I’m guessing you’re not a programmer yourself? Because it’s really really not that east to /just/ detect in the server side, hacks can be super sofisticsted these days and there are often many client side exploits that you simply cannot detect serverside.
Using rootkit anti-cheat is a shortcut that reduces cost for both dev time and hosting time at the expense of your customers' security and CPU. You also have to lay your cards on the table for those who are attacking you. It is not the right solution for this problem.
Authoritative servers.
Never trust the client, especially with information the player shouldn't have right now.
Look at behaviors and group players based on if you think they cheat or not - let the cheaters play together, no need to spoil their fun and let them realize you know they cheat.
People do some or all of this on the server now, but root kitting all machines to try to solve this problem to play video games is one of the dumbest approaches ever and we will realize it one day when a state level actor pops their zero day against a big install base.
This. Having worked on some in-house anti-cheat solutions myself, it absolutely is just offsetting the processing and security cost to the players. The attack vector of having such a rootkit running on so many devices is just not even close to be worth the trade off of catching marginally (if really measurably at all?) more cheaters.
Never trust the client, especially with information the player shouldn’t have right now.
This is a big part of the problem, but it’s not the only problem. If you do all of that stuff right, you can’t build a responsive first person shooter. There’s some level of trust you need to put in the client.
Disclaimer: This is based on my experience playing shooters and as a programmer. I have not worked on anticheat systems hands on.
We see less and less of the “god mode” hacks where players can send the packet for a carpet bomb and the server just blindly trusts it. Or the ludicrous spinbots that spin at an extreme speed and headshot anyone that comes into line of sight.
What we’re seeing is increasingly sophisticated cheats that provide “buffs” to a player’s ability. An AI enhanced aimbot that when you click gently nudges your hand to “auto correct” the shot and then clicks is borderline impossible to detect server side. It looks just like a player moved the mouse and fired.
The “best” method to prevent these folks from cheating seems to be to detect the system or the game has been tampered with.
Maybe the way to deal with that is to just let it happen and deal with smurfs down ranking… So these “soft” cheaters just exist in the “pro tier” where the pros can possibly stand a chance.
One strategy I have seen that I wish more developers would do is sending “honeypot” information to the game client (like a player on the other side of the wall that isn’t really there but an aimbot or a wall hack might incorrectly expose).
Maybe the increasing presence of hardware cheats will result in new strategies that make these things unnecessary. I keep wondering if a TPM could be used to solve this problem someday… But I’m not sure exactly how/we may need faster TPMs.
You don't necessarily need to detect the cheat itself, you can look at things like players having suddenly higher kill rates and put them into a queue for observation by either more advanced (more expensive) automation to look for cheating or eventually involve a human in the loop.
Even on consoles after a while it becomes obvious that you cannot control the hardware, let alone the software on the client side. Those are the very best argument for this kind of approach and they get cracked eventually.
You don’t necessarily need to detect the cheat itself, you can look at things like players having suddenly higher kill rates and put them into a queue for observation by either more advanced (more expensive) automation to look for cheating or eventually involve a human in the loop.
That’s true, if the player suddenly has higher kill rates. However, that doesn’t work if they’ve been using the cheat from the start on that account. A sufficiently advanced AI powered aim bot would also be nearly indistinguishable from a professional player. Kind of similar to how Google created the CAPTCHA that uses mouse movement … but had to go back to (at least in some cases) the additional old school captcha.
I think by the end of your message you were starting to arc around a little bit to the right way you need to think about clients: as outside your security envelope. (TPM is a joke in my mind, just like client side anti-cheat.)
There are many ways to try to identify and stop cheating on the server side that have not been explored because executives have directed use of off-the-shelf anti-cheat because they do not understand why it is snake oil.
I thought this at first as well, but they have an interesting property.
They have a manufacturer signed private key. If you get the public key from the manufacturer of the TPM, you can actually verify that the TPM as it was designed by the manufacturer performed the work.
That’s a really interesting property because for the first time there’s a way to verify what hardware is doing over the network via cryptography.
Hmmm… I was going to say no because it’s asymmetric crypto, but you’re right if you are somehow able to extract the signed private key, you can still lie… Good point
But… have you considered having control of 0-ring software that runs on hundreds of millions of computers, that can perform targetted updates to change behaviour on just a select few computers, even interact with the network adapters unbeknownst to the OS.
