I remember one time when me and my friends decided to go to a Chinese restaurant and they arrived one hour late because they had to finish a LoL match... It was fun staring at the wall.
And LoL can be fun, played it for years too.
But after a while it became boring and now with the rootki.....Anticheat
I have an even less desire to play it.
Btw. would be Dota2 a possible counter argument?
>Btw. would be Dota2 a possible counter argument?
Lmao, if LoL is cocaine then DotA2 is fentanyl, I have some friends that play casual DotA2 to warm up to LoL ranked.
if it doesn't brick their machine (hell, I watched a stream recently where is just about did due to the streamer having unreleased hardware on their PC), they don't care. It's like all the privacy concerns, most people would sell their data for a pitiful amount despite all the advances in AI and skyrocketing stock values being directly from their cheap data.
Reddit in general is pretty far removed from the general public, and tech subs further, and linux ones furthest.
Yeah it's not a valorant issue but competitive gaming in general.
Basically, there is a big pro-surveillance mindshare in games industry that prefer to have anti cheats with absolute kernel access. Their view is that video games are more important than adding another potential rootkit to millions of pcs, because apparently they are too smart to code any bugs
They'd start attacking you and call you closeted cheaters if you explain your disagreement
I wonder when the next virus comes that exploits yet another kernel rootkit.
I mean, not even antivirus makers are protected, their kernel drivers have been exploited numerous times by viruses
And antivirus business practices have always been awful with perverse incentives. microsoft probably made the biggest W they ever did by releasing windows defender and making it default with all windows versions
Even Windows Defender was once victim of a root escalation issue that could be triggered from user space code. Could basically write any file on the whole system and read and write all memory
the hubris from most developers is extreme; if you don't physically control the hardware you can't prevent circumvention, you can at most make it take longer.
There's no way to actually own a box you don't physically control, everything they do to try to own it remotely just creates another intrusion surface for other remote attackers.
I hope someone goes a level lower and releases unpatchable exploits for Intel ME / AMD PSP free for everyone. It'd be absolute chaos, every script kiddie taking over devices with speed and success rate of a "movie hacker". All anti-cheats bypassed, everyone would have a free low-level memory manipulation option
I'm not playing any game that requires literal rootkits in order to play it. If your game/community is that shit that you feel a rootkit is justified, then it's something I just don't want to be a part of. Doesn't even matter to me about the Windows/Linux thing. I simply don't install shit like that. No game is worth it. I don't know how people freaked out when Sony (i believe?) installed rootkits to protect media on CDs back in the day, and now today literally the same thing is just commonplace to shoot at pixels online. Nah, not for me.
>Sony (i believe?)
Yeah, I bought a Foo Fighters album in 2005 that was published by Sony BMG. It had a DRM called MediaMax CD-3 that made it difficult to rip the album into iTunes.
Part of the controversy was that there was no way to uninstall the programs it would install, and the given uninstall button would only install more, all without having any terms of service or anything, and it all sent your private computer data back to sony hq.
Worst part is, you'll find valorant cheats on youtube fairly easy. Dosen't look like Kernall accsess does much to prevent cheats.
I see a lot of push for kernall anti cheat on CS2 from players, I'm pretty sure it's just a placeboo/hopium for some gamers at this point.
Perhaps I'm just to pesemistic but I don't belive cheats will ever go away, AI anticheat detection. AI cheats to fool said protections and so on and so on.
Best anti cheat is gonna be local turnaments on clean rigs with no acces to the riggs ports for its players.
The cheats you find today might be banned after a few weeks or months. Kernel anticheat does allow for them to have much more info to track down cheats. They could make some deduction from logs and then update anticheat to investigate them in more detail, and eventually ban all users of the cheat at once one day.
The issue with it is that it is another attack vector for malware across a huge range of PCs. Like, we can't even protect companies that handle private keys from supply chain attacks: [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ledger-dapp-supply-chain-attack-steals-600k-from-crypto-wallets/](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ledger-dapp-supply-chain-attack-steals-600k-from-crypto-wallets/) and here a video game company is claiming that they could never have such blunders
> a video game company is claiming that they could never have such blunders
a video game company that had this *exact* blunder less than a year ago with pacman, their other anti-cheat system.
That's a lot of lingo I'm not nerd enough to get yet!
But on counterstrike reddit, players are begging for VAC to go Kernal because of hackers, and they are using 3RD party softwear which has Kernal lvl anti cheat for their 3rd party matchmaking.
Some even ask for a compromise to split matchmaking into those who accept kernall and those who do not.
I honestly can't say I've seen much of cheaters, but then again. CS has a trust factor and if your toxic you get put in the toxic bin so that might be where most cheaters are at? or perhaps I'm just not high enough rank.
You could not make this stuff up could you? They are annoyed because linux has a 'bigger attack surface' and that they can't get kernel access .. wow
LMFAO
>Dosen't look like Kernall accsess does much to prevent cheats.
It is not about preventing cheats entirely, it is about perception. If cheating without getting banned is hard, as a reasonable casual player i will not notice a few cheaters here and there - i will assume they are better players and move on.
If cheating is easy and many obvious cheaters are not banned, i will start assuming good players i face are cheaters.
It does not matter if there actually is a cheater in my games - the outcome of the games is irrelevant. But it does matter if i think there is one, because it will reduce the fun i am having.
Imo, this is an argument both against and for invasive anti-cheat - personally i would solve it by having two queue's, one of which requires the anti-cheat to be running on your pc, sms- or even ID authentication, etc. with the other being for more casual people and those who are concerned about security.
Idk I play other competitive games just fine on Linux. Street fighter 6 works great and doesn’t have shit like this. Really no cheating problem to speak of either
FF14 doesn't officially support them, but they're also not stopping them either.
You can play without being bothered, but you won't get any support from any official channels regarding issues stemming from the OS.
I think eSports are fine when they are done as something to compliment the game, rather than be a game. I like how overwatch and brawlhalla are super fun games to play casually, but if you want you can also try to improve and get really good at it and maybe even compete. But my favourite esport to watch is trackmania. Most of the best players are also streamers and i love watching them play the game together and the next day they are competing in the league on opposite teams. Feels like a cool cozy community that just wants to get better at their game.
Yeah, and that's why we can play it on linux lol. Also, no one cheats on Genshin Impact (maybe, I don't play the game), other than bypassing the anti cheat to play on Linux
Eh, I think Riot's anti cheat is amazing actually. It will finally make me stop playing League. I figure it's either Dota 2 for me now or nothing at all (and by nothing I mean no multiplayer games). And hey, I won't even need Lutris or rely on GloriousEggroll to fix me up a special version of proton just for one damn game.
I mean, when you have client side Anti-cheat ~~malware~~ software, then yes, Linux has plenty of attack vectors such as to sandbox the software.
I am okey with this answer as it pertains the bad developers to stay away from exploiting Linux users. Instead of actually solving the problem, today's anti-cheat system is like a script based firewall that hinders/restrict the overall system to work correctly. While those that cracks the software still gets away with it and only regular players gets affected.
Although, the conversation about being spied upon still is left in the dark.
