order of 1,000+ players.
And if you start banning people for being too good with no other evidence of cheating, you'll drive of the people who would likely be your most avid non-cheating players.
Back in my day, we just played on community servers with moderators who'd just ban cheaters!
I know that's not really a solution with the scale of today's online games, but cheating isn't a new problem. It's only become a problem of today's world of matchmaking systems, global public servers, and the removal of community hosted servers. Still, I feel like just hiring a few more people to manually check suspected cheaters would reduce the need for such heavy handed anti-cheat.
On the other hand, Valve run 2 of the most popular online games (CS:GO and Dota 2), which both have Linux clients, and don't have the same level of intrusive anti-cheat compared to EAC and BattlEye.
Most of these games have not scaled up. "Scale" is not the issue here.
The issue is that companies want to provide their own server hosting, and charge users for the privilege of hosting games. This leaves no room for community moderation.
Anti-cheat has been one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of gaming on Linux for a long time.