One message for the developers: Don't use anticheat softwares. Just simply put more work into cheat prevention. It's not that hard to detect if player moves normally or teleports. No need for fancy anticheat solutions that has more access over your pc than with an admin account. For regular cheats like aimbot, etc. it's almost impossible to prevent. I could easily connect a microcontroller to my pc that acts as a keyboard and mouse and send the output of the gpu to a physically separated computer and make the AI to do the hard work. There is no anticheat that could detect that. But cheats like wall hack, money generator in GTA V, etc. are easily preventable, they just need to put more effort into that. For example for wall hack, just don't send the informations of the other players if they are not visible for that player.
I agree that for many things there should be hardcoded triggers. Like, ok maybe someone finds a way how to throw a nade across the whole map and kill someone, ok. But in CS2 it was possible to shoot them through like 8 walls with a sniper in some sort of burst mode. Like what?
dude, every comp game already has hardcoded anti-cheating software, the thing is, there are some sickos, who modify the input itself, not the game logic, like automatically moving your mouse down to prevent gun recoil, something a hard-coded anti cheat would never detect
@hunterzone4846 Probably, but there are many things in a lot of games which could be avoided by just coding the game right. For example: "wall hack". It could be avoided by just not sending the opponents to the client who are not visible. It's a more complex thing and needs a bit more server resource, but I think if they can make a game and maintain a lot of servers, they could easily handle this.
@@cyanoure okay so, i know the in and out from an anticheat, i even looked into a anticheat source code. The thing is it cant detect esp or any other visuals since it doesnt affect the games memory, it creates and overlay letting people access it, u only need to know the hash code of the models, which im not gonna say how. Speed hacks can be easily detected by either making an rage check or the value of someones movement which btw isnt hard at all! Aimbot unfortunately is harder to detect if it isnt that blatant therefore will ai systems can or will do nothing about it.
Technically, the problem can be solved by running the game in its own virtual machine with its own "trusted" kernel. Just as a Linux kernel can be run inside Windows using WSL, it is possible to run a another Linux-basred system with its own kernel inside Linux. I think that future implementations of anti-cheat will work something like this. By the way, in this case it will be possible not to release a version for Windows - it will be enough to make a version for Linux/WSL.
Performance is the issue. You'll be at a disadvantage thanks to virtualization. Youll have to sacrifice some frames. It's the same issue with gpu passthrough.
Yes, I was thinking of a similar concept with games run in containers. The issue is, that even if the container was inaccesible by the user, at some point the data needs to be processed by a CPU. Someone could catch the data there, but if they don't know how the game works at all, it will be harder
Google is implementing a similar idea in ChromeOS where Steam runs in a VM. It's called Borealis. It also relies on the Virgl and Venus drivers in Mesa for GPU acceleration.
@Watcher AI cheating is impossible to counter with local Anti-Cheat software anyway. The only way this method could be tackled is, if the Anti-Cheat also is AI-powered, but the performance hit would be higher on a client. Server side Anti-Cheat is also not that great since it's reliability heavily depends on the ping.
@@mritunjaymusale Manipulated game files is easy to detect. What's hard to detect are changes in the RAM or Cheats that hide themselves as an essential piece of hardware (e.g. a mouse input)
Having legal ramifications for cheaters is honestly a frightening concept. Imagine the long term effects something like that would have and the inevitable evolutions that would result. This would change the way games and software are controlled in an absolutely negative way. The last thing we should want are these companies having any more power over our hobby. The real issue here is that kernel level anti cheat does nothing to stop cheating, it exists to collect data. Plain and simple. It wouldn't even surprise me if the very same companies that are developing the anti-cheats are developing the cheats themselves. How else would these coders have the information on the windows kernel? Not to mention without them, their anti-cheat software would be useless and their money would be gone. Kernel level cheat software isn't even something anyone with a brain cell would use, if you're worried about anti-cheat privacy just imagine the cheat tools.
I hate to break it to you, but that's not how Anti-Cheats work. Can they collect data about you? Sure. Are they doing it? Some of them are collecting SOME data like your system configuration. But that's about it. Data collection is only worth doing, if you can sell that data to third parties, who can then proceed to make personalized ads, which is the most profitable way. AC-Vendors don't directly sell data, and this is known. They already make money by providing a service for companies, which as of itself is profitable (subscription model). Why would a company buy a subscription to a shady service? It would negatively impact everything if something were to get out. Think about this stuff in money terms, not in objective ones.
@@MichaelNROH I'd only truly believe that if they release the code for the anti cheat, which will never happen. I tend to lean on the conspiracy side of things these days 🤷♂️. Regardless I really like your channel and you make a good point.
@@MichaelNROH Data collection is a certainty especially considering that the companies that decide to use kernel level anti cheats have affiliations with the CCP (tencent).
Having a massive security hole in the form of these kernel level access anti cheat software is very worrying. I have to ask: if I had two separate drives, one with Windows installed on it for gaming, and another with Linux installed on it for personal work and information, could the anti cheat rootkits from the Windows drive compromise my personal Linux drive in any way like with ransomware attacks, remote code execution, data theft etc?
There are things out there that theoretically would work quite well. Using a virtual machine or even just a container for a game, if done right, provides a similar level of security. The key here is, that how the game works is obstructed from the cheaters. That means that they cannot don't receive location data for wallhacks, because they wouldn't know location data in an encrypted state. The only thing that these solutions won't prevent is AI, but maybe even an Anti-Cheat within a container would be possible, which can differentiate our wacky human accuracy from a bot. But it's hard to find a solution with encryption, decryption, the necessary APIs needed (GPU output, etc.) while performant and transparent. (What could the game transmitt from my system)
This is exactly why I don't want to game on Linux -- kernel level access. Let Microsoft do what they do well, keep their kernel and OS secure. If I had to dual boot to game, I'd take advantage of the full encryption option when installing Linux and Windows too if Ihad a Pro license. (Actually, I'd just spend the money to buy a Pro license and have Bit Locker. I'd grimace, but I'd do it.) Also, the two OS's would be installed on separate drives or series of drives. As it stands, it's just easier to have a dedicated gaming rig running Windows. So, I game on Windows and use Linux for everything else. Drive encryption, a two way firewall, never running on an administrator account -- maybe I'm paranoid. :-)
At this point anti cheat is becoming pointless. I saw a video that showed a set up with a raspberry pi, camera, and manipulators to control the keyboard and mouse. This real world cheat bot was just as good as cheat software. The only thing they really could do is force people to go to monitored gaming cafes and use their computers to play rated games. That or start spying on people through cameras in their rooms which is just creepy.
Rule one of developing a server based application is "NEVER TRUST THE CLIENT". Atm anticheat software work mostly via security by obscurity. Issue is Linux is open source. It is difficult to impossible to make something on Linux truly obscure. Which makes implementing security via obscurity difficult if not impossible. Add to that the fact that unlike windows the kernel team can't add some undocumented interfaces an anticheat can access to secure a system and you start to see the issue. Since a bad actor can just rewrite that interface. The good news for anticheat developers might be the fact that they can probably get the fsf to shut down cheaters that distribute kernel hacks unless said kernel hacks are open source. Which means it might actually be possible to detect the modification in that case. I feel that if Linux gaming became more mainstream. The GPL license on the kernel might actually be the bane of cheat developers in the long run.
I'm a systems dev and ex-cheat developer and this is just false, the anticheat doesn't just """"trust the client""" and rely on ""security via obscurity"", it utilizes the server AND client to be able to gather enough data to determine if a user is innocent or cheating. Without the clientside anticheat, the server is effectively BLIND to non-obvious cheating, any good cheater can easily hide their cheats if there is nothing looking at the game's process. from the client-side. Most anticheats implement: - memory signature checks (compare patterns of memory within the game against a database of flagged cheat signatures on the AC server) - memory hooking checks (that pretty much any cheat needs to deploy in the game's memory) - foreign memory uploads (if there is a pattern of memory inside the game process that is not usually in the actual game, then upload it to anticheat server for inspection) - client-side heuristic checks (is there an overlay being displayed in the game that is not in the actual game)? - winAPI handle detection and blockade (for external cheats, they would be utilizing window's ReadProcessMemory and WriteProcessMemory functions) - DMA device detection (DMA devices can read the system's memory without actually doing anything in software) And the most important of all, pertaining the most to this context : Anomaly detection : if there is behavior in the kernel or anticheat daemon/driver that is not typically how it should be behaving, the player is forcefully kicked out of the server by the anticheat, this is not foolproof, however it is a strong mitigation for direct attacks on either the anticheat daemon/driver, or modifications of the kernel.
@@ChristopherGray00 You're contradicting yourself. "Without the clientside anticheat, the server is effectively BLIND to non-obvious cheating" and yet you say "the anticheat doesn't just trust the client". If your server is blind to a client that lies to your server about the data it has gathered then you are TRUSTING THE CLIENT. Memory signature checks? Sure boss, here's what you expected to see. Memory hooking checks? Sure boss, here's what you were expecting. Foreign memory uploads? Sure boss, here's what you expected to see. Client-side heuristics? Here you go boss, this is the heuristics you expect to see from gamers who aren't cheating. And on and on of course. Anything is open source if you can read the circuit board or otherwise reverse engineer, but security by obscurity is just a bet that the attacker won't go that far because its just a game so surely they won't put in that much work.
@@Nerd2Ninja The client checking to see what is going on in the game's memory is not trusting the client, you seem absolutely clueless as to the topic at hand, bypassing one mechanism within the clientside AC does not then magically bypass another mechanism within the serverside AC. If i write a cheat, in which the clientside AC has no signatures for, and can insta head lock aim in a randomized fashion and kill everyone on the team instantly, i didn't bypass the anticheat, the server can still see that. Were you intoxicated when typing such a stupid comment? Actually curious
I think the only AC that works long term is virtualized game sandboxes that are checksummed. That would still not defeat modifying RAM on-the-fly, but...
This will only shift the root of trust to ring -1 though, which opens another round of cat and mouse game just like when they shifted from ring 3 to 0.
I think it's also about the potential. I don't have any numbers because no one is releasing stats, but I don't think that from the actual playerbase, only a fraction is cheating. Those of course stand out from the crowd, because even in a 10 player lobby, there aren't that many cheaters (cheater per game). I think they are scared that the small percentage of Linux Gamers becomes a cheater only plattform because they switch. Stupid approach, but it's probably what's going on
As for kernel-level driver support via Wine/Proton, i'd say it's impossible because Wine is a cross-platform project, as Wine is available for macOS, Solaris, *BSD operating systems, and son on. All of those operating systems use their own kernels completely different and incompatible with each other, and i think Wine devs also don't really like the idea of having too many OS-specific dependencies, that's why Wayland support is taking so long, because they don't want Wine to have dependencies on a specific compositor (Wayland's reference implementation, Weston has some linuxisms afaik) Regarding the anti-cheats, the userspace ones I can tolerate, but the kernel level ones never, the disaster caused by kernel level DRMs like StarForce that broke Windows installations is more than enough not to support them at all, not to mention that they can be used as a backdoor to exploit other vulnerabilities, be it the anti-cheat itself or gain privilege escalations, so the disadvantages of that approach far outweigh the benefits.
Wine can't natively run drivers on its own, however there is nothing stopping a program from interfacing with wine, or a modification of wine that communicates to and from a driver.
