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Comment by shrimp_emoji | Hacker News Reader

A perk of gamimg on Linux is that none of these invasive anti-cheats work. I consider that a plus since I never care enough about a video game to surrender my privacy or my kernel over to it.

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I am not a fan of anti cheats, but I do like to play video games online and I want to be able to play fair games without cheaters. I am not sure what other options there are.

Consoles have a lot fewer cheaters.

A locked down system, possibly including remote attestation if things get real bad, is the only realistic solution aside from game streaming which removes the hardware from the user's control altogether.

The freedom afforded in personal computing by Windows and Linux is fundamentally mutually exclusive to the security that multiplayer game operators and proper players legitimately need.

It's why game consoles and mobile gaming are the core gaming platforms. Note how Sony and Microsoft blacklist consoles suspected to be used by cheaters, and how games (and also banking) absolutely hate rooted smartphones because it breaks the assumption of a locked down and secured system.

> I am not sure what other options there are.

Unironically, Cloud gaming. Stadia had a terrible business model, but the tech worked. Microsoft's XCloud together with GamePass could be a winning ticket for that. (I think there's also GeForce Now)

Of course, that wouldn't prevent anyone from capturing the screen, running image recognition software on the screen and sending USB Controller inputs to create an Aim Bot, but then again, that's not something anti-cheat software can stop these days anyway.

Cloud gaming will never be good enough for competitive FPS or racing, the latency will never be overcome, it's just physics. And if you want to do 300-400FPS, like most high-level players in CS2 do, local hardware is the only solution.

Ironically, cloud gaming is the perfect solution for single-player game, where input lag and high FPS doesn't matter much.

That aimbot would be significantly harder to implement than current ones though, the good aimbots are not generally scanning the framebuffer for heads to click, they are using the game data directly. If they do use frame scanning, it's usually with the aid of a texture swap, which also wouldn't be possible here.

YOLO will work just fine.

I remember playing online games in the 90s and early 2000s without lots of cheaters. It was easy: if we thought they were cheating we banned them from our server.

Rust players (the game, not the language) have discovered what CS players knew back in the day - the best anti cheat is an active admin. Although Rust has much better tools than CS server admins had back in the day - we essentially had to guess, and deal with the blowback if we were wrong.

At some point, admins started to ban me pretty often, accusing me that I use wall hack (I don't), so I stopped to play online years ago. I started to play online again two weeks ago, I cap my system (I hide my cursor, I cap my framerate at 60fps, I use a submachine gun) to have more fun, but other players are trying to ban me anyway when I kill 4 enemies in 2 seconds.

Obvious cheats like spinbots spinning like crazy aren’t the only form of cheating, many cheats are more subtle and you may not realize as a player in the game, or an admin. Just look at the occasional streamer caught cheating — it’s not even obvious with tons of people watching their first person POV streams.

If we couldn’t tell they were cheating, than they weren’t ruining the experience. They didn’t gain anything from cheating on our server. There was no ranking or prize for being good.

Except lots of people like rankings and matchmaking with similarly skilled players, and people like winning too, so completely removing the incentive to cheat is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So, in a matchmaking system, the cheaters filter themselves into a cohort of other cheaters and players who are on even ground without cheating.

On the other hand, you have issues like smurfers who cause the same disruption without actually running any cheat software.

Ultimately your problem is uneven matchmaking and the perception of cheating, not cheating itself.

I really enjoy matchmaking games, though... being able to immediately find a game against someone of similar skill as you is a huge factor in enjoyment. I don't want to give that up.

Plenty of server admins even back then thought that wouldn't scale, and it hasn't. Anti-cheats like BattlEye and Easy Anti Cheat started as community developed anti-cheats. Even Starcraft 1 ICCUP (3rd party Battle.net clone) had additional "anti-hack". Counter-Strike still has 3rd party servers with ESEA/FaceIT. They have additional anti-cheat, not less.

Especially with gaming becoming mainstream compared to early 2000s. The majority of players are now casual gamers who are not interested in a job as a server admin/hoster.

The really invasive kernel level ones don't and probably will never work, but there's a chunk of them that do. One of the big ones, Easy Anti Cheat, mostly works[1].

I, too, consider it a benefit of gaming on Linux.

[1]: https://areweanticheatyet.com/breakdown

On the flip side, I am really annoyed about games that require anti-cheat, especially if I would just play them single player, because it makes it harder or impossible to play them on Linux.

To be more accurate, the games that use those anticheats aren't available on Linux.

totally agree, but there are some things we just cant do.

I bought Marauders to play with my son, and had maybe 4 months of excellent fun play with him. Then the dev's enabled EAC... now I cant play it anymore :-(

I cant blame the mods, they never wrote the game to work on linux it was just a happy happenstance that i could use proton to play it before the EAC transition.

Every game i have in my steam catalogue is at risk of this (except for the native ones obviously)

Why wouldn't you blame them? They should at least provide an option to turn it off like games used to. It looks like it's a co-op game; if you're playing with your friends/family why do you need anti-cheat?

no self hosted servers otherwise yeah, like 7 days to die I'd just turn it off.

Why do you need self hosted servers? Most looter shooters are p2p in game, right? Either way, you just need a filter to allow matching with other people that have anti cheat off. Or at least allow private groups in that mode.

its been a while but from memory the EAC is mandatory. you cant launch or play without anti cheat. its not an option.

Right, that's the criticism. Games used to make it optional. Why'd they stop (I suppose so they can sell you things like skins that you could otherwise just mod in like people used to)?

They used to be about having fun. If you wanted to put gravity at 10% and make everyone use only rocket launchers with unlimited ammo, that fell within the parameters of having fun:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uo7-qyfeThU

Your comment is naive. It’s like saying “I don’t like sport so why do we force athletes to do drug tests”.

How is that a plus? It's the same as just not playing the games with anticheat.

It means you don't have to figure it out, the platform tells you whether it works or not.

Your kernel might be private, but all your files can be accessed by the game, if it's run by the same user, which I imagine is the setup for most gamers. And since games are proprietary and auto-updated, the potential to do damage or compromise privacy is very high. Adding the kernel to the mix basically changes nothing.

It's a cliche, but XKCD shows this really succinctly: https://xkcd.com/1200/

Yea, complaining about the Anticheat doesn’t help since the game itself can arbitrarily run any code when you launch it

I wouldn't say none.

I got VACd on Linux the other day. Not cos I was cheating, just blocking VAC from network access. And not because I was blocking VAC deliberately, just blocking arbitrary code running from random /tmp steam binaries.

It is a pretty fucked situation that in order to allow anti cheat, you have to abandon securing your machine.

Yea it’s because Valve updates and streams the VAC modules OTA lol. So to them you were essentially blocking VAC

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