EAC Linux v2 aims to close the protection gap with Windows, helping combat increasingly sophisticated cheats. Read the system requirements and what Linux distributions need to support here.
How would you server-side validate against something like a wallhack where the inputs are still all done by a human moving a mouse, but the player has information they shouldn’t? Or modifying shaders to disable smoke grenade type effects, or etc etc.
Not that I think remote attestation is good but I don’t think there’s a way to deal with cheating that’s as easy as “just do X”.
Focus on detecting the effect of the cheat, not on blocking it. Server knows how good a player is, if they consistently outperform, or achieve impossible feats, it’s a cheat.
Modern Warfare 4 servers have server-side culling, so the information you’d need for wallhack never even gets sent. There are still other kinds of cheats that would work though, like auto-aim
You can’t actually cull that much. Sure, you can deprive wallhackers from seeing players across the entire map, but you can’t actually cull people who are about to be seen, or sound emitters behind walls. And both of those are plenty of advantage to make the game completely one-sided.
Perhaps, don’t send them data they don’t need. But you’re right it can never be perfect with server-side, I just don’t see that casual gaming requires such extreme measures that invalidate a basic security principle: never trust the client to execute the exact code you sent.
The proposed solution of “let cheaters cheat” kills games dead. Game devs are aware the client only needs such and such minimal amount of data and it’s barely a bandaid against the effectiveness of client-side cheats. Statistical methods can only do so much.
My point is that anticheat is a battle where any ground gained is good ground. Deadlock and Overwatch haven’t died because they have satisfactory (YMMV) anticheat and they’re fun games (I have 1,200 hours on Deadlock). Here’s some examples of what I mean:
APB
The Division 1 (Dark Zone was unplayable)
TF2 for a long time, the bots would openly cheat on VAC-secured servers before votekicking you unless you paid an extortion fee
Tarkov is dying because of an epidemic of cheaters
Apex for a long time until they switched to kernel-level anticheat
etc etc.
Of course there are outliers of great and/or popular games, but there are games that are rendered practically unplayable and generally unfun by unsatisfactory anti-cheat. It might never be perfect but it’s necessary to have some kind of client-side enforcement, the inverse of which is for all practical purposes “let cheaters cheat”.
That is never true, in any domain. Eventually the cost of the new ground becomes unacceptable.
The result in this case isn’t just losing some potential players, it normalizes a tech that will be used for much more problematic purposes. It’s worth pushing back against even if you don’t play those games.
I can’t speak for APB or The Division here since I haven’t really played them, but…
TF2 is a 19 year old game that had its niche more or less taken over by Overwatch overnight and hasn’t seen a major update in the last 9 (Jungle Inferno). Cheaters or not, it shouldn’t be surprising that people want a bit more variety than that.
Tarkov (and extraction shooters in general) seem like outliers because there’s such an immense punishment for losing. I can believe that cheating would cause serious problems there, but personally I think that’s more just down to multiplayer perma(ish)death being a bad game design.
Apex is sort of in between. I did actually play it around when they dropped the Wine support, and don’t remember perception-of-cheating being much of a problem. Then again, I only played it on a pretty casual level. But you don’t need to ruin casual access to the game for the sake of competitive players, you could do something like Counter-Strike’s VAC/FACEIT split.
That’s not what I’m suggesting at all. I’m suggesting that this strategy is/will be invasive and ineffective. There are other mechanisms to root out cheaters based on e.g., multi-game analysis, human moderation, and server-side validation.
Well, anything where input devices and output devices are plugged in user-controlled USB can only do so much, too…
(Whether hardware cheating killing specifically the games where you are opposed to strangers in real-time play would have a positive or a negative effect on a society is anyone’s guess)
Can we already get the cheating cottage industry mass-produce virtual-screen+virtual-keyboard to virtual-network USB-c gadgets? Just to discourage crazy remote attestation schemes. And I am not talking about gaming when I want to discourage the attestation…
Yay, more ineffective surveillance instead of server-side validation, woo!
