This is an absurd comment for two reasons. Most games aren't multiplayer with anti-cheat requirements. And you're only talking about lazy, client-side anti-cheat systems.
It's impossible to verify everything between eyeball and public network. The drop-in systems available essentially check for known things, good and bad. This war on clients has a front line moving lower and lower into your computer. It used to be process and driver inspection but it's in the process of moving up to UEFI-locked ring0 (Riot's Vanguard) and it'll be a TPM-like hardware module by 2025.
There's another way: INSPECT ACTIONS. Every client knows what's going on, the server —if one exists— knows what's going on. Just replay 10 seconds leading up to a suspicious event and you very quickly discover wall-hacking, or aiming too fast and too accurately, or impossible macros. This system can be automated, cross checked by multiple clients, and you very quickly know if somebody is probably cheating.
Even if you don't want to spend time tuning your machine learning, you can just replay scenarios to other players. Hackers aren't subtle! CSGO's Overwatch is essentially crowdsourced moderation... and it works.
The reason we pretend that client-side checks are the only anti-cheat feature out there is because they're cheap. Drop-in. But they're awful for gamers' freedoms.
Yes, but deploying even the most basic client input validation will mean we cant just ship a thin message passing shim masquerading as a server! Our cloud costs would go up by at least 20%!!1
As you said some install Kernel Level drivers (I believe this is a Ring-0 but I am not an expert in such things) as a Anti-cheat mechanism.
These do not work with Wine/Proton. e.g. Doom Eternal worked fine until the first patch and then didn't once the anti-cheat was installed (for the non-existant multiplayer community). Then they removed it only after the fanbase heavily downvoted the game on the steam store and constantly bitched to bethesda about it.
However most companies bet on most players just putting up with the bullshit to play the game and they are normally right.
I don't drop £700 on a GPU to worry about software freedoms. I buy it to play games. If I get fed up of messing about (I am the guy that runs unironically runs Arch on my desktop when not gaming and OpenBSD on my office laptop), the vast majority of players just won't even bother.
The best solution I've found is GPU passthrough (which a friend of mine has setup and I am going to try in the coming weeks) but that has it caveats and tbh Dual booting and just putting up with BS is just easier than trying to fight it.
Those games don't work. And it's important to note that occasionally those games also don't work for Windows users. New drivers, strange setups, perfectly legitimate background software, they've all upset the boat at some point, and will again in the future. Trusted Clients are fragile beasts.
It was Denuvo's Anti-Cheat and Anti-Tamper that were added retrospectively to Doom Eternal. Denuvo has a pretty awful track record even on Windows, so seeing its quick removal wasn't too surprising. If anything, the experience was positive to see a large publisher acknowledge Linux compatibility.
Games companies can keep betting on the worst anti-cheat mechanisms, I'll keep gaming on Linux thanks. I happily trade a few frames and titles to not use Windows. In my eyes, I'm better for it. If I wanted a locked down system, I'd buy a console.
Well they defintely don't work on Linux which is the point and I definetely can't play them. I personally left a negative review and removed the game until the patch was removed.
Whether the anti-cheat should be there isn't the issue. The issue is "does this stop the game from running on Linux". The answer was yes it does.
For a lot of people the only reason they buy a PC is to play games. So you might be okay saying "well I don't care about those titles" but for a lot of people those big titles with shitty DRM is literally the reason they bought the PC in the first place and saying the concern was absurd is just incorrect.
I'm not trying to give voice to every gamer, just pointing out that there's more to gaming than games that rely on this crap, and that some of us accept that.
Life is full of quasi-moral choices like this. You can choose to support hardware that supports your platform. You can choose to buy local rather than carrots flown in from South Africa; wtf Waitrose! You can donate your time to helping people hoping it makes the world slightly better.
Not playing games that go out of their way to force me to run Windows is my moral stand here. I get that it's not for you, and it's not for a lot of other Windows gamers, and it might even be stopping the Year of the Linux Desktop...
But my view is this too shall pass. Trusted Clients are bound to fail, as they have again and again and again. They're running out of options. Engines with action integrity checks are the future. And e-sports will move to the cloud because that just makes sense for everybody involved.
> I'm not trying to give voice to every gamer, just pointing out that there's more to gaming than games that rely on this crap, and that some of us accept that.
That wasn't what I was taking umbrage with. You dismissing the concerns as absurd was what I was taking umbrage with.
> Life is full of quasi-moral choices like this.
Yes understand this.
> You can choose to support hardware that supports your platform. You can choose to buy local rather than carrots flown in from South Africa; wtf Waitrose! You can donate your time to helping people hoping it makes the world slightly better.
I don't wish to be rude but you are being so overly dramatic.
> Not playing games that go out of their way to force me to run Windows is my moral stand here. I get that it's not for you, and it's not for a lot of other Windows gamers, and it might even be stopping the Year of the Linux Desktop...
The dramatic language aside. Yes that is your choice. However a lot of games at the moment require this, so proton as good as it is won't run these games and that is a deal breaker for many people. Whether or not you continue with your moral crusade will make no difference to the current reality.
As for the year of the Linux desktop. It is never going to happen. I've been using alternative Operating systems such as Lnux for about 17 years. I've tried 21 XFCE, Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, mucked about with windows managers and there is always some really irritating bugs that never get resolved and have been there for years on end. That combined with almost every Linux distribution kinda breaking itself as time goes on and requiring you to drop to the terminal to fix it (I have used many distros over the years).
> But my view is this too shall pass. Trusted Clients are bound to fail, as they have again and again and again. They're running out of options. Engines with action integrity checks are the future. And e-sports will move to the cloud because that just makes sense for everybody involved.
I doubt it. It is a good enough solution. These cloud based services have bunch of input latency which is just unacceptable. Many of the large games before covid happened over lan in stadiums, once covid is over we will go back to this.
I suspect with esports I think cheating will be discovered by observing replays at the higher levels. (this already happens in the speed running community).
My dismissal of the original statement is well explained.
While some games with some anti-cheats won't work on Linux, the vast majority work well. There are options for viable future anti-cheats on Linux, between recreating what's been done for Windows, simple reputation systems, community moderation and actual event audits. The reason they'll be contemplated is the continued failure of trusted clients. And the significance of the 13 [of top 100] games that currently don't work is entirely down to player preferences.
Dramatics: you seem to be a person that understands the problem, understands individuality, but refuses to paint as more than a binary outcome. There are already a million gamers playing games on Linux, there's clearly room in the middle, and positive road to the future.
E-sports: the elite will continue to happen at real venues, but I think there's going to be significant growth in the every-day teams. Think five-a-side pub teams. They're not going to rent a £15k/d venue like Multiplay can, they're going to play online and need a way to ensure that all players are playing with the same tools. A cloud-rendered system does that and it'll only become more feasible in time. Yes, there's higher latency, but it's a known latency.
It's trivial (if you know what you are doing) to load kernel drivers from userspace by abusing windows bugs.
If you trust a program to run in userspace, then it already has all the keys to the kingdom.
Windows is probably moving in this direction too, so games will have to figure it out regardless. New installs of Windows 10 run in a VM; drivers no longer have access to the entire machine.
