Those games with anti-cheats are anti-player garbage anyway. You don't lose much without them.
It's pretty hard to have fun when the server is full of cheaters.
I mean, hard to call cheating in a multiplayer game the same as cheating in a singleplayer game. The former ruins the experience of others, the latter just affects your own session. Hard to be against cheating in a singleplayer context.
Realistically these days with how expensive most of these games are to run and make, if you do not keep cheaters away it can tank the entire project, e.g. Cycle: The Frontier basically had to shut down because they couldn't keep cheaters at bay, in a system that heavily relies on player count to remain healthy and fun. Once the cheating gets bad enough, people stop playing the game, which leads to a death spiral: it starts with bad queue times, which leads to people playing other games, and that spiral further diminishes the playerbase beyond a point of no return. Cycle barely made it 12 months and the result was a multi-million dollar project getting flushed down the drain.
I am glad that Bungie is going with fog of war for Marathon. And heck, given the features Marathon is getting, maybe someday Destiny can have those nice things too. We'll see...
So players of those games are sacrificing privacy for no security at all by the sounds of it.
I can make a game with full server trust to show you if you like.
It isn't. If you play with people you don't know, some of them will cheat. If you don't want that, stop playing with strangers.
Citation needed. I'd be quite surprised if it were common for servers of professional games to trust the client in that sense (i.e. allowing it to decide game logic like what gets spawned where).
As far as I'm aware the most common types of multiplayer cheats are
* wall hacks, which you could probably prevent by not sending the client any information about objects that the player can't see, but that would require the server to calculate the line of sight for every player/object, * and aim bots, which I don't think you could prevent at all on the server side since they don't rely on the bot having access to any information that the player isn't supposed to have. They just rely on the bot being better at aiming. I suppose if you did all rendering server side and only sent the rendered graphics to the client (i.e. streaming), that would make it harder for the bot because it'd now have to do image recognition to find the target, but that just makes it harder, not impossible. Plus, game streaming wasn't well received for a reason and anyway, I don't think that's what you had in mind when you talked about "not trusting the client".
Things are certainly not always as professional as they appear to be.
Visibility test is definitely feasible against wallhacks, it's not that expensive.
Aimbot is an assist cheat, which technically does not violate the physical rules of the game, so you are right that it's more difficult to detect. One solution to detect this class of cheating is to record the player's movement, and rely on a combination of outlier scores and outlier movement behavior to detect abuse. It's not watertight, but neither are any of these client side anti-cheat detection schemes.
Btw tell me exactly how an aimbot that takes the visuals from the player's screen and tilts the player's cursor so (or not so) slightly towards identified moving targets, are to be avoided from the server. Modern cheating is already a hard-ass problem to solve, much more so if no client-level monitoring is desired.
The very same way that you'd do it on the client. If I run an aimbot on an nvidia jetson devkit, using HDMI in to get the screen image and USB emulation to send inputs, your anticheat has to do the same work regardless if it's on the client or the server.
If we complain about companies being too quick closing up their servers when games are not as successful as they hoped... imagine if those servers were x10 or more expensive, due to that kind of analysis for all players. Companies would be much quicker to pull the plug, I guess.
And exactly. You cannot detect that with client-side anti-cheat nonsense either. Record on the HDMI and output a fake USB mouse, why not? Botting doesn't break the physical rules of the game, so you're right that it's hard to detect. One "solution" is to record player movement on the server and detect outliers in behavior and scores. Not perfect (and also very difficult), but just as unreliable as client-side anti cheat nonsense.
Automation and assist botting differs from outright cheating in that it still obeys the actual rules of the game.
When I start a game and I see an Easy Anti-Cheat banner I think to myself "Great now I can be killed by an aimbot while simultaneously hosting a root-kit voluntarily."
Why do you think these systems are advertised like that, at the forefront of the game load? It's so that the developers create a false trust in the playerbase that they're doing their damnedest to prevent cheaters, when the reality is that they paid a small amount of cash to a third party to use a system that does a piss-poor job at everything aside from being a symbol of effort and adding incompatibilities where there shouldn't be.
eac bypassing is trivial to a laymen, that doesn't bode well as a defense against people that have made cheating their hobby.
and to be clear : I use EAC as the example because to me it symbolizes the 'security theatre' side of the effort. Real anti-cheat efforts exist, and those should be applauded. EAC ain't it, but it's the industry standard... worrisome.
