These anti-cheats don’t even work. Anyone can go out and buy a hardware DMA card with an FPGA on it, which is basically a modern day Action Replay. It has full access to RAM without touching the OS and cheaters like to use them to get around anti-cheat.
yeah, i haven’t done tech support in a hot minute either and had to look up some shit too. All that makes sense, although I don’t recall it existing in the early 90s when I actually thought I knew what i was talking about.
You just put me on a rabbit hole of looking at what FPGA means. Are these cheaters buying their cards already made? Learning such magic to cheat in games seems very weird.
Is “Mister FPGA” an FPGA because it can reprogram its “internal logic” to be as the gaming chips from the consoles?
How come people know so much? Dang here I thought being a computer wizard was one thing and you shattered my expectations
An FPGA is essentially a reprogrammable computer chip, or integrated circuit (IC), that can behave as another computer chip. It is widely used in the development of new ICs.
The MiSTer FPGA project uses an off-the-shelf Altera DE10-nano development board, which has a combo FPGA + ARM SoC on it. The OS, USB controller input, and some other stuff runs on the ARM core, and the FPGA is reprogrammed upon launching a core to behave as closely as possible to the original hardware that it’s emulating.
FPGAs can either be pre-programmed or programmed on-the-fly. In consumer hardware, FPGAs and CPLDs (essentially weak FPGAs) are used when you need an IC produced in small scale, or when you need to be able to change the functionality of the IC with updates.
People know so much because they take the time to learn, and it does take a lot of time and patience.
Nothing that takes significant amounts of time to accomplish is easy. Many people go to school specifically to learn about FPGA development (Computer Engineering students specifically).
These days when people say roguelike they just mean a game that divides its gameplay into short, disconnected runs instead of one long, continuous save. It unfortunately has nothing to do with whether a game is anything like Rogue.
Yes, the term is often misapplied, but Balatro has the other key part of actually being a roguelike which is leveling up your build periodically from a randomly selected set of options. The bosses are also randomly selected. It very much is a roguelike
The definition of roguelike has been stretched to the point of near-uselessness, lol. Nowadays, any game with permadeath and “runs” is classified as a roguelike.
Personally, I’d prefer it if we stuck a little closer to the Berlin Interpretation definition.
No, it’s rogue-lite. Not -like. Rogue-lite games have randomized runs, permadeath, and (often tons of) meta-progression involving spending stat points, or unlocking new skills or weapons. In many games, the difficulty decreases by unlocking new skills and adding stats. Sometimes the games increase their enemy difficulty as you earn victories in order to balance the difficulty with all the new choices and skills you have. And sometimes entire game mechanics get added to more you play: new zones and new things to do.
Example rogue-lite games: Binding of Isaac, Undermine, Enter the Gungeon. Even games that have a real sense of story and progression might have tight gameplay loops that can cause people to call them rogue-lites, or say they have “rogue-lite mechanics”. Example: Dave the Diver.
Rogue-likes, on the other hand, are turn-based dungeon crawlers that have very little or no meta progression. They may have training wheels like being forced to start with a simple class and unlocking additional ones doing simple things in-game. They do this to avoid overwhelming new players with character choices, and not to make the game easier as you play. You get better by learning the game, and not by unlocking more things or adding to stats.
Examples: Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Brogue, Caves of Qud.
My son wanted to play the Battlefield open beta over the weekend. It legitimately took me 4 hours to get their shitty kernel anti-cheat shit working. I can’t imagine the average non-technical person being able to do that just to play a game.
What’s funny is battlefield to me was always just a chill game I used to play to do whatever. More for fun and blowing off steam with very little consequence of death. Like if someone was cheating in battlefield i hardly ever care. I also don’t remember a huge ranked or competitive scene for the battlefield genre but I could be ootl cause I haven’t played since 4
Compared to games like Tarkov or DayZ which have a lot more consequence tied to death.
I wish i could be zen like you. I hate dying in any game I JUST WANT TO KILL. Tryna rack up high scores, when I get killed it’s a big bummer, and dying by a cheater just makes it a WAY BIGGER bummer because it wasn’t even a fair fight.
I came home pre early access and saw that I could play if I just watched some stream on twitch for 30 minutes. So I did. Got the code and it did not work. Started up the game and it was locked until early access/ next day.
Went to bed and tried again on early access. Now the game won’t even start, claiming it needs secure boot to be on. I have secure boot on.
