Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton
areweanticheatyet.com306 points by doener 2 days ago
306 points by doener 2 days ago
Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers.
It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% solve the problem.
This isn't the reason.
The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today.
And cheating is an arms race. It's just hacking. You either preserve game integrity or you're going to have cheaters.
We lost a lot of other things as well. Like modding and especially maps.
It doesn't matter how good the game developers are, someone out there is could make a better map.
The studios took control of everything, and their answer is to rootkit our computers, and to buy more DLC if we want another map.
Personally, I don't accept the premise that such studio control is necessary for me to have fun playing a game.
I especially miss custom maps.
This has nothing to do with anti-cheat. I work on Rust and most servers are hosted by the community and there is a good modding+custom map scene. The game has an anti-cheat because it's a big target for cheaters.
Do you work on community maps?
Rust remains maybe the last true community game that's just solid all the way through where the studio is good to its players and doesn't patronize and betray them. I can have the sort of fun I would have had 20 years ago in Rust, and everything else feels like monocultural slop by comparison.
I wish more of my friends wanted to play it, and wish I had more time for it.
No, I don't work on maps, I work for Facepunch. Thanks :)
Then I wish nothing but good fortune for you and the crew and hope the game continues forever!
Too bad rust isn’t playable on linux due to anticheat.
Rust is playable on Linux on servers that disable anticheat
Implying that Linux gamers have to play with cheaters. It may as well not be playable at all.
Actually it kind of works out because cheaters want to play with people who aren't cheating. The few servers that run with anti-cheat disabled would have small communities that aren't attractive to cheaters.
This is the truth of it. If you can unlock all the on-disc DLC or create and use your own maps, mods, skins, etc. it risks the money companies want to take from you after you've already paid the $60-$80 for the incomplete game itself.
Anti-cheat is about protecting DLC profits as much as it is anything else.
It's a shame too because we got so much good content from random people who just loved the games and wanted to create neat things for them. It was one way that some people started their careers in the video game industry and it spawned a lot of other websites and communities around sharing, reviewing, and creating all that free content.
There are hundreds of popular games with mod support. See https://mod.io/g
If anything, we are in a golden age of mods!
Not really. A huge number of players are on consoles that have little to no support for mods and games today have too many centralized online servers and companies who keep insisting on control over your local PC which means that game companies can decide what mods you can and cannot have on your system.
There was a time when the concept of "banned mods" only ever applied to a specific server out of countless other servers and locally you could do anything you wanted, even run your own server.
Make a list of all game genres and modes that sprung out of player modification
I agree with you in sentiment and am very nostalgic for the pre-monoculture days, but I also acknowledge that competitive games are a multi-billion dollar industry, and trying to moderate a game with millions of players in a distributed environment is just a non-starter.
You reject the premise that such control is necessary for your idea of fun.
But millions of players enjoy ranked matchmaking enough that without aggressive anti cheat you will wind up with cheaters.
I hate the root kits as well, but if you spend any time playing Valorant vs CS, you will see the difference. If I play CS consistently I'll get cheaters once or twice a week. In Valorant it's almost unheard of by comparison. It sucks, but that's just what's happening.
Do I wish I at least had the option in Valorant or whatever to host a server? Absolutely. Do I think they use the rootkits maliciously? No, generally not. Do I think studios are disincentivized to provide server hosting due to DLC or microtransactions? Definitely. But I also think there's often also a game integrity component. All of these things can be true simultaneously.
> The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today.
Case in point, Counter Strike is a rare example of a popular game which supports both the "modern" matchmaking paradigm and the classic community server paradigm... and for better or worse the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking.
> and the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking
The server browser is buried under a couple layers of obtuse menus (and, at present, is completely broken on my SteamOS machine) while matchmaking is obvious and straightforward. You cannot come to any reasonable conclusions about player preference given the way the UI drives players towards matchmaking and away from servers. If they were presented on equal footing you might have a point.
Consider also TF2. It launched as a server-based game, and in the years after matchmaking was added Valve went through many UX iterations designed to drive traffic to it before it was more popular.
