Off topic. Is the anti cheat as invasive as people make it out to be? I'm no computer wiz but I've stopped playing pvp games with root kits but don't actually know enough. Also anti cheat in a pve game lol.
No, it doesn’t, and you’re betraying your ignorance of the topic by making the suggestion.
First of all, when we refer to rootkits, we’re talking about the fact that NProtect, by design, gains an absolutely staggering amount of access to the kernel space of your computer. VAC, by comparison, does not demand anything like the same level of access. You’re making an apples to oranges comparison, and when questioned on it responding with “But they’re both citrus fruit, right?”
No, they’re not, and the fact that you think they are means you don’t know nearly as much about this subject as you think.
But putting that aside for a moment, suppose one day you went hang gliding. Then, upon telling me about how much you enjoyed it, I immediately demanded that you play Russian roulette with me, and got seriously offended when you refused. That would be insane, right?
So you see how a person consenting to one risk doesn’t obligate them to consent to others? It’s not an all or nothing state between “My computer is exposed to exactly zero vulnerabilities” and “My computer is exposed to literally every vulnerability ever”.
Every single program you install on your computer brings some potential amount of risk, but a) that risk is MUCH higher when the program demands the kind of kernel level access to resources like your memory that NProtect wants, and b) that risk has to be commensurate to the benefits offered, and it’s hard to see what benefit I’m being offered by a notably cheaply made kernel level anti-cheat in a purely cooperative gameplay experience.
I gave a concrete example of an exploit using Steam, and you’ve provided a hypothetical while arguing that your hypothetical example is much more risky (and compared it to hang gliding vs Russian roulette).
Specifically how much more of a risk is it to have kernel level anti-cheat installed than it is to install software like Steam and games on your system? Since you are claiming in-depth knowledge I would actually like to know more specifics for future reference. I don’t find the hang-gliding/russian-roulette example super helpful personally.
…it’s hard to see what benefit I’m being offered by a notably cheaply made kernel level anti-cheat in a purely cooperative gameplay experience.
You don’t see how it would affect your enjoyment of the game to have someone insta-killing all the enemies in a match, or generating 1000x more rewards than you would normally receive, breaking the progression permanently?
For some reason FOSS bros don’t have any issues with capitalism or security when it comes to Steam, they think Gaben shits gold or something idk. It’s weird. Steam is virtually a monopoly and has had security vulnerabilities in the past but they just plug their ears and ignore it.
Yes it is. Its literally a free for all rootkit on your system. Anything you run can exploit it. Its an open invitation to take over your system. The only way I'd run this, would be under linux with proton emulation layer.
Setting aside that there really shouldn’t even be an anticheat in a PvE game (unless progression allows you to unlock items that are real world currency based on which I could see why they’d want to stop people from accessing it without one of their two methods) the concept of a rootkit doesn’t equal “software with admin privileges.”
A rootkit is a package of different (specifically malicious) programs that are designed to hide themselves from your system.
Is the anticheat designed to be invisible when installed or running? No. Is it designed to specifically be malicious? No. Therefore it’s not a rootkit.
There’s a difference between software designed for malicious purposes and software that has the ability to be hijacked for a malicious purpose. These two aren’t the same and everyone with even a smidgeon of actual IT security knowledge would acknowledge that at the bare minimum which no one in this thread seems to have done yet.
This isn’t just semantics, rootkits are defined by their purpose not their permissions. Bunch of script kiddies in this website pretending their ability to install Arch makes them professional Comp Sci degree holders.
unless progression allows you to unlock items that are real world currency based on which I could see why they’d want to stop people from accessing it without one of their two methods
This is the reason I believe. There’s a premium season pass that has some later game unlocks which they probably want to incentivize. That, and there’s a meta-game that depends on the community making concerted efforts to progress the story. I’m assuming that they don’t want a modder to unbalance that.
Yeah, it’s definitely getting difficult to identify the difference in PvE and PvP from a security and financial standpoint in the modern live service landscape. Games that don’t include direct competition still have aspects of them which can be messed up by other people with cheats.
A somewhat similar concept is how easy it is to stop at the space anomaly in NMS and get handed a stack of Starship AI valves that will immediately skip you past early-mid game progression in a lot of gameplay loops. It has nothing to do with paid currency which is why they don’t stop it but the idea is similar I guess.
Setting aside that there really shouldn’t even be an anticheat in a PvE game (unless progression allows you to unlock items that are real world currency based on which I could see why they’d want to stop people from accessing it without one of their two methods)
I can think of another reason. It’s a live service game where it’s the community vs the game masters. They want to tell a story within the game and direct us with community challenges. Right now there’s a challenge to protect planets from automaton invasions. We lost the first planet, won a few but it’s not looking as much of a clearcut victory like the first challenge was. There’s a real chance we fail this challenge and maybe that part of their plan?
