I think there should be real world legal consequences for exploiting information systems like this. "Gaming" shouldn't magically exempt a business sector from reasonable protection against fraud and abuse. Just because it's easy to do or involves bits in a computer (that isn't physically on the game developer's premises) should not magically exempt bad actors from prosecution. Yes, it's your computer, those are technically your bits, but this is about how these things are used and the context within which they are.
We have the CFAA in the US, but you'd need a fairly loose interpretation to cover most forms of cheating today. I don't really see the distinction between client and server when the actions taken on the client side cause a dramatic loss in quality of service for other clients connected to that same server or p2p relay.
South Korea has laws on the books as of 2016.
https://dotesports.com/overwatch/news/ow-hacker-sentenced-pr...
Avoiding to play games that take over my system on a low-level is a no go, I can live without LoL or BF6 and I live even better :)
ignoring this problems means you don't care about your identity, data, privacy and you prefer to keep ignoring this and play the games that hype abd you like, but inside you know that long term your are profiled and such profiling will be used against you!
I don't believe Vanguard did this at all? It told users they need to update their firmware to play, it didn't touch the firmware itself.
> Cheats started in user space, so anti-cheat moved into the kernel to see them. Cheats followed into the kernel, and then below it into hypervisors
I think cheats moved into kernel space before anti-cheats did.
An anti-cheat mechanism can always be defeated if the cheater can access a lower order of abstraction from the mechanism. An arms race is the inevitable outcome. It's either that or competitive gaming is not viable.
I'd rather just give my passport and do one of those face turning challenges to play competitive video games. Then if I get caught cheating, my real life identity can't play anymore, rather than make a new account and "get better at cheating".
If I am a habitual cheater in literally any other sport on Earth, governing body figures that out and issues me a lifetime ban. At that point, I'm blacklisted. Even my Tuesday night dodgeball league can issue bans that actually stick because they know my real identity.
You are limited in envisioning a game where the client device is being trusted for ground truth about the game.
In client-server models, it is possible to limit trust such that many cheat modes and methods are impossible. Furthermore is the “remote GPU streaming” model like Stadia, which nearly obsoletes conventional techno-cheating, and likewise obsoletes kernel-mode anti-cheat.
https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/vanguard-on-demand
> A “pixelbot” is a computer vision cheat that injects player input for the purposes of aiming at heads or casting spells with perfect timing. Coming in “external” (hardware microcontroller) and “internal” (python script) varieties, pixelbots can be extremely impactful in VALORANT due to the low time-to-kill, sometimes just simply pulling the trigger for the cheater when an enemy enters their reticle (also known as a “triggerbot”).
The reality is none of the companies want to do these things. Every step in this process locks out some subset of customers. And that's not including the ones who meet the technical requirements but are turned off enough by the decision to just avoid the games anyway
They're an unfortunate response to how utterly profitable and expansive cheating in online games has become. They cost the companies precious development time that could be spent making the game better to instead make it just vaguely "playable" for normal people
Writing an article about a problem without addressing the problem shows the author never had the problem i. The first place
If I'm reacting to information that I shouldn't have at a rate much much greater than the general population, then I'm not psychic, I'm just cheating.
This is also true for aiming, spray control, etc. All current cs2 cheaters are producing a very large and detectable audit trail of very suspicious plays in game, even if they think they're being sneaky. The resolution of the data looks like keeping track of your location and where you're aiming about every 15ms.
Here's some recent research that's related: https://arxiv.org/html/2508.06348v1
I can hide from a kernel module, but I can't hide from my own data trail.
There's only really two paths:
* We do kernel anti-cheat in trusted execution environments, which is bad for all the reasons in the article. When I break through this, you'll get the full "having a cheater" experience in your game.
* We do AI/ML heuristic-based detection to the point where cheaters are forced to behave exactly like non-cheating teammates or risk detection, cheating maybe only 10-20% above their previously established skill patterns. When I break through this, you'll have a normal game and I'll be kind of bored and nobody will be having the "cheaters in my game" experience even though I'm actually cheating.
In either case, I'm still going to try and beat the system for fun. Because video games.
Yeah except that’s not the options here. Even with ring-0 there are lots of cheaters. Without it the game would be completely infested with them.
So it makes a lot of sense for a company releasing a new FPS game centered around competitive gaming to pull out all the stops to prevent that issue.
Now, the bigger question here is why can I play a game like Overwatch 2 on Linux, but not Valorant? Does Overwatch have a bigger cheating problem? If not, then Valorant should take a look at why their anticheat is just as effective without requiring kernel access.
Yes, considerably.
One can also look at Counterstrike running on Valve's matchmaking which uses userland cheat detection versus Faceit's kernel level anticheats for the exact same game. It's been incredibly rare for me to run into obvious cheaters on Faceit but I'll often run into cheaters in Valve's matchmaking. It's the same game, the same executables.
Users do not have meaningful choice. On most games that use Anticheat, it is required to play the game. I can’t choose to use a non-anticheat version of games. It’s either submit to it or don’t play. Not much of a meaningful choice.
This is a long winded way of saying that there isn’t a good way to have a multiplayer game give you the choice while still being fun.
Here's an example. ARC Raiders recently added Denuvo. There's basically no game like it that doesn't have anticheat. None. You can't just go play another similar game that doesn't have anticheat, you just don't get to play those games
Linux and some BSDs are basically the only free operating systems nowadays. Maybe HarmonyOS. Too bad most anticheats don't work with it, too bad most companies only release broken windows drivers and maybe mac drivers but not linux, etc etc. You just don't get to use that hardware or play those games or etc.
