Comment by Fr0styMatt88
21 hours ago
Anticheat is one of those things where I probably sound really old, but man it’s just a game. If you hate cheating, don’t play on pub servers with randoms or find a group of people you can play with, like how real life works.
For competitive gaming, I think attested hardware & software actually is the right way to go. Don’t force kernel-level malware on everyone.
Yeah, that's hilariously impractical if you like these games.
> pub servers
Most of these popular competitive games probably don't even have community servers of any kind. Maybe some games like RTSes have custom matches, but they're not used much for the standard game mode, at least not for public lobbies.
Sorry but you're just old IMO :) PUBG or Arc Raiders have over 100 players in a game. Even Valorant or League have 10 players in a match. It's definitely not easy to find 9 friends to play the same game at the same time as you. And playing any of these games with a cheater can completely wreck the match. If the cheaters go unchecked, over time they start to dominate games where like 30% might be cheaters who can see through walls and insta headshot you and the entire multiplayer mode of the game is ruined. Even worse some cheaters are sneaky, they might have a wallhack or a map showing all players but use it cautiously and it can be quite hard to prove they're cheating but they build up a huge advantage nonetheless. Most of us are happy to have effective anti-cheat, and it's not forced upon us. I understand the tradeoff to having mostly cheater-free games is having to trust the game maker more and am fine with that. Riot for example is quite transparent about what their anti-cheat does, how it works and I don't consider it "malware" anymore than I consider a driver for my graphics card to be "malware" even if they do operate in kernel mode.
This was never an issue 20 years ago when we had 64 player servers, but the 64 player servers also generally had a few people online with referee access to kick/ban people at any given time. That seemed like it worked well to me.
Exactly 20 years ago I was both a competitive CS player and I also liked reverse engineering so I was somewhat interested in the cheating community and even programmed a custom injector and cheat for CS (it was surprisingly easy if you knew a bit about Windows APIs).
Cheats were a problem. Not even a nascent problem, but already established. Bad enough that VAC was released in 2002, Punkbuster in 2000...
In competitive gaming you cannot just find a stable friends group to play against: you need competition, and a diverse one. We somewhat palliated this by physically playing in LAN, but that still limits to a radius around you and it's cumbersome when you can just find an opponent online (we had manual matchmaking on IRC before modern matchmaking existed).
The problem is that cheating can be very subtle if done correctly. The difference between "that guy is better that me" and "that guy can see through walls" is pretty much undetectable through non-technical means if the cheater is not an idiot. This poisons the competitive scene.
Competitive gaming is huge. It was big back in the day but now it's a monster. Just check the largest categories on Twitch: LoL, TFT, WoW, CS, Valorant...
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That's really the paradigm shift - communities were self-organizing and self-moderating before. Now game publishers want to control all aspects of the online experience so they can sell you content and skins, so that means matchmaking and it means they have to shoulder the moderation burden.
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It was still an issue enough that some developers made BattlEye for anti-cheat 20 years ago for Battlefield games. It's still one of the more popular anticheats today.
Other games did similarly. Quake 3 Arena added Punkbuster in a patch. Competitive 3rd party Starcraft 1 server ICCUP had an "anti-hack client" as a requirement.
Some real rose tinted glasses here.
> Most of us are happy to have effective anti-cheat
I could almost get on board with the idea of invasive kernel anti-cheat software if it actually was effective, but these games still have cheaters. So you get the worst of both worlds--you have to accept the security and portability problems as a condition for playing the game AND there are still cheaters!
It's kind of like when people say Google is getting worse and has too many spam results even while I suspect they're actually improving, but the volume and quality of spam has gone up 100x so it looks like they're doing worse. The question is what is the base rate of attempts to cheat and how many of those attempts does kernel anti-cheat prevent vs. conventional mechanisms. I don't have the answer, but my intuition is cheating is more accessible and viral in many ways now with professional level marketplaces and actors working to build and sell cheats. I also don't think the industry would dedicate so much effort into invasive anti-cheat which is difficult, risky and gets them negative PR unless they felt it truly necessary. Counter Strike a few years ago had huge, huge numbers of cheaters and the super popular games like that attract a lot of attention. But ultimately, this is a cat and mouse game like search & SEO, so you're right there are still cheaters and getting that number to 0 is probably impossible.
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Valorant really is the only FPS where I was never once suspicious that someone may be hacking. I mean, I don’t play it and the anti-cheat is part of the reason, but it does absolutely work.
Worst of both worlds? In theory this is accurate, in practice, it isn’t. The crux of why people are fine with it as far as I can identify is “but these games still have cheaters” - people aren’t looking for 0 cheaters so much as < X% are cheaters, keeping the odds low than any given match they are in has a cheater.
> I don't consider it "malware" anymore than I consider a driver for my graphics card to be "malware" even if they do operate in kernel mode.
the bloggers/journalists calling it malware is doing the conversation a disservice. The problem is only really the risk of bugs or problems with kernel level anti-cheat, which _could_ be exploited in the worst case, and in the best case, cause outages.
The classic example recently is the crowdstrike triggered outtage of computers worldwide due to kernel level antivirus/malware scanning. Anti-cheat could potentially have the exact same outcome (but perhaps smaller in scale as only gamers would have it).
If windows created a better framework, it is feasible that such errors are recoverable from and fixable without outages.
I'm not giving a small time software vendor proprietary access to my machine at that level. I honestly think that anyone who accepts it must be woefully uninformed about the risks involved.
I'm already salty about the binary blobs required by various pieces of firmware.
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Really good points about big games and your comparison to graphics card drivers is pretty convincing. Changed this old-timer’s mind a bit.
I play a lot of dota 2 and never really notice anything that is obvious cheat wise. IMO league would probably be fine to do valve level anti cheat, it's even a less twitchy of a game than dota.
FPSs can just say 'the console is the competitive ranked' machine, add mouse + keyboard support and call it a day. But in those games cheaters can really ruin things with aimbots, so maybe it is necessary for the ecosystem, I dunno.
Nobody plays RTSs competitively anymore and low-twitch MMOs need better data hiding for what they send clients so 'cheating' is not relevant.
We are at the point where camera + modded input devices are cheap and easy enough I dunno if anti-cheat matters anymore.
Usually the one with kernel anti-cheat is competitive one(GTA, BF, LOL).
You clearly don’t play competitive shooters and thus aren’t qualified to opine on the matter.
Competition vs other human beings is the entire point of that genre, and the intensity when you’re in the top .1% of the playerbase in Overwatch/Valorant/CSGO is really unmatched.
I think the problem comes when someone makes a cool, fun, silly little game that is otherwise great when played with randoms, and cheating just sorta spoils it.
Case in point from a few years back - Fall Guys. Silly fun, sloppy controls, a laugh. And then you get people literally flying around because they've installed a hack, so other players can't progress as they can't make the top X players in a round.
So to throw it back - it is just a game, it's so sad that a minority think winning is more important than just enjoying things, or think their own enjoyment is more important than everyone else's.
As an old-timer myself, we thought it was despicable when people replaced downloaded skins in QuakeWorld with all-fullbright versions in their local client, so they could get an advantage spotting other players... I suppose that does show us that multiplayer cheating is almost as old as internet gaming.