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linux_gaming

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redbr64 , in Explicit Sync support has been merged into KWin!
@redbr64@lemmy.world avatar

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?

Max_P ,
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

It should fix most of the flickering and stuttering particularly on NVIDIA Wayland, once every part of it gets merged.

redbr64 ,
@redbr64@lemmy.world avatar

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)

Rustmilian , (edited )
@Rustmilian@lemmy.world avatar

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.

redbr64 ,
@redbr64@lemmy.world avatar

Ah thanks for the explanation. The steam app flickering is indeed one of my symptoms

EddyBot , in Slay the Spire 2 announced, using Godot as its engine

It would be amazing if the runtime (per run) would be lowered
playing through three acts in one sitting is quite long, a runtime like Monster Train (40~90 minutes on non-speedrun time) would be pretty good

CalcProgrammer1 , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat
@CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml avatar

Fuck Riot. Never playing their games again. If you’re going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies. Besides, they should be doing anticheat at the server level not spying on the boot sequence of client PCs. That shit is unnecessary for a fucking banking app let alone a goddamn game. It’s just a game, let us enjoy it rather than making such a ridiculously over the top response to cheating.

yukichigai ,
@yukichigai@kbin.social avatar

If you’re going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies.

This, a thousand times. I can understand requiring anti-cheat for Ranked matches, but some of us just wanna screw around. If there's no progression tied to the match why should they care?

(Microtransactions, if I had to guess)

nekusoul ,
@nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de avatar

Yup, at the very minimum let me continue to play TFT. You can’t really cheat there, and if you could, that’s more likely due to an underlying gamplay/UX problem.

jeansibelius ,

Just tried TFT on Android device, and … well, its time to let this shit go.

dinckelman , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat

The issue with this entire statement is that despite the amount of system access they want, and the complexity of the software they’ve made, cheating is as rampant as it was before. The fact that they continue treating Linux as an issue, just as Ubisoft do with Siege, or Bungie with Destiny, just shows that there is a much larger issue at hand

dustyData ,

Even worse, it proves that they themselves don’t understand the entire psycho-social scope and workings of cheating. Cheating is not an entirely technical problem. It’s multidimensional.

yggstyle , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat

tldr for anyone:

They aren’t fixing it. fuck y’all.

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.

umbrella ,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

at this point i want to cheat on an approved, bare-metal windows machine, just as a fuck you.

but then i remember this game is awful and i dont wanna touch it anyway.

yggstyle ,

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.

umbrella ,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

yggstyle ,

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.

umbrella ,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

arin , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat

DotA 2 works right? Just upgrade to DotA 2

PrefersAwkward ,
@PrefersAwkward@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, but what if I want:

  • pre-2010 graphics
  • a free rootkit
  • a single ugly stagnant map with no skins
  • a single and unchangeable and uninspired drone of an announcer
  • a game whose bug-ridden, laggy client leaks memory and processes
  • a game whose client prevents you from spectating pro games, past and present
  • a pro scene rampant with match fixing and ads injected into the horrendous casting

If not League of Legends, where else am I gonna get all of that from?

yggstyle ,

I love that you mentioned that abomination they call a client. Something so bad a developer solo wrote a better one only to have them hire that person and quietly kill the project.

escaped_cruzader ,

But what if I want to turn without waiting?

Norgur , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat
@Norgur@fedia.io avatar

So .. do we have any evidence that rootkits actually decrease the amount of cheating? Like... At all?

fluckx ,

it totally decreases the amount of cheating by a lot. Like the biggest decrease in history. That’s right. It’s huge. /trumpvoice

Also

trust me bro

Norgur ,
@Norgur@fedia.io avatar

I wouldn't trust you if you were a valid SSL cert, bro

fluckx ,

Come oooon. I’m google.com. really! Would I lie to you?

Karyoplasma ,

If you’re google.com, then yes. But then that would mean you are not google.com, which would mean you are google.com.

Norgur ,
@Norgur@fedia.io avatar

It's a good thing Google isn't based on Athens. That would have amplified the logic bomb tremendously!

Norgur ,
@Norgur@fedia.io avatar

Nah, you wouldn't! Sorry, mate!