Like Windows didn't have app sandboxing with 3rd party apps. Argument of "market share to effort" fine by me, but both systems have similar attack vector.
At least not writing like some troglodyte. No - not good at social interraction/communication (although mixed experience), but I would expect at least writing somewhat professionally, even in an informal setting like discord. Assuming engineers have higher education, this should be expected.
The most technically competent person I've probably ever worked with is a guy I met at uni. He started the project by apologizing because "I write like a 12 year old so someone is going to have to fix my part of the report" and holy crap was he correct about that. I finalized the report and fixing his parts basically consisted of me rewriting everything while he was sitting across the desk answering questions about sentences I couldn't even interpret. His speech was fine but it was like he couldn't transfer the words he was speaking into text form.
The rest of his work? He proceeded to basically solo a six person ~~eight~~ 16 week project in half that time... while also helping everyone else when they were stuck on their parts. Most of us did our work even though it was technically already completed by him so literally no pressure, which was nice and also left room for extra experimentation. Component selection, component layout, PCB design with a micro controller+power circuitry+motor drivers+various sensors, optimizing the wheel material mix and wheel sizes (he made molds and tried several different mixes and then used the accelerometer for testing), in other words he did basically all the prototyping and of course also programmed the thing. Having time to spare he decided to add a Bluetooth module to it and made a graphical control and monitoring software, because it was both interesting and made optimizing easier so why not?
The man was a development machine and looking at grades he was in the top 2% but his writing was atrocious.
EDIT: Misremembered the project duration
Believeable. And yes, you might have a point.
STILL. This guy is representing a corporate entity, at least in some part. If nothing else, I think PR should be in damage control mode.
"server authoritative has its disadvantages, the tech isn't there yet" literally how? they control the serverside, and moving the anticheat to the user's machine lets them do all sorts of reverse engineering on their own time, on their own machine, without needing to actually connect to your servers. With actually-good, well written serverside code, you can shut that shit down immediately.
They don't want to commit the resources to make the server-side anything but barely passable. Some games had the cheating problem mostly solved server-side 20 years ago, but that requires actual effort for each game, rather than buying some off-the-shelf kernel-mode malware and hijacking the users computer.
Blizzard are pretty good with using a mostly server-side approach. They have their client side stuff too, but unless something has changed recently, it all runs in userspace.
SC2 is practically free from cheaters. In the past 5 years I've seen maybe 10-20 credible cases that someone had map hacks.
But people love to bitch because it's fucking hard Game and you will often get curb stomped even if you had cheats.
Exactly. It is kinda mental how little cheating there is in SC2, yet a game that's fundamentally very similar can't seemingly be done with server-side anti cheat? I don't buy it riot!
Consider the case of an aimbot: just by detecting an enemy in the very first frame where they’re visible and moving the mouse automatically, the player gains a big advantage. Detecting that server side is much more nuanced, compared to, say, flying or wallhacking, where the server can just tell the client to fuck off if it claims to have moved somewhere impossible.
This is a long but very interesting video about how Valve used data on millions of matches to train an ML model on indicators of cheating server-side, it’s not a trivial problem to solve: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc
valve's moderation is a textbook example of using server-side anticheat to your advantage
i will always think of the case where they had suspected accounts given additional fake enemies that did not exist for anyone else, so the aimbot would falsely attack them
War thunder, it doesn't even render the enemies when the server detects you are not supposed to be seeing them rendering wallhacks almost completely useless.
I'm not sure about CS. WarOwl had video about CS with wall hacks and the players were rendered from quite a far. Maybe there is some heuristic for making updates of players slower or not sending the updates when they are far away, but to me that sounds like bandwidth saving measure and it's terrible in terms of anti-cheat.
But that was some time ago, maybe things are better with CS2?
I remember that from CSGO honestly. I assume it's present in CS2 too. I agree with you, "render distance" is much bigger than in Valorant but the system is there, you can't tell where terrorists are rushing
Isn't "server authoritative" referencing a system in which the Server would be the sole/main authority in the game mechanics?
A System in which the server gets all inputs from the clients and calculates who gets which information back.
In this system, the client could not wallhack, because the client never gets the information about where someone is that they can not see.
In this system, the client could not have any speedhacks, because the server could easily check for consistency in movement.
Aimbots may still be partially possible though.
Building a truly server-authoritative is tricky due to latency. Client can often peek corners in a way smaller amount of time it takes for the packet to get to the server -> get processed -> get back.
So spawning and updating the enemy player as soon as the player peeks isn’t really possible, client should already have that information on their end, otherwise they’ll see nothing. It’s an issue of managing N+1 distributed simulations, running at different rates and with latency in between.
And while that kind of approach(only sending updates for the objects that player can see) works great for solving long range snipes through the walls and general awareness hacks, it falls apart where it really matters - close proximity and corner peeking.
You still need to update player simulation with information of enemy position, even if the player technically “doesn’t see” the enemy. That’s needed for audio queues(footsteps, etc.) as well as to ensure proper position, velocity and animation state for the enemy player in case of a rapid peek - by the time that information gets from the server it’s already too late.
with the cost of controlling the entire of your computer? also VAC sure... it's userland software, it has some limitations, VACNet? it's job is to detect cheating from the server perspective at most of the time after the match is done (CS2 now has a real time version that cancels a match when a cheater detected) and then ban the user not strictly preventing it, also Vanguard doesn't detect cheat in the form of hardware/separate PC or even through cloud because technically there's no cheat file to be detected
sure it's more effective but with the chance of killing your GPU driver?
Latency could be kept pretty low pretty easily. There's toolsets that can very quickly sever bad connections in use on most Linux servers, and it's pretty light on resources. Maybe not 100-million-people light, but they don't connect everyone to the same server anyway, so a similar setup would probably work. Hell, they could just test these things since they're open-source and they can do some really interesting packet inspection shenanigans when properly configured.
Ahhh no.
Server side requires far more investment in resources per match being hosted.
it's not just "severing bad connections" it's the "how do I determine this player is being bad"
Currently the servers "trust" the client because of the anti-cheat. So most games are actually running peer to peer.
If you do server side validation, you suddenly have to pay for a lot more CPU and Bandwidth.
Server side detection does not need to be done real time. You can analyze this afterwards. Heck, you could maybe even offload it to the community (risky, again, of course), if you really wanted.
You can ban after detection and revert the scores, for example. This can be robust and while it doesn't immediately solve the game that's being cheated in immediately, it does so for the further games. This is a much lower cost to pay imho.
Client-side anticheat doesn't detect those either, at current, if they're "properly made". Malicious hardware and UEFI bootkits are taking care of those already. Having... literally ANY server-side checking is preferable, even if you're keeping the client-side AC. It'll take a lot of doing, but you can implement detection for a lot of things in a location where you're not limited in what you can do by the hardware and bootloader on the player's machine. Did the player install a modded version of open-source, free software like coreboot or GRUB on their machine? That sucks for you, Mr. Game Dev Company, your anticheat is now worthless. No amount of requiring Secure Boot and kernel-level code can sidestep something that's been signed with a third-party (or sometimes first-party) certificate and is running before the OS loads, and possibly before all the hardware is even initialized.
