Comment by b1temy

Comment by b1temy 5 days ago

A few years ago, I would have said that any game that uses such a level of anticheat that makes wine/proton unable to play it (ie: kernel level anticheat) is basically malware and you _shouldn't_ play it anyway, out of both principle, and also because if they had a bug in their code, you're just opening up your device to an unnecessary privilege escalation vector that other malware can abuse to escalate their privileges. (This is not theoretical, this has happened before, eg: with Genshin. Though I believe just the mere existence of a signed driver was enough, since malware can just "Bring your own Driver" (BYOD) and download the driver, at least before it was revoked)

Now, I still hold this belief in most regards. But I do see the appeal, especially if your friends and peers are gamers and actively play these sorts of games, and you feel that you're missing out on socialising or making new friends in that aspect. But there are plenty of other games and consoles, if you could just convince them to switch...

nusl 4 days ago

This sort of anticheat exists because cheat developers ruin the experience for players, and for games that intend to be competitive in a real sense, the integrity of the game. Cheat developers keep getting smarter, so anticheat developers need to do the same. I guess the kernel is sorta as deep as you can go, at least with software.

I don't like it personally but I do understand why they do it. It just means I can't play those games on Linux, and some studios just don't care.

It's a shame that they don't care, though supporting such a minuscule percentage of the gaming market doesn't make a lot of sense unless out of principle/just do to it.

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b1temy 4 days ago

Well, we'll have to agree to disagree here.
You absolutely can design a non-intrusive anticheat that doesn't hook into the kernel layer, and many games do exactly that. They do checks server-side, without hooking into your system. Or design their game to make it harder, eg if a player is behind a wall and can't be seen, don't even send the packets saying there's a player there.
Even with invasive anticheat, any dedicated actor can (and usually eventually do) find ways around it, and it becomes a game of cat and mouse. I feel a similar way about DRM in general.
Imo the tradeoff and danger is not worth it for consumers, but most are just not aware of the risk. Game developers take advantage of this and also do it because it's easier than actually designing their game in a way to minimise cheating (be it through code, or game mechanics)
On a tangent, even though it's for the wrong reasons (Even if I were a full-time user and a fan of Windows, I would not want to install games with invasive anticheat and pollute my system, out of principle), I'm glad that there is at least some pressure and pushback on invasive anticheat by gamers that usually run Windows, just for the reason so that it can run on something like a Steam Deck.

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- nusl 4 days ago
  
  Many games do that, yes, though with varying degrees of success and often they get beaten by cheat tools. That's not to say that kernel-level anticheat can't get beaten, though there is a reason why games like Valorant have fewer such incidents. The cost/effort required to bypass the anticheat is way higher than some client-side checks.
  Some games do choose to go the route of server-side authority, only showing what the client should be able to see, though I understand that's super compute heavy. Final Fantasy XIV does something akin to this, but players still develop client-side plugins to make their lives easier (higher-than-allowed camera zoom-out, displaying hidden boss mechanics when the client receives them, etc)
  Cheats are also financially supported, specially in higher-profile games like Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, or similar, so the incentive to produce higher quality cheats exists.
  People have been caught by pretending to play but actually screensharing the view of a pro player on their account, so I suppose that won't cover this :P
  
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