I’m not talking about zero days popping up for this. But rather, this being part of the design?
A less nefarious application: The root kit anti cheats already continuously monitor processes. Say it finds a crypto mining one. It can request the instructions needed to search for a wallet and snatch that off.
A more nefarious one: RK is known to be in the device owned by the kid of a military contractor. Etc.
Trusting the client is a fools errand. So we are in complete agreement. I never understood why the effort isn’t placed on server side. People are very good at knowing when others have cheated. They know this from information that exists on the server side, so with the correct classifier, the server should also be able to know this.
It’s not easy, but it’s really not worth the massive gaping security vulnerability you are giving your users. One disgruntled employee giving out the keys to the castle or one programmer plugging in an infected USB, and every user now has a persistent malicious rootkit. The only way to fix an issue that deep after it gets exploited is to literally throw away your hard drive.
The only way to fix an issue that deep after it gets exploited is to literally throw away your hard drive.
This can’t be right.
Don’t throw your hard drive in the trash. Quarantine the infected computer, and then wipe that hoe and slap your choice of OS back on it and scan/monitor to see if any issues arise.
Edit: since folks may or may not read though the rest of the conversation: I am wrong, throw that SSD/HDD in the garbage like barbarian said.
I’m sorry to disappoint, but with rootkits, that is very real. With that level of permissions, it can rewrite HDD/SSD drivers to install malware on boot.
There’s even malware that can rewrite BIOS/UEFI, in which case the whole motherboard has to go in the bin. That’s much less likely due to the complexity though, but it does exist.
Outside of monitoring individual packets outside of your computer (as in, man in the middle yourself with a spare computer and hoping the malware phones home right when you’re looking) there’s no way of knowing.
Once ring 0 is compromised, nothing your computer says can be trusted. A compromised OS can lie to anti-malware scanners, hide things from the installed software list and process manager, and just generally not show you what it doesnt want to show you. “Just remediate” does not work with rootkits.
Dude… That’s fucked. They should really go a little more in depth on rootkits in the CompTIA A+ study material. I mean, I get that it’s supposed to be a foundational over view of most IT concepts, but it would have helped me not look dumb.
Please don’t walk away from this feeling dumb. Most IT professionals aren’t aware of the scale of the issue outside of sysadmin and cybersecurity. I’ve met programmers who shrug at the most egregious vulnerabilities, and vendors who want us to put dangerous stuff on our servers. Security just isn’t taken as seriously as it should be.
Unrelated, but I wish you the best of luck with your studies!
Good morning! If anything this was a great example of not being able to know everything when it comes to IT and especially cybersecurity. Thank you for your well wishes! I earned my A+ last month and I’m currently working on a Google cybersec certificate, since it’ll give me 30% off on the sec+ exam price. I really appreciate your insight on rootkits and it’s definitely going in my notes!
Just as another thing to add to your notes, in ordinary circumstances, it’s practically impossible for non-government actors to get rootkits on modern machines with the latest security patches (EDIT: I’m talking remotely. Physical access is a whole other thing). To work your way up from ring 3 (untrusted programs) all the way to ring 0 (kernel), you’d need to chain together multiple zero day vulnerabilities which take incredibly talented cybersec researchers years to discover, keep hidden and then exploit. And all that is basically one-use, because those vulnerabilities will be patched afterwards.
This is why anti-cheat rootkits are so dangerous. If you can exploit the anti-cheat software, you can skip all that incredibly difficult work and go straight to ring 0.
EDIT: Oh, and as an added note, generally speaking if you have physical access to the machine, you own the machine. There is no defence possible against somebody physically being able to plug a USB stick in and boot from whatever OS they want and bypass any defences they want.
Cheers to the note as to why the anti-cheat is basically satan in software form. This is the real reason that riot isn’t open to community discussion on this topic. It’s indefensible… and if the userbase understood more they wouldn’t have any users left.
It’s the same reason stuff like antivirus is a huge vector for attack. It runs at elevated permissions generally and scans untrusted inputs by default. So it makes for a great target to pivot into a system. These anti cheat kernel modules are no different in their attack profile. And if anything them being there is a good reason to target them you have a user that has a higher end gpu so the hardware is a known quantity to be targeted.
