I wish you to play a competitive multiplayer game filled with cheaters.
You don't know if your opponent is good or cheating.
It simply kill all the fun.
If it won't work on PC, multiplayer gaming will simply moves to consoles.
Great, now you are stuck with a closed standard, with a closed OS, where you can't run the programs you want.
I have. Many times. Yes, its a bit of a bummer. No, it still doesn't justify Tencent being able to see more about what is going on in my machine better than I can.
Video games are a hobby for 99% of people out there, including myself. I can do without a plaything if it means not handing over the keys of the computer I built with my own hands to nefarious actors. That is FAR AND AWAY more important to me, and I'd hope most people.
Wild how this turned from "I don't want a game-related kernel-level driver in my system" to "I don't want China spying on me" in one reply. You lost me there to be honest, if you think the "true" purpose of anti-cheat drivers is for a foreign power to spy on us boring ordinary uninteresting people.
But you are correct in saying that it's a personal choice for everyone to make for themselves, based on how much they value fair play in their hobby of choice.
Particularly for anyone who puts hundreds (thousands?) of hours into getting good at their competitive multiplayer game of choice, the trade between installing an anti-cheat, suffering cheaters, or giving up on their hobby, is probably not the same math you're doing.
> Wild how this turned from "I don't want a game-related kernel-level driver in my system" to "I don't want China spying on me" in one reply.
Fair criticism. I used Tencent as the example as they are one of the most prominent offenders. I don't trust any company to install these drivers, period, Chinese or otherwise.
> You lost me there to be honest, if you think the "true" purpose of anti-cheat drivers is for a foreign power to spy on us boring ordinary uninteresting people.
That's fine, but I definitely don't think keeping your "gaming experience" as hacker free as possible is the primary goal of these programs. I've worked in software too long to not know better.
What is it about games that makes you particularly worried about this? Why is that an industry that is more susceptible to this kind of "nefarious" activity as you put it?
Wouldn't it make more sense for business-related products to do this, since the odds of being on a computer that has actual useful information to steal would be much, much higher?
Why would a company invest in this kind of tech, in a highly visible field, full of people who will go over it with a fine-toothed comb (gamers are obsessive), for what seems like a very low-percentage hit rate on obtaining information?
> What is it about games that makes you particularly worried about this? Why is that an industry that is more susceptible to this kind of "nefarious" activity as you put it?
Because it targets a younger, more ignorant user base that is much more likely than a company with security audits to blindly install. I certainly was at that age.
> Wouldn't it make more sense for business-related products to do this, since the odds of being on a computer that has actual useful information to steal would be much, much higher?
It does happen, but its less successful due to folks that work in operational security. If I suggested installing software with this type of driver at any job I've ever worked at with a security professional halfway worth their salt, I'd instantly be rejected.
> full of people who will go over it with a fine-toothed comb (gamers are obsessive)
Show me a gamer that has seen the code of one of these drivers. Name a single person. Those programs are black box by design.
> If I suggested installing software with this type of driver at any job I've ever worked at with a security professional halfway worth their salt, I'd instantly be rejected
You forgot to tell them it’s a state-of-the-art antivirus solution.
> Show me a gamer that has seen the code of one of these drivers.
They don’t want to see the code, they just want to know it works and allows them to play games with a much lower chance of playing against a cheater. The ban waves that end up on Reddit every year[0] are good enough for them.
> Wouldn't it make more sense for business-related products to do this, since the odds of being on a computer that has actual useful information to steal would be much, much higher?
Not necessarily. That gaming machine has good odds of being in a local network with other, more important and interesting machines. It can also scan local Wi-Fi area and scoop up even more information that can be used later.
Thought these were obvious.
> Why would a company invest in this kind of tech, in a highly visible field, full of people who will go over it with a fine-toothed comb (gamers are obsessive), for what seems like a very low-percentage hit rate on obtaining information?
1. They invest nothing out of the ordinary. They already have programmers on the payroll. Not like they spend 200 million on this alone. (Although there are companies like Google and Facebook who absolutely would and have invested much more than this just to be able to scoop up as much private info as possible -- not sure why this seems so unlikely to you, today, in 2022.)