1 : companies don't care enough to even do the minimal work to get their anticheat compatible with proton, seriously guys, any EAC game has no excuse given how easy they have made it. Some games, yes, their anticheat is a bit lower level, but many, many games aren't even doing the minimal work to get higher level anticheat working fine. 2 : why the hell is their no open source anti-cheats yet? think about it, the users know it's not a privacy nightmare, anyone annoyed with cheaters could check it to make sure it's doing it's job, and, sure, maybe making cheats will be a bit easier at first, but the SECOND any user gets a hold of that cheat, they can just figure out how to make the cheat engine stop it, start a pull request, and within a few days or less the cheat is useless. Why would I, as a cheat maker, pour hours and hours of work into looking for vulnerabilities in the anti-cheat source code, to make an exploit that's good for a few days, MAYBE. At best I'm only using it for personal use, but 1 : most cheaters don't write their own shit, and 2 : the few people that do, could be decently easily covered by in-game reports now that EVERYONE ELSE is being banned without needing shit tons of reports and clogging the system. Most people who write cheats? they're selling them. Why would I spend money on cheats, that are only good, if they were released yesterday, and I'll only be able to use for maybe a few days before I get caught and banned? Seriously, this isn't national security, where a SINGLE bad actor getting to an exploit before pen testers could is game over, this is anticheats, if a hacker or two find a cheat before it's patched, you get a few rounds of dealing with a hacker, but as the usage of a cheat increases, it gets fixed quicker and quicker since more and more people have the opportunity to get it, then write code to fix it's exploit. I might be wrong, but if you rely specifically on people just, being able to make pull requests to cover all of the edge cases, I could see a situation wherein you don't even need kernel level access to stop kernel level cheat software. If you know EXACTLY what you're looking for, I'd imagine you could probably detect that sort of behaviour without having to live in the kernel level, just peek down there occasionally. Might be totally wrong on that bit though, games may genuinely need to install kernel modules to stop cheats. Even those though, could be open sourced, nothin's stopping them
Open Sourcing Anti-Cheats is not being done because it is less a security issue, but more a marketing issue. People make money with providing Anti-Cheat solutions and open sourcing that would lead to several issues. Most of all the exposure of methods which could lead to a temporary increase of cheating exploits, while the community is not allowed to fix issues themselves. (Server validation and licenses) Open Source Anti-Cheats could only work if: * The community is allowed to contribute * It offers commercial support for companies (Warranty and all that) * It somehow needs to be verified, that it is an official release which was not edited
@@MichaelNROH honestly all of those things seem decently doable imo. The first one is just "the people behind it need to understand open source isn't just a buzzword", the second one could be a ZorinOS situation where there IS an organization/company behind the project that can offer support, but the actual thing itself is completely open. (yes Zorin pro does have some extra features, but let's be real the main reason people buy it aside from a fancy donation is for the support) The third one, well there I can't say anything for certainty unfortunately. I'm not a cryptography expert, I understand the basics of hashing, encryption, pub-private key pairs, etc. buuuuut definite statements on what is and isn't possible is a bit out of my purview. I'd imagine it probably is possible to verify it with some black magic cryptographic wizardry, but I wouldn't know how to say anything for certainty. In THEORY I could see a system where the internal variables are isolated in memory, and then the rest of the memory itself is used as an encryption key or something, (thereby requiring people be running an entire dummy instance of the entire anti-cheat in order to be spoofed) but, again, I can't speak with certainty. All I can say with high confidence is that I've seen good cryptography do some seriously absurd crap, "zero-trust computing" just seems completely impossible to me but, apparently it's a thing. Given that, I find it hard to believe you COULDN'T create some way of verifying it's correct, buuut the exact implementation, how wide reaching it is, how effective it is, etc. is beyond me. The only real point I'd disagree with is the aspect of marketing. In regards to licensing, if it did follow a "support" business model, so companies could optionally license support to fund the organization that manages the product, rather than a central company which wholly develops the product, you wouldn't really need have a dead period where the community can't contribute for licensing reasons. Additionally, since you're basically outsourcing most of the development and your mainly just guiding the project, you could offer much lower prices to license it, so smaller games would pick it up as a nice drop-in way to get some anticheat of anysort without breaking the bank. Then, once it has that userbase, it could grow up from there as people realize this low-cost solution is equally, or more, effective. I suppose I should clarify that my point is basically that "an open source, community driven (and potentially organization or company managed) anti-cheat would have every capacity to work equally as good, or superiour to, current anti-cheats". Obviously existing anti-cheat companies are going to have a problem with their business model being ripped out from under them, but I'm looking at it specifically from the community standpoint here. It would take some serious organizational work, but I can't imagine it being impossible. With some elements of corporate DRM already being baked into the kernel (unfortunately mind you, seriously, DRM being unnecessarily baked into the kernel is just a no-go for me when it patently doesn't work, just about everything ever can be found on 1337 so DRM only gets in the way of normal users) and proprietary blobs being common, a completely open source, user-first anti-cheat seems entirely reasonable to me. Maybe some hardcore FOSS guys with hardcore Stallman fanfic tatted on their junk would take some serious issue to it but I think for most people, if they know it isn't spying on them, if they know it isn't hurting their performance, and if it lets them play games, I don't think most people would care. Sure, "people don't care" isn't a complete justification for something (people don't care about a lot of things they should) but generally, so long as I still know it's honest and has my best interest in mind, I don't really see any reason to hate something just because it's goal is to limit what I can do. (at least not if I voluntarily install it that is, or have some way of removing it if I don't want it) Maybe I'm wrong on that last point though but thats just how it seems to me.
Maybe try to think about a "community anti cheat system". Something like crowdsec who collect IP address who try to hack into server and share those IP with all the community. This could help to identify people who are cheating and blocking them everywhere... Then the cost to cheat could start to be very expensive... Enforce static IP everywhere that is possible so people can't change their own IP to easly... When people will start to be banned for few hours, then few days then a full month on every gaming plateform because they have try to cheat on a game, then they will think twice about using such tools... It's impossible to fight against hackers, the only solution is to always increase the price to use such solution and in the same time, reduce the cost to fight them... I clearly think that there are some idea to look into...
@@LtSich people have tried crowdsourced unified ban lists before, they've failed miserably every time. What you would need is a FOSS detection engine that can hook into a per-game banning system.
@@robonator2945 This is exactly what crowdsec is actually doing.... A french company... Not used for game atm, but as long as you develop something to detect cheater and report those IP to them then you should be able to do the same for gaming... I use that to protect my server (again, no gaming atm) and it's really good. I'm sure that if the dev and this company work together they can build something similar for gaming...
In my view, the issue with cheaters is less about the cheats themselves and more about smurfs (new accounts). 1. A cheater can easily create a new account and keep using it 2. When a highly skilled player joins a lower skill lobby, other players in that lobby may mistakenly label them as a cheater, even if they aren’t Also, if a game studio wants to prevent the problem with cheaters, it can provide a mechanism such as patrolling, where players can watch the recording and decide whether it is a cheater or not, and if many players say yes, they can ban it, and to make players have a good time, they can give some in-game gifts for the work they have done
Patrolling won't fix the issue in the long term. Until people actually know how to differentiate between a cheater (especially soft cheats) and someone who is legit they already need a lot of hours in a game. The current cheating situation is really bad whereas a slightly better gamer can already be labeled as a cheater in your mind, simply because it's not that unlikely anymore.
Any form of anti cheat has never worked. They now have AI and hardware level cheats where the AI that can view the screen and control the mouse mechanically. It is just like DRM never has worked and is just a waste of time. The best way to defeat cheaters is to identify the cheaters, tag the account and only allow cheaters to play with other cheaters. Don't tell them, let them figure it out.
AI Anti-Cheats probably can't ever be prevented unless you have an AI that counters them. There are some differences in how consistent a human behaves. Nonetheless, the problem is still the identifying.
I use Linux every day, for playing games with anticheats like EAC or PunkBuster I use VM for that I need it cause EAC would not work on Linux because developers would not enable it's support, and second for privacy and security reasons, punkbuster is really old and probably has many vulnerabilities, EAC is kernel level so this speaks for itself. Battleye, MRAC and Vanguard just blocking us out, idk why but this looks shady for me.
Battleye has userspace-support on Linux, but Vanguard has a huge problem. It ONLY runs on Kernel-Level. There is basically a whole rework needed, and frankly the potential player numbers on Linux are not that high for that.
@@MichaelNROH Yes but I am waiting for company named Ubisoft to enable proton support flip one f**king button and let us play games like Rainbow Six Siege! What is so hard in it, game even support Vulkan out of the box and plays really well.
The problem can be solved if the comparatively small number of Linux gamers monetarily support multiplayer game developers who are Linux friendly, but that's the problem with an open source user, they expect "free". Why not buy Insurgency Sandstorm, and the cosmetics? They are Linux multiplayer friendly, and I can go on with many other great multiplayer games that work on Linux. Monetarily incentivize developers to make multiplayer games work on Linux, and we'll see all excuses banished.
Qemu KVM with Gpu passthrough and Hyper v you can play genshin, tarkov and valaront (involves more hastles) relatively easily. I play online game sless , The ones i do play are opensource spyware/anticheat free games like xanotic and cube 2 and both are cheater free as well. We have the community diff compared to the Winblows community.
@D Reaper exactly, too much effort for a shittier counterstrike. I got my mates ro play cuned 2 instea dbc if the mac user in the office and our friendly neighborhood toaster gamer can play it at 60fps
Thankfully Yoshi P refuses to put anti cheat in FFXIV, he says they have no right to look at what's on my computer. That's the kind of game I can get behind.
it just that for my perspective its about a culture you see lot of chinese community are embraced cheating as normal thing at game since they are nurtured to win any cost its they culture hell even if someone in they community point out how bad a cheating is in video game they are shunned its really problem when one of biggest populated in the world that thinking cheating is a good thing or normal they think that its not they fault then if someone cheating is the game it self that fault
there is also 1 specifc problem why anticheat doesnt support linux 0 ring mode, this is becouse they will need to compile their ac module for each linux version making it close to imposible to maintain
@@MichaelNROH Ring 0 Device drivers like Graphics ship with the Linux OS, Sometime some OEM Linux Distributors disallow the final user to load Kernel Modules, meaning you cant load your modules nor anyone after the Linux Kernel was shipped
@@MichaelNROH the point is... unlike Windows, Linux does not have a stable kernel ABI. That means that without compiling the kernel driver SPECIFICALLY for the kernel version used it simply **will not work**. Also, loading these "out-of-tree" modules taints the kernel which makes its logs completely and utterly useless for bug reporting kernel/driver issues etc.
If you find some of those cheater channels, they all basically say that they're, 1. Having fun just like you 2. It's just a game 3. It's the dev's fault for not banning them 4. They don't have the time to learn the game with a job/family/etc 5. (most likely theyre all psychopaths who like to see people suffer) 6. Or they just admit that it's funny and loop the question TLDR, they stonewall and try to gaslight you into believing they're not an extremely narcissistic person. And yea idk how cheating is fun, I cheated a bunch of money into GTA5 and it instantly ruined the game for me. There was no reason to play.
