Apex Legends is taking away its support for the Steam Deck and Linux
theverge.com
theverge.com
I don't think trust is a bad thing, but this feels forced and unpleasant.
Let players run their own servers and host their own playgroups as they did before game servers were monetized.
Then when someone cheats you ban them until they apologize in person and sing the Very Sorry Song.
This has been proven to work time and again. The only reason it is not the default is that some value extractor just has to feed their kids.
I think parent's point is that you don't need skill-based matchmaking and ranking systems if you give players the ability to self-organize.
You don't need this stuff, of course, but people (who don't play games) love to dismiss these things as if they don't matter.
I mean, I know the answer, it's because doing both would be significantly more work for unproven returns, but still, a guy can dream.
The rise of those things you describe matched the decline of my interest in any form of online multiplayer.
The problems start when everyone cares about their damn ranking. And yes, even casuals care about that crap. Everybody follows the same strategies, everyone is whiny and annoying because losing means your ranking is damaged.
Back in the day nobody cared. A match went awry because someone did a completely retarded build on their toon, or didn't know how to play with the class they picked? Oh well, game is over, you find a new one.
The ranking itself is meaningless, the only thing important is that it accurately represents my skill so that it can be used to find a match.
It sounds like I might play different kinds of online games than you… I mostly play sports games, which don’t have the issues you describe.
So many quality of life standards have been sacrificed just to let jackasses feel superior to others in what is supposed to be a fun game.
Mostly because ranked games were full of tryhards that raged constantly and in general didn't actually treat the game like a game.
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In fact now that I think about it... some of my funnest LoL games back in the day was when I got paired with someone way out of my league in unranked and they would spend a lot of the game mentoring teammates.
And when the opposite happened, we would get stomped quickly and would be able to into a new match quickly. No one felt the need to drag out a unfun/mismatched game because their ranking would get hurt. Wasn't really an issue.
By far, the best time I had in online multiplayer was playing Dota (the WC3 map, not the standalone atrocity that exists nowadays).
No ranked whatever. Every game was a blank slate. Nobody really cared, everyone was having fun. People tried weird builds, odd team composition, etc. You sometimes played with nice people and added them to friends.
With ranked matchmaking everybody is pissy if you are not playing optimally, everyone moans and hisses when they lose, etc.
A lot of the time in the game was spent scrimming on private servers against other teams. Public games were played on the team’s public server, where people of all skill levels would meet. The highest skilled players would always look to be challenged and would switch to the weaker team all the time. Of course on the scoreboard you’d have people who had a K/D of 40/2 and people who were 1/12.
People who weren’t looking to improve and got stomped would of course leave.
After a while of playing on a server you’d know the good players and they’d also self select to form teams with each other and move to private servers.
Also the f2p model isn't doing us any favors by making new accounts cost zero, though iirc cheats can cost like $100/mo so I assume dedicated cheaters would still cheat if games all cost money.
If I had the option of Quake 3 Arena-style "matchmaking" and no cheats, or 2024 matchmaking and cheats I'd choose option 2 every time.
At any time of day or night, I can just sign in and immediately find a match. In addition, it can match me against players that are close to my skill level so the games I play are fair and challenging. I can keep my statistics to see how I do over time in those fair and challenging games.
This is a very valuable service.
I have played on plenty of community hosted servers, and the experience is hit or miss. Sometimes, you will get power hungry mods who ban anyone who is better than them, or won’t ban the cheaters because they are friends. Without the anti cheat tools, it is often very hard to distinguish people who are really good and people who are cheating, so you leave it up to the whims of the moderators.
Yes, you could tell me to just go and find a different server, but I don’t want to spend my time trying to find a good server I just want to play… and who knows if the good server I find will still be around the next time I play.
I have thousands of hours on both types of games, and for any sort of competing games (whether FPS, RTS, or sports), I get a lot more enjoyment out of centralized matchmaking with anticheat.
I even remember ICCUP for Starcraft 1 had 'anti-hack'.
Being able to host your own playgroups is generally possible in modern games still. Private lobbies on their public servers exist, but that's still more effort than people are willing to do versus hitting the 'play game' button. We used to call those PUGs.
1. Allow community-hosted servers, as were common 20 years ago. These can be moderated with greater attention than a massive global server, and tend to eject cheaters quickly.
