Comment by zuzululu
13 hours ago
I support linux gaming btw but I can't help but feel every narrative glosses over that certain games are going to require uncomfortably intrusive anti-cheating systems.
I'm just realizing that I can't play Battlefield 6 and I do wonder what the path is. I don't think it's ever going to be supported on Linux or Mac.
Unfortunately, the alternative to uncomfortably intrusive anti-cheat is more cheaters, because cheaters don't care about how intrusive their cheats have to be in order to evade anti-cheat. They will happily run hypervisor-level cheats.
There's certainly room for improvement on the netcode sometimes (Client-side hit registration is an absolute bone-headed design), but those won't prevent aim bots.
Server-side anti-cheat relies on heuristics and can easily be evaded. At the high level, a highly-skilled player may be indistinguishable from a cheater, so you could easily get false positives.
I get that people want to play games with randos and 13-30 yr old basement dwellers on the internet, but the idea never appealed to me.
If the vendors said: Disable anticheat and we’ll block you from tournaments / matchmaking, I’d consider that a feature, not a bug.
If some IRL friend of mine wants to be an asshole and use auto aimers / see through walls to screw with me, then I have ways to deal with it outside the game.
On the other hand, if we both want to run some bullet hell mode + cheats with physics mods and a debugger attached, then what’s the problem?
It’s none of the game developer’s business.
I’m not sure if I am in the minority or majority, but I’m not the only one with this attitude. I suspect the set of people in this boat dwarfs the 5% market share Linux currently has.
They might even get some of us to buy their games if they added support for such a mode. How hard could it be?
there should be just an anti-cheat lobby an a no anticheat lobby
I don't think that's necessarily true, I think companies are lazy and highly invasive anticheat is an easy win they can license from a 3rd party. Algorithmic security, server-side heuristics, and human review can get you far. I have very, very rarely seen a blatant cheater in Overwatch (maybe 3 times in 10 years?), for example, and yet it's been playable via WINE for almost its entire lifetime.
Overwatch is more dependent upon teamwork, ability usage, positioning, etc.
Cheating is endemic in BR and tactical shooter type games. I remember one f2p game was deleting 50,000 cheater accounts every month.
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I recently had my faith shattered with I saw someone lock onto an ally through a wall in a kill cam, and I haven't played sense.
Blatant cheaters are bad in some ways, but subtle cheat are far worse imo.
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Hypervisor anti-cheat is old hat. The current 'state of the art' is either a DMA card that pretends to be a sound or network card but really is constantly reading and writing directly to RAM in the game's memory space.
The other 'state of the art' which is much cheaper, easier, and essentially impossible to detect on a hardware/equipment level, are the AI-based systems that examine the video and generate inputs via USB, emulating controllers or keyboards and mice. It's a huge problem on console right now and can only be detected via server-side analysis.
The real state of the art is single-game machines.
Instead of running the game in some arbitrary computer, you'd require players to buy your dedicated hardware, a black box that runs the game and nothing else.
What is even more insane is I was playing Battlefield 1 on Linux for years, until in 2023(?) they backported "EA Anticheat" to BF1, half a decade after the game stopped getting support.
This broke what was otherwise a perfectly normal Battlefield experience. Battlefield 4 requires Punkbuster, although it can run on Linux with no issues. You have to downgrade to an older version though, since EA hasn't updated BF4 to the latest PB AC, which causes you to get kicked.
The fact that some games now come with root kits is insane. I really hope Microsoft cracks down on that nonsense.
Given the kernel level anticheats inform you they're going to be installed, I don't think they fit the definition of a root kit.
CloudStrike was installed with user consent, and still ended up being a fatal rootkit. Installing software in Ring 0 is always a bad idea.
Battlefield 4 plays great on Linux, with active servers and functional crossplay/anticheat. It's usually less than $5 on sale and satiates my transient BF urges.