I’m a programmer, yes it is. It’s not easy in the sense of easy to implement, it’s easy in the sense that everything else is impossible. Client-side anti-cheat is impossible, and by that I don’t mean hard, I mean perpetual-motion level of impossibility. If someone tells you they implemented a foolproof client-side anti-cheat you should be just as skeptical as if someone tells you they created a perpetual motion. It’s impossible, never going to happen, want an example? Robot using a camera to watch the screen and directly moving the mouse and keyboard, completely undetectable from the client side.
From the server perspective the person is cheating or is behaving like a human. If they’re behaving like a human their behavior is completely indistinguishable from a human, so who cares if they’re cheating?, whatever they’re doing has them still at human level so if the game has skill based matchmaking (which most of these games do) he’ll rise up until his cheating puts him in the same level of more skilled humans and everyone has fun. If he keeps rising forever he’s not on a human level, therefore a cheater. More importantly this also penalizes people who buy bot leveled accounts, because their matches will be all against people they can’t hope to win and the game will not be fun.
Server side can also trick clients into giving up that they’re cheating, e.g. sending ghosts behind walls to check for wall hacks or other similar things to gauge player responses.
But what do I know? I’m just a senior programmer who’s been working on servers for some years. l never worked on the client side anti-cheat though, also never tried to build a perpetual motion machine.
Could they harden their clients somehow or maybe randomize memory locations for things? Seems like their should be a better solution than installing malware to prevent cheating.
You’re asking good questions but factor this in: a development team at a game company will only want to spend as little time as possible on this process: it doesn’t make them more money - it costs it. Conversely a hacker / cheater is being paid (or gaining) directly from breaking this code. Which is more motivated? Now remember that the protection has to be in place first. Who has the advantage? Client side code will always be breakable. A rootkit doesn’t change the game - it just adds a new vector to attack for other hackers to exploit.
It’s not easy. And league is free. So banning people won’t work well either. They can’t ban ip addresses either without banning college campuses, some apartment buildings, and Internet cafes.
There are solutions to this problem but they don’t want to permanently ban them. A ban = a new registration… maybe even two. Bonus! You get to pad your ban numbers and user registration numbers at the same time!
But that wastes their clockcycles to make sure you’re not cheating. So much easier to make everyone’s experience worse so they don’t have to upgrade and build out more servers.
I’ve long believed that the main point of client-side anti-cheat is to serve as security theater.
If the player sees “PROTECTED BY ACME ANTI-CHEAT” on the boot screen of a game, they’re less likely to cry wolf when they get their ass kicked. At least, until they see a blatant example of hacking and lose all faith in the ability of the platform to protect them from it; from that point on, everyone better than them must be cheating from their perspective (speaking from firsthand experience here).
Given how infamously toxic and high-strung the LoL community is, I can only imagine that Riot’s basically at the end of their rope here. If you read the original forum post, they sure make this sound like a Hail Mary. “Sorry, it’s just what we have to do to make sure the game is fair.”
Hilariously, they even undercut their own points in the FAQ:
Q: If Vanguard is so good, why do I still see cheats on VALORANT?
For starters, we do not action every cheat or account instantly. Every ban is like broadcasting a signal to the developer that their cheat has been detected and that they need to “update” it. In order to slow the progression of our “cheat arms race,” we delay bans based on the sophistication and visibility of the cheat and cheater, respectively.
But also, cheaters gonna cheat. [Emphasis mine.] We’ve really driven our preventative layer as far as we can feasibly go without colliding with existing setups and hurting legitimate players. [Linux players aren’t legitimate I guess?]
Also, they’re apparently not bothering enabling Vanguard on OS X because apparently few people have actually developed cheats on it yet. Really tells you what’s the more developer friendly platform, Linux or OS X, doesn’t it? Or maybe the OS X market share is too small to care.
They do also mention using machine learning to detect cheating server-side but lament that it’s not always enough information, and that cheat developers have added “humanization” elements that play more like humans.
My thought is… if a cheat doesn’t make someone obviously better than a human player of a certain skill level, then what does it really matter? Congratulations, you made a bot that’s indistinguishable from a human, thanks for padding our player numbers.
The real problem is that botters don’t pay for microtransactions. And players who buy bot-leveled accounts probably don’t spend a ton either. Why would they? They got everything unlocked for them, they didn’t have to grind for it. That’s all Riot really gives a shit about.
