I play games mostly on my Steam Deck after migrating from Xbox. Didn’t want to pay for Internet access to use the Internet I already pay for (Xbox Live).
Battlefield games like BF1 and BF4 used to run on the Deck about a year ago, but then EA toggled something and disallowed any and all Linux distros. Can’t remember their reasoning, but something something anti-cheat.
Now me, a paying customer, was fucking pissed. I purchased these games on my Steam Deck to avoid corporate walled gardens like the Xbox, and then EA lock me out of my purchase after the refund period had elapsed. What the fuck???
So I started dual booting Windows 10 on the Deck to regain access to a product I had paid for. Fucking shit I had to do this in the first place.
But now I need to enable Secure Boot to play the new shit, and I have no clue how to do this without bricking my Deck. I’m an engineer, but not the software type. I don’t want to fuck around with my gear just to play games.
Client-side AC is a poor solution to cheating that can be solved with server-side AC.
Fuck EA. Fuck M$. Fuck all the corporations that want to run spyware on my devices
More proof that anti-cheat and bans just isn’t a working approach.
Almost every cheater I’ve talked to or seen interviewed has said they do it because they like winning. If thats the case, pushing them away isnt getting rid of them, its making them try to win harder, and they are literally spending money to make that happen.
This means, there is a market for cheaters, one that publishers and devs simply assault instead of realizing they could replace it entirely.
Create a marketplace in your game for cheats. When a player buys a cheat in game, they can turn it on but only in a specific playlist that cheaters get to play in. You dont need to own or turn on cheats to play in that playlist, in case you feel like challenging yourself, but cheaters can use them as much as they want in that playlist. If a cheater wants to go into cheat free playlist, their cheats get turned off by the game and they have to play like everyone else. Cheat free playlists can have cheat detection, and if you are caught cheating then you get banned from cheat free playlists permanently, but you arent banned from the game or the cheat playlist.
This deters cheaters from paying third parties for cheats, gives them a space to experiment in, makes money for the company running the game, and reduces the amount of cheaters in regular public lobbies. It also creates a space of challenge for people who don’t cheat, sorta like how people will do no death runs in souls games.
Sure, it isnt a perfect solution, but its far better than punishing every player with invasive tech, while simultaneously letting a market of cheat sellers thrive. For a bunch of capitalists, its wild they haven’t realized they are missing out on money with cheats.
Hm, yeah, it’s something every developer should know; client-side validation of input still needs server-side validation, because client-side is not reliable, no mather what you force on them.
Server side anticheats need to be considered. Clientside has been annoying users far too much, and can be bypassed. A combination of both (and I’d like a less intrusive clientside one) would be better
Same. Keeps things simple with Linux, and Windows doesn’t even complain about it being disabled, so long as it’s present. I’ll never understand why it’s even required if you don’t even have to enable it.
So they can have an excuse to force you to upgrade to Windows 11 beyond “whoops, turns out making an operating system as a ‘buy once’ product is a bad idea.”
Joke’s on them; I already upgraded to Windows 11. I was among the first. It’s actually a solid OS once you disable all the ads and telemetry with O&O Shut Up 10.
You can still get win 11 without TPM by using Rufus and bypassing TPM which will have to be done for a lot of old PCs and we will have to do it by October this year.
Your computer will gradually get more and more filled with security holes that will be problematic to patch. Eventually, programs will stop supporting it as well.
Does this disable updates though? My wife somehow had Win11 installed on her pc without enabling secure boot, and her updates got so far behind that now it refuses to update and needs to be reinstalled.
Things were better when private servers had actual mods and admins, they acted more like pubs where you could go see the regulars, actually form a community.
This is where we need dedicated servers and self moderation
My knowledge towards battlefield games ends at BF4 but I’m pretty sure people pay to host custom servers, EA refuses to open source it and only supply a handful of third parties with the actual code for them to charge hosting fees.
From my research, while I could see that being the case, “Secure Boot” is classified by the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project as Tivoization, and GPL-3 was made to fix that. That’s how I saw it, at least.
so glad we have to give huge corporations tons of access to our private data just to play a game we paid for! so cool!
Real talk: Not all multiplayer games require kernal level anti cheat. Fortnite is a good example. If this type of anti-cheat, forced secure boot is so necessary to prevent cheating, why doesn’t Fortnite have problems with rampant cheating? Or do they and I just don’t notice because I’m losing either way? lol
Having Anti-Cheat of any kind outside of the game is laziness or lack of resources.
I believe just have physical limitations of the character or objects and verify the movement every once in a while to make sure that their movement is not super human (ie, aim bots).