This is windows, So Valorant is running its anticheat stopping Battlefields anti-cheat from starting up. Meaning you will have to pick one game as they all seem to start from boot though other sources have said the games have to be running.
In Linux you could prob just run a pass-through in a couple of VMs. But Linux itself doesn’t work with most of these anti-cheats so by default no one running Linux is exposed to this sort of thing.
Yes, obviously, and you don’t typically have trouble with display drivers either nowadays, I suppose we were both jesting.
The right way to do it would probably be either to spin a dedicated partition, or to add a boot entry that sets up a dedicated environment for the game (I haven’t really thought about it but it’s probably doable). In both cases it’s a bit silly, when the whole anti-cheat thing is apparently mostly useless anyway.
I’m not an expert, but it sounds like if you finish a session of valorant, the anti cheat never unloads and continues to monitor memory and files.
Easy Anticheat though, according so some sources, only runs during game play.
Riots Anticheat has a bad history though. But both essentially are black boxes that send details both hash and samples back to their owners for them to approve what’s on it computer. Opened a medical record? It’s probably been hashed and sent back.
Opened your employers accounting files when working from home? details you probably sent riot a copy.
Both can be updated. There’s no guarantees that riot won’t do something nasty against a portion of high value targets. They know you from your payment details. They can identify, update the module and get anything they like, they have root.
They do this to prevent cheaters, and it is effective. Some people who have no problems running any other executable that can do just as much damage believe this load on boot style is too invasive.
I wouldn’t mind this feature dying so I could play on Linux though.
Tell me how any other app uploading your entire documents directory is okay then. “Into the kernel” is largely fear mongering. Other, less trustworthy apps can do plenty of damage, and you don’t seem to care about those.
If you really want to be secure, you can’t do gaming on the same machine as your security sensitive stuff. It’s not limited to these anti-cheats.
code running in kernel space is hugely privileged… it can open up enormous security vulnerabilities because when you’re in the kernel you can bypass a LOT of security checks and restrictions… windows code is generally pretty well tested, so is unlikely to have particularly bad bugs like RCEs etc… but these kernel mode apps aren’t nearly as rigorously tested - things like this is what lead to the crowdstrike outage
things running in the kernel can also cause a lot more damage than user space apps, because the kernel doesn’t do a lot of the error checking and validation that stops things like kernel panics
And anti-cheat needs a lot of access (e.g. read app memory) and sees a lot of churn to evolve with cheat engines. More churn means less thorough testing, which means higher likelihood of an exploit.
and also, security isn’t about 100% guarantees… we each have our own risk profile: regular joe gamer doesn’t need to be as security conscious as someone working for the NSA… their risks are different, because their exploitation value is different… most people only need to protect themselves from generalised attacks because they’re not going to be targeted
kernel level apps, however, blast a massive hole in the walls that keep us secure and potentially open attack vectors for generalised attacks… it’s just not worth that risk
You’re running closed source software that has permissions to read your keyboard input to other applications (other than apps running as admin), they can access your files, and and they can communicate over the Internet.
You’re inherently trusting these publishers if you’re gaming on Windows. Who is the publisher of Darkest Dungeon or Deep Rock Galactic or Lethal Company?
And it's such a weird argument to make that just because some other app uploads your entire documents directory (which to be clear is also not okay) you shouldn't care about being forced into an potential attack vector that can take over your entire computer. Do you also leave your home server unsecured because Google is tracking you through your phone?
With Linux, that’s impossible. However, I will say that you won’t need to worry about these privacy invading rootkits disguising themselves as anti-cheats (Ricochet, EA’s Ring 0 malware, EAC, Battleye, etc.).
I think you’re right. The text isn’t consistent enough to be a font, but it’s not a real woodcut since the wood grain is just following the contours of the shapes (instead of you know… Following the grain of the wood).
It could be artistic filter on another image, but the lack of a font makes that unlikely I’d say.
I can tell you why they do it. Which is to get installed at launch time (like a driver required to boot for example), so they can watch absolutely everything that loads into the system.
But yes, I wouldn't play any game that needs a kernel anti-cheat.
I got a console when I switched to Linux. This has been a problem for decades now. So I’ve got one corporate game box that works with my friends, and one computer that I actually control.
between the toxic communities, over monetization, and this kind of crap, I have been done with online competitive games for years. Anti-Cheating is going to always be a cat and mouse game, with the cheaters winning all the time. Anti-Cheat will always be reacting to whatever the new method of cheating is and humans are very innovative when they want to be.
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