In practice, client side anti cheat is essentially DOA because hardware cheats that analyse the player’s screen on a 2nd computer and proxy inputs to your mouse USB have made it so cheat clients are never actually executing code on the host machine.
At that point, even players cant tell someone is cheating because the cheats aren’t modifying the game state in a noticeable way- they’re still weak to effects that obscure your vision and have inputs that are difficult to differentiate from a “real” player.
IMO cheating is a social problem and one that is totally impossible to beat with rootkits by design.
Good riddance, spent several years hooked to League. That being said, the fragmentation argument is bullshit, they could ship a read-only container in a flatpak and it’d run everywhere.
Kernel level is a huge risk and it doesn’t guarantee anything, especially in the age of Ai cheats and network mitm cheats
That’s the point. A read only container to keep low hanging fruit at bay, and flatpak to distribute without having to repackage to every distro under the sun.
I don’t fuck with the game, the game doesn’t fuck with my system.
“linux does not allow us a good enough ability to confirm boot state”
Skill issue, L for riot games.
Realistically, if this is true, it’s because of security. Shocker on that one really. Also, there are probably only 800 players on linux because the anti cheat doesnt fucking work. But that doesnt count apparently
I’m no expert here, but couldn’t they rely on SEV/SME or similar? My understanding is those features encrypt RAM, which would make it a lot more difficult for an attacker to do memory-based attacks when the game is running within a VM. I expect “physical attacks” would include attacking a VM’s memory, but again, I’m not an expert.
I also wonder if this could work in a containerized environment instead of a VM, so players could just run a lightweight container and preserve direct access to resources like the GPU. I don’t know if GPU access can be required to be encrypted as well, but surely this is a massive step forward.
i have no clue myself frankly. Realistically, doing literally anything is probably going to be better than what riot claims is possible. I think a fundamental part of the problem is stuff outside the control of the game, the OS already has segmented ram for instance, it’s all supposed to be virtually privatized, that way you don’t get these kinds of problems On the fly encryption would probably help, though they would probably just use shitty encryption anyway. Regardless, if you get something to hook into the game code itself, rather than just abusing memory values, it wouldn’t matter. Because at that point it’s going to be running inside the game.
Sorry to be that guy lol… But what does this mean in English? Does it help me as someone with an NVIDIA card on Plasma 6 who sometimes has to jump back into an X11 session to get some software to behave, or I completely misunderstood?
Oh holy shit that is music to my ears! Thanks for the translation, I really don’t understand much about these graphics issues (only enough to understand it was potentially vaguely related to this problem)
So basically, we already have implicit sync which kinda works with Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, but the drivers also heavily rely on explicit sync in different cases and that’s why some of the graphical glitches occur such as steam flicking. This adds that missing puzzle peace. That’s about the gist of it.
Kernel anticheat is just like gaming piracy, where developers are constantly fighting ghosts rather than tackling the social issues that encourage the behaviours they want to avoid.
there are no social issues you can ever fix to be found here. give a 11 year old an auto-win button for counter strike that he can press whenever he loses a single round and feels his pride hurt - he’ll press it.
i think that anti cheats display a disrespect to the customer, because in an ideal world he should then run two computers instead of one. one for online banking, the other one for every company’s favorite rootkit with questionable maintenance.
the only way out, in my view, is going to server side ai cheat detection.
But my point is: What makes that player want to push the “auto win” button? There are lots of games with cheating, but also many more that dont suffer nearly as much from cheating, if at all.
Competitive games, especially ones that lean towards eSports and “real prizes” are going to have some incentive to cheat, but even in this genre there’s games known for cheats and others that have better reputations. The question is what game design decisions can improve the urge of players to seek cheats in the first place.
I don’t believe that only 800 people played on Linux. It makes no sense to me in the grand scheme of things. I have a personal YT channel with only 108 subs and my random low effort video on how to get League running on Steam Deck has almost 70k views which is nuts and there are many other much better videos than mine with many more views. If only 0.1% of those people are active players that would still make a lot more than “800” figure. I know this is just a random speculation but 800 is just waaaay too low.
Also - it’s not a rootkit - it just loads at boot and has higher privileges than the userspace that you can’t contr… oh. it’s a rootkit. They don’t want you to call it that though. It’s not cancer… it’s a growth.