Counter Strike makes matchmaking far more prominent than community servers, so I don't think this is that good of an example. For a game like Team Fortress 2 where the options are presented more equally, It seems the players are closer to a 50/50 split. The reality is that most people follow the light patterns that get them in a game, which most modern multiplayer games make that matchmaking.
> can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today
I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which have less of a cheating problem to begin with.
I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without centralization, if only because centralization is exactly where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense. Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least.
That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.
Yeah, this is pretty clear. The community for any competitive game if you are a member of the top 100 players is always amazing. These players play the most, they end of seeing each other over and over, and you build up a rapport with the other players and can start to play against specific peoples play-styles.
However, for the vast vast majority of the player-base who is top 50% in skill, the fat normal distribution nearly guarantees that most of the people they play against will never be seen again. And therefore there is no harm for them not to be toxic to them, so most people only ever experience toxicity in online competitive games.
Server browser games solve this because players end up with "home" servers where they come back to over and over, and over time build communities who do the same. This was taken away from the players when we moved to matchmaking, and many in the player-base have a bias against matchmaking because of it.
But this is in no way required, and merely a result of gaming companies to do any work on this front. It would be extremely easy for these games to add an arbitrary community tag to the matchmaker that would attempt to put people in games with players that they have not previously reported. The matchmaker might take a little bit more time, but since these players are in the fat normal distribution, their average matchmaking times will still be incredibly low.
WRT player stats and rankings: I'm inclined to disagree. Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy. Matchmaking often ends up constrained by the number of online players searching for a game at the same time, so the teams may not be well balanced, and the outcome of the match can be decided by the presence of a single highly skilled player who happened to be searching for a match at the right moment. The resulting rankings aren't necessarily a good measure of player skill.
Larger games have the luxury of being able to place players into teams consisting entirely of other players of similar skill levels, against teams of similar composition. The results of those games are a better reflection of those players' skill.
> Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy.
PP wasn't talking about ranking stability. PP was talking about the "Why should I give a shit about the leaderboard when ten million people play the game, and I'm someone with life obligations that aren't 'playing this game, exclusively', so I'm always in the middle of a sea of strangers because I can never git particularly gud?".
You might argue that the solution to that is to have separate rankings for folks in your friends' (or whatever) list, and I agree... but I'd get the same thing as filtered-to-friends-only leaderboards with leaderboards that are restricted to the population of players on the private servers on which I play. Plus, private servers give you the option to benefit from active admins who ban cheaters and other shitheels forever. [0]
[0] Or encourage them to cheat and be godawful, if that's the sort of server that they want to run. All-cheats-all-the-time and/or vent-your-spleen-24/7 servers are fun, too... just so long as folks are informed of what they're getting into by joining.
How did it work in the early Steam (CS 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, CS:S) and GameSpy days?
I think a big part of it is the stakes were just lower. There wasn't money and careers in it the same way there is with egaming now.
Are the stakes not still zero? Aren't like 99.9% of players not at all competitive in any meaningful sense basically by definition? Like if Counter-Strike has 1M active players, and you are in the 99.9%-ile, you are still only in the top 1,000. Do people watch the rank 1000 players? Are they making a career out of it? What fraction of the player-base thinks they are actually competitive vs. is just playing a game?
I actually think a big part of this anti-cheat push is just developers wanting their players to think something real is at stake. Yes we put a ton of effort into protecting your very important Elo score from hackers so you confidently sink hours into improving it.
If they would just let the cheaters win their way up the ranks, they could have their own little cheater lobbies and we wouldn’t have to deal with them.
Right, this is also my suspicion. It's all ultimately a way to psychologically manipulate people into buying more microtransactions. It's then important to always point out how silly and obvious the whole thing is. It's like if your local sports organization at the park insisted on drug testing everyone so they can try to convince you your beer league volleyball game is actually very serious and you should buy Air Jordans or fancy shorts to up your game. These people are a joke.
For some games like dota 2 cheats only make them marginally better at the game but much more frustrating to play against. The most common cheats are map hacks and instant action scripts both of which can be useless without the game knowledge for correct play. But both of these cheats make playing against them frustrating but they wouldn't rise to the top.