2. The field is EVERYTHING BUT VISIBLE. Nobody has ever seen the source of these programs (outside of the authoring companies). Nobody. Ever.
3. Games are obsessive but most of them are technically illiterate. They install these things without a flicker of doubt.
4. The low-percentage is how it seems to you. Do it on a few hundred million machines and you are bound to find something very interesting in a good volume. It's statistics.
Certainly was not my aim, and I sympathize. I've said many times I'd never move into game dev because of the workload and sheer work-to-flame ratio, and this thread isn't an exception. Likewise, thank you for providing some light from within the industry, it is appreciated.
I'd sign that NDA in a heartbeat if it didn't anonymize me, but I don't want my name floating around in databases I know nothing about. It's mighty tempting to see how the sausage is made, though.
I will ask this: Does the decision to include such an anti-cheat come from the studio usually, or the publisher?
Usually it's studio; but it's a bit give and take in that regard.
Some studios might have some bean counter at the publisher asking about things they think are good ("You gotta have anti-cheat/DRM!")
Other studios might be coerced to "if you're going to use anti-cheat, why not use this one we have a good deal with".
But ultimately it has been a studio decision.
I'm even swapping my current anti-cheat due to this kind of Sinophobia.
Ironically, we had to specifically ask Tencent for their anti-cheat (because it was the best available..) but.. people thought it was spyware[0]. To the point that you literally see nothing else about my game it seems.
Double ironically: we still had cheaters on the platform[1]... it will probably be worse with EAC (as it was in the division days[2], some people even blamed the state of cheating on "not enough anti-cheat"[3])
But, to answer your question: in my experience it's the studio's choice, but some people in the publishing chain might try to coerce a decision.
> If you’ll sign an NDA I can show you TC anticheat and EasyAnticheat.
And immediately land in a list of potential suspects the moment those cheats are broken by somebody else but not me? No, thanks. :( We live in a world where such an intellectual curiosity flags you as a criminal so I am never going to risk it.
If you want to demonstrate good will then maybe posting these files somewhere and making a "Show HN" thread is going to work better in showing the world that you're normal hardworking people?
> We can’t be open because it’s too risky. We can’t be closed because people think we’re scum.
I understand your position and I am not blaming you. But you are not the executive team of the company and you don't know their intentions and strategic plans.
> You lost me there to be honest, if you think the "true" purpose of anti-cheat drivers is for a foreign power to spy on us boring ordinary uninteresting people.
You probably need to be reminded that before the Snowden revelations people who were saying the same as him were laughed at? Ridiculed?
Nothing stops this to be a part of a bigger scheme, you know? Sweep as many machines as you can with whatever means possible.
You over-fixate on gaming and are IMO missing a potential bigger picture. Plus China has proven that it is hostile to privacy many times, including a recent story here on HN where a laptop ordered from China came with preloaded spyware on a pretty deep / low level.
And even if you ignore all that, I still don't want a random rootkit to be able to take control of my machine any time somebody figures they'll flip a remote switch. Doesn't matter what their motivations are, at all, doesn't matter if we are "boring uninteresting people". They still have no business being able to control my machine THAT well remotely.
It’s only “a bit of a bummer” when you experience it once every dozen games or less. If it occurs every other game, it starts to become a bad time investment to even start the game and try to get in a match.
Why does it matter if you built the computer with your own hands? It's sad that we need invasive anticheat but if that's what it takes to get a somewhat cheater free gaming environment I am ok with that. I'll take that over ruined games by cheaters any day of the week.
Until some overly agressive anti-cheat that has kernel level access, decides to blacklist your machine, and because of whatever black boxed bugs, blocks your machine's Ethernet connections, all of them, and now you're stuck until you reimage and remove that borked kernel, except that they implemented an IME level code chunk that immediately downloads the anti-cheat code on the IME channel, and now your machine can never connect to the internet again until you replace the motherboard.