Good luck getting anything like any iPhone or Android flagship that has a replaceable battery. When you choose something like pocophone you are giving up every piece of the bleeding edge to choose outdated components for their repairability. Which is repairable but not fast. Also depending on your choice of vendor you might lose out of netflix / google pay / etc because of course.
Some like framework laptop can have better value for money because their upgrade model is to replace the entire computer (logic board) so they can still vertically integrate it / be decently fast. Nobody has tried that yet with phones
It's terrible that we even have to deal with this. I don't want to be forced to accept an anticheat for games. I don't want to be forced to use any operating system for anything (even though I genuinely believe mac is best). I don't want to be forced to replace a whole device when the battery dies etc. Or spend hours removing dozens of tiny screws in order to do it myself. And I certainly wouldn't put up with a slower device just because it's repairable or just because of nearly anything ever.
ARC Raiders once forced me to update windows because it was too outdated or something, one of the system DLLs expired from their allowlist or whatever. Nobody cares, I should be able to play on windows 10 as far as they're concerned. Windows updates are a hazard nowadays, asking someone to update is asking them to risk all their data. I do everything in my power to block windows update. I never asked and I never consented.
Meanwhile I update all my apple devices the day each beta releases because apple is not a stupid bonehead
It's related to an idea I've had for years. You know, I've always wanted a news site that only announces products that already exist. Like things you can actually buy. I'm so tired of hearing about new innovations that don't exist yet that I want to punch whoever posts about them. I'm so tired. I don't want to hear about the future ever again. I want to hear about the present. I want to hear about stuff I can actually buy.
Likewise I am so tired of hearing about products that are harboring toxicity. I'll get so excited for something that seems so cool only to find out by surprise that I can't run it or wouldn't. And then I feel worse off than if I'd never heard of that thing.
Yes there are some markets where you need something. Like now, if you're in the comcast monopoly you can no longer manage your network without a smartphone. They retired the website, and they ripped out big sections of the LAN admin panel with pointers to go to the app. If you don't have the app you just can't do it anymore. More of the world is becoming like this, it's so exhaustingly evil and it's so normalized that stuff like that's not even a footnote.
I don't think the impact of not having a phone or car or etc matters in this discussion though. You can factor that into how badly you want/need one but in the end I'm talking about how shitty it is to have to miss out on something purely because it's tainted. Like if you miss out on a phone and you need one then you might be pretty sad you have to settle for something worse than what could've been possible. Same for a car or anything. It's just with a game you're not forced to pick an alternative and you can just be sad without having to settle for having to get something lesser. But being without the game you wanted is still sad. If that makes any sense.
And I sometimes hear "vote with your wallet". Unfortunately the product I want doesn't exist so that's not possible. I can avoid paying for the one I don't want, but then I have nothing at all. And not paying for something has also never changed anything, since no one will think the same way I do, so I am the only possible difference. So I don't bother trying. A difference of 1 is so vanishingly insignificant that I couldn't even possibly be supporting anyone with all the purchases I've ever made, let alone hurting anyone with any of the purchases I could ever not make.
I don't want to be forced to play with cheaters due to some people's philosophical concepts of what software I should be allowed to run on my computer when there's technology to radically minimize their numbers for the games I'd like to play.
If I want to have a computer that's locked down to be a platform for playing games online with a low likelihood of encountering cheaters shouldn't I have the freedom to be able to choose that?
This is exactly why I choose Mac and iPhone. I actually trust Apple to do this. I do not however trust Microsoft or third-party app developers to do this. But I absolutely believe in that freedom and exercise it myself.
cs2 is infested with hackers, arc raiders died because of hackers... many games I've played and loved are dead because of hackers.
I don't know why comments here are so negative. PC gamers should be wary of installing this stuff, and PC users in general wary of attempts to lock down their computer. If game companies want a fully locked down PC, they already have one; it's called a console.
It's fine. Personally I keep my Mac clean. It can play a few games, which is enough for me. I also found a spare PC in e-waste, and occasionally boot it up to play games in Win10, but wouldn't care if it died.
So you're prefacing it as someone who has never really dealt with the games you like to play getting totally infested with and nearly unplayable with so many cheaters in practically every lobby.
Its easy to think its something that's not needed if one never spends any time in the space.
Do they stop all cheats? No. Do they make the bar extensively higher to cheat? Absolutely. Even they point this out: "A DMA cheat is a separate FPGA card that sits in a PCIe slot and reads the game’s memory directly over the bus, while a second computer processes what it sees and feeds back aim and wallhacks..." Any random person can go run some executable they found on a forum, what percentage of the playerbase has these FPGA cards and a second computer to properly run these cheats? And even then, more modern systems can even detect these kinds of things.
Are there lots of problems with these anti-cheat platforms? Sure. Are they now often developed with ties to countries many wouldn't want have that deep of access to their computers? Sure. Is kernel-level anti-cheat overall as a concept overreach? Probably not for what a lot of players actively want. Players want systems to ensure everyone is playing on a somewhat equal playing field. Other than the games being rendered in the cloud I don't know any other real way to begin to enforce it.
> I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater
What if it wasn't "the occasional cheater" and instead was "nearly every match of every game you like to play"?
I don't play any games that use anticheat. But I also don't go out of my way to tell other players who knowingly, consensually installs games with anticheat so they can play them. It's like saying it is an invasion of privacy for cycling athletes to be subjected to doping tests. It's their game. Why does it bother you?
>The hardware requirements lock out Linux and the Steam Deck
Because their security is out of date. Meanwhile MacOS has modern security good enough to not even require Vanguard to need kernel mode to be effective.
No but it has largely reduced it to where you can play competitively and not run into cheaters. Go play f2p csgo and enjoy a hacker in nearly every single game blatantly spinning in spawn head shotting everyone.