Riot's fighting game 2XKO will use Vanguard anti-cheat

rdri , 3 minutes ago

Just decide that more than X inputs per second equals cheater, and measure that on the server side. No need to riddle users systems with code waste.

mox , 4 hours ago (edited 3 hours ago)

Kernel mode anti-cheat guarantees I will never buy your game. Not even as a gift for someone else.

Assurances like “we will never abuse this power” are laughably unrealistic, and even if they defied the history of humanity and somehow turned out to be true, that issue is made irrelevant by additional realities:

1. The risks come not only from corporate abuse of power, but also from vulnerabilities in their code that will eventually be exploited by third parties.
2. Beyond the risk of nosy corporations snooping on users’ private information, there are major security risks. An exploit at the kernel level means game over for the integrity of your entire system, all the data on it or passing through it, and every other system accessed from it. Bank accounts, for example.
3. Client-side anti-cheat is conceptually wrong thinking and doomed to fail. Even at the kernel level, it’s an arms race. Cheaters will find ways to weaken or circumvent it (such as running cheats on an external device that captures game video and generates input events) or even defeat it completely.

I guess this incredibly invasive and fundamentally flawed attempt to manage cheating might be acceptable to someone whose computer is used for nothing else but playing that game… —shrug— …but for me, it’s a hard nope.

ampersandrew OP , 4 hours ago

Not only that, but cheating isn’t exactly a huge problem in this genre, so it’s a heavy handed solution already and one that’s even less necessary to consider.

osprior , 2 hours ago

Cheating is definitely a problem in SF6, but it’s a lot less of a challenge dealing with it due to match duration. You generally move on to different opponents fast enough, unless of course you’re at the highest ranks.

Still agree that kernel level anti-cheat does nothing here, and I also won’t be buying it due to that reason.

DacoTaco , 43 minutes ago

How would cheating in a fighter even look like? Those games are mostly about reading your opponent. Unlike a fps or moba, all info is on the screen etc :/
Auto combo-ing? Auto reponse? Legit curious as i dont think ive seen cheaters in fighters before, but ive been out of the loop since sf4 haha

steal_your_face , 27 minutes ago

From the article:

Tony stated the following, “A lot of the cheats we see in fighting games are either about reading inputs, reading game state, or injecting inputs. They involve modifying the game binary in some way. Vanguard is really good at that, right? It’s a kernel-level anti-cheat, so it can detect and prevent a lot of those things happening.”

Ashtear , 1 hour ago

This likely has less to do with cheating and more to do with making sure players use the game shop, whether it’s blocking third-party skins or bots that automate currency grinds.