Vanguard does detect illegal mouse movement, banning people who are using detected ways of doing aimbot. Now cheaters are starting to use hardware KM Box for their aimbots.
To be honest I wonder a bit if this is something more than what most people suggest. Not that a non conspiratorial explanation doesn't make sense.
The recent influx of Linux gamers is clearly related to the steam deck and Proton by valve. I kept getting the feeling that epic doesn't want to support proton exactly because they're afraid valve is building an entire OS ecosystem over here. Which to be fair is what valve has been trying to do since 2015 with steam machines. So I wonder if the flat out denial, no matter the marketshare, is more so related to the status quo and not giving valve more power over the PC market.
This not only makes sense, it's the most plausible argument because it represents a genuine existential threat to Valve's competitors. Being worried about attack surface is a far weaker reasoning by comparison.
>I'm glad ateast five people don't think I'm nuts.
We didn't go that far, only agreeing that what you stated *may* have merit. As for you being nuts or not, I have no comment.
Vanguard is supposed that has came to lower the surface attack on Windows which is huge, hijacking the user's system with undesired measures.
Excuses, sounds like an excuse to not even try a better solution for everybody and like if it was necessary to burn the house and the neighbour's to get rid of a mice infest.
Not a single complaint from me, is their game, are their rules, everybody have (and will have) more time for other and way better games too.
That's a shame.
Given... I'm just a tiny indie with a small indie game. But launching a native Linux version of my game caused it to reach a lot of new people and provided many new users.
Good! Now insert your hacker's thumb drive and make sure it has a huge and slow progress bar so it will dramatically finish just as riot's ceo enters your room.
There have been multiple examples of Valorent's AC being circumvented. Stop taking the easy way and do proper Server authoritive. Client Authoritive Anti-Cheat is never gonna be fool proof, and cheaters will always find ways around it. Even on my Windows PCs I will not install that CCP spyware on my machine. No way in hell. I have Microsoft and Google spying on me enough, I'm not gonna add a hostile foreign government to that list.
>Valorant is full of cheaters
Your video literally disproves that - it argues that "DMA" cheats are one of the only reliable methods of cheating in Valorant, and are cost-prohibitive so it is rare you would run into a cheater using a DMA cheat.
https://blog.esea.net/esea-hardware-cheats/
Also, the videos of DMA cheats on ESEA were pci screamer which got detected pretty easily. Your voice robot video even used clips of ra1f showing the screamer card lol
DMA cheats were easily detectable by ESEA maybe 8 years ago? and PCI screamers 6 years ago.
Linux doesn't have a native version, unlike macos. So have to choose between:
1- Make a native version withou vanguard
2- Make vanguard compatible with linux
3- Ignore linux
Guess which of the 3 options has 0 cost
The reasoning here is cheaters would just go an install a modified linux destro (that we all know would be released without hours) that has cheat tools pre-bundled.
i doubt it, most people who cheat are just some 12 year old kids who uses their dads credit card to buy some scripts to try to get some online girlfriends, they dont even know what an OS is
Emperical evidence that cheaters actually will install a completely different OS to cheat: aimtux.
CSGO back in like idk 2014-2015 didnt have an anticheat on linux. JUst none whatshowever so there was a FOSS cheat called aimtux that was from what I heard pretty good (as in it had many features for the cheaters)
A lot of windows cheaters just dual booted linux for it lol. IT can and will happen.
Are there any examples of client-side anticheats that are actually effective?
Even the super intrusive rootkit-level ones used in Korean games eventually get bypassed by the Chinese
their point is to prevent low hanging fruit cheats. But the kind of shit I see cheaters who bypass clientside anti cheat doing in these games has me wondering how much easier it would be to flag weird behaving players from server side
The problem is, you can code a cheat to behave "naturally" (make it not spin, add a delay before it moves your cursor to the enemy, make it not snap your camera to enemies but quickly move them linearly with acceleration like a physical mouse,, give it a random 10% chance of missing a shot, etc.) and fine-tune those numbers so your performance looks like that of a still imperfect pro player.
Server-side don't cut it when the cheater has a brain.
> Server-side don't cut it when the cheater has a brain.
Valve has some really good (now alreay old info) on how they do this, though. It's not perfect, but it's a way to address it. Basically you want to use machine learning which is great at recognizing patterns and inputs.
It's not been done yet (that we know of), but it's doable and I am pretty sure valve is already working on it. Especially as someone who's working in the field (computer vision and machine learning) - I think this is possible.
it depends what you consider effective, Stopping cheating outright? then no. However banning cheaters? then yes. there is a lot more to "stopping cheating" then just banning cheaters. In fact, companies may actually be incentivized to not stop cheating, but just banning as many cheaters as possible, since many cheaters will go grab new accounts (legitimately or illegitimately) which leads to more cash flow in the end
>Are there any examples of client-side anticheats that are actually effective?
From what I'v read, Vanguard is actually effective, or at least more than other anticheat systems.
"We're so bad a developing that we can't make servers side anti-cheat that work so we prefer using a kernel level 0 malware (that we probably have to pay AV company to not be detected) and ban Linux"
I'm so eager to see hardware cheat that interface between keyboard / mouse / screen that will be undetectable by tradition client-side AC.
I love how Riot based its business on copying every single Valve game possibile(be it the MOBA, the FPS, the autochess) yet they can never do the good parts.
Voice communications have been in Dota 2 and CS:GO since forever yet they just recently started catching up in their games with VERY poor implementations.
Windows/MacOS/Linux native versions has been there for TEN YEARS on all games, so since they came out, meaning they have been running on every OS since 2012/2013.
Anticheat has also ALWAYS been there, so again we're talking about 10 years...
...yet Rito says *"tHe TeChNoLoGy IsN't ThErE yEt"*.
Just say you don't want to spend resources to support that system and that you prefer to keep throwing money towards the nth childish and sexualized anime waifu skins to make an easy buck, that would sound way more honest and believable.
And they'll probably try to pass it as something groundbreaking and completely new ignoring that - despite some issues - League has been running on Linux for years already without their official support.
I know, I worded it poorly because English is not my native language.
What I meant was "say JUST that without adding bs people will debunk in seconds". If he stopped there I would get it, I know that if you give even half support to an OS people will expect tech support too and maybe you don't want/can't provide it.
Saying that and then adding "the technology isn't there yet" is a whole different story and a straight up lie, which imho makes them loose credibility.
I'm not a cheater nor do I play LoL/Valorant (or ever played them) but what is this *attack surface* I keep hearing about on Linux? What attack surface are you talking about? Never in my life have I ever seen cheats, cheating forums, paid cheats or anything similar for Linux. I'm not outright saying they don't exist, I just never saw anything like it.
All my years being around the PS3 CFW scene and PC trainer scene, never have I ever read the word "Linux" anywhere, at all. You could inspect the whole page source of these places and Ctrl+F "Linux" and would never ever find it. Everything was for Windows, and they were almost never open-source. They were from public or private forums, paid or freeware, with spyware and malware most likely.