This is my biggest issue with Linux and Linux gaming. Anticheat has been an issue since I switched to Linux but as more and more games come out that are DX12 or games that have anticheat that isn't supported on Linux it makes me not use it for gaming anymore. I love Linux as an OS and I love its views. Sadly the problem with anti cheat still looms even after the success of the steam deck which everyone and their mother said would usher in a new Era of anticheat support. Companies have the ability to enable support and allow us to play. Until things change Linux will never truly be a platform for gaming. Sure we got a few games that are supported but it's quite sometime since we've gotten support for a game. Recently shatterline broke Linux anti cheat support. Sure they fixed it but it shows if a company doesn't take care of their anti cheat support we will lose it. Something needs to be done but sadly I don't think anything ever will which means I'll never switch to Linux for gaming 100% or keep using gpu passthrough/dual boot for kernel anti cheat games...
@D Reaper easier said then done when you enjoy playing games. I don't like this "don't support" or "don't play" mentality. Just cause a small minority doesn't play them doesn't mean they will change. Like I said things need to change and hopefully they do soon before all the momentum the steam deck has built wears off.
I slightly disagree with this. Companies don't really have the power to choose platforms if they want their games to become a blockbuster. They need to choose platforms, that the MAJORITY of potential players uses. If a Steam Deck would sell millions of units and people start playing on that more, then they are forced to take action or otherwise they would loose players over time. They also have some guruantees to fulfill. If it was up to Bungie, then they would release Destiny on every single platform they could to increase the playerbase and margin. However, if that results in an explosion (or even potentially), then they will certainly loose great numbers of players. Don't hate the company for trying, hate the Cheaters.
@Ransacked it's a domino effect. The more people that stop playing the more people will continue to stop playing. These companies will Make changes to please an extra 10-15%
Well yeah, but also no. Many games have those intrusive Anti-Cheats because they are competitive. And frankly, even on a fiber connection, the input, output latency is way too high for that
@@MichaelNROH my idea is more along the lines that player pc doesn't know where other players are in the game. If you can't see the other player ( being behind a hill ) you should not have info they are there at all. Biggest problem with cloud is bandwidth, compression and decompression. If server is at the same place latency stays the same for each packet. Maybe it could be approached with local render.
Yes and I think it's entirely possible to iron out most of the stability/latency issues. In fact, there's been some interesting work going on here in the direction of AI, allowing for insanely good real-time streamed video compression. Just currently requires you to have a 6000 dollar graphics card in both the server and the client lol.
Ive been considering moving to linux once windows 10 loses its support, but Destiny 2 is my favorite game. I have thousands of hours playing and I met my friends in it. I really hope bungie changes their mind in the next year. I dont wanna have to choose.
It was a difficult choice for me as well, but eventually I did and relied on Cloud Gaming for playing The Final Shape. Wasn't the best experience but good enough. Going forward, with all the Bungie layoffs, it seems like Destiny is going to fall flat anyway
Gona say words of a cheater once i meet: Me: isnt it boring to cheat and ruin others experience? Knowing that you will win will take away all of the fun and curtiosity. Cheater: isnt it boring to get killed every single game by 3 stack pred because of bad matchmaking and you just simply trying to enjoy game? Me: Enjoy game? no i dont enjoy it when pred kills me but atleast i know thats also my fault am not good enough and when dying to a cheater even preds cant win.
Cheaters were a major reason on why I had a phase of being tilted every single game. As soon as you meet someone who is better than you, you just can't tell if they were cheating or not (That is without a kill cam or not being obvious). If everyone was playing fair, it would be clear that they are just better
Gearbox Halo CE=Anti-cheat is only done server-side, and with real-deal admins on the dedicated servers of Gearbox CE, things mostly are good. That is, if you hop on to a server that doesn't just use "robo-enforcement" and actually has people enforcing anti-cheat regulations. They know what signs to look for with cheating.
i Think you LinuX Activisits,should pump the Pressure against the Anti Cheat Troubles and against Steam,Microsoft games.Im on Linux MInt but im on Emulators Stuff,Great Games,its Free and i dont care about procton,Electron or Neutron,But who is Activist,Must Fight for your Rights.
@@MichaelNROH Real speaking, most emulation is for games so old fishing them on the 7 seas doesn't hurt anyone, not even the companies that created them. And in that case not even a moral issue, Imo. And I feel like doing that with games that DOES hurt the companies is still a MUCH smaller problem than this anti-cheat (specially since it may actually be morally fine to sanction DRM crap) But that might just be because of the Linux bubble I'm in lol.
I keep getting anti cheat and it kicks me out . Idk why I don’t use any cheats . The only thing I did was hook up my controller for tarkov and boom now I get kicked from tarkov and insurgency like what in the world .
i have readed many of your responses and i have one more question on regards if it could be posssible to do the fallowing , like to force the game to depend on more Functionalities from the Server side than on the actual game files , and to make sure that the Player behavior are comming as normal behaviors?
The performance cost and heavy dependency on good pings makes this very hard to achieve. The netcode needs to be perfect to sync up if you could see an enemy that was moving behind a wall for example
@@MichaelNROH I do feel like it's possible to mitigate this (somewhat) by doing movement prediction, as we've done on clients for decades now. But there'd still be a bunch of issues with this.
If cheating and legality come together, I would raise some eyebrows. I absolutely hate to be in a match with cheaters (sometimes even beating them). But I very much hope that it doesn't target things such as QOL fixes or even modding in games in general.
Still would not work since you would need to encapsule everything related to the game. Audio, GPU, Mouse, Keyboard, etc. Every open driver could potentially be an entry point for cheats, and that is why a seperate Kernel module could only mitigate the issue, not get rid of it
Maybe this is a controversial opinion, but I don't think we should have anticheat on users computers. If they can't figure out how to prevent cheaters on the server side then they're doing it wrong. Yes, I acknowledge that some cheating will be impossible to detect and prevent. For instance using ML to give you a slight speed increase in reaction time or replace you entirely, but it's not like the client side can prevent that either. Any VM solution will be susceptible to the VM software you run, so that won't work either. Plus the VM solution will be slower and thus make you a worse player. I think the biggest problem with gaming these days is achievements and gaming tournaments. It pushes people towards cheating because they always want to be better instead of having fun playing a game. Somehow we need to get back to those days when people played games for the fun of it and not to compete against others.
Well that mindset was already there. What is missing nowadays is the social factor when playing video games. Back when LAN Parties and local Splitscreen was a thing, the mindset was different, since people could get to you in real life. We weren't trying that hard. With this face-to-face border that is the internet, a lot of people feel like they are more unhinged since they often only play in small groups together, instead of against each other. Since no one could hurt them, they use cheats more increasingly. Btw. Server side AC is a thing, however the processing power and accuracy for many players at the same time, is not a good for finances, but also the player experience. This only works for some Games. Valorant or CS:GO with 128 tick and 10 concurrent players is a nightmare for a server to calculate.
@@MichaelNROH Yeah, we all know their excuses, but as a programmer I know they're all false. It doesn't take up dramatically more processing power to do the kind of processing necessary to prevent cheats. Sure, they won't defeat "AI" cheaters, but they can't do that anyway. The majority of players won't have that capability either, for now. As for the mentality, anonymity plays into that a bit, but once someone gets to be a top player they generally have their name and face revealed. I don't know if anyone will get what I mean, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think it's all part of the moral decay of our civilization that encourages and forgives bad behavior. They look at the situation as black and white and have taken us from what they viewed as an extreme to what is actually an extreme. For the games industry, I think the only sensible way forward would be to open source everything. Make buying a game the same as buying a book or a piece of music. You pay the artists for their creation, but you get to experience it wherever and however you want. I know you don't agree, but only because you haven't seen how it could work. Game engines these days are mostly incrementally updated, and not everyone uses a close source engine anyhow. The bulk of the money taken in by a game should go to the artists since they do the bulk of the work. Ideally, the publishers would get a lower cut in this scenario.
Cheating in online games is a real issue. While we'll probably never completely eliminate it, interesting solutions like AI aim assist could be a step forward. It wouldn't be perfect - fairness concerns around assisted aiming exist. However, for some players who might be tempted by aimbots or wallhacks, AI aim assist could offer a less disruptive way to improve their aim and still have fun. Let's face it, not everyone wants to grind to become a pro gamer. Some folks just want to relax and enjoy the game without feeling constantly outmatched. AI aim assist, if implemented well, might create a more balanced playing field where everyone can have a good time. (Example of an AI assist: Aimmy)
Sure, as long as they stay exlusively in their own lobbies. You are right when you say that not everyone wants to grind a game, but that's no excuse for giving yourself an edge over those who want. Competitiveness needs fairplay or simple fun, even when loosing, automatically turns to frustration.
@@MichaelNROH You're hitting the nail on the head here. Competitive gaming presents a unique challenge when it comes to addressing cheating. Some players prioritize efficiency above all else, often at the expense of fair play. It's a reality that competitive gaming grapples with, where the term "competitive" can sometimes be synonymous with exploiting any available advantage. Trying to dissuade players from cheating in such an environment is no easy feat. For many, time is a precious commodity, and spending hours honing skills in a game can feel like an inefficient use of it. The stress and frustration that come with intense training can often overshadow the enjoyment of the game itself. That said, promoting a balanced approach is crucial. Instead of outright condemning aggressive cheating, advocating for cheats that align with the standards of professional gameplay, such as AI aim assist programs, could potentially create a more level playing field. These tools offer a way for players to enhance their performance without resorting to blatantly unfair tactics. By encouraging the use of cheats that emulate the behavior of professional players, we can foster a more respectful and enjoyable competitive environment for everyone involved. It's about finding a middle ground where players can still pursue excellence without compromising the integrity of the game.
That's because "theoretical", the Windows Kernel should be inaccessible to Cheat-Makers and Microsoft takes responsibility for that. On Linux, you can't really blame anyone, if someone just recompiles the Kernel. So the question is, why keep maintaining Kernel-Support for a small portion of gamers, when almost everything is open to Cheaters? With growing gaming numbers, Kernel support will follow, however it probably won't be much more effective against "Know-Hows".
The problem with cheater are (1) more to the culture of the players themselves and (2) the lack of repercussion from the act of cheating. For (1), i have some story. In my teenage days, i do use cheat on a rhythm game out of the FOMO when all my friends have all the items from the hard difficulty limited time event challenge, and i still don't have it. I don't have pc in my home and have no internet at that time, i can only play on shady internet cafe that i can bypass to install the cheat engine, but it is costly by each hour for teenage with only daily pocket allowance. For teen that time, where flexing their "pro"-ness with this kind of limited event item is quite a big deal, cheat become their way to get them without sacrificing the "time". And this kind of behavior is almost like addiction, one of my friend still use cheat in a lot of games, even though he have time to play, have a good job and somewhat good social life; yet we already near 30. I can bet you, 80% of the adult player that cheat follow the same story in their teenage days. For me, i only see the decline of cheater after my generation, where the act of enjoying the game with your friend is the norm rather than gaming to flex against your friend. That is why I understand why cheater still exist in my current time, but does not mean I agree with cheating. For (2), it simply quite hard to find the balance, especially on the Free 2 Play game. For subscription based games like WOW, you can just perma ban, so "money" is the cost of the act of cheating. But I find the "punished by law" is threading the thin line. Should I be punished by law simply by doing my hobby but not in the same way with everyone else? For analogy, should I be punished by law to use tomato ketchup rather than making tomato sauce for making pizza in my kitchen? I know it is a horrible way, but should i get punished by law? On the other hand, you can argue, that cheater hinder other person enjoyment of the game, but does this affect other player primary life? Not easy, but being punished by law kind of a lazy way of some game company from being unable to properly handle player report from the player. I know dealing with player report is labor intensive, and I get it that not all report can be human reviewed. But some big company seems like just don't want the hassle even though they have the resource, and this "punished by law" threat might promote this kind of behavior from game companies. That is why it is good that the act of cheating is punishable by law, but you can't just willy nilly create it without further studies on how to deal with cheater and what kind of punishment can be enforced to cheater; which gaming is not a primary needs of a human, so the studies for this kind of law ends up as not an URGENT issue and either delay the law being implemented, or the law not properly written and poorly implemented.
