If this happens it will be, without exaggeration, the greatest thing to ever happen to Linux gaming.
I'm not expecting a massive increase overnight, but it should mean that the marketshare will increase more likely than it will decrease.
The small minority of gamers who cheat impact the experience for a much larger number of customers who don't. So each cheater might cause dozens of lost subscriptions. (Contrast to software piracy, where each pirated copy only represents a probability between 0 and 1 of a lost sale.)
After all, if another player can run faster or fly or has perfect aim, everyone else is basically playing an unwinnable game.
This isn't helped by the current fashion for automatic match-making and 100-player battle royale games - which make one cheater impact a lot more players.
Not a gamer, so forgive me if the proposal is stupid, why not just treat cheaters like they do on (li)chess? If I am playing with someone that I believe to be cheating, I flag/blacklist that user and simply don't play with that user afterwards. That by itself is enough for me to play against only honest players, but if you want to be more strict you could even submit the game session for review, and in case it is ruled there was cheating, the cheater is banned and every game you lost to the cheater is awarded to you.
But in chess terms "Middling player occasionally made suspiciously good moves" is a pretty weak cheat report. But if you can tell they had stockfish running and changed windows to it several times in the course of the game? Well, now you've got a very clear cheat report.
More broadly, many gamers are chasing the dopamine rush of winning, complete with slot-machine-style flashing lights, music and dancing character animations. Being awarded a win by e-mail a day or two later doesn't really compare.
> Being awarded a win by e-mail a day
That is only half of the story. The other half would be in banning the cheater and making them lose access to their account, i.e, impute a real monetary cost to being caught cheating. Make it expensive for those caught cheating and equally expensive for those making false reports and I'd venture that we would see some sort of equilibrium where cheating is not worth it.
Well now you've tipped the scales too far. Nobody is going to make a report, even when it's justified, if they're risking their account to do so.
The important thing is not about being "perfectly provably fair", it is just to curb abuse (on either side) so that people still can have fun playing without having to accept such invasive software on their machines.
False dichotomy. What about playing 1800 players but starting with only one bishop? Or how about playing the same 1800 players get to use some assistance that warns of blunders/mistakes, but does not give away the better moves? It's only "cheating" if it is not agreed beforehand...
Also, bear in mind that your Overwatch example gave the impression that the good/honest player was so above the others that even without the opponent flagging system, the above-average player would be matching with "boring" games most of the time. Removing the opponent rating system does not solve his problem and still leaves the cheating issue open.
If breaking DRM was that simple, DRM companies wouldn’t exist; Games would be cracked on day 1 (or earlier). It’s way more complicated than that, and each DRM system is different.
That’s why Wine doesn’t do well with DRM. For example, some systems rely on undocumented behavior in Windows’ APIs that Wine doesn’t implement.
And the stupid thing is that a lot of games install this software regardless of whether you actually play online or not! I've even had some games that insisted I enable Valve Anti Cheat and refuse to launch otherwise, even though I just wanted to play single player (I rarely play online). That check should obviously come into play only at the multiplayer menu.
But this is actually why I still game on Windows. I just have one Windows box which I use for gaming and gaming alone. I don't want this crap on my Linux and FreeBSD computers I do serious work on. So I won't be one of those Linux users in the stats :) Even though I use it daily.
Thus permissions like that are kind of required. Now, you can dispute if some random online lobby should perhaps have an option of "i dont care". However large group of gamers does care, especially in more competetive games as league of legends, csgo etc.
Although there are all sorts of attempts at server-side and even player anti-cheat hardware devices, to my knowledge there is no option that can realistically replace client system anti-cheat.
Instead of playing a constant game of cat-and-mouse trying to prevent forbidden code from running when you can just plug in a USB rubber ducky, put the logic server-side. Ban problematic behaviour, as opposed to methods that might result in problematic behaviour. It takes some ingenuity, but what are gamedevs known for if not ingenuity? (Well, apart from withstanding abusive working environments for long enough that they can be profitably discarded, traumatised, after they can no longer function as effectively as a green new intern… but let's focus on the ingenuity.)
