Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

For a casual CS server the ratio could perfectly be 1:50 and that'd be fine. That's how it used to be with, i.e., CS:Source.

Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which lowered the ratio even further.

IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller forums (be it web communities or game server communities) than to do for huge ones.

I never ran a server back in the day but I still benefitted from community run servers where decisions about banning were done by volunteer admins. These days with centralized servers it has to be automated.

Kernel anticheat is not really effective because it can be circumvented on the hardware level, for example using direct memory access with a second computer and screen to show the hidden game state.

Cheating is a meat space problem and there is no technical solution to it. Thats why in tournaments there are referees standing behind the players. Ultimately it comes down to checking if metrics like reaction speed are humanly possible, but a rootkit is not really needed for that.

Imagine wanting tivoization. Horrifying.

If you play older games, Linux ironically works better than windows now for stability. The only game I have seen any issues with (note I don't really play multiplayer much) is the Harry Potter game, but proton eventually fixed that.

The user-level cheats are extremely bad. For example, Elden Ring uses EZ Anti-Cheat and it works on linux and that game is infested with PvP cheaters.

Many people have one or more Discord groups where someone will say "let's play Valorant tonight" and then everyone just installs it. Linux is fantastic for local gaming on a handheld or in the living room, not so much when your non-Linux friends pick the game.

It does mean that a signed OS image is running, so demonstrates that the kernel was unaltered at start-up.

It also demonstrates further levels of driver signing robustness.

> So you aren't breaking any laws of physics, you are just able to make much better tactical decisions.

With respect I'd like to disagree on this subtly. A lot of games have the client send their cursor position at relatively frequent updates/packages (i.e. sub-second). So the server knows pretty precisely in which direction and to which object a player is looking.

This in turn can be readily used upon when using wall-hacks, as most players, who use wall-hacks tend to almost faithfully follow objects behind walls with their cursor, which good moderators can usually spot within a few seconds, when reviewing such footage (source: I was involved in recognizing Wall-Hacks in Minecraft, where players would replace textures, to easily find and mine diamonds underground).

Fuck me, this makes everything make sense... how did we end up here?

Based on the latest report from Dice/EA/BF6, seems indeed like they're detecting hardware-based cheating as well: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2807960/view/4972134...

Although who knows, they might be outright lying about that just to scare cheaters, but I tend to default to assuming what they're saying is more or less true.

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Often because of cross play.

The games have ToS though right?

Bad excuse, they could rely on Steam ToS for example.

AIUI you can do it, but you risk the Switch you got the data from being banned.

How do you stop a client-side wallhack with server side anti-cheat?

From the top of my head: Rocket league, Splatoon.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the 2 I play

Madden and NBA2K

Some kinds of cheating can be mitigated that way, but it can't really stop cheats which just play the game more optimally than the user is able to, using the same inputs and outputs that a legit player would use. Aim assistance in shooters, automatic parries in fighting games, economy-breaking levels of automation in MMOs, and so on.

There's also practical limits to how much data you can filter out in complex 3D games, both due to performance constraints, and because culling information too perfectly can cause things to pop into existence too late under real-world network latency. The effectiveness of ESP cheats can be reduced, but not eliminated in practice.

However, this only solves the cheat problem to a minimal extent. There is a lot of important data that players should not be directly aware of, but which is important for the game. For example, it is important for calculating sounds to know where enemies are nearby, even though you cannot see them, which makes wall hacks possible, etc.

This is not how it works, most games that take cheating seriously already have a gameserver where most of the gameplay logic happen.

Doing everything server side does prevent cheating.

That only solves half of the cheating problem - illegal inputs from clients.

The other half is much harder to solve. For a simple example - my client knows that there is an enemy player around a corner. It knows exactly where that player is, because that player is walking, and making noise. A cheats could allow the cheater to see his opponent's player's model through the wall.

For a more blatant example, consider cheats in a first-person shooter that just snap your aim to the nearest enemy's head. This involves zero violation of the game's logic, and also makes the game completely unplayable for everyone in a lobby.

> giving up some control over your own system

There could simply be a developer option that disables these integrity checks but subsequently breaks online games that rely on them. Valve could also offer a module that allows signed user-space binaries access to kernel space, which would be an improvement over Windows offers in that anti-cheat wouldn't need to live in the kernel.

I think that's a fine trade off.

You don't need a full distro, you can just run the game in a VM sandbox with trusted computing extensions alongside whatever distro you want. That breaks cheats that rely on network/memory inspection, you can still cheat using the raw pixel output to drive faked input, but I don't think the loop is closeable there.

Could reboot into secure mode for these types of games.

It works on Windows by essentially rooting the machine. MS holds control of a bunch of stuff because they hold the signing keys. It’s fundamentally incompatible with open source.

Yes and no. I agree the only thing that can be reliable is server side.

