For some, Helldivers 2’s anti-cheat software limits the ability to play at all

Really wanted to like this game. The hype had me.

I played it, waiting for it to get good. It just never did for me. Maybe I'm missing something, but after 10 hours I felt like I'd seen pretty much everything.

As for the anti-cheat, I understand why they'd have that. I've played so many games where people cheat and it just kills the fun. Even when it is PvE.

I don't really understand the mindset of the cheaters though. Do they think we all talk about how great they are after the game is over? Like, Bobfucker326 sure did shoot more stuff than any random player I've ever seen, he must have a massive wang and be great at maths and stuff.

I think the key you're missing is a friend group. The game excels when you play with friends you already know
- Yeah, it's a good "playing with the gang" game. Friday night crack a brew or a blunt and just mindlessly shoot and laugh at dumb stuff.
- Absolutly. Sometimes you find randoms that speak, or manage to work together and it is also good. But friends is the top tier.
- Accidental friendly fire and crazy shouting when getting ambushed is like 60% of the fun of Helldivers 2.
  
  For me, playing with friends is the vast majority of my playtime anyway since the little time that I get, I want to spend with my friends.
- And if not, being engaged with the community on discord or Reddit. Knowing which fronts the community is working on and joining in really helps the kind of meta/RP aspects of the game.
Honestly the game doesn't have that much content but I do love the gameplay loop. The emergent gameplay is fantastic in my opinion. The worst part is all the fucking technical issues
- To be fair to them they're deliberately holding back content to organically drip feed it in. I'm pretty confident we'll see a new faction in the next week or two. And probably more vehicles in the next 4 weeks.
  
  It's a bit rough around the edges and the patches introducing new issues like the arc weapon crash had been deeply upsetting. Hopefully we're past the worst of it.
The game has a ton of subtle mechanics that it doesn't really go out of its way to tell you about. So there's a degree of mastery and cross-polination of strategy and builds that take advantage of those mechanics between groups, which adds a lot of fun for me. I respect how that's not for everyone though.
I will cheat in single player games. I give it a solid "first time" unmodded play through. If it's good, I'll do other "paths" or "builds" depending on the game.

Then make it a little more... interesting, or different even.

Then you work up to Total Conversions, and thats fucking great for longevity.

Then at a certain point, its quality of life. I don't want to spend 20 hours getting to the "interesting" part of the game. I can no longer get even just an hour to dive into a game uninterrupted. I love immersion; in the past it was an unhealthy escape mechanism, now when I get it, its a breath of not dealing with my day to day shit for just a little bit. Life always gets in the way of living, at least the way we want or need to in the moment. But I digress...

But cheating in a multiplayer game really defeats the purpose of multiplayer. An unbalanced play field isn't fun for anyone.

I'd like to see more games embrace a modding community. If you and a few friends want to play with mods A, B, D, and F, more power to you guys. Keep enjoying that game.

Just don't force an imbalance on other people.
I like to play game normally, but i get bored easily... So i find it challenging to find a cheat or any bug and be ultra strong character or anything i want to be. I play games so i can relieve from my stress not to be stressful or frustrated to beat a boss.

Yeah I agree cheat in PvP is Unfair.

But cheat with PvE where I'm not harming anyone for their rank at leader board. That's fine by me.

I'm amazed it even works on linux, guess there is one benefit of using some shady unknown Korean kernel level anticheat instead of EAC.

EAC does work on Linux, developers just have to flip a toggle switch to support Linux. Some devs just don't want to do that.

Halo MCC, Apex Legends, Back 4 blood, and Smite are all games that use EAC and work on Linux.

And basically no kernel anticheat will work on Linux. So Helldivers 2 isn't kernel anticheat, just user-space.
- Helldivers 2's anti-cheat (nProtect GameGuard) is kernel-level on Windows, but has a userspace fallback for linux
  
  Edit: see this post
- I did forget apex legends works, boggles the mind that EA's most popular multiplayer game just werks on linux. But most EAC using games don't sadly.
And the anti cheat functions in user space! No special permissions required.
- Literally the only reason I decided to buy it.

Does this game need client-side anticheat at all? It's not PvP, so if you're cheating, you just ruin the experience for yourself and maybe your teammates. But as far as I know, there are no rankings and not really any competition.

I haven't played it, but it seems very similar to Deep Rock Galactic which does perfectly fine without anticheat.
- Deep rock's much less widely popular though, so it enjoys the benefits of a small, chill community
Not ruining the fun is kind of the point, and not all hackers and cheaters are benevolent, greifing other players in their game.

Further more, every victory adds to the score for that planet and factoring into the galactic score, which is the primary vehicle for storytelling to the community. Which the Devs clearly want to be a community effort of the players and also feedsback into how they balance the game.

So cheaters or hackers adding a lot of false data or win to that pool could result in the devs overturning new content, nerfing existing items or buffing enemies to put the difficulty curve where they want it. I don't think many players would appreciate a sudden difficulty spike because cheaters made the game too easy.
Since it has friendly fire, I imagine an aimbot would be one of the worst things for the game.
- If you want to shoot your teammates, you can do that just fine without an aimbot
It's probably mostly there to try to protect the microtransactions for some of the cosmetics.
the game updates based on the actions of other players, with planets being liberated and events having them taken back by the enemies. if the game had a big hacker problem it would negatively effect the game. plus having a hacker make your mission a free win would not be fun
Whether or not the game needs this anti-cheat feature, players are still finding ways to give other players huge amounts of Samples (a grindable resource with limited amounts included in each mission) and spawn in unreleased equipment and stratagems.

So clearly the GameGuard isn't as useful as it could be.
My main concern would be hackers, not cheaters
- Right? Ring 0 kernel level access is pretty stupid to give a random company. I was gifted this game on steam and immediately returned it.
No, the game is basically a MMORPG, so even though the players aren't against each other, cheaters would ruin the fun for everyone.
- The fuck it is. There's no economy, simultaneous instancing, raids, rarity of weapons/armor/items/mounts, and the "DM" makes completely arbitrary game-wide decisions. Hell, there's barely even a "levelling" system. You high? 🤪
  
  edit: not only is the "anti-cheat stupid simple to bypass, should you want to, the real concern should be that it's a kernel-level invasion of privacy for no fucking reason... but who cares, right? 😅😶

They should at least give the option for friend groups to play without anticheat.

I really wanted to like helldivers and it was fun for a few days but I’ve just lost all interest just about, which is a shame because there is potential there

Well yeah, I would hope it limits the ability of some of them. Like the ones that are cheating, duh

So glad I didn’t waste my money on this. But why called it “Helldiver’s anti-cheat” there’s no way they’re using their own.

It's N-protect game guard. But if you say that in a headline, normies don't know wtf you're talking about.
- What N are they protecting from?