There are some interesting repercussions of this train of thought though. Take an enemy hiding in brush in an FPS game. The player would have line of sight to their hiding spot, and current games (I think) just leave it to the player's eyeballs' ability to see them through the brush. That's kinda cool in that it raises the skill ceiling and it's obviously immersive.
However, there's a whole host of reasons it's bad. First, there's the aim bots and other cheating it allows for. Second, what if the player has bad eyesight? So there's an accessibility issue there. Third, you get people doing a... lighter form of cheating where they turn their graphics settings down to the lowest setting (sometimes even editing INI files to lower them down below what is possible via the GUI) that would lower foliage quality, making it easier to see the enemy. Probably some other things too.
There are perhaps many interesting ways to fix this. D&D has their own way with random chance, but I can see players of skill-based scoffing at this, and I don't blame them. But I feel the current approach is lazy game design, and perhaps something interesting could be thought up.
> First, there's the aim bots and other cheating it allows for.
You can make an aim bot by connecting the output of your monitor to a hardware-emulated mouse. Unless the server can detect this, kernel-level anticheat is building a really tall wall with the door unlocked. (If it worked I wouldn't object so much.)
Yes - cloud rendering. It's _a_ solution but comes with tradeoffs. Namely, it introduces large amounts of latency, and costs a dumpster truck of money.
> You can make an aim bot by connecting the output of your monitor to a hardware-emulated mouse.
Anticheat is a cat and mouse game, and raising the barrier to entry improves the experience no end. There's a _big_ difference between downloading and running an exectuable, and buying specialist hardware to cheat at a game.
Only a very small part of the rendering needs to be done on the server; notably, the camera could still move, and the client could still make the usual heuristic predictions about where things are, so it wouldn't feel laggy.
> and buying specialist hardware
If you have a streaming rig, you already have nearly all the hardware. Just add a Raspberry Pi Zero or something, and you're good to go. (But yes, the barrier-to-cheat is still higher… at the cost of also increasing the barrier-to-play-at-all.)
This is just nonsense.
The data that the client uses to make those heuristic predictions is the same data the cheats, so once you send that extra data over you've undone the benefit of not sending the client any extra info it needs, _plus_ youve added an intermediate network hop for your remote rendering, _and_ you've now required that your game has essentially a hardware DRM in the remote computer that you're rendering.
> If you have a streaming rig, you already have nearly all the hardware. Just add a Raspberry Pi Zero or something, and you're good to go.
The number of people out there who are spending thousands of dollars on secondary rigs to hook up emulated mice via a raspberry pi to run custom cheats has got to br vanishingly close to 0 for even biggest games in the world. Given that _these_ are the measures youre suggesting to bypass the anticheat, it sounds like they've sufficiently raised the bar to me.
When people writing AI driven hardware mice is a common cheat vector let's talk, but right now the cheat vector is people running cheats installed inside the kernel.
No, it's not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag#Make_clients_extrapolate
> plus youve added an intermediate network hop for your remote rendering
I never said anything about an intermediate network hop. It's not that expensive to cull a few tris, diff the geometry and then send it – especially if you can compress the information, which you can, because you control the client and server. (In fact, you likely don't even need to go down to the tri level to get the effect; all you need to do is turn locating obscured players into a computer vision problem.)
I don't know where this “intermediate network hop” comes from.
> spending thousands of dollars on secondary rigs
Think €60. An HDMI splitter, a USB HDMI capture card, a Raspberry Pi and a USB cable. Not that expensive.
> but right now the cheat vector is people running cheats installed inside the kernel.
It's functionally equivalent. Your “anticheat” is taking control of other people's computers, stopping a lot of people from being able to play the game entirely, because it was easier for the developers.
> It's not that expensive to cull a few tris, diff the geometry and then send it
Multiplayer games are doing this aggressively already. This is an out of the box feature in UE4 and Unity. The second the client gets this information, the cheat has the information too.
> all you need to do is turn locating obscured players into a computer vision problem. > I don't know where this “intermediate network hop” comes from.
You either send the positions to the client, along with an association for what it belongs to, or you render the _entire_ scene on a remote "client", which means streaming the video back to the end users device. The video streaming introduces an extra hop on the network as you now need to go from end user to streamed client to server, rather than end user to server. If you don't render the whole thing, at some point the client gets sent the information that it needs, and the cheat has it.