It sounds like you know more about how these work than I do so I'll assume it can happen. It's a risk to consider for sure. I obviously don't want this to happen to me, but I'll still take this major inconvenience that a few individuals might suffer from over cheaters in game that everyone playing the game suffers from. I'm talking cheating in multiplayer games to be clear.
I guess I'll get downvoted again, but I'll take those downvotes in stride.
First, anti-cheat software doesn't guarantee anything of the sort. There are still plenty of cheats out there.
Second, this was already a solved problem since we could run our own servers and kick whoever we wanted. But this has largely been taken away, to the point that people don't know it ever existed.
> First, anti-cheat software doesn't guarantee anything of the sort. There are still plenty of cheats out there.
It's not a binary thing. There will always be cheats. It's about raising the bar to be difficult enough for enough people to not bother. If you want an example of the effect cheating can have on games, look at Fall guys. It shipped as a unity game, was immediately reverse engineered and the game was effectively unplayable on PC [0]. They added easy anti cheat, and the problem effectively disappeared overnight.
> this was already a solved problem since we could run our own servers and kick whoever we wanted.
Banning someone from your server isn't solving the problem, it's pushing it onto another person. Abuse of these systems was rampant too, I have distinct memories of being kicked from battlefield and counter strike servers on the early 00's because I killed someone and they didn't like it. Having community run servers also has its one share of problems when combined with live service games. At best, you force community servers to keep up to date, or more than likely you end up with dozens of fragmented versions of games that are incompatible with each other, and if I want to play on server A with this group and server B with another, I need multiple copies of the game installed.
> It's about raising the bar to be difficult enough for enough people to not bother.
It does not do that either. I've been on certain... interesting forums, shall we say (in Tor; and I don't remember the names, was a casual stroll through it and I made no effort to write down any place I checked on -- before you ask). Whoever wants a cheat eventually finds the best cheat authors who are quiet and are not drawing attention to themselves but have public Web 2.0 sites where they sell their software.
Nobody has defeated a certain class of cheats yet. They hook up to the kernel even before the anti-cheat system and it's game over from there.
Let's not pretend that all this is for the user's safety. It probably is intended like so but nowadays it feels like the companies are just digging their heels in and doubling down on a measure that doesn't stop the truly dedicated cheaters whose software is very affordable to buy to the casual 13 year old who wants to have the best K/D ratio in Battlefield in their school.
And everybody else loses, including the companies because if Valve wants to install a kernel rootkit on my Linux machine they'll lose my business there (and I suspect most Linux users because we are of a certain mindset). And all casual gamers HATE the series of "Install X?" and "Are you sure?" banners, too. Annoy them for long enough and they'll just shrug and move to XBox / PS / Switch. I've seen it happen a good amount of times already.
It clearly does. There's a world of difference between running tor/finding onion links, and googling "cheats for battlefield 2042". There are multiple stories out there of games destroyed by cheaters who add in Anti-cheat after the fact and the problem practically disappears. Note that doesn't mean no cheaters, but for games like Fall Guys (post linked above) it was practically every game was won by a cheater literally `noclip`'ing to the finish line.
> Whoever wants a cheat eventually finds the best cheat authors who are quiet and are not drawing attention to themselves but have public Web 2.0 sites where they sell their software.
While those cheats will continue to exist, most people aren't going to go to the trouble of installing Tor, finding an unlisted website and buying via bank transfer, they're going to google "Cheats for <Insert game name here>" and if the first link lets them spend $40 they will. _Those_ cheats are what utterly destroy games.
> And everybody else loses, including the companies because if Valve wants to install a kernel rootkit on my Linux machine they'll lose my business there
Honestly, the number of people who care enough to not install the kernel level anticheat is so small for modern games it doesn't really matter. I'd put $20 that there are cheaters out there that would install linux to avoid the kernel level anticheat than there are legit players who are ok with running closed source games, but not closed source kernel modules.