I look forward to watching friends of mine demonstrate the irrelevance and overstep of whatever they deploy.
score 1 · canonical
How would you server-side validate against something like a wallhack where the inputs are still all done by a human moving a mouse, but the player has information they shouldn’t? Or modifying shaders to disable smoke grenade type effects, or etc etc.
Not that I think remote attestation is good but I don’t think there’s a way to deal with cheating that’s as easy as “just do X”.
score 1 · canonical
Focus on detecting the effect of the cheat, not on blocking it. Server knows how good a player is, if they consistently outperform, or achieve impossible feats, it’s a cheat.
score 1 · canonical
Modern Warfare 4 servers have server-side culling, so the information you’d need for wallhack never even gets sent. There are still other kinds of cheats that would work though, like auto-aim
score 1 · canonical
You can’t actually cull that much. Sure, you can deprive wallhackers from seeing players across the entire map, but you can’t actually cull people who are about to be seen, or sound emitters behind walls. And both of those are plenty of advantage to make the game completely one-sided.
score 1 · canonical
Perhaps, don’t send them data they don’t need. But you’re right it can never be perfect with server-side, I just don’t see that casual gaming requires such extreme measures that invalidate a basic security principle: never trust the client to execute the exact code you sent.
score 1 · canonical
deleted by creator
The proposed solution of “let cheaters cheat” kills games dead. Game devs are aware the client only needs such and such minimal amount of data and it’s barely a bandaid against the effectiveness of client-side cheats. Statistical methods can only do so much.
score 2 · canonical
Right, that must be why Deadlock and Overwatch died years ago! /s
(Not that they don’t both use anticheats too, but neither is anywhere close to as invasive as this nightmare.)
score 1 · canonical
My point is that anticheat is a battle where any ground gained is good ground. Deadlock and Overwatch haven’t died because they have satisfactory (YMMV) anticheat and they’re fun games (I have 1,200 hours on Deadlock). Here’s some examples of what I mean:
Of course there are outliers of great and/or popular games, but there are games that are rendered practically unplayable and generally unfun by unsatisfactory anti-cheat. It might never be perfect but it’s necessary to have some kind of client-side enforcement, the inverse of which is for all practical purposes “let cheaters cheat”.
score 1 · canonical
That is never true, in any domain. Eventually the cost of the new ground becomes unacceptable.
The result in this case isn’t just losing some potential players, it normalizes a tech that will be used for much more problematic purposes. It’s worth pushing back against even if you don’t play those games.
score 1 · canonical
I think this is a good point and I should’ve clarified I agree.
score 1 · canonical
I can’t speak for APB or The Division here since I haven’t really played them, but…
TF2 is a 19 year old game that had its niche more or less taken over by Overwatch overnight and hasn’t seen a major update in the last 9 (Jungle Inferno). Cheaters or not, it shouldn’t be surprising that people want a bit more variety than that.
Tarkov (and extraction shooters in general) seem like outliers because there’s such an immense punishment for losing. I can believe that cheating would cause serious problems there, but personally I think that’s more just down to multiplayer perma(ish)death being a bad game design.
Apex is sort of in between. I did actually play it around when they dropped the Wine support, and don’t remember perception-of-cheating being much of a problem. Then again, I only played it on a pretty casual level. But you don’t need to ruin casual access to the game for the sake of competitive players, you could do something like Counter-Strike’s VAC/FACEIT split.
score 1 · canonical
That’s not what I’m suggesting at all. I’m suggesting that this strategy is/will be invasive and ineffective. There are other mechanisms to root out cheaters based on e.g., multi-game analysis, human moderation, and server-side validation.
score 1 · canonical
Well, anything where input devices and output devices are plugged in user-controlled USB can only do so much, too…
(Whether hardware cheating killing specifically the games where you are opposed to strangers in real-time play would have a positive or a negative effect on a society is anyone’s guess)
score 1 · canonical
Can we already get the cheating cottage industry mass-produce virtual-screen+virtual-keyboard to virtual-network USB-c gadgets? Just to discourage crazy remote attestation schemes. And I am not talking about gaming when I want to discourage the attestation…
score 1 · canonical