I really like your statements, even though I find it very interesting how people "slip" into cheating. I myself somewhat come from the opposite side, whereas if I were to start cheating, I would just embarrass myself on local coop. Plus, maybe playing mainly on a console further set that mindset. The second point is kind of hard. Enforced by law does not mean punishements like prison or something like that. I mean, this is technically breaking a contract that they signed and they can be made responsible for losses if players stop playing after facing them. This is something that can happen at any point, since Cheaters signed the contract that they won't cheat and revenue loss lawsuits do exist. Can get very expensive, but the company decides if they want to sue or not. It's not controlled by the state or country is what I'm saying
@@MichaelNROH From what i observe from some of my friends, rather than get embarrassed, they just admit it they use cheat when asked and move on. When it comes to coop or partying up, what quite embedded in their brain is "My friend is platinum, and i don't have time to get there in time when he ask me to party up next week, so lets get it on", These kind of cheaters usually not cheat when you play party on competitive type of game (ranked, mmr, etc), and only cheat when play solo. Looking at the the paragraph above, "addiction" might be too much, but for cheater in my example, cheating becomes something "hardwired" to the brain. When you want something from the game, most player think if they have the time, should they clear some schedule, ask to be carried, but cheating is kinda a "sins", while for the cheater in my example, cheating just a method they can just use as if it is something normal (even though they personally know it is wrong). The moral brakes when they consider to cheat just not there compared to normal player.
Nothing like giving giant coporations the more options to charge you with a crime. The only way they identify you is using your redit card information and if you want to get around it just use anonymized payments. And then if you force people to de-anonymized themselves you're getting people who want to keep their personal data out of big corporations.
Its just all dumb. Instead of making client side anticheat they should make it server side. That be way more secure too. You can like hide player locations and only show them when they should be visible. Wallhacks cant work then for example. Or follow how somoen aims and figure out if someone uses aimbot. But they wont, because its more work. Instead I have to use a client side anticheat, which I dont know what it does but has full access of my system. Also that client side anticheat runs on a untrusted plantform. It can be modified, bypassed, edited and so on.
Some server side Anti-Cheats do exist, however they face a lot of problems. For once the processing power and therefore the cost of running several game instances becomes more expensive. Another thing is latency. If you shoot at an enemy, the server has to calculate the chances of being legit, and this takes time. On the client's side it's much faster since everything got processed already.
I am SURE this is possible but it's just one of those things that companies won't pour in any money researching for because it's just cheaper to keep going with the current system.
In my opnion just use qemu with gpu passtrough if you have a dedicated gpu or an igpu with gvt-g/sr-lov or just use vmware 3d acerlation if you only have a igpu without gvt-g or sr-lov its the second best thing to gpu passtrough only diffrence is that it cant run dx12
The problem is not the compatibility most of the time, but just the Anti-Cheats. A VM won't resolve this since many ACs detect virtual machines and ban your account because of that.
Yeah it takes alot of effort to trick your vm into thinking its not a vm almost to much effort honestly im pretty sure compiling gento 3 times would be easier then doing this dualbooting would be way easier but honestly i really dont want to have to run closed source anti cheat witch has full accses to my cumputer from a coropration im just really concious about my kernal and whats going in there alot of malware exploit kernal anti cheats and bypass firewalls running it in a virutal mechine is more secure but most of the time if all your doing is playing video games you probbaly wont get hacked i gues im just really paranoid about my kernel@@MichaelNROH
well if i am not mistaken , the idea of you getting in trouble for cheatting will be implemented very soon by microsoft after their acquirement of Blizzard , they were saying that there could be legal consecueses for cheatting in a game or even fines so let's see how that develops.
I followed a video of someone who played Crossout on the Steam Deck which surprised me because almost everyone on gaming forums are struggling hard to try to play this game in Linux. So I was wondering why exactly the Steam Deck makes things easier than a gaming oriented Linux Distro and if I have to believe Lenovo's statement regarding Steam, Steam OS use DRM. Is it the reason why Steam doesn't want to make their OS available? I am not sure for now but I have to say that VM is something I might look into if that can help me to play the few games I can't run with Linux Mint. 🤔
I think the reason on why Valve hasn't released Steam OS 3 for regular PCs is, that they have troubles with certain Hardware. An example of this would be Gamscope and NVIDIA, which doesn't play nicely.
Who says kernel level anti cheat works. Even firmware level(bios level) security feature like secure boot and hardware level(tpm2) security feature sucks in term of blocking cheats/hacks. And on top of that there are three or may be four type of cheating techniques that can never be detected. Those techniques include use of sbc like raspberry pi or Arduino. And cheaters are doing that.
It's funny, I was around back in the day of dedicated servers, and we never saw this many cheat problems. I wonder why. I wonder what it was about those older games that made cheating less prevalent? Like could it be the MASSIVE PREDATORY MONETISATION WHICH IS THE UNDERLYING CAUSE and not the cheating?
Nahh, not really. I believe it just took some time for cheat makers to advertise themselves (money) and due to the growth of streaming services, more people feel bad if they can't keep up with the pros. The growth of the internet is essentially the growth of cheat sellers and consumers as well.
@@MichaelNROH Games being paid for and popular / good servers being well moderated meant cheaters were quickly taken care of -- they still existed but could be banned quickly, so it wasn't much fun to cheat. Because these companies now monetise in-game, and because there are monetary incentives to cheat, they need to do their own moderation and the problem is now much worse. I think anti-cheat is just DRM with reputation laundering built in. Thanks for replying to my comment, I'm a recent subscriber and your videos are excellent.
Easy: Old games were simpler. Also, people expect more and more from video games, but the number of developers working on a game can't be scaled infinitely, which causes more time pressure and more mistakes to happen.
My Only "Gaming Lifehack"on Linux is Choose a Distro Very Liteweight and Play Ruinnows Games on a Virtual Machine...Otherwise = Use Android on Big Screen....Or Buy a Playstation.
@@MichaelNROH and it would stop those as well as it does on windows because it has parity access level to any spoofed driver modules or w/e. Basically then we will be a feature parity with windows and able to be supported like windows.
Honestly, I think the solution to this is to just abandon anti cheats entirely and come up with new ways to curb cheaters. A great example are systems that valve implements, such as overwatch, and also just canceling matches mid game if the server senses something fishy.
Most people cheating in online games, once again, are typically windows users. It's far easier to get nexus mods running on Windows than it is on Linux.
@@MichaelNROH i mean... thats the point? i mean, sure nexus mods will become simpler to use over time on linux, but who's to say that anticheat wont get better as well as time goes on?
I'm really not sure about if VAC actually works or if it is even improved upon. From all of the people that got banned iN my CS:GO matches (forgot where to look that up), I believe that the majority got banned with their Overwatch system (People reviewing the game), not VAC itself. A ban also needs to happen ingame and not after a while.
@@MichaelNROH i think they may have started using some new anticheat system in csgo cus i hear there are lot of bans recently and it doesn't seem to be just a normal vac wave. I think they may have automated the process of adding new cheat to vac so it will ban those cheats if it sees it cus previously i think they had to add those manually.
I won't go back to Windows until I absolutely have too. If I play games on Windows, then telemetry data is telling game devs that I prefer to play on Windows. That's why I will continue to play everything on Linux
Not very well researched, sorry... One example is that one scene showing the use of the different rings claiming rings 1 and 2 to be used for drivers is just... wrong. In fact, CPU manufacturers are thinking of REMOVING Rings 1 and 2 because they aren't even used by ANY relevant operating system these days! All drivers run in Ring 0 on Kernels like Windows NT and Linux, and on Microkernels they run in Ring 3. There are tons of other technical details that you got wrong some even invalidating your points. However I DO agree that all anti-cheat games should support Linux somehow, specially because, well... I only run Linux, exclusively. You won't ever see a Windows system running on my PC outside a virtual machine.
You should've talked about server-side anti-cheat solutions, like with Overwatch. I think it doesn't have a client-side anti-cheat and there are no cheaters nor problems running it on Linux. Client-side anti-cheats are just a cat & mouse game and I don't know why Blizzard is the only AAA-developer that can code game servers. The kernel driver anti-cheat from Genshin Impact was even used to disable antivirus and cheat in other games xD
Server side Anti-Cheats are not ready for deployment. Such servers need more processing power, but also guruantee a good latency. A game like Valorant or CS:GO with a higher tick rate (64 - 128) should not feel like a 16 tick game because the Anti-Cheat takes too long to calculate 10 players at once.
regardless its just microsoft doing this so they can make more money in the long run so other users have no choice but stick with windows only why? because users want to play games, Linux is about to be to a dead end for alot of games very soon. then Linux will only be for those that only want to do graphic design or linux to be used as for Buiness owners that dont want to spend money or use for office. or watch movies or youtube videos thats it. even steam is going to have to probably drop support because of microsoft pushing these new proceedures on kernal levels
One message for the developers: Don't use anticheat softwares. Just simply put more work into cheat prevention. It's not that hard to detect if player moves normally or teleports. No need for fancy anticheat solutions that has more access over your pc than with an admin account. For regular cheats like aimbot, etc. it's almost impossible to prevent. I could easily connect a microcontroller to my pc that acts as a keyboard and mouse and send the output of the gpu to a physically separated computer and make the AI to do the hard work. There is no anticheat that could detect that.
But cheats like wall hack, money generator in GTA V, etc. are easily preventable, they just need to put more effort into that.
For example for wall hack, just don't send the informations of the other players if they are not visible for that player.
I agree that for many things there should be hardcoded triggers.
Like, ok maybe someone finds a way how to throw a nade across the whole map and kill someone, ok. But in CS2 it was possible to shoot them through like 8 walls with a sniper in some sort of burst mode.
Like what?
dude, every comp game already has hardcoded anti-cheating software, the thing is, there are some sickos, who modify the input itself, not the game logic, like automatically moving your mouse down to prevent gun recoil, something a hard-coded anti cheat would never detect
@hunterzone4846 Probably, but there are many things in a lot of games which could be avoided by just coding the game right. For example: "wall hack". It could be avoided by just not sending the opponents to the client who are not visible. It's a more complex thing and needs a bit more server resource, but I think if they can make a game and maintain a lot of servers, they could easily handle this.
who let blud cook 😭
@@cyanoure okay so, i know the in and out from an anticheat, i even looked into a anticheat source code. The thing is it cant detect esp or any other visuals since it doesnt affect the games memory, it creates and overlay letting people access it, u only need to know the hash code of the models, which im not gonna say how. Speed hacks can be easily detected by either making an rage check or the value of someones movement which btw isnt hard at all! Aimbot unfortunately is harder to detect if it isnt that blatant therefore will ai systems can or will do nothing about it.
Technically, the problem can be solved by running the game in its own virtual machine with its own "trusted" kernel. Just as a Linux kernel can be run inside Windows using WSL, it is possible to run a another Linux-basred system with its own kernel inside Linux. I think that future implementations of anti-cheat will work something like this. By the way, in this case it will be possible not to release a version for Windows - it will be enough to make a version for Linux/WSL.
