We need the game publishers to face more consequences for neglecting a significant segment of the market

Most games I know about do both, but my understanding is it's hard to stop some of the client-side stuff server-side.

Look, we've been here before. I'm not super invested in multiplayer stuff, so I don't care that much, but I am old enough to remember when gamedevs would not even try crossplay and just let the PC be the wild west when it comes to cheating.

I didn't necessarily hate it. I lived in a world of dedicated servers where moderation and security came down to some kid in his underpants being pretty sure he didn't like you and kicking you out. I'm guessing there's a bit too much money and too much of an expectation of free-form matchmaking for the mass market to go back to that.

But hey, I'm not a security software engineer and I'm not excessively involved in competitive shooters, which seems to be where most of the problem happens. My interest in this is having enough PC security for crossplay to make matchmaking in fighting games less of a hassle than it used to be in the Street Fighter 4 days. You sweaty FPS nerds can do whatever, as far as I'm concerned.

One part would be to run a shadow client that takes the user's input and sees how much the game state diverges. There will be a certain amount of it due to network latency, but if there's some cheater using an engine mod/hack to fly around the map, this will catch that. Though something like that should be caught by a lower level check that makes sure the players are following the laws of physics in the game (like max speed, gravity applies, no teleporting).

Another one would be to see if the player follows things they shouldn't be able to see. If a player hides behind something they can shoot through but can't see through, do they somehow seem to always know they are there? Do they look around at walls and then beeline for an opponent that was hidden by those walls?

Another one would be if their movement (view angle) changes when they are close to targeting an enemy or if they consistently shoot when the enemy is centre of target, then it's a sign they are using a device that even kernel mode anti cheat won't catch to cheat (it plugs in to your input between your mouse and PC, also plugs in to somewhere that would allow it to act as a video capture device, then just watches for enemies to get close and sends movement or clicks to aim or shoot for you). Though this one is pretty difficult to catch, due to network latency. But those mouse movements might defy the laws of physics if the user was already moving. Natural movement is continuous in position and its first derivative (always, by Newton's f = ma, though sample rate complicates that), and the way we generally move is also continuous in the second derivative, but banging your mouse into your keyboard can defy that and it's even more sensitive to sample rate.

Imo these techniques should be combined with a reporting system and manual reviews. Reports would activate the extra checks for specific players (it would be pretty expensive to do it for all players), then positive matches from the extra checks would trigger a manual review and maybe a kick or temp ban, depending on how reliable the checks are.

That said, I believe there will eventually be AI-based bots where detecting them vs other skilled players will be impossible. And those will be combinable with some infrastructure that allows players to take certain amounts of control, maybe even with an RTS-like interface that could direct the bot to certain areas. Though adding an LLM and speech to text and vice versa could allow it to just respond to voice commands, both from other teammates and from the player.

I think at that point, preventing cheating in online games will be impossible and in person tournaments will probably involve using computers provided by the organizers (tbh I'm kinda surprised this isn't already the case and that some people have been caught using cheats during these kinds of tournaments).

You'll never catch all cheaters no matter what you do. All the kernel access in the world won't stop someone from having a secondary device hooked into the monitor output and faking a dumb keyboard and mouse.

A solid robust server-side solution and well architected server-client system will stop 99% of cheating. And no, Kernel AC is not part of a "well architected" system.

It's, at best, a bandaid for a shitty server-client system that introduces a shit ton of privacy and security issues for everyone that uses it. Shit needs to stay out of the kernel unless absolutely necessary, and that goes for Linux, Windows or MacOS kernels.

Almost every blue screen/Kernel panic I've dealt with was traced back to some shit hooking itself into the kernel where it didn't belong. And absolutely fuck third-party antivirus that hooks into the kernel too.

Anticheats on Linux don’t have kernel access

Yeah, I know. I'd like it to stay that way. Furthermore, this is also why games with kernel-level anticheat still don't work on linux, despite developments in wine/proton.

Don't give corpos any ideas

The post is about anticheat that doesn't work on linux. Non-kernel-level anticheat works fine now thanks to wine/proton. That just leaves kernel-level anticheat. If a game has kernel-level anticheat, the studio is not going to remove it for the sake of a linux version. Therefore, to be compatible with linux, they would be introducing kernel-level anticheat into a linux version. To this, I say "fuck no".

It's implied, because anything would behave the same.

Not that client-side anti-cheat makes any sense anyway.

Denuvo et al are exactly what I'm talking about.

Wanting them to work is reasonable, but complaining about the lack of anti-cheat makes no sense. The problem is the insistence on client-side anti-cheat to begin with.

Kernel seems to be where the publisher interest is currently at..

Not even slippery slope, that guy just manifested an argument out of his ass

Can't we just have machine learning models running server side to detect cheaters or something? Why do they need to be so invasive

We actually know this number. As per Steam's hardware survey this group is around 2%, including Steam Deck players.

Best guess, Steam Deck sales are 5-10% of the Switch, which is in the same ballpark, so both numbers are probably roughly right.

Wheter you want to count that as "significant" is up to you, I guess. I bet the impact is very different depending on the game, even for supported games.

There are 3.2 billion video gamers in the world, and 1.17 billion play online (numbers are from 2023).

"millions" is a couple percent. (As seen in the steam survey as well as napkin mathing the numbers from above)

Good point!

That's also a symptom of first-past-the-post only giving people 2 realistic options when we should really have more under mixed member proportional.

I always vote.

But when I vote for a minority favourite, I don't go around saying that all other parties ignore a "significant portion" of voters.

As for games, I also always vote with my money.

Oftentimes I buy games (and not even play them) just because they have a linux native release. But I still don't think linux gamers are a "significant portion" of gamers.

So stop with these kind of baseless accusations, where you conjure up a non existing correlation from your ass.

It’s not petty to use your voice to vocalize your displeasure. The squeaky door gets the grease.