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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

> Ultimately, it is inevitable that you will encounter a cheater eventually, but we will just keep banning them all over and over again until they finally work up the courage to run the uninstaller.

What a great message to send to your fans. "We know we installed Ring 0 anticheat on your PC and banned Linux/Steam Deck players, but look at how useless it is!"

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How exactly do you arrive at the conclusion that it's useless? I don't know anything about the game, but if the numbers in this post are not made up, including the spike, it looks not only effective but absolutely vital for the game to be playable at all.

Hacker News has always been bad at understanding the words “mostly effective.”

An anticheat does not need to be 100% effective to be worth something.

A DRM solution does not need to be 100% effective to be worth something.

A website block does not need to be 100% effective to be worth something.

And so on. “There’s a workaround” != “This is therefore mostly useless.”

Otherwise, let me tell you, seat belt laws and speed limits are the most useless things ever made. The workaround is just pushing my foot down harder!

> How exactly do you arrive at the conclusion that it's useless?

They just hit a new bans-per-second record?

This is true of any online game ever. Games require integrity and there are plenty of people who would rather have game integrity than system integrity because, for them, the system is for the game.

I don’t think Riot is losing sleep over denying access to the 4 people who want to play Valorant on a Steam Deck.

And for macOS the OS itself provides enough system integrity that Riot don't need a kernel anticheat on macOS.

Steam Deck users need to ask Valve to similarly improve SteamOS's system integrity to prove to game companies that it's safe for people to run their games on it without compromising their game's integrity.

As a Steam Deck user I'd rather have the platform kept open like how it is now than lock it down. It's one of the significant advantages the Steam Deck (and PC gaming in general) has over consoles.

Allowing the OS to affirm integrity doesn't turn it into a closed platform. Checking integrity is an optional feature.

It can be beaten by a $10 piece of hardware that is plug and play.

Not really, no; not without getting detected and banned. There are way cheaper ways to get banned.

It absolutely can and does and rarely gets detected and banned. There is a really good video on this written by Unity Research that goes over all the different ways cheaters beat valorants anti cheat and builds some of them from scratch and shows why they are so effective and hard to beat. Hardware cheating was by far the hardest to stop.

I dunno it seems better to be honest and up front about the reality of the situation - since most players experience it themselves - than to pretend like it's all roses and perfectly anti-cheat.

Is there any other solution to drive away cheaters without using TPM & Ring 0?

Thanks.

Yes, fast and effective moderation (it's be real nice if the blatent cheaters were banned before the game ended, as opposed to in 'waves' where they've already had plenty of time to cause problems). But that's expensive.

Allow private/player-run servers with votekick enabled.

A game I can't play on linux means more productivity for me anyways, thanks to all the game devs who ignore us

There's a lot of ways the cheater problem can be mostly neutralized, for example a dedicated matchmaking pool for players who ONLY have allowed devices, hardware, drivers. No ifs or buts or stupid exceptions like for LAN cafes.

For years, gamers have been told install xyz rootkit for your safety, enable xyz option in your BIOS, get a TPM, install the latest versions of windows, it's all for your security to make your experience better and cheat-free with state-of-the-art technology! across like 3 or 4 different vendors, and the outcome has been the same ever since the beginning: cheaters find ways to skirt basic restrictions, because companies don't _want_ to actually put an end to cheating. Especially more so for companies like valve that get cheaters constantly re-buying their games or "premium" status, not sure if this exists in the valorant realm

Just end the "gary's pool cleaning" problem once and for all rather than continue to play stupid games just on the off 0.00001% chance Gary's business (incorporated last week) decided to branch out to software. Let Gary come appeal to Riot directly and let them manually analyze whatever they need BEFOREHAND.

They're focusing on DETECTION rather than PREVENTION.

Is it technically illegal once someone’s installed anti cheat to use it for telemetry and data harvesting? I mean in the us.

Murder is legal if it serves the powerful. Some goes with spyware.

Spyware is legal. As long as people who care about these things are a tiny minority, the law (and lawmakers) will never be compelled to change.

The best bet for those who play these games is to explore alternatives, or leave games altogether and socialize in the real world.

The reputational risk involved in using their anticheat for that is pretty severe, and I can't imagine they'd make that much money by selling telemetry to advertisers compared to how much they make off Valorant itself.

At their scale it would also turn into one or more big class action lawsuits if they got caught trying it too, I expect. The lawyer fees would probably swamp any profits from selling telemetry data.

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