However that means that anything based on reaction times and such is impossible to protect against (under reasonable conditions). At the end of the day you can always have a robot sitting at your desk. But there is steps to that. You can have something that highlights enemies, etc., you can have something that controls keyboard and mouse (maybe inside a VM, so you don't need hardware) and so on. You can reverse engineer packet encryption in a debugger (in most situations) and have something on the network messing with stuff and so on.

So in that regard, yes you can prevent everything you can prevent on the server, but you cannot prevent every sort of cheating on the server.

Everything that has rounds basically can be prevented (other than again a bot playing).

Everything that is complex to automate is better, but might just make cheating more "worthwhile".

The other thing you can do on the server is "dumb cheat" detection. Eg. the odds of someone being consistently as good at a game and such. Statistics like that is widespread and doesn't need any change on the client.

It doesn’t have to be 100%. The point is to make it inconvenient. The majority of people will not do it if it is inconvenient.

Thats the point to many things in life that you just make it more difficult and most people won’t be bothered to attempt to circumvent whatever it is.

There will still be circumventers but it is will be less than if you just said fuck it.

Correct. E.g. you can aimbot by routing the video signal to a capture card on a separate computer and run image recognition software to generate mouse movements spoofed at the hardware level. The only way to reliably prevent cheating is with in-person tournaments played on hardware provided by the organizers.

The best way is to just make private servers, so people can play with their friends and not have to worry about random players. This also solves the issue of people using.... language thats not acceptable in games.

CSGO has actual humans watch replays to determine whether people were cheating, it's called overwatch. As can be seen, it doesn't actually stop cheating, at most it ensures that blatant ones are banned after the fact already happened.

IMO the real solution is back in community servers and votekicking.. It works on old games with no anticheat measures..

Maybe add some blatant detection for people teleporting and doing other absolutely impossible things serverside, but I don't understand why my team has to ruin their 'reputation' teamkilling a cheater so he doesn't ruin the game completely in most current games when the anticheat only catches free, old cheats. Just let people votekick and find someone else in the matchmaking queue who's willing to join halfway through.. Once votekicked enough times you can escalate to the AI (always indians) for automated (manual) review.

Also, you don't even have to ban cheaters. Just isolate them to play with each other. Some might find it fun and keep away from the normal players.

Edit: The 'issue' with community server manual review and votekick is you can be kicked for being cracked or garbage at the game legitimately, but TBH at this point you're ruining the fun of everyone else, so you should probably get in another server/match.. Also that premades can have majority, but that's easily solved by reducing their vote weight.

You can’t prevent wall hacks with only server side anti cheat. The client needs that data locally before the enemy is rendered on screen.

As mentioned in another comment, you can’t do this on the server without expensive checks for every single player that is always checking line of sight, because it’s not just your session running on a single server but multiple sessions.

And let’s say you did this, now you have a latency problem because most modern games to make them feel fluid has client side prediction with server reconciliation. This is what makes your modern games feel more responsive, if you put a constant server check there you have lost this.

No matter what people say online, it isn’t just move all of it to the server, there is data the client needs to know and can’t be spoonfed by the server.

I think it’s an organization accountability issue.

Why would a company pay for anti cheat infrastructure when they can outsource it to some company and blame them if there are cheaters or upset users? Windows is the status quo too, so it’s very easy to point to everyone else when justifying your choice to the execs.

It would be great if steam deck+box start costing studios quantifiable amounts of money that can be used to justify fixing this instead of outsourcing and hand waving.

> The idea that any (currently realistic) cheat prevention is unbypassable is silly.

The idea that anti-cheats don't make sense because they don't catch 100% of the cheaters is what's silly, who believes that? Not even the people writing these anti-cheats believe catching 100% of them are possible, why are you under the assumption that others think that's possible?

If it removes 80% of the cheaters from the game, the experience goes from "Holy shit lets leave" to "Ok, bothersome, but fine", this is what they're reaching for, not some fantasy utopia that you seem to be under the impression is the target.

Overwatch (1 and 2) had/have an avoid system, but it only avoids as teammate. Overwatch 1 use to at the very beginning have a system to avoid a player as a whole and they wouldn't be matched in your game at all, but that was remove really early on, as it is easily abusable against good player (I don't want them on the enemy team, they are too good so just get rid of them entirely) and there was a report system anyway for other kinda bad stuff.

Then there is just the endorsement system, which is just a level from 1-5 and you can endorse people you liked playing with. It doesn't really do much in matchmaking but you can't do certain things if you are below a certain level (I forgot what all it was but you can't make (public?) custom games if you are too low and I think text and voice chat could also get disabled if you are too low).

Pretty sure the commendation system in CS is just for looks, as it can be easily gamed.

> The idea of someone rating me, or rating someone else makes me anxious.

But not enough to avoid, as you’re here.

I think it’s more anonymized like “did you enjoy the game with this team (1-5)”

No, I just assumed things would change a lot.