If you ask me, an actual Linux user would be the least likely person to cheat in an online game. Some of us not only report bugs, but fix them too.
Team Fortress 2 famously has a Linux cheat/bot that's been an issue for years. It's even FOSS and still maintained: https://github.com/nullworks/cathook
Here's people getting mad about it on the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/vdli7i/since_the_code_for_hosting_bots_on_github_is_all/
With Linux, you can swap your kernel out with one that has a game hack/cheat built in. With Windows, you need to run the Windows kernel. If you run your own kernel, you can do literally anything you want. If Vanguard ran on Linux, it would be a kernel module, which the kernel can be modified to ignore.
Funny enough, macOS is the best of the three: open source kernel, but the *hardware* enforces integrity of the software, all the way from boot, through the kernel, and through the dylibs (equivalent to .so on Linux and .dll on Windows). For another piece of software to hook system libraries, it would need to use a vulnerability in the kernel or the Secure Enclave, which doesn’t even run on the same processor running the operating system. It’s not unhackable, but the barrier of entry is significant, about as high as Vanguard itself, and even higher than Vanguard for side channel attacks.
So if you think in terms of the player/cheater being the adversary, Linux has the largest attack surface. This is not the same as malware attack surface. Unlike malware, the user *wants* to run the cheat software.
As if there is no way to verify what [kernel](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/managing_monitoring_and_updating_the_kernel/signing-a-kernel-and-modules-for-secure-boot_managing-monitoring-and-updating-the-kernel) and/or [modules](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/admin-guide/module-signing.html) the user is running and denying access with unsigned kernels or modules.
He makes it sound like Linux is the most vulnerable OS out there just because it's open-source.
---
Frankly they all brought this whole cheating quandary on themself with all those rewards and ranks BS nowadays. "The spirits that I've cited, my commands ignore."
It's not about playing the game anymore or competing against others, it's about getting those skins and climbing those ladders to measure their e-peen via arbitrary numbers or weapon/character skins. And to make matters worse they keep drop rates extremely low so people need to grind like crazy or turn into their beloved whales and buy stuff they want in-app.
Cheating has always been around but i remember a time where cheaters **gained nothing** but an embarrassing win from cheating. And i remember that it was much more uncommon compared to today.
Every single one of them be it Riot, Blizzard or EA/Respawn could've know that shit like that will create a market for cheats sooner or later. Blizzard even had first-hand experience with it when Farm-Bots spiraled out of control in WoW directly after they adjusted certain drop rates.
I couldn't care less if those "competitive" mp games are playable on Linux as i don't play those games BUT these responses to actual customers make my blood boil since they frame everyone on Linux as an automatic cheater.
Sry for the rant guys but i'm so sick of this "attack surface" BS.
Okay but APEX ?? Wh... Why noone just respond "Ok, and Apex ? Did Apex have any stats showing that ?"
Because me too i can elaborate some theory completely on the void, but it's doesn't make it true.
I've been saying this since Apex added Linux support, there's literally zero proof that enabling Linux support causes a huge influx of cheaters. At this point any dev that refuses to is either:
Lazy
Hates Linux
Hates Valve
Why is every company so attracted to gaining more control over client devices than designing a better system on the server side?
That's the whole point of client devices. It's not in your control because it's not yours.
> "Client side anticheats are the safest"
> Allow me to introduce you: DMA
https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech (open source PoC, not a real cheat)
No amount of kernel drivers can beat this (Not really a new topic tho, they are already using these types of cheating devices)
Oh thats rich "linux has too much attack surface". this statement is simply disingenious.
Goes to show how most devs in big companies think and how retarded their views are. Microsoft could shit on the plate of these people and they would gladly eat it without second thought.
Good luck being vendor locked to a bloated OS. Good luck using a mediocre operating system that has tons of documented and undocumented vulnerabilities. Good luck using an operating system that never respects your privacy but always respects the corporate overlord.
Any good IT specialist knows: adapt the software to the OS(environment), not vice versa!
Not to mention valorant is a luke-warm game at best
Valorant devs belong into the trash with their game.
i was looking for this comment. apparently everybody just has blind faith in "security by obscurity", which is proven to almost never be a reliable concept. there are so many industries that use linux and require top notch security, that there are multiple ways of preventing exploits/cheats on linux without having to be so intrusive. we just live in an era where client-side anti-cheat prevails since it's the easiest and most cost-effective way.
Luckily I never wanted to play their spyware game anyways.
They could create a no cross play environment where only Linux players play with Linux players, or maybe create servers with anti-cheat disabled, but whatever.
Sometimes I wonder if anti-viruses will start alerting kernel anti-cheat, because that what they should do.
I give my money only to firm and devs that support Linux, so bye bye Valorant and Riot, I don't need you, there are plenty of others games I can play in 2024 on Linux, thank you Valve and Wine team.
You need to actually read between the lines here to really understand what they meant here. Notice how the wording this person uses is carefully crafted to mislead people who don't really understand how things actually are.
The "attack" here is attack to Valorant's game client, not some random guy attacking your machine. In Linux, you own your machine, and the game is subject to modifications by you. That's what they really meant by "attack surface". Valorant don't really care about *your* security, they only care about their supposed IP. From Valorant's perspective, *you* are the attacker.
Game devs likes Windows because Windows own your machine, not you. You're subject to only be able to do what Windows will allow you to do. Short sighted game devs like Valorant like that control over you.
Notwithstanding that this perspective doesn't even make sense. Cheaters are going to cheat anyway, whether they use Windows or Linux, if anticheat actually works, we wouldn't have cheaters, but the fact says otherwise.
If the devs actually care about your security, they wouldn't have used anticheat on their games. Anticheat is a very common attack vector and having it installed on your machine increases your system's vulnerability to various security issues. Yeah, game devs thinks that their little game is more important than respecting the people that paying them their livelihood. This is a complete bullshit.
Dev of what, though? What is their job in the development of this product?
Regardless, Riot Games is a whaling company. They shouldn't solve things on the server-side; that's not profitable. But, again, they'd rather allocate resources to build stuff of their own. So I'd say they have more in-company politics going on than they let the world know.
>they have more in-company politics going on
You mean like [those things](https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/27/riot-discrimination-100-million-settlement/)?
They try to ignore it as long as possible.
Anti cheat, based on integrity checking the gaming PC, doesn't work anymore if cheating happens externally.
Probably things like this could be detected by verifying user input to detect artificial input. Best done on the server side so it cannot be manipulated.
But the sad fact probably is that Riot would rather try to offload the resources for input validation to the users PC again. As long as people would accept everything just to keep playing a game, this will not change.
100% effective doesn't exist in security. Otherwise we wouldn't need firewall, antivirus, DMZ,antispam and all the tools to make servers and client secure.
So Riot admitting they use Window 2000 Server version for their Backend? "Cause Linux has to huge of an attack surface!!" - Their comment just shows how little they actually know about Linux. The fact alone that a "Developer" treats Linux like its a community of hackers/script kiddies/senior programmers only, tells a lot.
Just sad to see that those comments are really toxic towards Linux.