> An HDMI splitter, a USB HDMI capture card, a Raspberry Pi and a USB cable. Not that expensive.
Apolgoies, when you mentioned a "streaming rig", I thought you were talking about having a secondary gaming PC hooked up. Just because it's _theoretically_ possible doesn't mean it's actually happening though.
> It's functionally equivalent.
I fundamentally disagree. One of these (kernel level cheats) are readily being sold on the internet, available to anyone with a debit card/paypal/btc and a computer, and the other requires dedicated hardware, along with the knowledge of how to write these cheats in the first place.
> stopping a lot of people from being able to play the game entirely, because it was easier for the developers.
The numbers of people who are legitimately stopped from being able to play the game entirely are very small, but those people do exist, and it sucks for them. Your blame of `it's easier for "the developers"` however is untrue. It's not because it's easier, it's because (at least right now) it's necessary.
google stadia exists. nobody playing competitively uses it, and that's exactly the demographic that cares the most about anti-cheat
and, it still doesn't prevent computer-assisted input
Think about the case of seeing an enemy onscreen and headshotting them instantly.
Can you explain further though? I don't understand your case. It sounds like an aimbot, which is what would be prevented by not sending the client more info than is needed.
Also, all these anti-cheat methods are not supported by Mojang but are third-party plugins. Stock Minecraft Server hardly tries to prevent many of the hacks.
It would require stuff like server-side chunk culling, which doesn't jibe with the way Minecraft is designed. However, there's nothing stopping a new game from being designed like that.
I named Minecraft because it's fundamentally flawed for server-side anti-cheat (you're limited by a client that requires a lot of theoretically-unnecessary information, and doesn't send enough requests for you to provide this lazily), and people manage to catch enough cheating to keep things fun for everyone else. If you control both the server and the client, you don't really have much of an excuse.
Modern games do network culling. UE4 supports it out of the box. The _millisecond_ that information is replicated to the client, (which has to be before the client views it on screen to allow for hardware latency), a cheat will have access to it and will be able to act on that information. Even if you have the fastest monitor known to man, and no rendering buffering there's 6ms before you can draw the player on screen, or 1ms to poll your mouse/gamepad, so the cheat wins.
Cheating players are statistically distinguishable from really good non-cheating players most of the time – and when they're not, we're at the level of cheating where it's unlikely your anti-cheat will help, because they'd just fork out the €50 for cheating hardware.
This just delays the problem by 8ms - you still have all the same problems, except you've introduced 8ms latency. The cheats are still perfectly accurate, and are responding to perfect information. If you could only delay the information to the cheat, then you wouldn't need to do any of this because you could reliably just boot out the cheaters.
> ollect probabilistic evidence on players until you have a lot of evidence that a player is cheating, and add them to the “we'll ban later, but let's mitigate the damage for now” list.
That's what anticheat providers already do already, and yet we still have that problem.
> We're at the level of cheating where it's unlikely your anti-cheat will help, because they'd just fork out the €50 for cheating hardware.
Hard disagree here.
1) if you have an algorithm which can statistally distinguish cheating players from non-cheating players enough of the time, I'm guessing you have an algorithm or model that you can point to that does that? Because as far as I'm aware, they _help_, but don't fix.
2) People aren't forking out for dedicated hardware to spoof mice en masee, but they _are_ forking out for kernel level cheats to bypass the userland detection.
But not all anti-cheat software does this, even those that install drivers, and it's not always clear.
Completely ineffective. It will be trivial to circumvent those protections. Might as well not bother.
The truth is cheaters are merely excersising their computing freedom. It's my computer, the game is merely running on it. If I want to read the game's memory and adjust aim or automate boring parts, it's my prerogative.
In order to prevent any of this, the game company must take over my machine. They must literally own my computer. Anti-cheating software is virtually indistinguishable from malware and there is no situation where this is acceptable. The game company's "needs" are irrelevant.
After all, you're the top rank in CS:GO not because of your skill but because you simply exercise your freedom to have everyone else play against your computer.
