As a counter strike player, I definitely shy away from the invasive anti cheat stuff… but I’d let valve inject it into my veins if it meant I could actually play and not suspect everyone of cheating all the time. Mostly because Valve has earned my trust. I won’t install games from other companies using similarly invasive techniques though.
Valve wouldn't purposefully backdoor you for nefarious purposes. But any such code is not nearly reviewed enough to be sure it is free of unintentional backdoors that could be exploited by third parties.
While I trust valve, I'm not willing to mess up with my workstation to play.
Also, there's hardware cheats, so I don't need a rootkit on my machine, but a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans.
> a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans.
No. No no no.
Automated bans via the report system is very well-known to be abused.
Even if you implement a "trust" system where initially, all your reports are manually verified by game staff until its determined your reports are correct until your reports are acted on automatically, all it takes is a player to just be "good" until their trust is high enough, then start reporting people who don't actually deserve it.
And I'm not convinced that server-side anti-cheat can be effective. You have to rely entirely on heuristics. Sure, a simple aim-bot that instantly snaps someone's aim right on someone's head might be detectable, but one that simply lets you see through walls certainly won't be if the player doesn't make it stupidly obvious by pre-aiming around every corner.
Yeah, I generally trust Valve but gaming is definitely not important enough to me to give them kernel access to my system. I’m sure many gamers disagree with me though.
I take it community moderation tools like voteban/votekick aren't sufficient anymore?
They worked pretty well for pub matches back in CSS and 1.6, where it was pretty trivial for anyone to cheat or bot for free with minimal effort. I wonder what changed.