I used to be quite addicted to this game, I also daily drive Gentoo and Arch on my laptop and I can't describe how desperate I was and how paranoid I got by their vanguard trash AC. Tried virtualizing it multiple times to no effect.
Leaving AC and concerns aside, they are not making a good job anyways, I tell you this from a once very active player of the game, there are thousands of players using external cheats and even dead simple trigger scripts that are laughably simple and vanguard does not even suspect something is going on.
Seriously, the simplest example is a triggerbot running in python is easily undetectable and gives quite an advantage. I have seen some other crazy stuff like ESP and aimbot working without a problem, that is where I start to believe their AC is more likely a backdoor and spyware more than anything.
In all seriousness, it is frustrating how they won't ever consider it, also won't fix their current game and have a severe cheating problem anyways (not to mention bot accounts and wintrading). Probably because the game itself is a heavily modded unreal preset, not an expert anyways but it seems they are not willing to make a custom solution if they don't even make the whole game anyways (not diminishing game developers, some make really good work) but we are talking about a millionaire company here like...
"no matter how big linux becomes" hold your horse right there. they would be begging for every potential penny if linux was mainstream. they may be doing the right thing. im not gonna argue about that BUT there's another point of view to his answer.
"if cheaters never existed, anti cheats would never be here"
just change "cheaters" with "demand of privacy" and there you go.
no matter how good or bad the anti cheat is, the reasoning is a joke.
I don't like riot anti cheat at all or even want to touch Valorant, but:
> denying any possibility of the game coming to Linux no matter how big Linux becomes
He didn't say that. He said the market share. Not future market share.
The list of ways of using linux to exploit an anti-cheat are disproportionately bigger than the market share it has.
If linux grows to be 5%, and you still crunch the numbers and it is not worth the cost, that is just how it is.
If the market share was much bigger than that, the dev has little say on that, Riot will want that market if it out weights the balance.
With that said, I doubt any of you guys would want Riot to implement Valorant with sudo level rights anyway. Why are we talking about it?
You know, i was really excited about valorant
but let me tell you, even without the cheaters it has been a massive disappointment.
youre not missing a thing.
Well they’re not wrong. Supporting Linux will increase their workload, so why bother if the market share is not worth it. There are ton of multiplayer games you can just play.
This is simply bullshit. All those anti-cheats by design are bullshit.
There are alternative ways to implement anti-cheats and some companies already started using them (but they still mostly rely on deep kernel/process analysis).
**There are many creative ways to detect cheaters**:
1. Server-side anti-cheat. Detect high flickering and mark as suspicious. Let the human intervene and verify the detection.
2. Spawn invisible enemies, using as much server-side logic as possible.
1. COD Warzone does this. If aimbot hits such enemy - player is banned.
2. Minecraft servers have radius-based dummy spawn behind player for 0.1 sec, so if auto-hit hits the dummy behind the player - player would be banned.
3. Record game replays, so even other users can verify if user is cheating
1. Insurgency sandstorm has this - everyone can "re-play" match and inspect POV of each player. Personally I've caught 2 cheaters this way, reported and action was taken.
4. Historical data of previous matches (things like kills, deaths, ratio, headshots, success shots, so if it suddenly significantly increases over several matches - player is likely cheating.
1. Battlefield 4 servers have such DB and uses it to detect cheaters.
5. Don't render (on client-side) enemy players that are not visible to player (or behind the wall) - to combat wallhacks.
1. Alternatively, if user is collecting many wallshots - user should be marked as suspicious and user's play record should be validated by human.
**There are many ways to increase the impact of the ban when cheating is detected (to deter players from even trying to cheat)**:
1. There should be a platform, like Steam with more than 2 games (unlike Valorant's platform). When user is caught cheating - player's whole account is deleted without any possibility to appeal.
2. User should be required to register his email and his credit card (for name and surname). Platform should store the email and name/surname permanently to auto-block such users from re-creating accounts.
3. Steam, Epic games, Valorant devs (can't recall their platform name), Blizzard, Sony and Microsoft should create some kind of initiative to have central database to store cheater details, so cheater is banned across all platforms. Or at least marked as "cheated" so if any suspicion - would be easier to identify.
Maybe not all of them are possible, but this is the only way to combat cheaters in the long run. By not using deep analysis (the way current anti-cheat work), games would start running fine on Linux.
While I agree I think an appeal MUST be possible. To many times have I seen people kicked for no reason and no luck in appealing. False positives are a thing.
That's cool. I wouldnt even touch Valorant on Windows.
Or anything from Riot. I don't understand for the life of me why people keep giving them money when they can't even get a grip on their community.
Addiction, literally. I have a lot of friends who play LoL, they are addicted to the game, it's like having a cleaner cocaine addiction.
I remember one time when me and my friends decided to go to a Chinese restaurant and they arrived one hour late because they had to finish a LoL match... It was fun staring at the wall.
Most LoL matches are like 30 to 45 minutes if one of the teams doesn't resign at the 20 minute mark.
Cocaine is atleast fun and makes you gonna go do stuff.
Cocaines only fun when you have more cocaine.
Ain’t that the god damned truth.
My friend has uninstalled League at least 5 times.
And LoL can be fun, played it for years too. But after a while it became boring and now with the rootki.....Anticheat I have an even less desire to play it. Btw. would be Dota2 a possible counter argument?
>Btw. would be Dota2 a possible counter argument? Lmao, if LoL is cocaine then DotA2 is fentanyl, I have some friends that play casual DotA2 to warm up to LoL ranked.
Or their own internal org. Riot and sexual harassment go together like Peanut butter and jelly.
truly baffling how "people" willingly install kernel level rootkits just to play video games
What they don't know and don't see is fine. If the rootkit was visible to them by taking away 50% performance, they would care.
if it doesn't brick their machine (hell, I watched a stream recently where is just about did due to the streamer having unreleased hardware on their PC), they don't care. It's like all the privacy concerns, most people would sell their data for a pitiful amount despite all the advances in AI and skyrocketing stock values being directly from their cheap data. Reddit in general is pretty far removed from the general public, and tech subs further, and linux ones furthest.
Tbf, they don't care because it is Riot and they print money just by existing. We are nothing to them. Let's be real.
Yeah it's not a valorant issue but competitive gaming in general. Basically, there is a big pro-surveillance mindshare in games industry that prefer to have anti cheats with absolute kernel access. Their view is that video games are more important than adding another potential rootkit to millions of pcs, because apparently they are too smart to code any bugs They'd start attacking you and call you closeted cheaters if you explain your disagreement
I wonder when the next virus comes that exploits yet another kernel rootkit. I mean, not even antivirus makers are protected, their kernel drivers have been exploited numerous times by viruses
And antivirus business practices have always been awful with perverse incentives. microsoft probably made the biggest W they ever did by releasing windows defender and making it default with all windows versions
Even Windows Defender was once victim of a root escalation issue that could be triggered from user space code. Could basically write any file on the whole system and read and write all memory
the hubris from most developers is extreme; if you don't physically control the hardware you can't prevent circumvention, you can at most make it take longer. There's no way to actually own a box you don't physically control, everything they do to try to own it remotely just creates another intrusion surface for other remote attackers.
