Correct, they're completely irrelevant. Of all the affronts to computing freedom, anti-cheating is the worst. The truth is the online gaming model where we play with untrustworthy strangers is completely broken. We should all be playing with friends we can trust instead.
I wouldn’t install anti-cheat malware personally, but I think many of the people who want to play these games care more about not having cheaters in their games than having ring 0 control.
They’re extremely passionate about their skills and want nothing more than a fair playing field. Playing only with friends is not a real solution.
Computing freedom means you have the freedom to give up control, too. It’s your choice.
Completely agreed. Where is this "right not to be cheated in an online game" coming from anyway? Sounds absurd when you put it in proper terms, that is someone else taking control over your computer.
From the same place that real-life competitions tend to have rules about cheating that are enforced.
Why do people think that they get a free pass because they can't see the opponent face to face?
If you want to play with friends, plenty of multiplayer games offer that without anticheat (Arma lets you even uninstall the anti-cheat and play on anti-cheat disabled servers).
Does my local basketball competition requiring all competitors to submit negative doping tests before competing? Do they get to monitor me for 24 hours before the game?
Because that's the level of seriousness of most gaming and the proportionality of using a rootkit to prevent cheating. Sure, the Olympic athletes (or I guess in this analogy, eSports pros competing online) get the full "we're going to make very sure you're not cheating approach" but "my local basketball league" or "unranked ladder" doesn't justify these measures being routine
Why? Do I get to pick the people on the opposing team in the local basketball competition? I didn't specify a local club for a reason. Just because it's some competition organisers rather than a matchmaking algorithm doesn't change my perspective.
> Why do people think that they get a free pass because they can't see the opponent face to face?
We don't think that. We think anti-cheating rules aren't important enough to justify shipping literal malware to people's computers and taking over their machines.
It's not literal malware though, unless you have proof that it does something malicious like encrypt a users directory or exfiltrate sensitive data and that every single anti-cheat does that.
> Where is this "right not to be cheated in an online game" coming from anyway?
No idea. Who cares if some random guy cheats really? It's nothing compared to losing our computing freedom. Actual important stuff that matters. Same fundamental issue as DRM which nearly everyone agrees is bad.
Our computers are ours and game companies just need to deal with it. If people are gonna cheat, then so be it.
The kind of people who care enough to spend money on an online game.
> It's nothing compared to losing our computing freedom.
Then don't play online games with anti-cheat. Freedom doesn't mean your decisions don't have consequences—just you have the freedom to choose between the privacy of not submitting to an anti-doping monitoring regime or participating in certain competitive sports.
> Our computers are ours and game companies just need to deal with it. If people are gonna cheat, then so be it.
Game companies online services are theirs, and your just going to need to deal with it. If firms are going to require anti-cheat, then that's the cost of playing online. You have the freedom to not participate.
Don't wanna have anti cheats installed? Don't play (online) games, noone is forcing you, for me I'm really happy i have the option on Linux in the future.
What would be the point of a competitive game if you could just cheat? Racing games like Trackmania live off verifying people don't cheat because it's a game where people compete for leaderboards. Should they not be allowed to prevent you from cheating yourself to the top of the leaderboard.
But it's not impossible to prevent cheating. CS:GO has a very low occurence rate of cheating as most cheaters are caught extremely early by anti-cheat or later by other anti-cheat efforts with more complex functionality.
They do in fact verify server side that everything is where it should be. But it doesn't stop people because ultimately the inputs of a high level player in Trackmania are nearly indistinguishable from inputs of a bot playing the track.
CS:GO faces the same issue where inputs by high level players are indistinguishable from cheating.
Speedrunning tends to have similar issues, where people perform tricks that are so close to TAS inputs that it can take years to spot an issue. Or in case of Dream, it takes an entire statistics paper to explain why they cheated. In those cases it's even worse because you cannot do server side validation on video data.
Being against anti-cheat is effectively being against competitive gaming or speedrunning.
