One could argue that a game isn't critical but one could say it's critical to stop hackers.
If you were to take the stance that gaming isn't critical than with that logic you're then claiming multiplayer hacking is a feature of the game.
Doesn't do well for the community or the company. But nor do the rootkits do good for the consumer.
Some cheats are getting rather sophisticated now. There's an ever-increasing number of Pi-devices where the cheating is done externally.
FaceIT only sells one thing, matchmaking, so they have people manually reviewing games. A thing that Valve will never do.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/irdeto-backtracks-on-plans-...
Both the anti-tamper and anti-cheat affect performance and it's incredibly noticeable to anyone who isn't building a new bleeding-edge hardware PC every year or two.
But nowdays the Valorant community complains about hackers almost as the CS community.
Look at what Apple has done in recent years. kexts (kernel-level drivers) are basically all but unsupported today, and both DriverKit and IOKit are fully userland.
It's never critical to stop hackers in a videogame IMO. We need to stop being so damn serious about gaming.
(I’d still lean towards expecting game houses to find another way, kernel drivers are still client side trust mechanisms).
One user is on a connection with 10ms latency, the other user is on 50 ms latency. Now, if first user does something, and second user can either do something to evade or can do something that actually prevents the first user from acting, how do you consolidate that?
The actual timestamp of when exactly what happened helps immensely, but you have to trust the timestamp. And how can you know that is not manipulated?
But... that's just the surface. Consider: one client uses a rendering that takes 25ms longer to show up and another client does not render textures/shadows etc. That client is faster and the sender can even send "official" response times, but would still give an advantage.
So, I am not sure this can be solved serverside. But... I don't play these games anymore and would never opt for a rootkit to be installed just so I can play. I can imagine plenty of people, though, who would.
You don't have to trust the timestamp - and you shouldn't. You can use a bunch of methods to go from untrusted to grudgingly accepted: requiring monotonicity means cheating clients have to be permanently slower rather than selectively slower. Having tolerances for out of order packet rates or accepted deltas before discarding player actions will have some false positives for players on terrible networks, but will also reduce the impact of any possible timestamp-related cheats.
It can't be fully solved server side, not without sacrificing acceptable performance. I reckon it can probably be dealt with enough on server side to keep cheating to a tolerably low level. It's probably cheaper to just license a windows rootkit though.
Valve added vote kicks to CS to help keep cheating (and other antisocial behaviours) under control - it seems pretty important to them.
Well, this problem simply can't be solved server-side only. Client-side can't be validated without rootkit (and even then it's not enough, but enough to deter majority of cheaters).
Is it fun to be a non-cheater, and join a multi-player game where there are other players using software cheats that let them easily beat you every single time?
I'm pretty sure I would quickly stop playing that game, and demand the publisher refund my money. That's just not fun.
And that's just as a casual gamer. For people who compete and win prizes, endorsements, etc., the stakes are a bit higher.
I'm not saying kernel-level rootkits installed on everyone's machine is the answer, but letting people cheat isn't going to work either.