No idea. Who cares if some random guy cheats really? It's nothing compared to losing our computing freedom. Actual important stuff that matters. Same fundamental issue as DRM which nearly everyone agrees is bad.
Our computers are ours and game companies just need to deal with it. If people are gonna cheat, then so be it.
The kind of people who care enough to spend money on an online game.
> It's nothing compared to losing our computing freedom.
Then don't play online games with anti-cheat. Freedom doesn't mean your decisions don't have consequences—just you have the freedom to choose between the privacy of not submitting to an anti-doping monitoring regime or participating in certain competitive sports.
> Our computers are ours and game companies just need to deal with it. If people are gonna cheat, then so be it.
Game companies online services are theirs, and your just going to need to deal with it. If firms are going to require anti-cheat, then that's the cost of playing online. You have the freedom to not participate.
Why do people think that they get a free pass because they can't see the opponent face to face?
If you want to play with friends, plenty of multiplayer games offer that without anticheat (Arma lets you even uninstall the anti-cheat and play on anti-cheat disabled servers).
Because that's the level of seriousness of most gaming and the proportionality of using a rootkit to prevent cheating. Sure, the Olympic athletes (or I guess in this analogy, eSports pros competing online) get the full "we're going to make very sure you're not cheating approach" but "my local basketball league" or "unranked ladder" doesn't justify these measures being routine
We don't think that. We think anti-cheating rules aren't important enough to justify shipping literal malware to people's computers and taking over their machines.
They’re extremely passionate about their skills and want nothing more than a fair playing field. Playing only with friends is not a real solution.
Computing freedom means you have the freedom to give up control, too. It’s your choice.
Absolutely. As long as they don't force this malware on the rest of us who do care, it will be fine.
CS:GO faces the same issue where inputs by high level players are indistinguishable from cheating.
Speedrunning tends to have similar issues, where people perform tricks that are so close to TAS inputs that it can take years to spot an issue. Or in case of Dream, it takes an entire statistics paper to explain why they cheated. In those cases it's even worse because you cannot do server side validation on video data.
Being against anti-cheat is effectively being against competitive gaming or speedrunning.
But if we remove the assumption that you are entitled to play any game how ever you please i think this argument somewhat falls apart. If you don’t like their using anti cheat, then just don’t play those games which use it.
I just don’t think enough people agree with you that it will work in your favour unfortunately.
It means I've agreed not to cheat. I have the power to do it, I just agreed not to use it.
I won't let them take my power away though.
> isn't respecting licensing models a huge thing for Linuxheads?
Personally I'm not a fan of intellectual property in general. Licenses included. They all depend on copyright which should be abolished.
The only thing that makes any sense to me is the boundary between my computer and their servers. I should be able to do whatever I want on my computer. They should be able to do whatever they want on their servers. If they can't detect cheating server side, that's just too bad because they aren't gonna be doing it on my machine.
Feel free to not play those games that requires anti cheats and let the ones of us who likes having it enjoy a game with less cheaters.
In CSGO for example, many players _want_ a more invasive anticheat solution, and are literally asking or even paying for it through third parties like ESEA and Faceit.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/malware
[1] https://www.webroot.com/us/en/resources/tips-articles/what-i...
[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/security/what-is-malware
Most complaints I hear about using Linux for gaming are that it can't run games. With anti-cheat it will be able to run games (all of the top ten and most of the top 100).
The principles of allowing Anti-Cheat at all are a valid discussion, but I don't think we should be sabotaging Linux as a viable gaming platform just because some of the trends in software at the moment aren't in line with absolute ideals.
After all, if you don't want anti-cheat you can just continue to not play the games that require it.
> We’re working with BattlEye and EAC to get support for Proton ahead of launch.
Of course now I expect I'll be eventually banned for running under a VM.
Proton support for anti-cheats can't come soon enough.
Unfortunately a lot of people don't care about running malware (see: the % of people who still use Windows). Lots of those people would be more likely to switch if they could run their malware on GNU/Linux.
For non-steamdeck Linux users, at least running on Linux shouldn't be a disqualifier for the Anti-cheat software.
I'm not sure why you'd buy games with anti-cheat if you don't like anti-cheat though.