Back on Reddit, there were even complaints that EA's anticheat was conflicting with Riot's anticheat. Yep, now you potentially need two different installations of Windows to run each of your games. At this point, you would need to buy several SSDs and a SSD extension (or an external USB reader, since USB speeds nowadays are relatively fast enough to afford running those games from an external drive), then install each game (and operative system) in a different one, and swap between them before booting, just like a cartridge. Same would go, of course, for your actual main GNU/Linux drive that contains your actual personal data - that way, the anticheat can't even see your personal information, as it'd physically unplugged from your computer. And since Windows checks the license per motherboard, not per drive, you should be able to recycle the activation key between your Valorant "cartridge" and your Battlefield "cartridge". At this point, paying for a dedicated game console and the online pass starts becoming attractive...
...That, or just boycott multiplayer games altogether. If your group of friends doesn't mind, of course.
Didn’t this only happen if you tried to run both games at the same time, which realistically should never be happening? The only time this might trigger is if one anti-cheat misses or drops the command to close for whatever reason and keeps running while the game is closed and you go to play the other game instead.
Both anti-cheats could just whitelist each other, though. Anti-cheats already have software whitelists, there is no reason they can’t add each other. That automatically solves the problem without the consumer or developer needing to do anything other than update their software to the newest version.
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
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
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.
Anyone with half a brain could see this coming from a mile away. My conspiracy brain almost thinks this is some concerted and calculated effort by Microsoft to artificially lock games to Windows through anti cheat. It’s disgusting, isn’t needed, and just plain isn’t effective. They can spew all the metrics out of their ass, we all know that it’s just not effective.
a year ago on Mastodon when EA started locking out games like Apex Legends, BF1, V, 2042, etc from Linux I said “I bet you Microsoft is about to launch a handheld and since they have a deal with EA and Gamepass they want EA Exclusivity on their handheld and to lockout Steamdeck/Valve” sure enough a few months later Microsoft announces their Xbox handheld with Asus.
They want to keep windows relevant so hard. Yeah, i enable secure boot, and let some kernel level anti cheat into my system. At least i don’t have to play with cheaters. Oh there are still cheaters. So glad
Honestly, if I had the skills I’d be doing that as an explicit fuck you to the draconian anticheat bullshit they force on everyone, because what better fuck you than showing all that effort was for naught, especially close to launch.
EA can go fuck themselves with the world’s biggest cactus.
CSGO used to have Overwatch which is an anti cheat system that uses trusted and experienced players to go through video footage of reported players. With this method I both reported blatant spinbotters, wall hacking, and other chears. I also was on the side of watching back footage of hacking players.
Say AI trains on this data, it might work.
I’m not a fan of this though because knowledgeable and experienced players will be better than AI.
What actually exists but what I have yet to see implemented in any game I play are those server-side “AI anti-cheat” solutions like from anybrain that basically just analyse the players behavior to fit certain criteria. According to areweanticheatyet.com though there are four games using it already (the most well-known one probably being Lost Ark). In theory ai models can be very efficient and accurate at this (we are not talking about transformer models here like with the current llm craze) but that all depends on how they train a model and what the training data looks like.
I am not sure what the user above is thinking, but to play devil’s advocate:
One thing that modern AI does well is pattern recognition. An AI trained on player behavior, from beginner level all the way up to professional play, would be able to acquire a thorough understanding of what human performance looks like (which is something that games have been developing for a long time now, to try to have bots more accurately simulate player behavior).
I remember someone setting up their own litmus test using cheats in Tarkov where their main goal was just to observe the patterns of other players who are cheating. There are a lot of tells, a big one being reacting to other players who are obscured by walls. Another one could be the way in which aimbots immediately snap and lock on to headshots.
It could be possible to implement a system designed to flag players whose behavior is seen as too unlike normal humans, maybe cross-referencing with other metadata (account age/region/sudden performance anomalies/etc) to make a more educated determination about whether or not someone is likely cheating, without having to go into kernel-level spying or other privacy-invasive methods.
But then…this method runs the risk of eventually being outmatched by the model facilitating it: an AI trained on professional human behavior that can accurately simulate human input and behave like a high performing player, without requiring the same tools a human needs to cheat.
Cheating humans already perform closely enough to trick such a system. Many cheaters are smart enough to use an aimbot only for a split-second to nail the flick. With a tiny bit of random offset, those inputs indistinguishable from a high-skill player.
These tricks may make it indistinguishable to a human moderator, but machine learning is actually really good at detecting that. But most companies don’t have the expertise, resources or training data to build a proper model for it.
Machine Learning is really good at CLAIMING it detected that.
The reality is that every few months there is a story about a fairly big streamer/e-sports player MAYBE getting caught cheating on stream. Sometimes it is obvious and sometimes it really becomes “Did they just know the map well enough to expect someone to come around that corner?”.
And a lot of times… it really is inconclusive. A somewhat common trope in movies is the veteran gunslinger literally aims at the wall of a stairwell and tracks where they expect the head to be and either fires a few rounds through the wall or waits for them at the bottom and… that is not entirely inconceivable considering that people tend to not crouch or move erratically down stairs. Obviously Jonathan Banks has a wallhack but Mike Ehrmantraut is just that damned good.
And false positives are a great way to basically kill a game. ESPECIALLY if they are associated with demonstrably false negatives too.
But you can be damned sure most of the major esports games are already doing this. It really isn’t expensive to train and they have direct feeds of every player in a tournament or twitch event. The issue is that there are (hopefully) tens of thousands of servers active at any moment and running Computer Vision+Inference on every single server is very costly.
And… I seem to recall there was a recent intentionally poorly defined Movement about maybe keeping user hostable dedicated servers a thing? How does that mesh with having every single server need to phone hom (a fraction of) all 32 players feeds to a centralized cluster?
Machine learning doesn’t necessarily require a centralized cluster. Usually running those kinds of models is pretty cheap, it’s not an LLM basically. They usually do better than human moderators as well, able to pick up on very minute ‘tells’ these cheats have.
I understand your point about edge cases, but that’s not something the average player cares about much. E-sports is a pretty niche part of any game, especially the higher ranks. You just want to filter out the hackers shooting everyone each game that truly ruin the enjoyment. Someone cheating to rank gold instead of silver or whatever isn’t ruining game experiences; they’re usually detectable too, but if you get a false negative on that it’s not the end of the world. A smurf account of a very highly ranked player probably has a bigger impact on players’ enjoyment.
Depending on the model, inference can be run with CPU only. To distinguish what was originally proposed (a momentary flick consistent with aimbotting), you are either doing ray tracing (really expensive) or analyzing (effectively) video feeds. Both of which tend to put things more into the GPU realm which drastically increases the cost of a server.
But also? The only way these models can work is with constant data. Which means piping feeds back home for training which basically is never inexpensive.
Aside from that: if it was as simple as you are suggesting then this would be a solved problem. Similarly, if people don’t care about hackers outside of e-sports then there would be no reason for games to spend money on anti-cheat solutions when any match that matters would have heavy scrutiny. And yet, studios keep pumping out the cash for EAC and the like.
Since human beings are hot garbage and will always cheat, I really enjoyed playing against the AI soldiers in BF. It can also ensure that the game is playable forever OFFLINE.
Where I live I cant play BF4 anymore. Servers are down for my country, but I paid money for the game. Digital media is a scam once the servers go down. That is why I jailbroke every console I own. Ppl are already reviving BF2 with AI bots. The future is looking bright.
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