Everybody but all the non-cheating gamers that don't have to face cheaters in literally every single match. Where I think you and many others in this thread differ from folks like me is that you seem to expect a perfect solution whereas I will accept a solution that reduces the problem enough that it is barely noticeable. I don't care if "dedicated cheaters" will still cheat.
most regular players want MMR and matchmaking so they can play against similarly-skilled teams and can see themselves improve by winning against better opponents over time. They don’t want to have to weed through a lobby list to maybe get into an evenly-matched game, or maybe get destroyed by someone leagues better than them.
So letting people run their own servers where the kernel doesn't need to be compromised for all the players will have minimal impact. Gotcha. So we agree, let them run their own servers and the minority who are security conscious can game away happily.
> Great, now you are stuck with a closed standard, with a closed OS, where you can't run the programs you want.
The DRM anticheat drivers turn Linux PCs into a closed standard, closed OS platforms where your software kills itself (even if it's single-player) when you step out of the locked down platform.
You're trying to picture a difference where there is none.
What DRM anticheat measures do is to monitor your whole system for modifications and kill the app if they detect changes. For example, they will make sure that your nVidia (or AMD) driver is one of the whitelisted hashes and hasn't been modified with a wallhack.
This is why Linux users using Wine keep being banned from these platforms - they detect "unusual" runtime environment and ban the players because it doesn't fit into their narrow hash of an "acceptable" system.
It is an outright definition of sealing off your OS from modification.
Evergreen, but the incentive/enforcement structures for this in games are often very wrong.
If you're playing against someone who's sniping you across the map every thirty seconds, it (usually) does not matter whether or not they're cheating or doing it legitimately. Both outcomes aren't fun for players, and both outcomes make the game less competitive. The idea that toxic behavior saps the fun out a game only when it's automated is just silly -- cheating doesn't really change anything about that dynamic.
Yes, this is admittedly more complicated than I'm making it sound, and yes, there is a valid conversation to be had about players wanting to feel that multiplayer games are fair, even when they mostly aren't. But while that player instinct around fairness does exist, it is also true that for a huge portion of your playerbase if someone is cheating convincingly enough that other players are still having fun then (outside of esports leagues) it often doesn't really matter. Let them, especially if they're convincing enough that players can't tell the difference. And if someone is purposefully creating a bad/toxic experience for other players, they should be either matched differently or banned anyway, even if they're just that good entirely out of their own skill. Good players who legitimately win can still be toxic and annoying to play against.
This isn't a universal hard rule, but in general you should optimize for the outcomes you want, not for the way that people get there. It is better to have a game with cheaters/bots where people are still constantly playing at the edge of their skill level, where there are consequences for griefing, and where players are trying to create competitive/fun matches, than a game where all of your energy is devoted to just figuring out whether or not a match was miserable for "legitimate" reasons.
And for a lot of games, probably >90% of your playerbase is in this group where they care more about competitive, interesting matches that help them grow as a player and get better at the game than they care about the extreme low-level integrity of the game. Most of your playerbase is frankly not good enough or competitive enough at your game at the global levels where it matters whether or not everybody on the global ladder deserves their win count. So why are we collectively optimizing everything around such a small percentage of players?
Stream gaming is inherently safe from cheating too, because the game logic and rendering is not computed directly by the player so there's no way they can 'cheat' in a conventional sense.
But it does eliminate whole classes of cheats like ESPs and wallhacks. It also allows for servers to trust the clients. There's no issue with letting a client determine if they've killed someone instead of needing on the server to rollback and check for kills.
Maybe check out some existing ones before confidently making such a claim? E.g. https://github.com/petercunha/Pine. IIRC there are even high quality image recognition-based aimbots for sale; can’t find them right now.
And when we get to the point that those are available to anyone with $40 and a credit card they'll be handled. Until then they're a theoretical attack for all intents and purposes.
This has been a thing since day 1 of Overwatch at the very least. Most aimbots being used didn't touch the executable or memory at all, they were called 'color bots' because all they had to do was match pixel color values. They were basic enough a concept you could build them in AutoIT macro software along with ramp up and down features so you weren't just instantly spamming headshots, but instead incrememently your aim would get better. They became so sophisticated that you could be sat behind someone physically using one and not be sure they were cheating or not.