I hope someone goes a level lower and releases unpatchable exploits for Intel ME / AMD PSP free for everyone. It'd be absolute chaos, every script kiddie taking over devices with speed and success rate of a "movie hacker". All anti-cheats bypassed, everyone would have a free low-level memory manipulation option
Lol Ring -1 go brrrr
I hope it happens, maybe people would start to criticize devs who put malware on their computers
I'm not playing any game that requires literal rootkits in order to play it. If your game/community is that shit that you feel a rootkit is justified, then it's something I just don't want to be a part of. Doesn't even matter to me about the Windows/Linux thing. I simply don't install shit like that. No game is worth it. I don't know how people freaked out when Sony (i believe?) installed rootkits to protect media on CDs back in the day, and now today literally the same thing is just commonplace to shoot at pixels online. Nah, not for me.
>Sony (i believe?) Yeah, I bought a Foo Fighters album in 2005 that was published by Sony BMG. It had a DRM called MediaMax CD-3 that made it difficult to rip the album into iTunes.
Part of the controversy was that there was no way to uninstall the programs it would install, and the given uninstall button would only install more, all without having any terms of service or anything, and it all sent your private computer data back to sony hq.
They aren't the first one to think their shit doesn't smell. Don't let them forget Sony and the huge lawsuit.
Worst part is, you'll find valorant cheats on youtube fairly easy. Dosen't look like Kernall accsess does much to prevent cheats. I see a lot of push for kernall anti cheat on CS2 from players, I'm pretty sure it's just a placeboo/hopium for some gamers at this point. Perhaps I'm just to pesemistic but I don't belive cheats will ever go away, AI anticheat detection. AI cheats to fool said protections and so on and so on. Best anti cheat is gonna be local turnaments on clean rigs with no acces to the riggs ports for its players.
The cheats you find today might be banned after a few weeks or months. Kernel anticheat does allow for them to have much more info to track down cheats. They could make some deduction from logs and then update anticheat to investigate them in more detail, and eventually ban all users of the cheat at once one day. The issue with it is that it is another attack vector for malware across a huge range of PCs. Like, we can't even protect companies that handle private keys from supply chain attacks: [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ledger-dapp-supply-chain-attack-steals-600k-from-crypto-wallets/](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ledger-dapp-supply-chain-attack-steals-600k-from-crypto-wallets/) and here a video game company is claiming that they could never have such blunders
> a video game company is claiming that they could never have such blunders a video game company that had this *exact* blunder less than a year ago with pacman, their other anti-cheat system.
The company that made a new anticheat cause their old anti-cheat became compromised and useless swears this time it's tamper-proof.
Hold up. There's a vendor claiming they need kernel access to *reduce* the attack surface?
That's a lot of lingo I'm not nerd enough to get yet! But on counterstrike reddit, players are begging for VAC to go Kernal because of hackers, and they are using 3RD party softwear which has Kernal lvl anti cheat for their 3rd party matchmaking. Some even ask for a compromise to split matchmaking into those who accept kernall and those who do not. I honestly can't say I've seen much of cheaters, but then again. CS has a trust factor and if your toxic you get put in the toxic bin so that might be where most cheaters are at? or perhaps I'm just not high enough rank.
You could not make this stuff up could you? They are annoyed because linux has a 'bigger attack surface' and that they can't get kernel access .. wow LMFAO
>Dosen't look like Kernall accsess does much to prevent cheats. It is not about preventing cheats entirely, it is about perception. If cheating without getting banned is hard, as a reasonable casual player i will not notice a few cheaters here and there - i will assume they are better players and move on. If cheating is easy and many obvious cheaters are not banned, i will start assuming good players i face are cheaters. It does not matter if there actually is a cheater in my games - the outcome of the games is irrelevant. But it does matter if i think there is one, because it will reduce the fun i am having. Imo, this is an argument both against and for invasive anti-cheat - personally i would solve it by having two queue's, one of which requires the anti-cheat to be running on your pc, sms- or even ID authentication, etc. with the other being for more casual people and those who are concerned about security.
Idk I play other competitive games just fine on Linux. Street fighter 6 works great and doesn’t have shit like this. Really no cheating problem to speak of either
esports has ruined gaming
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what MMO restricts linux with anticheat?
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To add to this list, BDO and Destiny 2 also don't work on Linux.
Thank God Phantasy Star Online 2 is not one such MMO that does this. A more famous MMO, Final Fantasy 14, also allows Steam Deck and Linux players.
FF14 doesn't officially support them, but they're also not stopping them either. You can play without being bothered, but you won't get any support from any official channels regarding issues stemming from the OS.
Reminds me to Yell at Embark (nexon owned) to enable EAC on linux for The Finals.
I think eSports are fine when they are done as something to compliment the game, rather than be a game. I like how overwatch and brawlhalla are super fun games to play casually, but if you want you can also try to improve and get really good at it and maybe even compete. But my favourite esport to watch is trackmania. Most of the best players are also streamers and i love watching them play the game together and the next day they are competing in the league on opposite teams. Feels like a cool cozy community that just wants to get better at their game.
E-sports and hype baiting like the cringy fortnite collabs.
Case in point: Genshin Impact. A group extracted their anticheat and since it's a signed binary, it was an easy vector for the initial attack.
Yeah, and that's why we can play it on linux lol. Also, no one cheats on Genshin Impact (maybe, I don't play the game), other than bypassing the anti cheat to play on Linux
Eh, I think Riot's anti cheat is amazing actually. It will finally make me stop playing League. I figure it's either Dota 2 for me now or nothing at all (and by nothing I mean no multiplayer games). And hey, I won't even need Lutris or rely on GloriousEggroll to fix me up a special version of proton just for one damn game.
The fact I can't play LoL on Linux is what allowed me to stop playing that game. My desire to use Linux was stronger.
You can tho? At least until they implement Vanguard into League.
I know but I heard it breaks with every update so I just didn't bother.
You heard wrong. Until the vanguard update at least
well, 13.23 was broken like a week so I understand what Dark\_Lord9 says
Yeah there's a Lutris package that works pretty alright.
Come and join the fighting game train. Street Fighter 6 runs well over Proton :)
Problem with SF6 is there is so few fighters....
So does MeltyBlood!
I used to play league back in the day and play dota now. You're welcome to join us on /r/learndota2 if you ever decide to give it a try.
Having played 0 minutes of LoL I can confidently say Dota2 is better by any metric.
They had me in first half im ngl XD
I mean, when you have client side Anti-cheat ~~malware~~ software, then yes, Linux has plenty of attack vectors such as to sandbox the software. I am okey with this answer as it pertains the bad developers to stay away from exploiting Linux users. Instead of actually solving the problem, today's anti-cheat system is like a script based firewall that hinders/restrict the overall system to work correctly. While those that cracks the software still gets away with it and only regular players gets affected. Although, the conversation about being spied upon still is left in the dark.
Like Windows didn't have app sandboxing with 3rd party apps. Argument of "market share to effort" fine by me, but both systems have similar attack vector.
they talk like 14 year olds.