So what would happen if you let cheaters run amok? Now you can’t tell a story where the community fails, because cheaters can guarantee wins. If you make it so hard cheaters can’t win you’re going to make it completely impossible for the community and that’s just not fun. So what can you do to make it fun for the community? Crack down on cheaters.
I just don’t see another rational reason to have anticheat. Even the real world currency isn’t that useful because it’s mostly for buying armors for cosmetic purposes. There’s really not much to gain from circumventing the real world currency.
Off topic to the off topic. OS masterminds out there, does rootkit anti-cheat translates to Linux over Proton? I assume not? If Proton is not originally run as root, it shouldn’t be able to elevate its privileges, correct?
It’s crazy peoples experiences so far, I got to play all week with zero issues, had some issues over the weekend but decided to not queue up to let others join.
If you look at the Steam player charts for the game you’ll see when it’s working vs. when it’s not. Off-peak it works fine, but right now the player base is ramming up against their temporary player cap for hours at a time on-peak. If you try to connect when there are thousands of others also trying to connect, that’s when things go south. That was the case for much of the weekend.
In the last 48 hours, player counts hit 400k at about 7pm Eastern UTC and just stayed there for 6-ish hours. That isn’t normal, almost all other player count charts show a gradual rise and fall over the course of a day. The devs implemented an artificial cap after they found that their servers bog down when there are too many active players, basically sacrificing the peak time login experience to preserve the in-game experience. If you try to connect while the active player count is pegged, you’re essentially joining a swarm of other players who are also trying to connect at the same time. That swarm is likely DOSing some aspect of their own login systems.
A lot of the player count on steam is users AFK idling so they don’t have to get stuck in queue again. My discord friend list is a ton of idle users on Helldivers 2 all day and night
Yeah, that’s definitely a thing. They need to implement an idle timer. Seems like a low effort feature that would improve the login experience significantly.
The server issues were cute for a couple days following their overwhelming success but I would like to be able to play the game I fucking paid for now please
You can get past the black screen by deleting the config file in the game’s appdata. After that, it’ll launch, you’ll apply settings, and you’ll get stuck on the “Defrosting Helldiver” screen because you can’t access a server, and be stuck with a black screen the next time you launch. I’m having so much fun.
If you let it sit on the black screen, it will eventually let you in. Or to be exact it will eventually display the intro movie and splash screen, you’ll probably see servers at capacity there and after some time there you’ll eventually get in. Not exactly sure what it’s doing on that black screen, but I’m guessing it’s trying to talk to some server that’s massively overloaded. I spent most of the weekend playing with friends, so I had to suffer through the wait multiple times.
Hmm. I don’t like the waiting. I have about 1.5hrs of playtime before I can get it refunded with ease. I’ll just see what state it’s in next weekend and refund if it’s still iffy.
That’d be great. I’ve had the game for a week or so, and most of that time has been spent playing other things because H2 is completely and literally unplayable with the current server issues.
That sounds a lot like the jump from HD to 4K. Which is to say a lot less impactful than the previous jumps and tech. And something a lot of people might not even notice.
Are there other benefits to this? Like less work for developers?
A lot less work for developers, smaller game sizes, and map and game design no longer needing to be built around the onerous limitations of raster lighting and reflections.
Ray tracing is a bigger deal than most people realize. It feels like a gimmick because the games that support it today are still ultimately designed around rasterization.
Path-traced lighting in particular is a huge game changer, and means developers will no longer have to choose between rudimentary global dynamic lighting and very static and storage-intensive baked lighting. You can get the benefits of both without the drawbacks of either, assuming the hardware is up to snuff.
It's worse than that, they've been going through their back catalog and adding Enigma Protector DRM to games because the company doesn't like mods saying they are no different than cheating and some are morally offensive.
There's conflicting messaging on it, some on Steam claim when they implement it that mods quit working, and others claim that just isn't true... I don't know as I'm not paying what Capcom wants for some of their games, but I know that it messed up compatibility with the Steam Deck when they added it to Monster Hunters in January.
If I owned one of the games that might get it, I would look into keeping a second copy that isn't updated though. Or turn off auto-updates in Steam.
Even in the very game, CP2077, as impressive as it can be, it can also be just as disappointing. It’s still a nice technical marvel, but it’s not at all the gamechanger it wanted to be.
And there’s games such as A Plague Tale Requiem where the baked lighting looks flat-out better in most scenes than the raytracing, since unlike the “realistic” raytracing they hand-crafted it to be unrealistic but fitting for the tone and atmosphere of the scene. So I turned it off again.
I’ll be honest, so far the only game where RT universally made me go “I’ll leave that on, that’s awesome!” is Riftbreaker. And it has a comparatively minor effect there, but at least a purely positive one (CP2077 I prefer at native rez over RT + DLSS which gets a weird pseudo-blur even with carefully tweaked resharpening, it’s just part of how it renders I think as other games don’t have this issue).
And all for prettier shinies. No offense, but SSAO/Cubemaps are still damn pretty looking and cheaper in terms of resources. For me, 2077 still runs like ass with raytracing even today.
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