2. Server-side analysis. This is arguably more expensive to implement than forcing every player to accept a rootkit, but machine learning might reduce the cost. Moreover, it is more effective in at least one dimension: it can't be circumvented* like a rootkit can.
But this approach takes up server disk space and client CPU time. It's also reactive.
Snooping at hardware is easy. You don't even have to do it game-by-game. That's the reason.
These are features, not bugs. Cheating must be detected serverside. Never trust the client, this is basic security. Breaking the user's client security is not a valid solution, and I get increasingly frustrated with these gaming companies that insist that a rootkit is "fine" and "normal" and "something a regular user should install without question"
As long as rendering happens on the client, it's going to require client-side anti-cheat to stop players from looking through walls or adding aimbots.
Client side rendering means the client has information like the location of the opponent even when the opponent is not visible. The server is unable to tell on its own whether the client is using this information inappropriately.
Other techniques include simple statistical analysis: it's usually pretty damn obvious when a player is making inputs that shouldn't be humanly possible consistently, or reacting to information they shouldn't be able to see. That doesn't have to be done in realtime, it can be stored and reviewed later. (That might even be a feature on its own: delayed bans make it harder for cheaters to know if their techniques were detectable.)
Bans have typically been done in waves for a long time for exactly this reason, yes.
So if you're sending that data to the client, well now cheats can look for that and detect if there's a player behind you and warn you, giving an advantage.
The same thing applies to corners and other occlusions, just less extreme, but still just as frustrating.
The community HAS figured it out. If you want cheating reduced you do server side cheat detection not just client side and/or you release real dedicated servers.
Neither of which shitty game companies are interested in, because it either cost more money to implement or means a minor loss of control.
The TF2 dedicated server mailing lists, back in the day, were filled with new cheats, crashes, and exploits being found and reported by server admins.
Still though even today I can open up TF2 and still have a few favorited servers that have been going for a decade+. I can join those servers and play bot and cheater free for the most part.
Also the mailing list I spoke of are basically dead at this point as the number of invested server admins has dwindled.
Still though even today I can open up TF2 and still have a few favorited servers that have been going for a decade+. I can join those servers and play bot and cheater free for the most part.
You can somewhat cat-and-mouse this by attempting to humanize the inputs, but it's surprisingly difficult to replicate "natural" motion as input by a human. The humanized aimbot will end up with its own detectable signature. Besides that though, don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Catching the low-hanging-fruit (the stuff that is easy to detect) is *most* of the problem. Leave the crazy advanced stuff to the professional leagues, where players are under higher scrutiny anyway.
Mind that I don't meant to argue against clientside cheat detection. You can still do a lot of that in userspace, and you really should. It's more data to analyze and it raises the bar for casuals. But since you inherently can't trust the client, you need to also do serverside detection, and really the serverside stuff (being remote, unknowable, and much harder to exploit) is going to be the stronger signal.
Also, server-sided anti-cheat is far cheaper than client-sided. I see the inverse quoted everywhere, but it's just not true.
The downside is you don't own the game. But this is more or less the case right now, with DRM and all. And for online games, you're already beholden to the servers.
It does help that cheating can only help so much in fighting games. I haven't thought about it much, but I guess you could have a macro that executes a devastating combo? Even then you need to be skilled enough at defense and hit confirming to even know when to press the "win the game" button. And most of the games I play have enough defensive options[0] that the player executing the combo might still need to react to something.
[0] E.g. bursts in Guilty Gear
Now rollback is basically standard and you do see competitive tournaments happening online frequently. Obviously the big events like EVO are still offline, but you could say the same about the majors for DotA, LoL, even Brood War, which are all very "online-first" games.
I think the big difference between EVO and e.g. DoTA offline majors[1] is that anyone can show up at EVO and jump into the pools. For other esport events, to play in an offline event, you first have to have qualified online. If the whole process were offline beginning to end, that would be closer to the FGC model.
[0] I myself only dabble, somewhere between filthy casual and semi-serious
[1] and do correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know that much about the competitive MOBA and FPS scenes
Fighting games are also unique in that they're the cheapest to run. You just need a console and a 60hz display, and can share between opponents. While FPS gamers usually ask for at least 120hz, maybe even 240hz, and you need one per player, which can get pretty high with team 5v5 games.
I can only speak to smash really, but in smash your tech is not the most important factor. Your adjustments, reads, and mixups are. If you cover roll get up every time, you will lose. You need to, very quickly, understand your opponent's play style and capitalize on it. In addition, you need to be aware of when YOU are being exploited and strategically drop in mixups.