Performance is the issue. You'll be at a disadvantage thanks to virtualization. Youll have to sacrifice some frames. It's the same issue with gpu passthrough.
Yes, I was thinking of a similar concept with games run in containers.
The issue is, that even if the container was inaccesible by the user, at some point the data needs to be processed by a CPU. Someone could catch the data there, but if they don't know how the game works at all, it will be harder
Google is implementing a similar idea in ChromeOS where Steam runs in a VM. It's called Borealis. It also relies on the Virgl and Venus drivers in Mesa for GPU acceleration.
@Watcher AI cheating is impossible to counter with local Anti-Cheat software anyway.
The only way this method could be tackled is, if the Anti-Cheat also is AI-powered, but the performance hit would be higher on a client.
Server side Anti-Cheat is also not that great since it's reliability heavily depends on the ping.
@@mritunjaymusale Manipulated game files is easy to detect. What's hard to detect are changes in the RAM or Cheats that hide themselves as an essential piece of hardware (e.g. a mouse input)
User space + server solutions, because cheaters will stop at nothing
A Linux user saying that "I cant wait for government intervention for something I did on my vomputer" yeah it checks...
Having legal ramifications for cheaters is honestly a frightening concept. Imagine the long term effects something like that would have and the inevitable evolutions that would result. This would change the way games and software are controlled in an absolutely negative way. The last thing we should want are these companies having any more power over our hobby. The real issue here is that kernel level anti cheat does nothing to stop cheating, it exists to collect data. Plain and simple. It wouldn't even surprise me if the very same companies that are developing the anti-cheats are developing the cheats themselves. How else would these coders have the information on the windows kernel? Not to mention without them, their anti-cheat software would be useless and their money would be gone. Kernel level cheat software isn't even something anyone with a brain cell would use, if you're worried about anti-cheat privacy just imagine the cheat tools.
I hate to break it to you, but that's not how Anti-Cheats work.
Can they collect data about you? Sure.
Are they doing it? Some of them are collecting SOME data like your system configuration. But that's about it.
Data collection is only worth doing, if you can sell that data to third parties, who can then proceed to make personalized ads, which is the most profitable way.
AC-Vendors don't directly sell data, and this is known. They already make money by providing a service for companies, which as of itself is profitable (subscription model).
Why would a company buy a subscription to a shady service? It would negatively impact everything if something were to get out.
Think about this stuff in money terms, not in objective ones.
@@MichaelNROH I'd only truly believe that if they release the code for the anti cheat, which will never happen. I tend to lean on the conspiracy side of things these days 🤷♂️. Regardless I really like your channel and you make a good point.
Japan already outlawed cheats because it hurts the gacha game industry too much
@@MichaelNROH Data collection is a certainty especially considering that the companies that decide to use kernel level anti cheats have affiliations with the CCP (tencent).
It doesn't perform better? Not true I play Valorant and while I'm still pretty new around my 460 hours I have NEVER seen a cheater in Valorant
Having a massive security hole in the form of these kernel level access anti cheat software is very worrying.
I have to ask: if I had two separate drives, one with Windows installed on it for gaming, and another with Linux installed on it for personal work and information, could the anti cheat rootkits from the Windows drive compromise my personal Linux drive in any way like with ransomware attacks, remote code execution, data theft etc?
There are things out there that theoretically would work quite well.
Using a virtual machine or even just a container for a game, if done right, provides a similar level of security.
The key here is, that how the game works is obstructed from the cheaters. That means that they cannot don't receive location data for wallhacks, because they wouldn't know location data in an encrypted state.
The only thing that these solutions won't prevent is AI, but maybe even an Anti-Cheat within a container would be possible, which can differentiate our wacky human accuracy from a bot.
But it's hard to find a solution with encryption, decryption, the necessary APIs needed (GPU output, etc.) while performant and transparent. (What could the game transmitt from my system)
This is exactly why I don't want to game on Linux -- kernel level access. Let Microsoft do what they do well, keep their kernel and OS secure. If I had to dual boot to game, I'd take advantage of the full encryption option when installing Linux and Windows too if Ihad a Pro license. (Actually, I'd just spend the money to buy a Pro license and have Bit Locker. I'd grimace, but I'd do it.) Also, the two OS's would be installed on separate drives or series of drives. As it stands, it's just easier to have a dedicated gaming rig running Windows. So, I game on Windows and use Linux for everything else. Drive encryption, a two way firewall, never running on an administrator account -- maybe I'm paranoid. :-)
Yes, they can. You can format a HDD from windows too, so kernel drivers can do much more than normal software, so Yes, easily
Everyone knows the Microsoft source code, they just arent allowed to talk about it or use it. The Emperor is essentially naked.
At this point anti cheat is becoming pointless. I saw a video that showed a set up with a raspberry pi, camera, and manipulators to control the keyboard and mouse. This real world cheat bot was just as good as cheat software. The only thing they really could do is force people to go to monitored gaming cafes and use their computers to play rated games. That or start spying on people through cameras in their rooms which is just creepy.
@@JS-vn1og And even then, someone will find a way. I mean, data has been stolen by using the leds on certain ethernet ports iirc.
Rule one of developing a server based application is "NEVER TRUST THE CLIENT". Atm anticheat software work mostly via security by obscurity.
Issue is Linux is open source. It is difficult to impossible to make something on Linux truly obscure. Which makes implementing security via obscurity difficult if not impossible.
Add to that the fact that unlike windows the kernel team can't add some undocumented interfaces an anticheat can access to secure a system and you start to see the issue. Since a bad actor can just rewrite that interface.
The good news for anticheat developers might be the fact that they can probably get the fsf to shut down cheaters that distribute kernel hacks unless said kernel hacks are open source. Which means it might actually be possible to detect the modification in that case.
I feel that if Linux gaming became more mainstream. The GPL license on the kernel might actually be the bane of cheat developers in the long run.
I'm a systems dev and ex-cheat developer and this is just false, the anticheat doesn't just """"trust the client""" and rely on ""security via obscurity"", it utilizes the server AND client to be able to gather enough data to determine if a user is innocent or cheating. Without the clientside anticheat, the server is effectively BLIND to non-obvious cheating, any good cheater can easily hide their cheats if there is nothing looking at the game's process. from the client-side.
Most anticheats implement:
- memory signature checks (compare patterns of memory within the game against a database of flagged cheat signatures on the AC server)
- memory hooking checks (that pretty much any cheat needs to deploy in the game's memory)
- foreign memory uploads (if there is a pattern of memory inside the game process that is not usually in the actual game, then upload it to anticheat server for inspection)
- client-side heuristic checks (is there an overlay being displayed in the game that is not in the actual game)?
- winAPI handle detection and blockade (for external cheats, they would be utilizing window's ReadProcessMemory and WriteProcessMemory functions)
- DMA device detection (DMA devices can read the system's memory without actually doing anything in software)
And the most important of all, pertaining the most to this context :
Anomaly detection : if there is behavior in the kernel or anticheat daemon/driver that is not typically how it should be behaving, the player is forcefully kicked out of the server by the anticheat, this is not foolproof, however it is a strong mitigation for direct attacks on either the anticheat daemon/driver, or modifications of the kernel.
@@ChristopherGray00 You're contradicting yourself. "Without the clientside anticheat, the server is effectively BLIND to non-obvious cheating" and yet you say "the anticheat doesn't just trust the client". If your server is blind to a client that lies to your server about the data it has gathered then you are TRUSTING THE CLIENT.
Memory signature checks? Sure boss, here's what you expected to see.
Memory hooking checks? Sure boss, here's what you were expecting.
Foreign memory uploads? Sure boss, here's what you expected to see.
Client-side heuristics? Here you go boss, this is the heuristics you expect to see from gamers who aren't cheating.
And on and on of course.
Anything is open source if you can read the circuit board or otherwise reverse engineer, but security by obscurity is just a bet that the attacker won't go that far because its just a game so surely they won't put in that much work.
@@Nerd2Ninja The client checking to see what is going on in the game's memory is not trusting the client, you seem absolutely clueless as to the topic at hand, bypassing one mechanism within the clientside AC does not then magically bypass another mechanism within the serverside AC.
If i write a cheat, in which the clientside AC has no signatures for, and can insta head lock aim in a randomized fashion and kill everyone on the team instantly, i didn't bypass the anticheat, the server can still see that.
Were you intoxicated when typing such a stupid comment? Actually curious
I think the only AC that works long term is virtualized game sandboxes that are checksummed. That would still not defeat modifying RAM on-the-fly, but...
This will only shift the root of trust to ring -1 though, which opens another round of cat and mouse game just like when they shifted from ring 3 to 0.
I don't understand the fear of a 1% of player base that might increase the cheater population by 0.01%
I think it's also about the potential. I don't have any numbers because no one is releasing stats, but I don't think that from the actual playerbase, only a fraction is cheating. Those of course stand out from the crowd, because even in a 10 player lobby, there aren't that many cheaters (cheater per game).
I think they are scared that the small percentage of Linux Gamers becomes a cheater only plattform because they switch. Stupid approach, but it's probably what's going on
As for kernel-level driver support via Wine/Proton, i'd say it's impossible because Wine is a cross-platform project, as Wine is available for macOS, Solaris, *BSD operating systems, and son on. All of those operating systems use their own kernels completely different and incompatible with each other, and i think Wine devs also don't really like the idea of having too many OS-specific dependencies, that's why Wayland support is taking so long, because they don't want Wine to have dependencies on a specific compositor (Wayland's reference implementation, Weston has some linuxisms afaik)
Regarding the anti-cheats, the userspace ones I can tolerate, but the kernel level ones never, the disaster caused by kernel level DRMs like StarForce that broke Windows installations is more than enough not to support them at all, not to mention that they can be used as a backdoor to exploit other vulnerabilities, be it the anti-cheat itself or gain privilege escalations, so the disadvantages of that approach far outweigh the benefits.
Wine can't natively run drivers on its own, however there is nothing stopping a program from interfacing with wine, or a modification of wine that communicates to and from a driver.
1 : companies don't care enough to even do the minimal work to get their anticheat compatible with proton, seriously guys, any EAC game has no excuse given how easy they have made it. Some games, yes, their anticheat is a bit lower level, but many, many games aren't even doing the minimal work to get higher level anticheat working fine.
2 : why the hell is their no open source anti-cheats yet? think about it, the users know it's not a privacy nightmare, anyone annoyed with cheaters could check it to make sure it's doing it's job, and, sure, maybe making cheats will be a bit easier at first, but the SECOND any user gets a hold of that cheat, they can just figure out how to make the cheat engine stop it, start a pull request, and within a few days or less the cheat is useless. Why would I, as a cheat maker, pour hours and hours of work into looking for vulnerabilities in the anti-cheat source code, to make an exploit that's good for a few days, MAYBE. At best I'm only using it for personal use, but 1 : most cheaters don't write their own shit, and 2 : the few people that do, could be decently easily covered by in-game reports now that EVERYONE ELSE is being banned without needing shit tons of reports and clogging the system. Most people who write cheats? they're selling them. Why would I spend money on cheats, that are only good, if they were released yesterday, and I'll only be able to use for maybe a few days before I get caught and banned?
Seriously, this isn't national security, where a SINGLE bad actor getting to an exploit before pen testers could is game over, this is anticheats, if a hacker or two find a cheat before it's patched, you get a few rounds of dealing with a hacker, but as the usage of a cheat increases, it gets fixed quicker and quicker since more and more people have the opportunity to get it, then write code to fix it's exploit.