Again I think there’s a better way if we push through the concept of a fair game, and just focus on fun. It should be possible and accepted to block (and never match with going forward) players who are just… unfun. Annoying, poor sports, or cheaters. Heck, maybe player-curated and shared matching and blocking lists could become a thing.
Games are a social thing we do to have fun, there’s no obligation to spend your limited social free time hanging out with annoying people.
The problem is the reverse of what is being argued here. The stakes are high because of how much money these companies are making off of DLCs/in-app purchases. The game operator thus has an incentive to ensure that high value customers can't be banned by third parties. Instead of just being banned, the player is suspended 24 hours or something, and then they come back.
Came here to find this comment. It is NOT about matchmaking and/or "protecting the incomes" of competitive players AT ALL! It is solely about protecting these games' in-game shops and associated economies. The real comp scenes are all done on LAN anyway, with entirely different anti-cheat setups.
I think it’s streaming in particular. With actual competitive games, like, tournaments and whatnot, the players are well known and they are competing in actual tournaments, right? The play is broadcast and all the players have their professional game-player reputation at stake, so there’s a strong incentive to not cheat (it is a very cushy and high-skill job with almost no transferable skills, so like, better not get booted). It is just that streamers might bump into cheating and that’s annoying for their viewers I guess.
When people play in these “competitive” matchmaking queues, it is more like a pickup game. If somebody shows up to a pickup baseball game with a corked bat, they are just kind of a loser and it isn’t a big deal, right? There’s no actual reward for hitting “platinum rank” or whatever in most games, other than skins or something. Nothing real is on the line.
IMO: we really should just have let these people cheat their way out of the normal matchmaking population. Smurfing is a much bigger problem. I don’t actually care if the guy dominating the match with some 60:0 kill-death-ratio is cheating or a semi-pro beating up on casuals, haha.
More distributed and more manual. More administrative overhead. More localized culture we all get nostalgic for. Much more effort to play against peer competitors.
It's the same phenomenon you see in many sectors.
Access is democratized and the friction/barrier to play is dramatically lowered/free, and the localization is diluted or non existent and just a monoculture.
PunkBuster and later VAC were commonplace. Anti-cheat middleware is not new by any stretch.
People are still playing Battlefield 4 (2013) on user-hosted servers. Right now.
The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping, and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of servers by ping.
Cheating is an arms race that no one needs to participate in. Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.
What, 2000 players? 5000?
Moderating that game is multiple orders of magnitude off of major titles.
No Battlefield game is even in the top 100 of esports earnings.
My point is that player-moderation scales, while corporate moderation does not. The fact that there are more players on corporate moderated servers only makes this reality more significant.
I wouldn't measure anticheat success by esports earning
It's clearly one significant measure. What do you think is going to happen to tournament money if every other tournament has a cheater? How many esports fans want to go play League after watching Faker decimate another team if they have cheaters in their match every other day?
What it tells you most of all is popularity and incentive to cheat. Cast a big enough net and you'll inevitably find cheaters. The bigger the net, the more cheaters you'll collect.
> Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat.
Does it though? Unless winning has real-world rewards, does it really matter that much if you are playing against someone who is cheating, if with cheating, they are evenly matched against you? Assuming the matchmaking works well, people who cheat would end up getting matched with either other people who cheat, or people who are good enough to compete against cheaters.
Not sure how to understand these questions. Have you ever played in a competitive game of any type, virtual or real?
A cheater isn't evenly matched against you. No one is good enough to compete against wallhacks/aimbots, never mind that it shouldn't matter. It ruins the experience, ruins games, ruins the spirit of competition and sport.
This argument is that the match-making software is incompetent. If what you say is true, and the match-maker could determine skill with any ability, then the cheaters would quickly find that the only people they match-make with is other cheaters. The non-cheaters don't care that the cheaters exist if they never play against them.
Two reasons this doesn't work
Most competitive games these days are free to play. A cheater gets banned, makes a new account, and gets placed on the competitive ladder level of a new player, and stomps their way up the ladder against unskilled players until they get banned, and repeat.
For players that cheat less egregiously and don't get banned, it's still obvious many times when someone has no skill but is using cheating as some form of assistance. It's not fun to play against a player who has a similar K/D ratio as you because they suck at aiming but can see through walls, or because they can instantly headshot people but have bad positional awareness or understanding of other game objectives like capture points etc.