Many, maybe most, of the best players can't parry with high accuracy. But they don't need to either. They're the best because they're mind readers.
And then I remember they literally spend their free time thinking of ways to piss off their own customers.
It was basically the norm when I was growing up, there was always someone using wall hacks or whatever, it was just kinda funny and never ruined the fun.
I think a majority of people who play competitive online games enjoy fair competition, and it really isn’t fun to play against cheaters.
I played NBA2k on PC for a few years, and unlike on consoles, cheaters were rampant. Half the games would be against players who were like 12 feet tall and could make every shot from anywhere on the court. It was zero fun, and I stopped playing.
I think “just let people cheat” is not a viable option.
A pick-up game of basketball
A weekend mountain bike race
A corn-hole tournament at your local bar.
Someone cheating in any of these contexts would typically be upsetting. No one likes a cheater.
Video games are different because you can't call them out on it in real-time. You don't usually have any way to prove it. You also can't really escape it because there might be another cheater in the next lobby. In person, you have a lot more power or control over the situation (typically).
When it is some small percentage of games you might shrug, hope you don't run into the cheater again, and move on to the next game where nobody is cheating. A few matches of your day get ruined but you still get to enjoy >95% of them so it's overall still a good experience. It has a very small impact on your enjoyment but you can move on and still enjoy most of your time.
It becomes a problem when there are so many cheaters that you encounter one in nearly every single game you play. Making it nearly impossible to play or win because the aim botting, wall hacking, infinite ammo, one-hit-kill, teleporting, invincible hacker is mowing down you and your entire team and the round ends in a few minutes. Except now it is 5 out of every 6 games you play and you hardly get to enjoy playing.
Additionally, back in the day you could leave matches without really getting punished for it. If you encountered an obvious hacker you could just leave and rejoin a new game. Now you get punished for leaving matches and might have to sit out a 15-60 minute timer if you leave too many games. Mix that with some high percentage of cheaters and you might be sitting in lobby waiting to play the game more than you're actually playing the game.
Let's say you enjoy playing Chess. How long would you enjoy playing against Alpha Zero - especially when expecting to play against someone your own ELO? At what ratio of playing against people cheating with Alpha Zero would you stop bothering to try and play Chess? I could tolerate it occasionally but if every single person I was playing against was just using Alpha Zero I'd stop trying to play Chess at all. It's no fun to lose every single time because the other person is always cheating.
PUBG also had an era with lot of cheaters and lot of people dropped the game.
Like the article says, when Linux gets critical mass, with the Steam Deck's broader adoption for example (their market is still very limited) it will make more sense to support this.
Now that I've got all of the money to build a bitchin' system... I'm not into vidya.
The MBAs got to it and we now _must_ have a multiplayer game with anticheat because if we don't have anticheat how are we supposed to sell the tournaments surrounding the game to streaming audiences as a way to monetize an otherwise free-to-play* game?
We let people make this hobby into their whole lives and when you do that, it has to be monetized, and it begins to suck.
The Internet is no fun anymore.
There are a lot of games where cheating wouldn’t be an issue, but games like Apex legends aren’t those.
So Linux users are malware?
I have the feeling that recent games that push you to loot box and equivalent might be a big incentive.
What are the incentives?
- Global leaderboard?
- you need to play hours or spend money to have better gears then other players?
- Winning sequence allows to humiliate the looser. Like end game video.
...
I think kernel-level anti-cheat is a security nightmare, but denying there’s a genuine economic motive here seems naïve.
Company runs entire ecosystem, how apart from hacking their DBs you can ever get back?
If apex legends released a real dedicated server tomorrow, within a month there would be a large selection of well moderated community servers and cheaters would be mostly a non-issue.
EA doesn't care to actually moderate cheating, because that either takes ongoing money to pay people or a loss of control by releasing dedicated servers. They instead just want to pay 1 time to "automate" their "solution" to cheating... even though that pretty much never works long term.
The tech behind is quite fascinating actually. These days people use FPGA boards connected via PCIe to directly stream the memory contents to another PC. There is no cheating software on the gaming machine.
Disclaimer: I don't cheat, but these boards are the cheapest pcie fpga dev boards I could find.
For non-competitive games, that drive generally isn't there, so it probably matters a lot less.