- DRM does not serve the consumer, but the producer.
- Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. And if someone cannot design a game, their anti-cheat is often a disservice to the consumer.
I don't like either DRM or anti-cheat solutions, not because I am not willing to pay the producers, but because I have been burned too many times by dysfunctional solutions.
That silly "speed of light" thing? Just design better.
The design question is about software that abuses the game state, which is sent to the client, but not displayed to the player (e.g. wall-hacks), and software that sends impossible input (e.g. speed hacks). Anything that manipulates mouse input is very hard to counter.
In the end, all the technical solutions have limits and you need other means to solve the issue (e.g. play with friends/live events). However, anti-cheat software tries to counter many cases that can be solved by better implementations (e.g. servers that send very limited information to the client).
And now you can't provide client-side prediction between packets, so you get movement stutter all over the place instead of occasional updates and you get somebody popping into existence because they were behind a wall occlusion on your last packet and you've now strafed into line-of-sight. And they got theirs before you did, so you're dead.
Winning, winning result.
Consider perhaps that the people making this stuff aren't stupid and would try such obvious things if they were practical.
Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days, but anti-cheat technology definitely raises the bar. It's only "unnecessary" if you're willing to accept a large number of cheaters.
Some anti-cheat stuff definitely goes to far but to dismiss the idea entirely is just naïve.
It worked pretty good, but all of that was taken away.
on the user side, it's perfectly possible if you only play online with your friends.
The whole idea that we should be able to play with random people if we all accept to have a kernel rootkit needs to die. Ultimately that's exactly what the NSA and other agencies want you to support.
I suppose you could argue that games could offer an "anti-cheat free" version that can only be used in private matches. But I think you can imagine how many downloads that would get.
On that part, we can agree, and if you think I want to 'dismiss the idea' you completely misunderstood the point. My point is, that the cases anti-cheat software tries to solve, are cases that a well-designed game has solved in the beginning (e.g. sending limited game state to clients, discarding impossible input, etc.).
On the other side of the coin, I have seen players who cheated even with anti-cheat in place (like you said), for some games I was unable to play games via proton because the anti-cheat didn't work and I was unable to play some games because the developers messed up their anti-cheat implementation. So there are drawbacks to a feature that has limited use and for which many cases can be solved by other means.
In the end, there are many cheat cases that anti-cheat software can't solve (e.g. using a secondary device) and which have to be solved by other means (e.g. spectator delays, live events, private servers).
What is productive is calling out hostile behavior and comments that do nothing but hurt the ecosystem. I see these type of strong negative opinions in a lot of areas of the Linux community. “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”
The best possible, most correct, most defensible, most world-improving advice to give for dealing with a user-hostile product or service, is to have the strength of will to reject it and live without it, and live the example to show that it's possible and you won't die.
Or at the very least, it is AT LEAST as defensible a stance as "The more pragmatic/adult approach is to give the bully whatever they want than to go without their product or service".
That philosophy is not remotely automatically more correct or more adult or nuanced or any of the self-serving words anyone typically uses to try to grant their idea more legitimacy than it deserves.
Calling the principled stance "hostile" is itself hostile.
You can phrase it in a way that sounds emotional and shortsighted and jeuvenile, and certainly there are many juveniles who are guilty of that.
Never the less, rejecting a bad deal is still fundamentally a reaction not an action, a defense not an offense.
The publisher promulgating a user-hostile deal is inarguably the offender, the initial hostile actor.
You can decide that the bad deal is tolerable for yourself, but that is entirely your weakness and does not make that policy smarter or more correct than that of those that decline.
I am not here debating DRM or anticheat. Simple pointing out that telling someone the game they play is garbage because it uses anticheat does nothing but hurts the Linux ecosystem.
You can come up with another essay but I don’t think it disproves what I am saying. Telling someone the game they play is garbage is not increasing the Linux user base. I am sure there will be a retort here, “we don’t want those kind of users or related software”.
The people you're trying to criticize are themselves only rejecting the software and the publishers that use it, and for a completely explicable and defensible reason, not because it's the wrong tribal colors or religion.