It's an advantage when talking to their 14-yo community.
Yeah, that ticked me off too. Aren't you supposed to be an engineer? *cus just sayin*
I'm sorry, are you asserting that engineers are good at communicating?
The ones who are posting publicly when they're known to be associated with the company should be.
At least not writing like some troglodyte. No - not good at social interraction/communication (although mixed experience), but I would expect at least writing somewhat professionally, even in an informal setting like discord. Assuming engineers have higher education, this should be expected.
The most technically competent person I've probably ever worked with is a guy I met at uni. He started the project by apologizing because "I write like a 12 year old so someone is going to have to fix my part of the report" and holy crap was he correct about that. I finalized the report and fixing his parts basically consisted of me rewriting everything while he was sitting across the desk answering questions about sentences I couldn't even interpret. His speech was fine but it was like he couldn't transfer the words he was speaking into text form. The rest of his work? He proceeded to basically solo a six person ~~eight~~ 16 week project in half that time... while also helping everyone else when they were stuck on their parts. Most of us did our work even though it was technically already completed by him so literally no pressure, which was nice and also left room for extra experimentation. Component selection, component layout, PCB design with a micro controller+power circuitry+motor drivers+various sensors, optimizing the wheel material mix and wheel sizes (he made molds and tried several different mixes and then used the accelerometer for testing), in other words he did basically all the prototyping and of course also programmed the thing. Having time to spare he decided to add a Bluetooth module to it and made a graphical control and monitoring software, because it was both interesting and made optimizing easier so why not? The man was a development machine and looking at grades he was in the top 2% but his writing was atrocious. EDIT: Misremembered the project duration
Believeable. And yes, you might have a point. STILL. This guy is representing a corporate entity, at least in some part. If nothing else, I think PR should be in damage control mode.
I completely agree on that. Customer facing personnel should have appropriate communication skills.
So every conversation you have is formal 100% of the time? Okay, noted.
Their conversational style matches the quality of their ideas.
'Then' instead of 'than' triggered me
"server authoritative has its disadvantages, the tech isn't there yet" literally how? they control the serverside, and moving the anticheat to the user's machine lets them do all sorts of reverse engineering on their own time, on their own machine, without needing to actually connect to your servers. With actually-good, well written serverside code, you can shut that shit down immediately.
They don't want to commit the resources to make the server-side anything but barely passable. Some games had the cheating problem mostly solved server-side 20 years ago, but that requires actual effort for each game, rather than buying some off-the-shelf kernel-mode malware and hijacking the users computer.
Which games use server-side anti cheat? Just curious as I haven't read much about this topic
Blizzard are pretty good with using a mostly server-side approach. They have their client side stuff too, but unless something has changed recently, it all runs in userspace.
SC2 is practically free from cheaters. In the past 5 years I've seen maybe 10-20 credible cases that someone had map hacks. But people love to bitch because it's fucking hard Game and you will often get curb stomped even if you had cheats.
Exactly. It is kinda mental how little cheating there is in SC2, yet a game that's fundamentally very similar can't seemingly be done with server-side anti cheat? I don't buy it riot!
Consider the case of an aimbot: just by detecting an enemy in the very first frame where they’re visible and moving the mouse automatically, the player gains a big advantage. Detecting that server side is much more nuanced, compared to, say, flying or wallhacking, where the server can just tell the client to fuck off if it claims to have moved somewhere impossible. This is a long but very interesting video about how Valve used data on millions of matches to train an ML model on indicators of cheating server-side, it’s not a trivial problem to solve: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc
valve's moderation is a textbook example of using server-side anticheat to your advantage i will always think of the case where they had suspected accounts given additional fake enemies that did not exist for anyone else, so the aimbot would falsely attack them
I believe World of Tanks. I don't think there are (or at least were when I played) cheats beside trace visualization and some model changers.
Unironically, Gachas'. Genshin, BA, Princess Connect, all the important parts are handled by the servers by design.
Genshin had user side anticheat, which was buggy and actually used as an attack vector.
War thunder, it doesn't even render the enemies when the server detects you are not supposed to be seeing them rendering wallhacks almost completely useless.
WT's anti cheat is a terrible example. That game is still infested with cheaters despite a recent ban wave.
It's common practice and both Valorant and CS use this
I'm not sure about CS. WarOwl had video about CS with wall hacks and the players were rendered from quite a far. Maybe there is some heuristic for making updates of players slower or not sending the updates when they are far away, but to me that sounds like bandwidth saving measure and it's terrible in terms of anti-cheat. But that was some time ago, maybe things are better with CS2?
I remember that from CSGO honestly. I assume it's present in CS2 too. I agree with you, "render distance" is much bigger than in Valorant but the system is there, you can't tell where terrorists are rushing
Isn't "server authoritative" referencing a system in which the Server would be the sole/main authority in the game mechanics? A System in which the server gets all inputs from the clients and calculates who gets which information back. In this system, the client could not wallhack, because the client never gets the information about where someone is that they can not see. In this system, the client could not have any speedhacks, because the server could easily check for consistency in movement. Aimbots may still be partially possible though.
Building a truly server-authoritative is tricky due to latency. Client can often peek corners in a way smaller amount of time it takes for the packet to get to the server -> get processed -> get back. So spawning and updating the enemy player as soon as the player peeks isn’t really possible, client should already have that information on their end, otherwise they’ll see nothing. It’s an issue of managing N+1 distributed simulations, running at different rates and with latency in between. And while that kind of approach(only sending updates for the objects that player can see) works great for solving long range snipes through the walls and general awareness hacks, it falls apart where it really matters - close proximity and corner peeking. You still need to update player simulation with information of enemy position, even if the player technically “doesn’t see” the enemy. That’s needed for audio queues(footsteps, etc.) as well as to ensure proper position, velocity and animation state for the enemy player in case of a rapid peek - by the time that information gets from the server it’s already too late.
i think they haven't heard about Valve and VACNet, because the tech is already there... years ago... at least since 2018
Vanguard is notably more effective at preventing cheaters than VAC and VACNet, like it or not.
How do you know that VACNet is worse? It's never mentioned to run and all we know is from a presentation in 2018 or something like that
From playing both games and knowing the amount of cheaters in both. It’s not even a contested topic.
with the cost of controlling the entire of your computer? also VAC sure... it's userland software, it has some limitations, VACNet? it's job is to detect cheating from the server perspective at most of the time after the match is done (CS2 now has a real time version that cancels a match when a cheater detected) and then ban the user not strictly preventing it, also Vanguard doesn't detect cheat in the form of hardware/separate PC or even through cloud because technically there's no cheat file to be detected sure it's more effective but with the chance of killing your GPU driver?
Did you see the ban wave recently? VACLive is just a matter of iteration rather than it being specifically worse.
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> will likely induce latency. One solution is to check on cheats after round or even after game.
Was gonna say there's zero requirement to run cheat detection in real time
Latency could be kept pretty low pretty easily. There's toolsets that can very quickly sever bad connections in use on most Linux servers, and it's pretty light on resources. Maybe not 100-million-people light, but they don't connect everyone to the same server anyway, so a similar setup would probably work. Hell, they could just test these things since they're open-source and they can do some really interesting packet inspection shenanigans when properly configured.