Funnily enough that’s how a lot of modern cheats work. it’s on a separate box. Good luck catching that automatically vanguard. Hard to out-ring the hardware layer.
If it’s not server based detection it’s exploitable.
I’m not in that line of work but make no mistake if it hasn’t been yet: a cheat vector will probably involve patching the anti cheat software or attacking how it communicates.
there are arduino-based cheats now, you dont even need an expensive box, it hijacks your mouse for aimbots and such. thinking of putting one of mine to use.
Yep, this is what I was referencing in other responses. Purely from a solution perspective it is positively the ultimate “get bent” from the cheat community. Add in some randomness and suddenly there’s zero difference between a ‘good session’ and scripting.
Next up: sorry you don’t have xyz brand mice you can’t play our games. Consumers get forced to buy shit they don’t want or need and meanwhile the cheat / hack community release a patch to emulate it.
It’s the same old cat and mouse game. There are solutions - but a rootkit isn’t it.
not looking forward to mice DRM of all things. but then it will be funny to see their games wilt because most people don’t own the xyz hardware they require. im willing to bet arduinos can fake hardware ids too.
And Vanguard is already being bypassed by using external tools. IIRC I saw a video about it where the cheater had the hack running on a completely separate computer.
The number would be higher too, I doubt I was the only one who stopped playing months ago when Vanguard was supposedly going to be implemented imminently.
Fun fact: you could get an account locked in under an hour if you used a command line to close the league client. Not powershell - just good ol cmd. No reports needed. Reproduced it 4 times in 2 days… Lots of fun emails with initially the support teams and then the devs. Apparently “taskkill” is the most nefarious cheat known to the gaming industry.
A grade schooler with a “learn programming in 24 hours” book could probably produce better cheat detection.
Honestly, i don’t get why people are bitching about it so much. A company, that makes a game with intention to make money off it, that never supported linux neither promised to support linux some time in the future, clarifies that it sees no purpose in supporting linux because of monetary reasons.
Okay, that may be your favorite game, you might have spend tons of money on in - but idea that it may never be supported on your favorite platform has never crossed your mind? It’s like whining that PS exclusive game is not getting ported to Xbox.
So basically, “it’s too hard, and our engineers are not good at their jobs.”
Imagine this: you have a cheater problem. Your team of developers have only ever worked on gameplay-related stuff - graphics, game engine, etc. You can:
Make them pull solution out of their butts, somehow gain expertise in topic they have never worked on
Pour ALOT of money in HR and hire specialists that have experience in anticheat software
Pay 3rd party for solution that you can use RIGHT NOW and that works (at least somehow)
When money is involved, you make decision by counting them. You give somebody (tech lead, probably) task to evaluate your options - and give you approximate numbers. And i’m not surprised they chose 3rd option.
Stop stealing our CPU cycles for high risk rootkits and start mitigating and detecting cheating on the server. It’s that easy.
I’m currently working on bot detection for web resources - and trust me, it’s extremely hard to distinguish them from people without some client-side analysis. Sure, you can use behavioral analysis, but you need lots of data and, again, expertise in that. Okay, they have the data - thousands of games played daily. Have you ever seen job listing for “game patterns analyst for LoL”? Again, you have to find someone capable - highly payed experts, who will spend some time testing their theories, with no guaranteed success.
“How do you separate good players from cheaters? This low ranked player who just got his second pentakill - is he cheating or smurfing? This weird behaviour - is it because of missing fog of war or are they just communicating over voice chat?”
It’s just… really NOT that easy.
The “distributions” argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)
There’s your answer - they are not interested. And there is nothing wrong with that! It’s just business! Remember the “a times b times c” scene from fight club? They’ve calculated their x - and it’s not worth pursuing (for them).
Rootkits are bad, m’kay. Wanna avoid them? Don’t install them. Just don’t be surprised when company adds them - it’s their product, they do whatever the fuck they want.
While yes the company can certainly do what they want - that isn’t to say that everything they want to do is correct.
In an isolated bubble their decision looks… fine… ish. The reasons they provide are mostly excuses- but for arguments sake let’s say it is actually making a meaningful difference. (It isn’t and won’t: TPM is flawed and has already seen demonstrations of exploits.) So we now have a platform that has locked out users based on OS version, hardware support (TPM), in addition to os. They are actively culling users that otherwise were viable customers. Smart.