It's like telling a high level chess player that playing against a child with poor chess knowledge but they're allowed to just ignore checks and flick your pieces off the board is similar to playing against an equally skilled non-cheating player just because they're capable of beating you only 50% of the time. A victory doesn't feel earned, a loss doesn't feel like an actionable learning experience.
The problem here appears to be the banning. If the cheaters are never banned then they will continue to only play with other cheaters, and everyone is happy. And in fact, to a normal player I doubt they care very much if the player is legit and smurfing or if they are not legit and cheating. That player ruins the game they are in.
The ranking system needs to be a better determinate of skill, especially early in a new accounts life, so that they can stop harming normal players games. This might mean changes to the rules of a game to allow this to be done better. The match-maker should take this into account, so that if a player does go up against a player that was far from the skill level that they end up at, it should protect that account from being placed with new players for a time so that they can forget about it.
For the example you choose for Chess, you might force players to do Chess Puzzles before they can queue for their first match. A normal player would then never see any cheaters.
Cheaters don't want to play against other cheaters. If they end up against only cheaters that's a kind of soft-ban or shadow-ban and once they figure out that's the case they'll do the same steps as if you had actually banned them. It also angers legitimate players to know that the top ladder tier is for cheaters only. If you're 200th in the world and legitimate, other players will say you only got that rank through cheating.
And the very best cheaters are still good at the games they cheat in, they just want to use cheats to be even better. One famous example in a game I play is Riolu in Trackmania. He was probably one of the top 10 players in the world. But he wanted to be #1. When he was accused of cheating it took a mountain of evidence for anyone to believe the accusations because he could set a world record live in-person. He just used cheats to be able to do it with fewer attempts.
Riolu is a uniquely terrible example. While he used Cheat Engine to slow down gameplay, he could have just as easily used TAS to record and replay his inputs since TrackMania is deterministic. This is still possible today. This will always be possible even with Kernel level anti-cheats.
I'll note here that the work that Nadeo has done on the matchmaking aspect is in line with what I'm thinking and should be expanded throughout the online gaming space. A division 10 COTD player will never see a cheater. If cheaters do show up, as they commonly do in Weekly Shorts leaderboards, the community ignores it. Their region leaderboards do a much better job than typical games of bringing the community together and they promote continuity. When top players smurf COTD on a new name, the community sniffs it out within the hour. TM doesn't need anti-cheat.
Did you played in this era ?
- If you were too good on some server, you'd get banned.
- If the admin doesn't know well cheating, he could tolerate something that was obvious cheating.
- Cheaters could just change server often.
It used to be easy to just ban peoples yes, and it was as easy to switch servers.
Plus on most competitive game today, you have custom lobbies, which do exactly what you want, and there is a reason why only a minority of players uses it.
Custom lobbies don't meet the same need. That's for playing with your friends, or at least, people you vet yourself. Community servers are a sub-community in of themselves: people tend to play on the same servers on a regular basis, allowing you to build rapport, community norms, and have substantially more direct moderation than company-run servers.
Yes, sometimes you run into power-tripping moderators. That comes with the territory of having moderators. But the upsides, of being embedded in a usefully-sized community, and having nearly constant human moderation, not to mention the whole "stop killing games" of it all, far outweigh the need to shop around a bit for a good server.
I think the ideal middle ground is something like Squad's server system: The developers offer a contract to server owners, establishing basic standards that must be met to be a recommended server. Rules forbidding the crazy bigotry that milsims tend to attract, minimum server specs to ensure smooth gameplay, an effective appeals process. If a server meets those requirements, and signs the agreement to keep meeting those standards, they get put on a "recommended" server list (which 90%+ of the playerbase exclusively use). Other servers go on the "custom" server list, which can be modded, or spun up for certain events, or whatever.
two or three months ago, I played a game that did exactly what you proposed, V-Rising, it have a server browser, I played a week with friend on a busy server. Then the server was gone for two weeks. When it was back, mosts of the bases were gone due to inactivity.
That's the kind of things that were common too, maybe you forgot about it.