It takes more work and resources to do what they’re doing. They already do server side anti cheat. And realistically, this is more effective than not doing it, though it definitely still gets defeated anyway. I would say the things that it asks of the customer are not worth the trade even if they were 100% effective, but they are more effective.
The best thing is back when Battlefield was Battlefield, it would self-regulate because most people played on self-hosted servers, so cheaters and bad actors were taken care of swiftly. But now they want their own control to put shitty bots and SBMM in the game, so here we are.
This whole game is a case of the devs making bad decisions and then instead of changing them decisions, they apply the quickest bandaid fixes they can.
Overall scope was set by EA, they wanted a more mainstream shooter to compete with the likes of Call of Duty, so they could jump into the seasonal content/battle pass grind. But the devs made all these little individual decisions that add up.
The issue with “just analyze the players” is that it is VERY expensive computationally. And it causes issues with non-official servers as it drastically increases the cost of a dedicated server and makes a listen server nigh unusable.
To be clear: I do not think the kernel level anti-cheats are a consumer friendly solution. But it takes a special kind of arrogance to insist you know better than decades worth of research and work in trying to stop hacking.
Yeah I mean its not like Valve has been using a combination of server side and client side game file only validation to do AC for Counter Strike for 20 years or anything.
Yep yep yep, the whole industry uses Kernel AC, other than the devs of the longest running comoetetive FPS genre ever, yep yep yep!
Valve is also barely a blip in the market when it comes to this, funny enough.
Valve’s data can be more or less officially pulled and steamdb lists them as having 1 million concurrents in whatever the default window is (looks like this month). Call of Duty claims to be closer to 70 million but most conservative estimates agree they are at least in the low 10s of millions of “active players” rather than anyone who just popped in to check their dailies to see if they wanted to do them.
Personally? I think the vast majority of games (including Battlefield…) would be perfectly fine with VAC and I like VAC. But there are reasons that the studios that make more money than some small nations on their games (as opposed to their storefront, which is what VAC actually is based on) literally pay for more invasive solutions.
Which is actually the other point worth remembering. Punkbuster and EAC and rolling their own costs money. Whereas VAC is “free” with Steam (and possibly elsewhere but that gets murky). Many of the mega games are associated with their own proprietary launchers but plenty of midtier games that ONLY care about Steam still feel the need to pay for EAC or whatever.
And… there is a reason beyond “We want to spend money to hurt our users”.
Okay. Apparently EAC is free if you sell your game on Epic but… ain’t fucking nobody considering EGS their be all end all platform. Even frigging Epic sued the hell out of Apple to get into the app store for crying out loud (not quite the same but roll with me).
I mean yeah, thats why I said longest lived, not ‘most popular’.
But I am glad you agree that… VAC is reasonable, and works pretty darn well.
But this leads into Part 2…
Why does VAC work pretty darn well?
Beyond the technicals of the methods of AC…
Because if you fuckup bad enough, your entire Steam Library can be deleted.
Steam is a platform.
Every single other major company that is trying to force Kernel AC on the PC market is acting as if they do, or should just also be the de facto platform, as they are on consoles.
Yep, cheat on Xbox or PS and your account can get banned there too… but a PC is more than a gaming console, has a lot more private stuff on it than one, typically.
Valve are PC natives so they never pushed for Kernel AC.
They just allow, and now warn you about Kernel AC from other mega publishers on their platform, and these other game publishers.
Their whole thing is that they want you to use their platform instead of Steam. They’ve pretty much all done it at this point, at least tried… Ubisoft, Rockstar, MSFT/GFWL, ActBlizz (now technically MSFT but w/e), etc etc etc
And they want to force Kernel AC down your throat on your PC as well as consoles… because it gives them more data, which they can use themselves, and sell to data brokers.
… Anyway, the funniest part?
EAC and BattleEye have offered full support to game devs to get their AC working on linux via Proton… for 3 to 4 years now.
It comes with their licensing agreements.
But management almost never cares to tell development to actually use this support thst they are already paying for!
… Because they get lots of money from MSFT, and MSFT hates Linux.
Also, if you go on areweanticheatyet … you can see that almost every single AC system of any kind, in the last 10 years… has at least one game that showcases it working on Linux.
This means that it is provably, entirely possible to get nearly all AC systems working on Linux, as some game dev team has done this.
Its just that most game dev teams, under most management… are not directed to.
There is no real technical reason why AC cannot be made to work in a satisfactory way on Linux.
At best, it is dev/management laziness/nonprioritization, at worst, it is publishers not wanting to upset MSFT, or still pursuing their idea of what should be normalized in terms of a gaming distribution platform, and the backend business side of profiting from dataharvesting.