I might be wrong, but if you rely specifically on people just, being able to make pull requests to cover all of the edge cases, I could see a situation wherein you don't even need kernel level access to stop kernel level cheat software. If you know EXACTLY what you're looking for, I'd imagine you could probably detect that sort of behaviour without having to live in the kernel level, just peek down there occasionally. Might be totally wrong on that bit though, games may genuinely need to install kernel modules to stop cheats. Even those though, could be open sourced, nothin's stopping them
Open Sourcing Anti-Cheats is not being done because it is less a security issue, but more a marketing issue.
People make money with providing Anti-Cheat solutions and open sourcing that would lead to several issues. Most of all the exposure of methods which could lead to a temporary increase of cheating exploits, while the community is not allowed to fix issues themselves. (Server validation and licenses)
Open Source Anti-Cheats could only work if:
* The community is allowed to contribute
* It offers commercial support for companies (Warranty and all that)
* It somehow needs to be verified, that it is an official release which was not edited
@@MichaelNROH honestly all of those things seem decently doable imo. The first one is just "the people behind it need to understand open source isn't just a buzzword", the second one could be a ZorinOS situation where there IS an organization/company behind the project that can offer support, but the actual thing itself is completely open. (yes Zorin pro does have some extra features, but let's be real the main reason people buy it aside from a fancy donation is for the support)
The third one, well there I can't say anything for certainty unfortunately. I'm not a cryptography expert, I understand the basics of hashing, encryption, pub-private key pairs, etc. buuuuut definite statements on what is and isn't possible is a bit out of my purview. I'd imagine it probably is possible to verify it with some black magic cryptographic wizardry, but I wouldn't know how to say anything for certainty. In THEORY I could see a system where the internal variables are isolated in memory, and then the rest of the memory itself is used as an encryption key or something, (thereby requiring people be running an entire dummy instance of the entire anti-cheat in order to be spoofed) but, again, I can't speak with certainty. All I can say with high confidence is that I've seen good cryptography do some seriously absurd crap, "zero-trust computing" just seems completely impossible to me but, apparently it's a thing. Given that, I find it hard to believe you COULDN'T create some way of verifying it's correct, buuut the exact implementation, how wide reaching it is, how effective it is, etc. is beyond me.
The only real point I'd disagree with is the aspect of marketing. In regards to licensing, if it did follow a "support" business model, so companies could optionally license support to fund the organization that manages the product, rather than a central company which wholly develops the product, you wouldn't really need have a dead period where the community can't contribute for licensing reasons. Additionally, since you're basically outsourcing most of the development and your mainly just guiding the project, you could offer much lower prices to license it, so smaller games would pick it up as a nice drop-in way to get some anticheat of anysort without breaking the bank. Then, once it has that userbase, it could grow up from there as people realize this low-cost solution is equally, or more, effective.
I suppose I should clarify that my point is basically that "an open source, community driven (and potentially organization or company managed) anti-cheat would have every capacity to work equally as good, or superiour to, current anti-cheats". Obviously existing anti-cheat companies are going to have a problem with their business model being ripped out from under them, but I'm looking at it specifically from the community standpoint here. It would take some serious organizational work, but I can't imagine it being impossible.
With some elements of corporate DRM already being baked into the kernel (unfortunately mind you, seriously, DRM being unnecessarily baked into the kernel is just a no-go for me when it patently doesn't work, just about everything ever can be found on 1337 so DRM only gets in the way of normal users) and proprietary blobs being common, a completely open source, user-first anti-cheat seems entirely reasonable to me. Maybe some hardcore FOSS guys with hardcore Stallman fanfic tatted on their junk would take some serious issue to it but I think for most people, if they know it isn't spying on them, if they know it isn't hurting their performance, and if it lets them play games, I don't think most people would care. Sure, "people don't care" isn't a complete justification for something (people don't care about a lot of things they should) but generally, so long as I still know it's honest and has my best interest in mind, I don't really see any reason to hate something just because it's goal is to limit what I can do. (at least not if I voluntarily install it that is, or have some way of removing it if I don't want it)
Maybe I'm wrong on that last point though but thats just how it seems to me.
Maybe try to think about a "community anti cheat system".
Something like crowdsec who collect IP address who try to hack into server and share those IP with all the community.
This could help to identify people who are cheating and blocking them everywhere...
Then the cost to cheat could start to be very expensive...
Enforce static IP everywhere that is possible so people can't change their own IP to easly...
When people will start to be banned for few hours, then few days then a full month on every gaming plateform because they have try to cheat on a game, then they will think twice about using such tools...
It's impossible to fight against hackers, the only solution is to always increase the price to use such solution and in the same time, reduce the cost to fight them...
I clearly think that there are some idea to look into...
@@LtSich people have tried crowdsourced unified ban lists before, they've failed miserably every time. What you would need is a FOSS detection engine that can hook into a per-game banning system.
@@robonator2945 This is exactly what crowdsec is actually doing.... A french company...
Not used for game atm, but as long as you develop something to detect cheater and report those IP to them then you should be able to do the same for gaming...
I use that to protect my server (again, no gaming atm) and it's really good.
I'm sure that if the dev and this company work together they can build something similar for gaming...
In my view, the issue with cheaters is less about the cheats themselves and more about smurfs (new accounts).
1. A cheater can easily create a new account and keep using it
2. When a highly skilled player joins a lower skill lobby, other players in that lobby may mistakenly label them as a cheater, even if they aren’t
Also, if a game studio wants to prevent the problem with cheaters, it can provide a mechanism such as patrolling, where players can watch the recording and decide whether it is a cheater or not, and if many players say yes, they can ban it, and to make players have a good time, they can give some in-game gifts for the work they have done
Patrolling won't fix the issue in the long term. Until people actually know how to differentiate between a cheater (especially soft cheats) and someone who is legit they already need a lot of hours in a game.
The current cheating situation is really bad whereas a slightly better gamer can already be labeled as a cheater in your mind, simply because it's not that unlikely anymore.
Any form of anti cheat has never worked. They now have AI and hardware level cheats where the AI that can view the screen and control the mouse mechanically. It is just like DRM never has worked and is just a waste of time. The best way to defeat cheaters is to identify the cheaters, tag the account and only allow cheaters to play with other cheaters. Don't tell them, let them figure it out.
AI Anti-Cheats probably can't ever be prevented unless you have an AI that counters them. There are some differences in how consistent a human behaves. Nonetheless, the problem is still the identifying.
I use Linux every day, for playing games with anticheats like EAC or PunkBuster I use VM for that I need it cause EAC would not work on Linux because developers would not enable it's support, and second for privacy and security reasons, punkbuster is really old and probably has many vulnerabilities, EAC is kernel level so this speaks for itself. Battleye, MRAC and Vanguard just blocking us out, idk why but this looks shady for me.
Battleye has userspace-support on Linux, but Vanguard has a huge problem. It ONLY runs on Kernel-Level. There is basically a whole rework needed, and frankly the potential player numbers on Linux are not that high for that.
@@MichaelNROH Yes but I am waiting for company named Ubisoft to enable proton support flip one f**king button and let us play games like Rainbow Six Siege! What is so hard in it, game even support Vulkan out of the box and plays really well.
The problem can be solved if the comparatively small number of Linux gamers monetarily support multiplayer game developers who are Linux friendly, but that's the problem with an open source user, they expect "free". Why not buy Insurgency Sandstorm, and the cosmetics? They are Linux multiplayer friendly, and I can go on with many other great multiplayer games that work on Linux. Monetarily incentivize developers to make multiplayer games work on Linux, and we'll see all excuses banished.
Qemu KVM with Gpu passthrough and Hyper v you can play genshin, tarkov and valaront (involves more hastles) relatively easily. I play online game sless , The ones i do play are opensource spyware/anticheat free games like xanotic and cube 2 and both are cheater free as well. We have the community diff compared to the Winblows community.
@D Reaper exactly, too much effort for a shittier counterstrike. I got my mates ro play cuned 2 instea dbc if the mac user in the office and our friendly neighborhood toaster gamer can play it at 60fps
Thankfully Yoshi P refuses to put anti cheat in FFXIV, he says they have no right to look at what's on my computer. That's the kind of game I can get behind.
this video slays !!! >:) thanks for breaking it down in a way that's really easy to understand!
it just that for my perspective its about a culture
you see lot of chinese community are embraced cheating as normal thing at game since they are nurtured to win any cost its they culture hell even if someone in they community point out how bad a cheating is in video game they are shunned its really problem when one of biggest populated in the world that thinking cheating is a good thing or normal
they think that its not they fault then if someone cheating is the game it self that fault
there is also 1 specifc problem why anticheat doesnt support linux 0 ring mode, this is becouse they will need to compile their ac module for each linux version making it close to imposible to maintain
It's not impossible to maintain since the Graphic Card drivers are on Ring 0. It's all about the execution
@@MichaelNROH Ring 0 Device drivers like Graphics ship with the Linux OS, Sometime some OEM Linux Distributors disallow the final user to load Kernel Modules, meaning you cant load your modules nor anyone after the Linux Kernel was shipped
@@MichaelNROH Some OEM Devs Turn off the insmod command, making it very hard to load Kernel Modules
@@MichaelNROH the point is... unlike Windows, Linux does not have a stable kernel ABI. That means that without compiling the kernel driver SPECIFICALLY for the kernel version used it simply **will not work**.
Also, loading these "out-of-tree" modules taints the kernel which makes its logs completely and utterly useless for bug reporting kernel/driver issues etc.
If you find some of those cheater channels, they all basically say that they're,
1. Having fun just like you
2. It's just a game
3. It's the dev's fault for not banning them
4. They don't have the time to learn the game with a job/family/etc
5. (most likely theyre all psychopaths who like to see people suffer)
6. Or they just admit that it's funny and loop the question
TLDR, they stonewall and try to gaslight you into believing they're not an extremely narcissistic person. And yea idk how cheating is fun, I cheated a bunch of money into GTA5 and it instantly ruined the game for me. There was no reason to play.
This is my biggest issue with Linux and Linux gaming. Anticheat has been an issue since I switched to Linux but as more and more games come out that are DX12 or games that have anticheat that isn't supported on Linux it makes me not use it for gaming anymore. I love Linux as an OS and I love its views. Sadly the problem with anti cheat still looms even after the success of the steam deck which everyone and their mother said would usher in a new Era of anticheat support. Companies have the ability to enable support and allow us to play. Until things change Linux will never truly be a platform for gaming. Sure we got a few games that are supported but it's quite sometime since we've gotten support for a game. Recently shatterline broke Linux anti cheat support. Sure they fixed it but it shows if a company doesn't take care of their anti cheat support we will lose it. Something needs to be done but sadly I don't think anything ever will which means I'll never switch to Linux for gaming 100% or keep using gpu passthrough/dual boot for kernel anti cheat games...
@D Reaper easier said then done when you enjoy playing games. I don't like this "don't support" or "don't play" mentality. Just cause a small minority doesn't play them doesn't mean they will change. Like I said things need to change and hopefully they do soon before all the momentum the steam deck has built wears off.
I slightly disagree with this.
Companies don't really have the power to choose platforms if they want their games to become a blockbuster.
They need to choose platforms, that the MAJORITY of potential players uses. If a Steam Deck would sell millions of units and people start playing on that more, then they are forced to take action or otherwise they would loose players over time.
