Honestly I feel like you should only use kernel anticheat on a dedicated machine that's kept 100% separate from any of your personal data. That's a lot to ask of people, but you really shouldn't have anything you don't consider public data on the same hardware.
Correct. Unfortunately, what you've just described is a gaming console rather than a PC. This problem fundamentally undermines the appeal of PC gaming in a significant way, imo.
Yes, game publishers are trying to turn PCs into a gaming console, which IMO will always be a futile effort, and is quite frankly annoying. I don't game on PC to have a locked down console-like experience.
Just embrace the PC for what it is and stop trying to turn it into a trusted execution platform with spyware and rootkits.
Look at BF6 - for all the secure boot and TPM required anti-cheat they stuffed it with, there were cheaters day 1, so why abuse your users when it's clearly ineffective anyway.
The game companies keep saying these things are necessary, yet they don't fully do the very thing they claim to do on the label.
Can't help but ask myself sometimes... why would users want to pay in the first place, for the content of someone who invests more money and leverage that some people see in their entire lives, in delivering user-hostile technical countermeasures that most of the time are ultimately futile?
What is the so valuable thing that one is supposed to get out of the work of someone who treats their audience this way, awesomely as their stuff might've been made? That's what doesn't make the most sense to me. But then I remember how most people aren't very intentional about most of their preferences and will accept whatever as long as it's served by an unaccountable industry into everyone's lives at the same time in a predictable manner, and I despair.
Of course the argument falls flat on multiple levels: It ignores other ways to prevent cheaters, like server-side detection or maybe developing a gameplay that is not based on channeling masses of anonymous strangers through the game world. It ignores that it doesn't actually solve the problem of cheaters. And it ignores that many games use anticheat for reasons that don't have to do with multiplayer at all, e.g. to keep players from bypassing in-game purchases.
Where with Anti-cheat and DRM only the 'good guys' get hit, since the 'bad guys' don't follow "the law" anyways.
A 14 year old who installs an autoclicker to mess with friends or randoms online I can get. But there are fully grown adults who dedicate their time and substantial amounts of money (whole second computer) just to win in online video games?
What's the motivation/justification for spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on cheating hardware and software? Are these just super-rich people who have more money than sense?
No doubt there are various reasons, some more understandable than others. There are some fascinating historical cases, like the one explored in "The King of Kong" :
Which is well worth a watch, if you're curious.
b) should’ve specified this is the bigger problem. glad to see from the other comment bf6 is coming on-board, but VALORANT doesn’t and that’s probably the quintessential title for this.
doesn't actually stop all cheaters.
We could have a better discussion around this if we recognize that failing to stop 100% of something isn't a prerequisite to rigorously evaluating the tradeoffs.
I'd argue the potential for abuse is a perfectly reasonable discussion to have, and doesn't have much bearing on the effectiveness of anticheat, but I understand that's not the point you are trying to make.
I didn't claim we should trust the company. Whether we can trust the anticheat maker is certainly part of the rigorous evaluation of the tradeoffs I mentioned. My point was that saying "it doesn't stop cheaters" is both incorrect and stifling to a more productive conversation, because it implies anticheat has no value and is therefore worth no risk.
As for me, if Gabe said "now you can opt your Steam Deck in to a trusted kernel we ship with anticheat and play PUBG," I'd probably do it. But that's because I, for better or worse, tend to trust Gabe. If Tencent were shipping it, I'd probably feel differently.
It is absolutely the case that there would be more cheating if we turned off the only partially effective systems. We know this because they are regularly stopping and banning people!
Probably the only workable solution is for windows to provide some kind of secure game mode where the game and only the game runs and can have windows attest nothing else is running. But that anti cheat has no access to the data in the real work OS which is currently not running. Ruins multi tasking, but assuming you can switch over fast enough it might not be too bad.
Cheating is a big draw to Windows for semi-pro gamers and mid streamers. What else is there to do except grind? Windows gives the illusion of "kernel level anti-cheat," which filters out the simplest ones, and fools most people some of the time.
For instance, a common cheat in Street Fighter 6 is to trigger a drive impact in response to the startup of a move that is unsafe to a drive impact. That is recognizing the opponent's animation and triggering an input. There's no part of that which cares where the game simulation is being done. In fact, this kind of cheating can only be detected statistically. And the cheats have tools to combat that by adding random triggering chances and delays. It's pretty easy to tune a cheat to be approximately as effective as a high-level player.
Kernel-level anticheat isn't a perfect solution, but there are people asking for it. It would make cheating a lot harder, at least.
As does Valorant and virtually every other first person shooter. The cheats aren't people flying around or nocliping, it's wallhacks and aim assists/bots.
I can move and reveal what's behind a corner a lot faster than a network roundtrip, so either the server needs to give some advance warning or you're going to see enemies pop into existence suddenly.
And computing if somebody is almost visible isn't trivial either. Level geometry can have narrow openings such as holes in a wall. Or what if somebody jumps?
And that's before getting into non visual information. It's not perfect, but you could still add a significant advantage by drawing the exact location of footsteps.
So yeah, (some) games try, but network latency means the client needs some information a wallhack can use, and the alternative: being killed by an enemy that was invisible is at least as frustrating as being killed by a cheater so the visibility estimate has to be generous.
But anti-cheat hasn't been about blocking every possible way of cheating for some time now. It's been about making it as in convenient as possible, thus reducing the amount of cheaters.
Is the current fad of using kernel level anti-cheats what we want? hell nah.
The responsibility of keeping a multi-player session clean of cheaters, was previously shared between the developers and server owners. While today this responsibility has fallen mostly on developers (or rather game studios) since they want to own the whole experience.
Wouldn't it be sufficient to simply have a minimal system installed on a separate partition or on a separate drive (internal or external). Boot that for gaming, and never give it the password for the encryption of your non-gaming volumes.
The idea that we should allow arbitrary code execution at some point, then we claw back security by running mass surveillance on your PC is clearly insane.
The only way to go forward is what BF6 has done - ensure the PC is in a pristine state, and nothing bad was loaded in the kernel - which is ironically why their anticheats conflicted - they don't allow loading random crap in the kernel.
Not to mention, people who develop these invasive security modules don't have the expertise, resources or testing culture to muck about in the kernel to the degree they do.
As to how dangerous this actually got actually showcased by Crowdstrike last year.
Yes, and at that point, you may as well use Windows for that machine.