As a "gamer", I have to say: We are running out of options for anti-cheat.
The cheaters are EVERYWHERE in games like Destiny 2, Fortnite, CS: GO, New World... any popular online game, the cheaters are in 1/10 matches ruining your fun.
Weather or not a kernel level anti-cheat will help? Probably not. It is unfortunate that a lot of lower information consumers are going to install this crap onto their PCs.
I think Microsoft should just ship an anti-cheat API as part of Windows so games stop relying on kernel drivers.
Instead, they should focus on non-invasive mitigations such as:
- Server-side anti-cheat.
- Pay-once or subscription models to deter cheating.
- Allow gaming coffee shops to authenticate themselves and give their customers privileged access to competitive worlds/instances. Because it’s much harder to cheat at these coffee shops already.
- Shadow-ban repeat offenders or apply punishments without them realising that they’ve been detected.
- Use bulk-banning to avoid giving cheaters a fast feedback loop which would otherwise make them understand what works and what doesn’t.
However, I do believe that we’re able to create an entire subfield within CS just to serve the purpose of implementing server-side anti-cheat if we wanted to. Games companies can implement rather sophisticated solutions to fight this issue more effectively while putting less emphasis on controlling every consumer’s computer. It’s all about what our values are.
I don’t want another player in my game to have control over his own computer to aimbot. I can exit or uninstall Riot Vanguard if I want.
However, it does seem inevitable that any anti-cheat could be overridden with some kind of clever virtualization or an external device that views the screen and sends input either via USB or sleek RGB gamer aesthetic robot fingers.
Then, I suppose, we’ll have to go back to laser tag.
Would also work for League of Legends "auto-hit" or "aura" cheats that will automatically trigger an ability aimed perfectly if someone enters a radius around you.
However: This would possibly require a hardware peripheral and you could analyze the inputs a-la captchas.