Let’s expand on this outside the bubble: what os is growing rapidly in usage with gaming? Linux. Riot is actively making a shortsighted decision (historically this tracks) which will cause them grief in the long run. Remember: their games worked on these platforms prior to this decision. The support was all free labor done by the community. Let’s say they want to release a game that takes advantage of the handheld platforms that are rising in popularity- they now need two separate anti cheat systems. Oops. They now need to try to claw back the early adopters and free community support they burned. Good luck.. Factoring in the cost of limiting future flexibility and growth… I can only imagine the game experience must have improved 2-3x by the addition of this anti cheat … except it hasn’t. By their own admission: cheat developers move faster. Objectively? It was a terrible decision.
Linux is at 2 percent in the steam hardware survey, also 50 percent linux gamers in steam are steam deck users. That is not a big enough market and riot has more data than us and they are probably right.
Based on the increase since steamos became a thing - I would argue it is gaining momentum in a significant way. Based on hardware manufacturers interest in the steamdeck and similar products - I would suggest my views are not off base.
Handheld gamers doesnt contribute much to league of legends, which is a highly competitive mouse and keyboard focused game. And riot have data about the linux gamers who plays lol before anticheat update. So they are right to offer zero support. Also linux never had much support for popular liver service games like EFT, warzone, siege, fortnite.
The point I was making is riot isn’t just a league of legends company. They are a game company that is applying this anti cheat on their entire software suite. This decision cuts off future growth- which from a business standpoint is awful. That of course completely ignores the primary issue, which remains, the rootkit.
Highly competitive is… no more competitive than any other game… but on that subject their matchmaking was so poor they had to hide the ELO mechanic completely to mask the issues with it. The issues still exist of course… but just like this smokescreen masking the shortcomings in their anticheat… they are just less obvious.
let’s say it is actually making a meaningful difference. (It isn’t and won’t: TPM is flawed and has already seen demonstrations of exploits.)
I dare to say their solution is “good enough” to stop ordinary user from cheating - not to solve cheating problem entirely - it may be impossible - but to raise bar of cheating without getting banned
They are actively culling users that otherwise were viable customers. Smart.
They may lose some users who won’t play anymore because they won’t install rootkit, but keep those who would leave because of cheaters. Maybe their situation is dire enough so they would apply such drastic measures?
Let’s expand on this outside the bubble: what os is growing rapidly in usage with gaming? Linux. Riot is actively making a shortsighted decision (historically this tracks) which will cause them grief in the long run.
I mean, i’m all in for that, but year of linux desktop 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025?
Linux is my favorite OS (i use arch btw) and i use it since… 2007, i think? But i sorta gave up on that belief - it’s a niche OS, and if gaming is ever coming to linux - it’s not coming to linux, it’s coming to ChromeOS or SteamOS.
To sum things up - i’m not saying rootkit anticheat is a good thing. It’s a solution to some problem, which people chose by comparing it to alternatives. Contrary to popular belief, CEOs don’t just sit around and think how to make players more miserable - those decisions are not made in one day. I’d drop a game if it forces me to install rootkit - i value my privacy more and i’d advice anyone to do the same. I’m just really annoyed by all the whining and comments “boohooo my favorite game developers suck and don’t value me enough”.
I dare to say their solution is “good enough” to stop ordinary user from cheating - not to solve cheating problem entirely - it may be impossible - but to raise bar of cheating without getting banned
The problem is that it isn’t raising the bar. Sure some low hanging collateral might be caught but in reality a department could easily fudge numbers (banrates) to justify a move to a new solution… and do. frequently. Speaking generally - this isn’t the days of download an exe and become 1337 like the old days. Hackers want to get paid. You sub to services which are monetarily motivated to stay ahead of a business which gains little from fighting on this front more than ‘good enough.’
They may lose some users who won’t play anymore because they won’t install rootkit, but keep those who would leave because of cheaters. Maybe their situation is dire enough so they would apply such drastic measures?
This wasn’t a dire situation. As long as league (or any online game) has existed there have been anti cheat mechanisms in place. And the best mechanism that has always existed was server side tracking with audits. Full stop. Clientside anything is a bandaid and this is no exception. If I were to speculate on the choice? This was the cheapest option available. Dress it up how you like… companies rarely go for correct options… they go for cheap ones.
