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Comment by cyanydeez | Hacker News Reader

i think your underwstimating the anticheat value that still exists. many of the online games are trash when theres not strict cheat control.

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Run anti-cheat server-side. Give us private servers again. There's no reason we should have to put up with client-side rootkits written by non-kernel-devs to play a game.

It's not possible, technically, to run effective anti-cheat server-side. Clients need precise enemy location data for things like sound effects. The server can't tell if the client is using the data for unfair purposes or not.

Once the data is sent to the client, in an untrusted setting, all bets are off. Not your hardware, no control over it.

Too bad. It's not possible for rootkits to be a good idea for a video game.

Cheating is a social issue, not a technical one. Communities are the solution.

Private servers are a nice way to do this and do still exist in places. My favorite online game uses them along with server side anti-cheat and while cheating occasionally happens, it has never been an ongoing issue. I've maybe seen a cheater once or twice in all my many hours playing the game over 10 years (elite dangerous, in case you were curious).

Community servers don't want server-side anti-cheat either. Hell they invented client-side anti-cheats back in the day. Even current day community servers like Face-IT have additional anti-cheats, not less. Same with modded GTAV FiveM (even before the main game added anti-cheats)

>written by non-kernel-devs

What exactly separates a kernel dev from a non-kernel dev?

One has experience writing secure, stable code for drivers, memory management, etc that is subject to broad review by other experienced devs. The other is looking at those things adversarially and pushes out whatever they think is good enough. Crowdstrike served as a useful reminder for who should be allowed in kernel space, and video game anti-cheat has far less justification to be there.

This. There are a lot of online games I loved playing but the cheating got so bad it made it impossible to play. MW1, MW2, Battlefield, CS, etc... you could see the wallhacks and aimbots taking over every lobby. I eventually stopped playing. I tried using Consoles for online gaming after that but never really got into using joysticks.... still prefer mouse and keyboard. Now I play limited games where the cheating isn't quite that rampant.

Im not a big gamer, but playing GTA Online, and getting taken out as soon as you spawn. Or items just spawning in front of you, like ramps. REALLY ruins the experience

Or everyone in the lobby getting nuked over and over.

Or trying to do heists and having a cheater in every session.

I'd like to play the game again but it's just not fun.

There are still some servers online for games like the first CoD or United Offensive. No hackers as far I can tell anymore. They have all moved on

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