All the multiplayer games I play today are either community server based, or I exclusively interact with private lobbies.
My negative experiences with community servers represent a pretty short list. Sometimes servers die, but games die sometimes, too. That's obviously only an issue with persistent-state games, like Minecraft, but it's unfortunate when it happens. Can't say it was so frequent that it impacted my enjoyment of any games as a whole.
All true, but of course you're missing the player agency component that renders those issues moot. If any of the above happens, you can simply find another server.
Private games (now called "custom lobbies") were available back then too, they're not equivalent to a public server browser.
They are functionally equivalent for the player. The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match, where now it's extremely common with matchmaking on servers hosted by the game company.
Back then at least you could do something about it. Now if there's an obvious cheater you just kinda sit there and take your L, and ask people to make reports.
> Back then at least you could do something about it.
Back then, the most common option taken was leaving the server to find another one.
This is drudging up some formative memories. In the counter-strike / TF2 communities you'd have servers that would grant vote kick rights with more playtime and some of those regulars would then apply for mod rights. It worked quite well.
It still doesn't solve the unfair votekick problem. People with more play time, doesn't have necessarly the abilities nor tools to judge if someone is cheating. Take a look at the trackmania community, some cheaters are caught years later, because they played it smart. Some cheating can't only be observed by looking at the statistics, or hard proof of cheating being ran.
It's a pub. It doesn't matter as long as it's not obvious aim bots and people are having fun. Besides when it's a 32 player instant respawn death match server you have like 200-300 regulars. That type of cheating was never an issue in those because the servers were always full during peak times and everyone kinda knows each other.
Something you are explicitly punished for in modern matchmaking. Unless you want to be downranked or even temp banned you must suffer the cheater.
If you were playing on a server you owned or for which you had ban permissions, you could do something about it. Otherwise, you had to hope that an admin was online to ban the cheater. If no one was around to take action, your option was to... sit there, take your L, and ask people to make reports (to the admins). You had the option to hop around between servers until you found one that didn't have cheaters, but is that all that different from just quitting back to matchmaking and hoping you find a match without cheaters?
Edit to add: I'm not disputing that kernel-level anticheat is bad; I agree that it is. I don't think it helps to try and hearken back to a golden age of PC gaming that didn't really exist. Maybe it was easier for server admins to manage because player populations were smaller back then, but that's about all that would have made things "better."
You were not helpless if the admin wasn't on, votekick has existed for 25+ years.
Believe it or not us old folks who played during this time had ways to address these issues.
Votekick still exists in modern games, too.
Then it's weird you weren't aware of it when you posted your previous comment.
They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are published in a list for strangers to join. Normally a custom lobby implies invite only.
Not everyone is interested in a "fair and balanced competitive match" where you're guaranteed to win no more and no less than 50% of the time. I actually find that intolerably boring.
> They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are published in a list for strangers to join.
Lots of the mosts played competitive games have that, or third party websites/discords that have links to custom lobbies.
Being able to make friends off-platform and then play with them is obviously not what we're talking about.
I have to conclude you're unfamiliar with what multiplayer gaming was like when servers were the norm.
> I have to conclude you're unfamiliar with what multiplayer gaming was like when servers were the norm.
Did you even played a single game competitively ? The fact you keep pushing for server browser tell me that no, you need communities on something else. You likely forgot the hassle that server browser were, and forgot that lots of games didn't had a server browser.
LFG communities were important and excluding this shows you were only playing casually, forgot all the problems servers browser had.
Do you even remember, that you could get malware by joining servers in a server list ?!?
No, I used to play multiplayer games for fun, which was the norm until that option was removed and replaced with derisive "casual" and "competitive" modes.
99% of people who played CS1.x/tf/Q3A/bf1942/cod/etc booted up the game, found a server in the browser with low ping to play on, and if they liked it they favorited it. They came back the next day, and the next, and started to recognized other players. That is the server browser experience.
If you were in the tiny minority of players trying to be "competitive" back then, you're right I don't know what it looked like for you. Sounds like it sucked, honestly, and maybe competitive matchmaking solved some of those problems, but in the bargain we lost a lot of what made those games fun for "casuals" as you smugly call us.