But... Uh... Do you really need all this credit card data and my banking password to show me more accurate search results? Sounds like a pretty convoluted tech to me... Well, who am I to question Google, right? There you go.

mitchty ,

Prove it with your dnssec record otherwise I shall consider you a liar.

You999 ,

The awnser is a firm no. Cheaters have moved to hardware based cheats with DMA boards. On valorant some cheaters have started exploiting remote play services to use machine vision based aim bots. Neither of those two methods can be detected by a kernel level anti cheat.

joyjoy ,

And now they have more fun working with hardware than software. No needing to reverse engineer the game either since you’re just processing display output and executing inputs on separate hardware like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi

You999 ,

With DMA based cheats I disagree as if you were developing a DMA based cheat you would still need to understand how the game works so you can figure out what memory adresses are for what part of the game.

joyjoy ,

You’re assuming the anti cheat won’t refuse to run if a DMA device is installed.

You999 ,
GlitterInfection ,

Pfft… that’s easy to solve. Just ask them to identify all the fire hydrants.

hperrin , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat

So basically, “it’s too hard, and our engineers are not good at their jobs.”

fluckx ,

It’s Harder to solve than you think. I came upon a documentary a while ago where they go a bit more in depth on the subject and what cheaters can do nowadays.

No company has solved the problem tbh. Even games like counter strike are riddled with cheaters and even on faceit there’s plenty of people that are dodgy AF and likely cheat.

It’s not an easy problem to solve and it is, AFAIK, still an unsolved problem in shooters. So your comment is a bit salty. Might as well claim every game engineer worldwide isnt good at their job because nobody has solved this yet. Not that I’m defending riot.

The rootkit “solution” is complete bullshit. It is completely disproportionate and a massive security/privacy risk. And to top it off it’s not even a solution that’s good enough.

This is the documentary I saw: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M&

It did remove my appetite for playing PvP shooters for a while.

yggstyle ,

The rootkit isn’t a solution. It’s a bandaid - and a bad one at that. Moba and FPS hacks have already moved outside the hardware of the PC or into the virtual space. It’s a beware of dog sign on the fence meant to scare users… while ultimately doing very little (besides providing a vector real hackers and tools can exploit to gain access to your system.)

Seriously anyone willing to install a rootkit on their system that that company is behind deserves whatever comes their way next.

fluckx ,

I fully agree with that. It’s why I quoted “solution” in the first place.

apt_install_coffee ,

Given the user always has a deeper access to the client (i.e. hardware access) than the anticheat dev does, eliminating cheating is probably unsolvable.

Best bet is probably always going to be a decently funded team dedicated to find and ban cheaters, rather than attempting to prevent them all with a rootkit.

hperrin ,

I’m sorry but I just don’t buy that.

First of all, you can’t solve a problem you’re not willing to work on.

Second, no one is expecting a solution that bans 100% of cheaters and has zero false positives. We all know that’s unrealistic. So saying no one has solved it yet is kind of misleading. There are existing solutions that work well enough for most people.

Third, there are solutions that can run entirely on the server side that would work for every system. Riot just isn’t willing to use them.

My comment stands. Bad engineers that can’t solve a problem other people have already come up with solutions for.

RiikkaTheIcePrincess , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat
@RiikkaTheIcePrincess@pawb.social avatar

The “any backdoors we leave open for it” bit kinda sounds like straight-up complaining that they can’t compromise users’ security without compromising their own control over users’ systems?

Boo fucking hoo, I guess 🤷

deweydecibel ,

That’s a pretty standard position nowadays from a lot of different tech companies. They can’t possibly give the user any freedoms, because it might compromise something. It’s this broad assumption that all users that refuse to surrender control of their device should never be trusted and therefore not have their desires respected.

Like how Google continues to actively punish users that claw back control of their devices through custom roms or rooting, and of course Apple has been doing that forever. Microsoft is threatening more invasive restrictions in windows, too. It’s why shit like integrity checking is continuing to be pushed.

The pattern is very clear: you are required to let them stick their arm up your device’s ass to participate in our “modern” tech space.