Yep yep yep, the devs of the FPS game with endemic cheating so horrible the competitive scene had to introduce their own matchmaking system with kernel AC.
So, again, Kernel level AC can be, and routinely is defeated, all the time.
This is easy to verify with a simple websearch and maybe 30 minutes of time, I don’t want to directly link to where you can purchase working cheats/hacks/methods that can defeat Kernel AC, because I do not want such things to proliferate.
But you appear to be claiming the competetive scene for CS has introduced a Kernel level AC.
I cannot find this, this does not appear to be true, but I could be wrong, could you please source this claim?
I cannot find a competetive CS community or league or tournament that has… somehow rolled their own custom version of CS, overlayed with some other AC, on top of VAC.
Frankly, I don’t see how this would be possible without somehow forking CS, and then either stripping out or modifying VAC… as … two AC systems working at the same time are nearly 100% guaranteed to fight each other, and class the actions of the other AC… as cheats and hacks.
Its essentially analagous to how, 15 to 20 years ago, if you had McAfee and Norton and whatever other realtime, always active, system level anti virus software running, simultaneously… they would fight eachother, treat the other AV system as a virus, as malware.
…
All I can find is CS communities discussing the problem broadly, mixed with a lot of speculation that a recent VAC overhaul now does include Kernel AC… despite there being no actual evidence for this, beyond the collective bias and fallacious logic that if an AC becomes more effective, the only possible explanation is that it must be because of Kernel access.
What Valve actually did, was hook up AI to greatly enhance its serverside cheat detection capabilities and accuracy… one of the rare actually good use cases of AI as it relates to cybersec.
It seems to have improved their, again, server side heuristic detection abilities… without needing Kernel level access.
…
So yeah, please source your claim.
Unlike my easily verifiable ‘claim’ that I do not wsnt to cite for cybersec reasons, your claim should not have that problem at all.
So yep, again, Kernel level AC, routinely defeated, all the time, with such regularity that it is a viable business model.
Almost like Kernel AC doesn’t do what people seem to think it does, it isn’t a panacea, and the tradeoff is that you lose all your computer security… for nothing, really.
I did not say that kernel level anti cheats makes cheating impossible. The improvement in the experience is not nothing. You would not understand unless you played both for yourself.
Kernel anti-cheat does absolutely nothing to prevent aimbots/triggerbots, as most are run using 2 separate machines, anyway. The first machine runs the game in a totally clean and legitimate environment, but sends its video output (either using standard streaming tools like OBS or by using special hardware) to the 2nd machine. The 2nd machine runs the cheat and processes the video to detect where to aim and/or when to shoot, and sends mouse input back to the 1st machine.
Colorbots are extremely efficient and can be run on just a raspberry pi.
Human reaction time is ~200-250ms, while the cheat will be introducing easily less than 10ms of latency.
I’ve never used cheats in a video game because I don’t see the point and it would spoil the fun of playing, but as a software developer, it is interesting to learn about how they work and are implemented
Wall hacks could be defeated by the server only reporting the positional information about enemy players to game clients when it detects that the client player’s camera should be able to see some part of the other player’s silhouette. This is possible, albeit computationally expensive, but the main functional issue is latency. Nobody wants enemies magically popping into view when their view changes quickly because their ping was more than 6ms lol
There are a lot of good reasons for secure boot both in game and in general. If your distro does not support it then that should be a complaint directed towards the maintainers. And… getting that through Proton is a different mess.
But EA have been spending the past year or so actively updating older Battlefields (I want to say all the way back to 3?) to actively block linux/proton. For whatever reason, they actively want to block anything but Windows for their games.
Secure boot can be used as part of a chain that eventually ends with unlocking your cryptographic keys only if the software stack has not been modified.
Sure, for most people that’ll make little difference, but it is an actual benefit.
First, Yo. Doesn’t even need to be a good password.
Second, what you are describing is something very different. Outside of very rare situations (most of which theoretical or specifically targeting a specific system by a state level actor), to be able to “boot the bios and disable it” would generally mean the machine is already VERY compromised or the bad actor has physical access to the machine.
A good way of thinking of it is that secure boot isn’t the lock on the door. It is the peephole that you look through to make sure that the person with your pizzas is from Georgio’s AND you actually ordered pizza. Rather than just opening the door because “Yo, free food”.
On its own? It doesn’t do much. But it goes a LONG way towards improving security when combined with other tools/practices.
Pretty much the same as all the other modern BFs. They all had cheats in the Beta/early release versions. I’ve played and own literally every BF game since the original release of 1942. Cheats have always been present more or less.
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