You are consistently neglecting to acknowledge the basic order of operations and ignoring the initial act and offense in order to focus on a reaction that you don't like and to excuse the initial act that you personally don't have a problem with.
I am saying that you only have the right to say that the deal proposed by drm and anticheat systems is acceptable to you, not to go one mm further to say that anyone else is ogbligated to feel the same, and is in any way hostile or harming the ecosystem or anything like that if they don't.
Okay; anti-cheat is user-hostile.
> “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”
Okay, the thing I want is to use a game that I paid for, play it on the machine I own, and run it without giving it any special privileges (certainly not modifying my kernel). I trust that you will support that and not be negative about the way I want to use it?
I am saying it’s hostile to tell someone who wants to run software but cannot because of a limitation in the OS that it does not matter because it’s garbage anyway.
That user would happily play that game, but the game publisher doesn't want them.
Incredible.
Well-designed games offer limited potential for cheaters by design. An anti-cheat software can help to eliminate the little potential that is left, but often games are designed without cheating in mind and some anti-cheat software is put in place to solve all the issues that were produced by the bad design.
[1] Unless we're talking about captcha solving competitions, for now, maybe. :)
But the question I want to ask is: Is that a problem?
If all the bots and cheaters are playing indistinguishable from high-level real humans, where's the harm?
Or, to quote Westworld: If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?
You don't have to reach pro levels, it often only takes small assists to turn a balanced game on its head, ruining someone's experience with a game. Repeat often enough and the userbase will leave, feeling cheated or at least demoralised for being unable to compete or improve.
And allowing machine-assists, thus leveling the playing field, turns the game into a completely different one that is (imho) drastically less fun whoever may not be interested in (or may be unable to) running/coding their bot.
A player playing cs go at 1280×720 at 30 ps on a ball mouse will always loose to one on playing at 2560×1440 240fps with a high-quality mouse.
Now there's one more dimension of unfairness. But who cares? You're still going to be winning ~51% of the time, that's why matchmaking systems exist.
No. That's not how it's going to work. You'll lose 100% games against cheaters Elo and then win 80% (or similar) against lower-level players you get matched against because your Elo goes down due to cheaters. Overall yeah, you might end up with a 50% win rate but that doesn't really matter.
Of course that would be more pronounced in RTS or other 1v1 or team games with small number of players (then again nobody would play them anymore because it would just be waste of time, when you're matched against a cheater because you'll be forced to waste X min before you figure that out).
If your anticheat prevents any superhuman reactions, you'll have cheaters that will be indistinguishable from the top human players.
How often do the top human players ruin your gameplay experience as an average player today?
Why would it be any different with cheaters indistinguishable from the top humans?
Matchmaking will just give cheaters a relatively high ELO so that the highest ranked matches will be cheaters playing against each other with a few of the top human players thrown into it, competing at the same level.
While for the average player, nothing will change.
There is a difference in skill level distribution. If everyone playing at a highly skilled player level, then it's simply not fun and doesn't provide an opportunity to get better.
Anyways, playing with cheaters isn't fun and if you want to play without them then you need anti-cheat and/or game to not be free.
In fact, I'd like to see the same bots developed by cheaters be used for NPCs as well.
1. It's easily possible to limit cheaters to the same skill level as the top human players. Send no information to the client that they don't need, prevent super-human reaction times.
2. If all cheaters can do is play at the level of the top human players, matchmaking will automatically balance the game for you without requiring any further anticheat.
3. If cheaters have bots that play at the same level as the top human players, you could use the same bots as NPCs and have much better NPC teammates and enemies in singleplayer.
Imagine you're one win away from going flawless (7 consecutive wins) and some asshole jumps in the air and headshots your entire team in as fast as the gun allows it.
That's not fun. That means you have to start over. You get lucky if you only get cheater(s) in your first game, so there isn't any progress lost.
This resulted in a very shallow matchmaking pool with large skill gaps because casuals and mid-tiers didn't want to deal with this bullshit.
And if the cheaters can't play any better than the top human players, there's no harm done. At that point it doesn't matter if it's a cheater that's breaking your streak or a top human player that's doing the same.
Yeah, with anti-cheat.
I think you have never seen destiny 2 PVP maps. They are small. The majority of times, you see the cheater and the cheater sees you. The difference, between cheaters and not-cheaters - you're dead by the time you ADS.