It’s the equivalent of a store that forces all customers to strip naked before entering to prevent shoplifting. You of course don’t have to enter that store, but that store has also run virtually all the other stores out of business, and it’s the only one that carries the specific brand of chips you’re looking for.

dustyData ,

In my country there was a story about a lady who got viral because it had been customary for shops to make people leave their backpacks and purses on a locker or with an employee. Then a security employee also had to check your receipt against the items in your bag before you left. It’s extremely annoying and cumbersome, it can add up to half an hour of extra time when the shops are full and there aren’t enough employees to do the checks.

So one day she went to buy groceries, before giving her purse to the employee she emptied it and itemized everything there was in there on a piece of paper. Then she bought her groceries and had the clerk double check the price and weight of every item she bought against the price tags and content labels of everything. Including the prepackaged meats. Then, when picking up her purse back, she had the list of items and emptied the bag again in front of the employee.

The manager noticed and went to her mad at what she was doing. She argued with him that they treated her as a thief so she would treat them as thieves themselves and pointed out how she had been charged for an extra plastic bag they didn’t gave her (we get charged the price of the bags) and demanded her plastic bag or money back.

Of course nothing came of it, but it riled social media discourse over here for a while. Some low end (local bodegas) and high end stores stopped the practice as the economic situation stabilized later, but it was still a quirky detail of that dark era. Some employees did steal stuff from customers bags sometimes. Same lady had a field day during the days of stores trying to return change on payments with lollipops and candy. So she tried to pay with a bag of candy and lollipops. That one was wild as well.

lvxferre , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat

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.)

Beyond that: I don’t play LoL, but the fact that they need such an aggressive rootkit as anti-cheat hints poor game design. As in, why are your players so eager to cheat?

yukichigai ,
@yukichigai@kbin.social avatar

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.)

My thoughts exactly. It is not unheard of at all for Linux ports to only be guaranteed to function on specific distros. It's well within the realm of possibility and this is not a real stumbling block at all.

rollmagma ,

Typical for a group of people that probably dedicated their whole careers to Windows. Could have just put it plainly that they don’t want to pay engineers that have the skills to do this on Linux.

howrar ,

I’m guessing that people just like feeling superior to others and video games are a convenient outlet for that. There’s no changing that via game design unless LoL ceases to be a competitive game.

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

Others might do it for them if they shared the source code 🤷

smileyhead ,

This is a game, not something interacting with the desktop much, it can be totally self-contained binary. So they just need to publish a Flatpak or .deb, no need to support bunch of distros that community decided to create and support, because who create a new packaging format should be responsible to promote it.

mitchty ,

It’s more likely an admission they have to trampoline every gpl function in the kernel which isn’t really easy to do and would let that kernel module run on any other kernel. Otherwise they would have to do a shim like nvidia which would mean a whole other level of issues like saying we support Linux but only Ubuntu which as a non Ubuntu user would mean to me they do not in fact support Linux. I’d vote with walle here but I already don’t own this game as my friends said the user base is terrible years ago but this just means there is no reason to buy any of their games.

andyburke , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

Stop stealing our CPU cycles for high risk rootkits and start mitigating and detecting cheating on the server.

It's that easy.

I stopped playing games that want this bullshit. Don't need that shit in my life.

gmtom ,

It’s that easy.

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.

andyburke ,
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

Actually, I am.

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.

folkrav ,

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.

Dark_Arc , (edited )
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

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.

andyburke ,
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

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.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

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.

andyburke ,
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

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.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

TPM is a joke in my mind

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.

andyburke ,
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

Or, if I can extract that key from the hardware, I can pretend to be that hardware whenever I want, right?

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

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

yggstyle ,

Got some bad news. They already can do that. It’s a very low effort attack too. Current TPM spits its key out in clear text. Funny right?

okamiueru ,

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.

Barbarian ,
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

JimboDHimbo , (edited )

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.

Barbarian ,
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

JimboDHimbo ,

not all rootkits are made to do that. So yes in some cases, throw it in the trash. In others, remediate your machine and move on.

Barbarian ,
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

JimboDHimbo ,

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.

Barbarian ,
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

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!

JimboDHimbo , (edited )

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!

Barbarian , (edited )
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

Glad to hear it!

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.

JimboDHimbo ,

Hell yes I’m adding this to my notes as well, thank you!

yggstyle ,

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.

mitchty ,

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.

