There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance and behaviour and simply binning players with those of similar competency. This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks. No banning required. Detecting the thing cheating allows is much easier than detecting ways in which people gain that thing, it creates a single point of detection that is hard to avoid and can be done entierly server side, with multiple teirs how mucb server side calculation a given player consumes. Milling around in bronze levels? Why check? If you aren't performing so well that yoh can leave low ranks, perhaps we need cheats as a handicap, unless co sistently performing well out of distribution, at which point you catch smurfing as well.
point is focusing on detecting the thing people care about rather than one of the myriad of ways people may gain that unfair edge, is going to be easier and more robust while asking for less ergregious things of users.
It usually takes months, if not years for cheaters to get banned, but it takes a couple of dollars for a cheater to get a new account and start cheating again. Every time Valve fine tunes their models, they end up accidentally banning more innocent players in the process, so nobody has trust in that system anyways. There's too many datapoints to handle in competitive games, and there is no way to set a threshold that doesn't end up hurting innocent people in the process.
Anti-cheat is not used to "protect" bronze level games. FACEIT uses a kernel level anti cheat, and FACEIT is primarily used by the top 1% of CS2 players.
A lot of the "just do something else" crowd neglects to realize that anticheat is designed to protect the integrity of the game at the highest levels of play. If the methods you described were adequate, the best players wouldn't willingly install FACEIT - they would just stick with VAC which is user-level.
> There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance
Ask any CS player how VAC’s statistical approach compares to Valorant’s Vanguard and you will stop asserting such foolishness
The problem with what you are saying is that cheaters are extremely determined and skilled, and so the cheating itself falls on a spectrum, as do the success of various anticheat approaches. There is absolutely no doubt that cheating still occurs with kernel level anticheats, so you’re right it didn’t “solve” the problem in the strictest sense. But as a skilled player in both games, only one of them is meaningfully playable while trusting your opponents aren’t cheating - it’s well over an order of magnitude in difference of frequency.
Simply put, the game companies want to own our machines and tell us what we can or can't do. That's offensive. The machine is ours and we make the rules.
I single out kernel level anticheats because they are trying to defeat the very mitigations we're putting in place to deal with the exact problems you mentioned. Can't isolate games inside a fancy VFIO setup if you have kernel anticheat taking issue with your hypervisor.
By this same logic: As far as I'm concerned, if the game developer only wants to allow players running anticheat to use their servers then they're just exercising their god given rights as the owner of the server.
My position is this is unfair discrimination that should be punished with the same rigor as literal racism. Video games are the least of our worries here. We have vital services like banks doing this. Should be illegal.
You can argue about the methods used for anticheat, but your comment here is trying to defend the right to cheat in online games with other people. Just no.
I rather suspect that the reason for this is the current gaming economy of unlockable cosmetics that you can either grind for, or pay for. If people can cheat in single player or PvE, they can unlock the cosmetics without paying. And so...
Don't play with untrusted randoms. Play with people you know and trust. That's the true solution.
Kernel level AC is a compromise for sure and it's the gamers job to assess if the game is worth the privacy risk but I'd say it's much more their right to take that risk than the cheaters right to ruin 9 other people's time for their own selfish amusement
If it kills online gaming, then so be it. I accept that sacrifice. The alternative leads to the destruction of everything the word hacker ever stood for.
You are hijacking this thread about VOLUNTARY ceasing of freedom as if the small community even willing to install these is a slippery slope to something worse. You have a point when it comes to banking apps on rooted phones and I'm with you on that but this is not the thread for it
Do you have evidence valve is working to infect the linux kernel for everyone?
Mind you, it doesn't mean that the Linux kernel will be "infected for everyone". It means that we'll see the desktop Linux ecosystem forking into the "secure" Linux which you don't actually have full control of but which you need to run any app that demands a "secure" environment (it'll start with KAC but inevitably progress to other kinds of DRM such as video streaming etc). Or you can run Linux that you actually control, but then you're missing on all those things. Similar to the current situation with mainline Android and its user-empowering forks.
> Or you can run Linux that you actually control, but then you're missing on all those things
We cannot allow this stuff to be normalized. We can't just sit by and allow ourselves to be discriminated against for the crime of owning our own devices. We should be able to have control and have all of those nice things.
Everything is gonna demand "secure" Linux. Banks want it because fraud. Copyright monopolists want it because copyright infringement. Messaging services want it because bots. Government wants it because encryption. At some point they might start demanding attestation to connect to the fucking internet.
If this stuff becomes normal it's over. They win. I can't be the only person who cares about this.
You're not wrong - this is a very bad outcome! - but I'm afraid the battle has already been lost.
People can dual boot, what's wrong with a special gaming linux distribution?
You may think it's your "god-given right" to cheat in multiplayer games, but the overwhelming majority of rational people simply aren't going to play a game where every lobby is ruined by cheaters.
The computers are supposed to be ours. What we say, goes. Cheating may not be moral but attempts to rob us of the power that enables cheating are even less so.