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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

> it's putting the collateral damage of these measures on the honest people to deter a few.

It's putting the collateral on _everyone_ to deter a few who have a substantial impact. It's completely different to DRM where there is no knock on impact to other legit customers.

> Some even keep running after you close the game.

They all do. If they don't, then the cheat just needs to run first.

> game developers can profit without having to design a game that is safe when dealing with untrusted clients.

This isn't about profit, and thinking it is is pushing your agenda. On the most extreme side you can just pixel stream a rendered video feed, but the latency is awful for many kinds of games. You inevitably need to let the client have some sort of say (I shot at X), and it _will_ be abused.

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> They all do. If they don't, then the cheat just needs to run first.

That is nonsense, otherwise the driver would have to be loaded at boot time, which in turn would mean installing a game would need a reboot which just isn't the case these days.

> It's completely different to DRM where there is no knock on impact to other legit customers.

The media industry claims that piracy cuts into their profit which would imply that it raises prices for everyone. So no, it very much is like DRM in many aspects.

> In the most extreme side you can just pixel stream a rendered video feed

Which is expensive since you now have to pay for the hardware instead of your customers paying for it, so that too is about profit. In a more extreme case you could put cloud gaming machines wherever CDNs put their edge acceleration boxes.

> You inevitably need to let the client have some sort of say (I shot at X), and it _will_ be abused.

No, not really. The client does not have to compute the canonical outcome of game mechanics, after all for any action they predict locally there might be an action taken by another player that is inconsistent with that prediction and they will only learn about that incompatibility once their lightcones intersect (which takes a few milliseconds). Something has to reconcile those, which might as well be the server rather than the client.

All a client has to do is to compute a tentative game state and the pixels that go along with it. That state will later be corrected once it learns about the canonical update, which can result in the infamous rubberbanding effect.

Most cheats that don't involve a broken game engine are of two flavors A) extracting information that the software has but the human shouldn't know (e.g. wallhacks) or B) having software perform inputs that the human should do (e.g. aimbots). A) Can be prevented by reducing the information the server sends to the client to the necessary amount to render their current view. B) cannot be prevented by any means as one could always hook up the output pixels of a GPU to an external computer and an emulated mouse via USB, this is analogous (heh) to the analog hole in DRM.

Neither of those have to do with the client determining "I shot at X" on its own.

> That is nonsense, otherwise the driver would have to be loaded at boot time, which in turn would mean installing a game would need a reboot which just isn't the case these days.

Riot Games' anti-cheat Vanguard (for LoL and Valorant) loads early during boot, requires a reboot after installing and if I recall correctly they now allow unloading it (because who wants to do banking with a rootkit loaded) but then require a reboot before playing again.

Ok, this is even more invasive than my worst experience and and also worse than some practices that already received backlash (such as persisting after the game closed, as previously mentioned). I wonder why game companies come to so different conclusions about the "need" for such things. Are their games easier to exploit and they just try to paper over it? Or is money involved, raising stakes?

If they go further we'll end up with closed, console-like systems (secure boot only with microsoft's key, only signed apps allowed). And of course DRM vendors would follow their footsteps.

> That is nonsense, otherwise the driver would have to be loaded at boot time,

This is already common - see valorant as an example.

> Which is expensive since you now have to pay for the hardware instead of your customers paying for it, so that too is about profit. I

No, it's about latency. See the absolutely vehement reaction to streaming services for twitch shooters on gaming forums.

> Something has to reconcile those, which might as well be the server rather than the client.

The problem here is that the server is some distance away from all the players. Waiting for a round trip from two players with server frame times could be up to 250ms, so for a better experience, some element of that is usually left up to the client; you can spin that either way, either the shooter gets the advantage, or the defender gets the advantage.

> Most cheats that don't involve a broken game engine are of two flavors

Most game engines are broken. The reality of the situation is that 1) this stuff is _really hard_, and 2) there are tradeoffs to be made at every single step of the process that affect how the game plays and feels. Moving processing to the server means latency, predicting and correcting server-side calculations means rubber banding. Neither of these things feel good in a twitch shooter.

> A) Can be prevented by reducing the information the server sends to the client to the necessary amount to render their current view.

Not just their current view, but everything the client needs to know about the next X ms before it expects its next server update (which might even be adjusted at a later point in time). And that state is just sitting there in memory, waiting to be (ab)used.

> B) cannot be prevented by any means as one could always hook up the output pixels of a GPU to an external computer and an emulated mouse via USB,

The number of people who are willing to do that is drastically smaller than the number of people willing to pay $130 a month for a rootkit that they willing install [0]. As I said in my previous comment, this isn't about eliminating cheating 100% - it's a cat and mouse game. It's about raising the barrier to entry from credit card to specialised hardware.

[0] https://www.skycheats.com/store/category/6-overwatch/

> Neither of those have to do with the client determining "I shot at X" on its own.

Even if you send inputs, and allow for a small amount of correction (because both clients have different representations of the game state at the same time), all it takes is one client to send "I actually did shoot at that guy 50ms ago".

> No, it's about latency. See the absolutely vehement reaction to streaming services for twitch shooters on gaming forums.

By putting trusted hardware close enough to the player you reduce the latency problem to a cost problem. This is more or less what game consoles currently happen do (of course the issue is that users still pay for it rather than the game company). Also, twitch shooters existed before rootkits. Choices made by game companies such as matchmaking with untrusted strangers probably exacerbated the problem over the years.

> Waiting for a round trip from two players with server frame times could be up to 250ms,

Only if they're living on different continents or have very high latency internet providers. Many games provide region-based servers for that reason.

And it's only a roundtrip that has to happen anyway. Clients stream their updates as they take actions, server reconciles them as they arrive and broadcasts the updates to all clients. This is the minimum amount of time it takes to get the information from player A to player B anyway unless you establish p2p connections between the clients and those happen to be lower latency than contacting the server.

> you can spin that either way, either the shooter gets the advantage, or the defender gets the advantage.

That doesn't matter, the point is that leaving reconciliation of some game actions to the client means clients can lie about something and claim that it was preempted by another action.

> Most game engines are broken. The reality of the situation is that 1) this stuff is _really hard_, and 2) there are tradeoffs to be made at every single step of the process that affect how the game plays and feels.

A problem being difficult is not a good justification for externalizing the costs, especially considering that hardware may be shared with other people and botnets that might use those weaknesses create further externalties.

> "I actually did shoot at that guy 50ms ago".

That would mean trusting the client's clock which quite obviously is something you shouldn't do. Arrival time should be the only thing that matters.

> The number of people who are willing to do that is drastically smaller than the number of people willing to pay $130 a month for a rootkit that they willing install [0]. As I said in my previous comment, this isn't about eliminating cheating 100% - it's a cat and mouse game. It's about raising the barrier to entry from credit card to specialised hardware.

That's only the tradeoff from the game dev perspective. It's totally ignoring the security or privacy implications of running these rootkits and the ever-escalating system restrictions that they demand. This is the crux of the argument. If we were only talking about game devs making tradeoffs between different game experiences, risk for themselves, profit and so on there wouldn't be a problem. But they're making a tradeoff with other assets that are not theirs.

It is about profit. They could simply not ship a root kit, and then presumably fewer people would buy the game because it would be known to have cheaters in it.

This is absurdly reductionist; they could also not ship a game, and less people wold buy it because it is known to not have shipped therefore not shipping the game is about profit, when it might be because the game itself isn't finished.

I honestly don’t understand what you are trying to say here. Not shipping a game would certainly result in less profit. These entities are profit motivated, so they make decisions to maximize profit. They decided shipping a game with a root kit is the best option available to them.

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