Nibodhika ,

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.

youngGoku ,

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.

yggstyle ,

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.

pulaskiwasright ,

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.

yggstyle ,

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!

Passerby6497 ,

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.

Technus ,

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.

merthyr1831 ,

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.

yggstyle ,

This. Server side anticheat is the only correct detection method. And it’s only part of the solution. Pure automation is pure garbage.

tabular , (edited ) in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

How far is the company willing to go to prevent cheating? Cameras in people’s homes to make sure they’re not using another computer that your anti-cheat has no access to?

If players tolerate that then competitive gaming is going in a deeper dark pit of proprietary spyware in the name of fighting cheating, an arms race with no end.

GlitterInfection , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat

I can’t believe they made a shitty Dota clone based off the Arcane animation on Netflix.

howrar , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat

I’ve never actually noticed cheaters during the time I played the game. If they cheat and matchmaking puts me against them, it just means that me without cheats and them with cheats are equivalent in skill level, so it’s a fair and fun game. So I don’t see the point in preventing cheats in the first place unless you’re at the very top of the ladder, and there’s so few people up there that it should be easy to just manually ban the cheaters.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

I think a part of it is the difference to losing to something “reasonable” vs “unreasonable.”

If you’re clearly really bad at the game when we are in a fight with line of sight but somehow you keep picking off my teammates through walls… That’s the kind of thing where cheating really starts to get annoying.

You may still be on the same skill level overall, but for specific parts of the game they have super powers, and it just feels ridiculous.

Smurfing is also a real issue because cheaters seem to overlap with trolls that just want everyone else to have a bad time, so they’ll spend a bunch of time down ranking, so they can spend a little time giving a lot of players a bad day.

howrar ,

I think a part of it is the difference to losing to something “reasonable” vs “unreasonable.”

Yeah, that’s understandable. I just don’t think there’s an equivalent in LoL that would feel particularly unfair. At worst, someone just knows where you are at all times. What do you do with that information? That requires good game knowledge. You can only influence a small portion of the map yourself and teammates tend to like acting independently even if you provide them with extra info.

Smurfing is a bigger problem, but I’ve found that Riot tends to be very good at gauging your skill level even if you intentionally sandbag. LoL is just one of those game where it’s really hard to convincingly pretend to be bad at it.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

That’s all very fair

KarthNemesis , in Riot official response about League of Legends on Linux for Vanguard anti cheat
@KarthNemesis@kbin.social avatar

their "hello fellow kids" energy works better for their goofy insignificant patch notes than it does for combating bad PR.

i was very on the fence about keeping it installed on a potato windows laptop i don't use for much else. this article absolutely convinced me fully not to. they could not have written a worse case for themselves if they had tried.

they have stated they even intend to try getting anticheat on macs as soon as possible. even if it is not possible, (which seems likely to me, considering the ecosystem?) their argument for axing linux could easily be used to just ditch macs. "we don't know how to secure it, and there were only 800 players [on a random, cherry picked day.]"

having a section in which they claim there are zero false positives is delusional. that's not how technology works. there will literally always be bugs, glitches, edge cases.

they claim they can currently read stuff in user mode, so it'll be essentially analogous in invasiveness, and it's straight bullshit.

this is several degrees of trust beyond "can read stuff in user mode when running"
this is "can read anything in user mode, in admin mode, on all other users on your computer, can restrict your bios and hardware, and has full potential to have permanent root access to any user or system you install in the future"

either they do not understand what they are implementing, which is a really bad sign for trusting them with it,
or they know exactly what they are doing and lying about it, which is another really bad sign for trusting them with it.

i'm gonna be honest, if they had taken the hardline "we know it's more invasive, but we need this" and kept it straight, i might have kept playing. it's the only multiplayer competitive game i have anymore.

but the ad hominem attacks in here, the calls to the "angry twitter mobs," the disingenuous and extremely loose way they play with the truth, (it's not running all the time! well, it is, but we don't really think it should count) that in just a few paragraphs has burned any goodwill i had towards them. they are weaponizing their own playerbase to cannibalize themselves and attack their friends for having legitimate concerns about degrees of personal invasion and that's unconscionable. that disgusts me more than the crappy implementation and the cavalier attitude ever could.

props to them, i guess, for making the only choice to be to quit a game i played happily for about a decade.

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