They also have some guruantees to fulfill.
If it was up to Bungie, then they would release Destiny on every single platform they could to increase the playerbase and margin. However, if that results in an explosion (or even potentially), then they will certainly loose great numbers of players.
Don't hate the company for trying, hate the Cheaters.
@Ransacked it's a domino effect. The more people that stop playing the more people will continue to stop playing. These companies will Make changes to please an extra 10-15%
Are we going to talk about the half a second video of a guy playing League on his TV with a controller?
I think cloud gaming could solve a lot of these.
Well yeah, but also no. Many games have those intrusive Anti-Cheats because they are competitive. And frankly, even on a fiber connection, the input, output latency is way too high for that
@@MichaelNROH my idea is more along the lines that player pc doesn't know where other players are in the game. If you can't see the other player ( being behind a hill ) you should not have info they are there at all.
Biggest problem with cloud is bandwidth, compression and decompression. If server is at the same place latency stays the same for each packet. Maybe it could be approached with local render.
Yes and I think it's entirely possible to iron out most of the stability/latency issues. In fact, there's been some interesting work going on here in the direction of AI, allowing for insanely good real-time streamed video compression. Just currently requires you to have a 6000 dollar graphics card in both the server and the client lol.
Cloud gaming has it's own issues and can only be used by those with fantastic Internet connections
@@NightRaven5568 Maybe in a 100 years 1 gbit will be like 16 mbit today... lol
But I agree.
Ive been considering moving to linux once windows 10 loses its support, but Destiny 2 is my favorite game. I have thousands of hours playing and I met my friends in it. I really hope bungie changes their mind in the next year. I dont wanna have to choose.
It was a difficult choice for me as well, but eventually I did and relied on Cloud Gaming for playing The Final Shape.
Wasn't the best experience but good enough. Going forward, with all the Bungie layoffs, it seems like Destiny is going to fall flat anyway
When hackers find out a way to use anti-cheat to their advantage that's when we're all screwed
Gona say words of a cheater once i meet:
Me: isnt it boring to cheat and ruin others experience? Knowing that you will win will take away all of the fun and curtiosity.
Cheater: isnt it boring to get killed every single game by 3 stack pred because of bad matchmaking and you just simply trying to enjoy game?
Me: Enjoy game? no i dont enjoy it when pred kills me but atleast i know thats also my fault am not good enough and when dying to a cheater even preds cant win.
Cheaters were a major reason on why I had a phase of being tilted every single game. As soon as you meet someone who is better than you, you just can't tell if they were cheating or not (That is without a kill cam or not being obvious). If everyone was playing fair, it would be clear that they are just better
@@MichaelNROH exactly, like you dont even know if you should blame yourself or not, you dont even know...
Simple! Ban cheaters.
bruh
Gearbox Halo CE=Anti-cheat is only done server-side, and with real-deal admins on the dedicated servers of Gearbox CE, things mostly are good. That is, if you hop on to a server that doesn't just use "robo-enforcement" and actually has people enforcing anti-cheat regulations. They know what signs to look for with cheating.
That sounds expensive though 😅
I guess, what's really happening is, that they watch several games simultaniously
i Think you LinuX Activisits,should pump the Pressure against the Anti Cheat Troubles and against Steam,Microsoft games.Im on Linux MInt but im on Emulators Stuff,Great Games,its Free and i dont care about procton,Electron or Neutron,But who is Activist,Must Fight for your Rights.
Legally speaking, emulation without owning the game is illegal though (ROMs from the internet). Not sure about owning the console as well.
@@MichaelNROH Real speaking, most emulation is for games so old fishing them on the 7 seas doesn't hurt anyone, not even the companies that created them. And in that case not even a moral issue, Imo. And I feel like doing that with games that DOES hurt the companies is still a MUCH smaller problem than this anti-cheat (specially since it may actually be morally fine to sanction DRM crap) But that might just be because of the Linux bubble I'm in lol.
Bungies battle eye anti cheat to this day still randomly blue screens my PC, usually after an update to the game or OS
I keep getting anti cheat and it kicks me out . Idk why I don’t use any cheats . The only thing I did was hook up my controller for tarkov and boom now I get kicked from tarkov and insurgency like what in the world .
i have readed many of your responses and i have one more question on regards if it could be posssible to do the fallowing , like to force the game to depend on more Functionalities from the Server side than on the actual game files , and to make sure that the Player behavior are comming as normal behaviors?
The performance cost and heavy dependency on good pings makes this very hard to achieve. The netcode needs to be perfect to sync up if you could see an enemy that was moving behind a wall for example
@@MichaelNROH i see , thanks so much for answering, we hope this get's a fix sooner or later.
@@MichaelNROH I do feel like it's possible to mitigate this (somewhat) by doing movement prediction, as we've done on clients for decades now. But there'd still be a bunch of issues with this.
okay, hear me out... containerized immutable game installs
It's a technical challenge, but feasible
If cheating and legality come together, I would raise some eyebrows. I absolutely hate to be in a match with cheaters (sometimes even beating them). But I very much hope that it doesn't target things such as QOL fixes or even modding in games in general.
if linux users are happy with these kernel level anti cheats, then they should stop talking about privacy.
They don't need to install it. There is a difference between not being able to play a game and not wanting to play a game
Easy anticheat works on linux
but many devs refuse to make linux ver so yeah
What about closed source kernel modules as with some drivers?
Still would not work since you would need to encapsule everything related to the game.
Audio, GPU, Mouse, Keyboard, etc. Every open driver could potentially be an entry point for cheats, and that is why a seperate Kernel module could only mitigate the issue, not get rid of it
In China & South Korea have many stick computer running Windows because have gaming include Anti-cheat, but not all to run on MacOS & Linux
Maybe this is a controversial opinion, but I don't think we should have anticheat on users computers. If they can't figure out how to prevent cheaters on the server side then they're doing it wrong. Yes, I acknowledge that some cheating will be impossible to detect and prevent. For instance using ML to give you a slight speed increase in reaction time or replace you entirely, but it's not like the client side can prevent that either. Any VM solution will be susceptible to the VM software you run, so that won't work either. Plus the VM solution will be slower and thus make you a worse player. I think the biggest problem with gaming these days is achievements and gaming tournaments. It pushes people towards cheating because they always want to be better instead of having fun playing a game. Somehow we need to get back to those days when people played games for the fun of it and not to compete against others.
Well that mindset was already there. What is missing nowadays is the social factor when playing video games.
Back when LAN Parties and local Splitscreen was a thing, the mindset was different, since people could get to you in real life. We weren't trying that hard.
With this face-to-face border that is the internet, a lot of people feel like they are more unhinged since they often only play in small groups together, instead of against each other. Since no one could hurt them, they use cheats more increasingly.
Btw. Server side AC is a thing, however the processing power and accuracy for many players at the same time, is not a good for finances, but also the player experience. This only works for some Games. Valorant or CS:GO with 128 tick and 10 concurrent players is a nightmare for a server to calculate.
@@MichaelNROH Yeah, we all know their excuses, but as a programmer I know they're all false. It doesn't take up dramatically more processing power to do the kind of processing necessary to prevent cheats. Sure, they won't defeat "AI" cheaters, but they can't do that anyway. The majority of players won't have that capability either, for now.
As for the mentality, anonymity plays into that a bit, but once someone gets to be a top player they generally have their name and face revealed. I don't know if anyone will get what I mean, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think it's all part of the moral decay of our civilization that encourages and forgives bad behavior. They look at the situation as black and white and have taken us from what they viewed as an extreme to what is actually an extreme.
For the games industry, I think the only sensible way forward would be to open source everything. Make buying a game the same as buying a book or a piece of music. You pay the artists for their creation, but you get to experience it wherever and however you want. I know you don't agree, but only because you haven't seen how it could work. Game engines these days are mostly incrementally updated, and not everyone uses a close source engine anyhow. The bulk of the money taken in by a game should go to the artists since they do the bulk of the work. Ideally, the publishers would get a lower cut in this scenario.
Cheating in online games is a real issue. While we'll probably never completely eliminate it, interesting solutions like AI aim assist could be a step forward. It wouldn't be perfect - fairness concerns around assisted aiming exist. However, for some players who might be tempted by aimbots or wallhacks, AI aim assist could offer a less disruptive way to improve their aim and still have fun. Let's face it, not everyone wants to grind to become a pro gamer. Some folks just want to relax and enjoy the game without feeling constantly outmatched. AI aim assist, if implemented well, might create a more balanced playing field where everyone can have a good time. (Example of an AI assist: Aimmy)
Sure, as long as they stay exlusively in their own lobbies.
You are right when you say that not everyone wants to grind a game, but that's no excuse for giving yourself an edge over those who want.
Competitiveness needs fairplay or simple fun, even when loosing, automatically turns to frustration.
@@MichaelNROH You're hitting the nail on the head here. Competitive gaming presents a unique challenge when it comes to addressing cheating. Some players prioritize efficiency above all else, often at the expense of fair play. It's a reality that competitive gaming grapples with, where the term "competitive" can sometimes be synonymous with exploiting any available advantage.
Trying to dissuade players from cheating in such an environment is no easy feat. For many, time is a precious commodity, and spending hours honing skills in a game can feel like an inefficient use of it. The stress and frustration that come with intense training can often overshadow the enjoyment of the game itself.
That said, promoting a balanced approach is crucial. Instead of outright condemning aggressive cheating, advocating for cheats that align with the standards of professional gameplay, such as AI aim assist programs, could potentially create a more level playing field. These tools offer a way for players to enhance their performance without resorting to blatantly unfair tactics.
By encouraging the use of cheats that emulate the behavior of professional players, we can foster a more respectful and enjoyable competitive environment for everyone involved. It's about finding a middle ground where players can still pursue excellence without compromising the integrity of the game.
you cab use kvm and hyperv in combination and a few mods in the config file of kvm/qemo to play in linux but its wayy too complicated
So anti-cheat companies can work with windows kernel but don't want make their own linux-anticheat kernel?
That's because "theoretical", the Windows Kernel should be inaccessible to Cheat-Makers and Microsoft takes responsibility for that.
On Linux, you can't really blame anyone, if someone just recompiles the Kernel. So the question is, why keep maintaining Kernel-Support for a small portion of gamers, when almost everything is open to Cheaters?
With growing gaming numbers, Kernel support will follow, however it probably won't be much more effective against "Know-Hows".
The problem with cheater are (1) more to the culture of the players themselves and (2) the lack of repercussion from the act of cheating. For (1), i have some story. In my teenage days, i do use cheat on a rhythm game out of the FOMO when all my friends have all the items from the hard difficulty limited time event challenge, and i still don't have it. I don't have pc in my home and have no internet at that time, i can only play on shady internet cafe that i can bypass to install the cheat engine, but it is costly by each hour for teenage with only daily pocket allowance. For teen that time, where flexing their "pro"-ness with this kind of limited event item is quite a big deal, cheat become their way to get them without sacrificing the "time". And this kind of behavior is almost like addiction, one of my friend still use cheat in a lot of games, even though he have time to play, have a good job and somewhat good social life; yet we already near 30. I can bet you, 80% of the adult player that cheat follow the same story in their teenage days. For me, i only see the decline of cheater after my generation, where the act of enjoying the game with your friend is the norm rather than gaming to flex against your friend. That is why I understand why cheater still exist in my current time, but does not mean I agree with cheating.