I mean, i’m all in for that, but year of linux desktop … Linux is my favorite OS (i use arch btw) and i use it since… 2007, i think? But i sorta gave up on that belief - it’s a nieche OS, and if gaming is ever coming to linux - it’s not coming to linux, it’s coming to ChromeOS or SteamOS.
Lots has happened with Linux sure, but recently it is becoming considerably more mainstream and is gaining a critical mass on a relevant front: gaming. Linux is (generally speaking) free vs licensed oses like windows. Want a cheap gaming system? Steam is blazing a helluva path. Devs want bigger audiences - and more eyeballs. It would be foolish to disregard the growth in this sector.
Contrary to popular belief, CEOs don’t just sit around and think how to make players more miserable…
CSuites / Parent companies make money for themselves - because capitalism. Look no further than VMWare torching their userbase and salting the earth. Short term gains over long term longevity. Riot is not special here- they are being shortsighted.
Look no further than VMWare torching their userbase and salting the earth. Short term gains over long term longevity. Riot is not special here- they are being shortsighted.
Hmm, good point. I’d argue that VMWare’s user base was more solvent (is that a right adjective? English is not my native language), but i don’t think this argument would be in my favor.
You sub to services which are monetarily motivated to stay ahead of a business which gains little from fighting on this front more than ‘good enough.’
And subscription costs too raise the bar to start cheating. Not everyone would pay to have upper hand in F2P game. Those who are willing to do it can be hand-picked by reports and manual review. We don’t know their “definition of done” in fighting cheaters - maybe decreasing number of cheaters by 80% is an acceptable result? Maybe those 20% of remaining cheaters can be accounted for as “really good players” - those exist too. That would solve the problem.
This wasn’t a dire situation. As long as league (or any online game) has existed there have been anti cheat mechanisms in place.
We both don’t know that, if we are being honest. If it wasn’t problem at all they probable wouldn’t have done anything at all - or they’d do something far cheaper. This is a speculation - i can be wrong about state of things.
Also,
Short term gains over long term longevity.
I think there is a shitty pattern — if everyone is making same bad decision (good short term, bad long term), it makes this decision not as bad as it would be otherwise. If you are the only one who is forcing players to install possibly-malicious software, you look really bad. But if every (or majority) of competitive multiplayer games requires it, this idea just doesn’t sound that bad. If you already have malware on your PC - what changes if you install another one?
I’m currently working on bot detection for web resources - and trust me, it’s extremely hard to distinguish them from people without some client-side analysis. Sure, you can use behavioral analysis, but you need lots of data and, again, expertise in that. Okay, they have the data - thousands of games played daily. Have you ever seen job listing for “game patterns analyst for LoL”? Again, you have to find someone capable - highly payed experts, who will spend some time testing their theories, with no guaranteed success.
“How do you separate good players from cheaters? This low ranked player who just got his second pentakill - is he cheating or smurfing? This weird behaviour - is it because of missing fog of war or are they just communicating over voice chat?”
90% of cheating that is incredibly annoying, that most people tend to be fed up with, is inherently obvious. You get rid of that shit and if someone is within the 99% percentile, then honestly, who gives a fuck, let them try hard.
Makes business sense. Why bother developing for 800 users when you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to worry about? The software company I work for has to make this kind of decision all the time.
But it was nice of them to include a viable strategy for cheaters via VMs.
Edit: I should clarify that “business sense” is almost always a poor excuse, and considering the potential growth in the Linux market thanks to handhelds, Proton, and NVK, seems dumb to thumb your nose at that potential.
800 feels like a number they cherry picked considering the overall community size.
Speaking personally: their vm detection is hot garbage and they know it. Detecting a VM is easy enough for anyone- detecting cheating via it is far more difficult. They flag a VM as such and wait for a report to roll in then blindly ban it… only to reverse it when pressured. This isn’t the behavior of an org with concrete evidence. It’s a smokescreen.
probably because those 800 users can’t fucking open the game. It’s almost like if you manufacture a car that doesn’t kill you the instant you fuck up even the slightest bit, that people will want to buy and own it.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !retrogaming
linux_gaming
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.