Comment by MrDrMcCoy
5 days ago
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.
5 days ago
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.
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.
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.
Too bad. It's not possible for rootkits to be a good idea for a video game.
Once the data is sent to the client, in an untrusted setting, all bets are off. Not your hardware, no control over it.