For (2), it simply quite hard to find the balance, especially on the Free 2 Play game. For subscription based games like WOW, you can just perma ban, so "money" is the cost of the act of cheating. But I find the "punished by law" is threading the thin line. Should I be punished by law simply by doing my hobby but not in the same way with everyone else? For analogy, should I be punished by law to use tomato ketchup rather than making tomato sauce for making pizza in my kitchen? I know it is a horrible way, but should i get punished by law? On the other hand, you can argue, that cheater hinder other person enjoyment of the game, but does this affect other player primary life? Not easy, but being punished by law kind of a lazy way of some game company from being unable to properly handle player report from the player. I know dealing with player report is labor intensive, and I get it that not all report can be human reviewed. But some big company seems like just don't want the hassle even though they have the resource, and this "punished by law" threat might promote this kind of behavior from game companies. That is why it is good that the act of cheating is punishable by law, but you can't just willy nilly create it without further studies on how to deal with cheater and what kind of punishment can be enforced to cheater; which gaming is not a primary needs of a human, so the studies for this kind of law ends up as not an URGENT issue and either delay the law being implemented, or the law not properly written and poorly implemented.
I really like your statements, even though I find it very interesting how people "slip" into cheating.
I myself somewhat come from the opposite side, whereas if I were to start cheating, I would just embarrass myself on local coop. Plus, maybe playing mainly on a console further set that mindset.
The second point is kind of hard. Enforced by law does not mean punishements like prison or something like that. I mean, this is technically breaking a contract that they signed and they can be made responsible for losses if players stop playing after facing them.
This is something that can happen at any point, since Cheaters signed the contract that they won't cheat and revenue loss lawsuits do exist.
Can get very expensive, but the company decides if they want to sue or not. It's not controlled by the state or country is what I'm saying
@@MichaelNROH From what i observe from some of my friends, rather than get embarrassed, they just admit it they use cheat when asked and move on. When it comes to coop or partying up, what quite embedded in their brain is "My friend is platinum, and i don't have time to get there in time when he ask me to party up next week, so lets get it on", These kind of cheaters usually not cheat when you play party on competitive type of game (ranked, mmr, etc), and only cheat when play solo.
Looking at the the paragraph above, "addiction" might be too much, but for cheater in my example, cheating becomes something "hardwired" to the brain. When you want something from the game, most player think if they have the time, should they clear some schedule, ask to be carried, but cheating is kinda a "sins", while for the cheater in my example, cheating just a method they can just use as if it is something normal (even though they personally know it is wrong). The moral brakes when they consider to cheat just not there compared to normal player.
Nothing like giving giant coporations the more options to charge you with a crime. The only way they identify you is using your redit card information and if you want to get around it just use anonymized payments. And then if you force people to de-anonymized themselves you're getting people who want to keep their personal data out of big corporations.
Its just all dumb. Instead of making client side anticheat they should make it server side. That be way more secure too. You can like hide player locations and only show them when they should be visible. Wallhacks cant work then for example. Or follow how somoen aims and figure out if someone uses aimbot. But they wont, because its more work. Instead I have to use a client side anticheat, which I dont know what it does but has full access of my system. Also that client side anticheat runs on a untrusted plantform. It can be modified, bypassed, edited and so on.
Some server side Anti-Cheats do exist, however they face a lot of problems.
For once the processing power and therefore the cost of running several game instances becomes more expensive.
Another thing is latency. If you shoot at an enemy, the server has to calculate the chances of being legit, and this takes time. On the client's side it's much faster since everything got processed already.
I am SURE this is possible but it's just one of those things that companies won't pour in any money researching for because it's just cheaper to keep going with the current system.
In my opnion just use qemu with gpu passtrough if you have a dedicated gpu or an igpu with gvt-g/sr-lov or just use vmware 3d acerlation if you only have a igpu without gvt-g or sr-lov its the second best thing to gpu passtrough only diffrence is that it cant run dx12
The problem is not the compatibility most of the time, but just the Anti-Cheats. A VM won't resolve this since many ACs detect virtual machines and ban your account because of that.
Yeah it takes alot of effort to trick your vm into thinking its not a vm almost to much effort honestly im pretty sure compiling gento 3 times would be easier then doing this dualbooting would be way easier but honestly i really dont want to have to run closed source anti cheat witch has full accses to my cumputer from a coropration im just really concious about my kernal and whats going in there alot of malware exploit kernal anti cheats and bypass firewalls running it in a virutal mechine is more secure but most of the time if all your doing is playing video games you probbaly wont get hacked i gues im just really paranoid about my kernel@@MichaelNROH
Linux User = Anything that require ring 0 access to my OS Kernel in order for me to run it is a red line!
Make players run the games in a container and stream the processed video data to the host machine.
well if i am not mistaken , the idea of you getting in trouble for cheatting will be implemented very soon by microsoft after their acquirement of Blizzard , they were saying that there could be legal consecueses for cheatting in a game or even fines so let's see how that develops.
I followed a video of someone who played Crossout on the Steam Deck which surprised me because almost everyone on gaming forums are struggling hard to try to play this game in Linux. So I was wondering why exactly the Steam Deck makes things easier than a gaming oriented Linux Distro and if I have to believe Lenovo's statement regarding Steam, Steam OS use DRM. Is it the reason why Steam doesn't want to make their OS available? I am not sure for now but I have to say that VM is something I might look into if that can help me to play the few games I can't run with Linux Mint. 🤔
I think the reason on why Valve hasn't released Steam OS 3 for regular PCs is, that they have troubles with certain Hardware. An example of this would be Gamscope and NVIDIA, which doesn't play nicely.
Who says kernel level anti cheat works. Even firmware level(bios level) security feature like secure boot and hardware level(tpm2) security feature sucks in term of blocking cheats/hacks. And on top of that there are three or may be four type of cheating techniques that can never be detected. Those techniques include use of sbc like raspberry pi or Arduino. And cheaters are doing that.
Battle eye don't work on console because lot player use xim or zen on xbox en ps5
These issues are not just with linux
im just wanna play on my steamdeck
How about the anticheat company making their own linux kernel?
It wouldn't really do anything as they would need to still open source everything besides their proprietary Anti Cheat "blackbox".
Same results
The program have full access to you PC. The first linux cultists is worrying about is to companies will see their secret data(furry collection), lol
It's funny, I was around back in the day of dedicated servers, and we never saw this many cheat problems. I wonder why. I wonder what it was about those older games that made cheating less prevalent? Like could it be the MASSIVE PREDATORY MONETISATION WHICH IS THE UNDERLYING CAUSE and not the cheating?
Nahh, not really.
I believe it just took some time for cheat makers to advertise themselves (money) and due to the growth of streaming services, more people feel bad if they can't keep up with the pros.
The growth of the internet is essentially the growth of cheat sellers and consumers as well.
@@MichaelNROH Games being paid for and popular / good servers being well moderated meant cheaters were quickly taken care of -- they still existed but could be banned quickly, so it wasn't much fun to cheat. Because these companies now monetise in-game, and because there are monetary incentives to cheat, they need to do their own moderation and the problem is now much worse. I think anti-cheat is just DRM with reputation laundering built in.
Thanks for replying to my comment, I'm a recent subscriber and your videos are excellent.
Easy: Old games were simpler.
Also, people expect more and more from video games, but the number of developers working on a game can't be scaled infinitely, which causes more time pressure and more mistakes to happen.
My Only "Gaming Lifehack"on Linux is Choose a Distro Very Liteweight and Play Ruinnows Games on a Virtual Machine...Otherwise = Use Android on Big Screen....Or Buy a Playstation.
Running Windows in a VM is not the way to go, espececially when the problem is related to Anti-Cheat.
Using VM's is bannable if detected
but one thing, if you cheat, you wont feel satisfied, asif you played normally
You can develop a widely used closed source kernel module for Linux you know. Nvidia does it....
Sure, but that still won't prevent people from easily disguising cheats as drivers
@@MichaelNROH and it would stop those as well as it does on windows because it has parity access level to any spoofed driver modules or w/e. Basically then we will be a feature parity with windows and able to be supported like windows.
Honestly, I think the solution to this is to just abandon anti cheats entirely and come up with new ways to curb cheaters.
A great example are systems that valve implements, such as overwatch, and also just canceling matches mid game if the server senses something fishy.
Most people cheating in online games, once again, are typically windows users. It's far easier to get nexus mods running on Windows than it is on Linux.
That's because most people use Windows. If Linux had the same amount of people and Windows was the opposite, then the story would look quite different
@@MichaelNROH i mean... thats the point?
i mean, sure nexus mods will become simpler to use over time on linux, but who's to say that anticheat wont get better as well as time goes on?
I prefer vac over other anticheats so it isn't a big issue for me but i get that it sucks for the people who want something more effective. 🙂
I'm really not sure about if VAC actually works or if it is even improved upon.
From all of the people that got banned iN my CS:GO matches (forgot where to look that up), I believe that the majority got banned with their Overwatch system (People reviewing the game), not VAC itself.
A ban also needs to happen ingame and not after a while.
@@MichaelNROH yeah lot of people get banned by overwatch system. Vac isn't very effective at banning.
@@MichaelNROH i think they may have started using some new anticheat system in csgo cus i hear there are lot of bans recently and it doesn't seem to be just a normal vac wave. I think they may have automated the process of adding new cheat to vac so it will ban those cheats if it sees it cus previously i think they had to add those manually.
should we back to Windows? but games Support linux slowly
I won't go back to Windows until I absolutely have too.
If I play games on Windows, then telemetry data is telling game devs that I prefer to play on Windows. That's why I will continue to play everything on Linux
Destiny has anti - cheat but still full of cheaters.. Strange..
Not very well researched, sorry...
One example is that one scene showing the use of the different rings claiming rings 1 and 2 to be used for drivers is just... wrong. In fact, CPU manufacturers are thinking of REMOVING Rings 1 and 2 because they aren't even used by ANY relevant operating system these days! All drivers run in Ring 0 on Kernels like Windows NT and Linux, and on Microkernels they run in Ring 3.
There are tons of other technical details that you got wrong some even invalidating your points.
However I DO agree that all anti-cheat games should support Linux somehow, specially because, well... I only run Linux, exclusively. You won't ever see a Windows system running on my PC outside a virtual machine.
as a cheater is so fun lol
You should've talked about server-side anti-cheat solutions, like with Overwatch. I think it doesn't have a client-side anti-cheat and there are no cheaters nor problems running it on Linux.
Client-side anti-cheats are just a cat & mouse game and I don't know why Blizzard is the only AAA-developer that can code game servers.
The kernel driver anti-cheat from Genshin Impact was even used to disable antivirus and cheat in other games xD
Server side Anti-Cheats are not ready for deployment. Such servers need more processing power, but also guruantee a good latency.
A game like Valorant or CS:GO with a higher tick rate (64 - 128) should not feel like a 16 tick game because the Anti-Cheat takes too long to calculate 10 players at once.
@@MichaelNROH But they also shouldn't be inaccessible to people who don't want to run Windows... meh. I know this argument sucks. But still lol
regardless its just microsoft doing this so they can make more money in the long run so other users have no choice but stick with windows only why? because users want to play games, Linux is about to be to a dead end for alot of games very soon. then Linux will only be for those that only want to do graphic design or linux to be used as for Buiness owners that dont want to spend money or use for office. or watch movies or youtube videos thats it. even steam is going to have to probably drop support because of microsoft pushing these new proceedures on kernal levels
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