Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewzah | Hacker News Reader

While valve is indeed quite neglectful, the reason they're "behind" on anticheats is because they don't run extremely invasive ones like EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) or Vanguard (what Valorant uses). These operate exactly like malware/rootkits that you just have to trust. Blegh. Even if I wanted to run those (I do not), they don't work on linux anyways.

So I'll stick to cs:go and tf2 community servers, thanks.

View on HN

Exactly. Valve leads the way on non invasive anti cheat. These scummy anti cheat devs are not people I want with keys to my computer.

Who is worth trusting? The answer is complicated and depends on many things. Anti cheat developers do not deserve anyone’s trust until they are open.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/20/esea_gaming_bitcoin_f...

> Anti cheat developers do not deserve anyone’s trust until they are open.

As in open source? I can't imagine that would go too well—my impression is that anti-cheat is almost entirely security by obscurity (because they have no other option; trying to beat the owner of the computer you're running on is a losing battle).

This is certainly true for client-side anti-cheat, but there's little reason server-side anti-cheat can't work just as well. They've been incredibly successful in chess and (from what I've heard) virtual cycling. These are generally based on statistics and while they can't catch the very subtle cheaters those generally aren't a problem outside of actual tournaments.

Ah, very good point.

While I would never want to use a malware of an anticheat, you're not quite right about Linux. EAC works on Linux, however it does not work through Proton. The developers must release a Linux build themselves if you want to use it. The effect is the same because they frequently don't bother to do so of course

Didn't EAC drop native support for Linux when they were acquired by Epic Games?

I understand it’s a security conscious person’s opinion to prefer non-invasive anticheat systems, but I personally would prefer to have a choice. Run two versions, one with invasive anticheat and guarantee for no cheats, one less invasive but more cheat prone.

I real cost of hours spent with cheats on cs:go for me is too high.

The funny thing is that you cannot "guarantee for no cheats". It's just software that runs on the players computer and there are cheats for both Valorant and League. So your choice is more between the two versions a) less invasive but cheats and b) installing a kernel driver and maybe a rootkit but cheats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com