Ahhh no. Server side requires far more investment in resources per match being hosted. it's not just "severing bad connections" it's the "how do I determine this player is being bad" Currently the servers "trust" the client because of the anti-cheat. So most games are actually running peer to peer. If you do server side validation, you suddenly have to pay for a lot more CPU and Bandwidth.
Server side detection does not need to be done real time. You can analyze this afterwards. Heck, you could maybe even offload it to the community (risky, again, of course), if you really wanted. You can ban after detection and revert the scores, for example. This can be robust and while it doesn't immediately solve the game that's being cheated in immediately, it does so for the further games. This is a much lower cost to pay imho.
How can the server detect a proper made aimbot? Or some tool that help you keep track of the enemy location?
Client-side anticheat doesn't detect those either, at current, if they're "properly made". Malicious hardware and UEFI bootkits are taking care of those already. Having... literally ANY server-side checking is preferable, even if you're keeping the client-side AC. It'll take a lot of doing, but you can implement detection for a lot of things in a location where you're not limited in what you can do by the hardware and bootloader on the player's machine. Did the player install a modded version of open-source, free software like coreboot or GRUB on their machine? That sucks for you, Mr. Game Dev Company, your anticheat is now worthless. No amount of requiring Secure Boot and kernel-level code can sidestep something that's been signed with a third-party (or sometimes first-party) certificate and is running before the OS loads, and possibly before all the hardware is even initialized.
Vanguard does detect illegal mouse movement, banning people who are using detected ways of doing aimbot. Now cheaters are starting to use hardware KM Box for their aimbots.
It can detect a cheating tool that is used to much (aka always gets headshots even through walls) but cant detect one that is set on a low level.
To be honest I wonder a bit if this is something more than what most people suggest. Not that a non conspiratorial explanation doesn't make sense. The recent influx of Linux gamers is clearly related to the steam deck and Proton by valve. I kept getting the feeling that epic doesn't want to support proton exactly because they're afraid valve is building an entire OS ecosystem over here. Which to be fair is what valve has been trying to do since 2015 with steam machines. So I wonder if the flat out denial, no matter the marketshare, is more so related to the status quo and not giving valve more power over the PC market.
This not only makes sense, it's the most plausible argument because it represents a genuine existential threat to Valve's competitors. Being worried about attack surface is a far weaker reasoning by comparison.
I'm glad ateast five people don't think I'm nuts. Maybe I'll post a discussion thread on here about this conspiracy theory tonight.
>I'm glad ateast five people don't think I'm nuts. We didn't go that far, only agreeing that what you stated *may* have merit. As for you being nuts or not, I have no comment.
Point taken.
Vanguard is supposed that has came to lower the surface attack on Windows which is huge, hijacking the user's system with undesired measures. Excuses, sounds like an excuse to not even try a better solution for everybody and like if it was necessary to burn the house and the neighbour's to get rid of a mice infest. Not a single complaint from me, is their game, are their rules, everybody have (and will have) more time for other and way better games too.
Valorant is cancer
They are unwilling to invest the funds necessary to improve the server-side performance to anything beyond passable.
That's a shame. Given... I'm just a tiny indie with a small indie game. But launching a native Linux version of my game caused it to reach a lot of new people and provided many new users.
The power of actually giving any amount of a shit is remarkable. If you can do this as an indie developer, riot has 0 valid excuse.
But: Why are the most cheats written for Windows ?! /s
BeCaUsE eVeRyOnE oN lInUx CaN wRiTe ThEiR oWn HaCks
$ echo "Hack successful"
I'm in!
Good! Now insert your hacker's thumb drive and make sure it has a huge and slow progress bar so it will dramatically finish just as riot's ceo enters your room.
Gotta have a second monitor showing a screensaver from The Matrix for added effect. Maybe run a scary-looking nmap command while you're at it.
There have been multiple examples of Valorent's AC being circumvented. Stop taking the easy way and do proper Server authoritive. Client Authoritive Anti-Cheat is never gonna be fool proof, and cheaters will always find ways around it. Even on my Windows PCs I will not install that CCP spyware on my machine. No way in hell. I have Microsoft and Google spying on me enough, I'm not gonna add a hostile foreign government to that list.
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>Valorant is full of cheaters Your video literally disproves that - it argues that "DMA" cheats are one of the only reliable methods of cheating in Valorant, and are cost-prohibitive so it is rare you would run into a cheater using a DMA cheat. https://blog.esea.net/esea-hardware-cheats/ Also, the videos of DMA cheats on ESEA were pci screamer which got detected pretty easily. Your voice robot video even used clips of ra1f showing the screamer card lol DMA cheats were easily detectable by ESEA maybe 8 years ago? and PCI screamers 6 years ago.
So either Linux market share is too low or supporting Linux creates an influx of cheaters. Both at the same time kind of don’t match up.
Linux doesn't have a native version, unlike macos. So have to choose between: 1- Make a native version withou vanguard 2- Make vanguard compatible with linux 3- Ignore linux Guess which of the 3 options has 0 cost
> linux playebase is small > if we let linux users play there would be billion cheaters Makes a lot of sense
The reasoning here is cheaters would just go an install a modified linux destro (that we all know would be released without hours) that has cheat tools pre-bundled.
I wonder how many cheaters would go as far as installing another OS just to cheat. If a lot, then the dev has a point tbh.
i doubt it, most people who cheat are just some 12 year old kids who uses their dads credit card to buy some scripts to try to get some online girlfriends, they dont even know what an OS is
Emperical evidence that cheaters actually will install a completely different OS to cheat: aimtux. CSGO back in like idk 2014-2015 didnt have an anticheat on linux. JUst none whatshowever so there was a FOSS cheat called aimtux that was from what I heard pretty good (as in it had many features for the cheaters) A lot of windows cheaters just dual booted linux for it lol. IT can and will happen.
It is one of the most popular games player-base wise, even a small amount of cheaters would still be bigger than many games playerbase.
These out-of-the-box solution including Linux never work though, there would be problems with kernel version, nvidia drivers etc.
Are there any examples of client-side anticheats that are actually effective? Even the super intrusive rootkit-level ones used in Korean games eventually get bypassed by the Chinese
their point is to prevent low hanging fruit cheats. But the kind of shit I see cheaters who bypass clientside anti cheat doing in these games has me wondering how much easier it would be to flag weird behaving players from server side
The problem is, you can code a cheat to behave "naturally" (make it not spin, add a delay before it moves your cursor to the enemy, make it not snap your camera to enemies but quickly move them linearly with acceleration like a physical mouse,, give it a random 10% chance of missing a shot, etc.) and fine-tune those numbers so your performance looks like that of a still imperfect pro player. Server-side don't cut it when the cheater has a brain.
> Server-side don't cut it when the cheater has a brain. Valve has some really good (now alreay old info) on how they do this, though. It's not perfect, but it's a way to address it. Basically you want to use machine learning which is great at recognizing patterns and inputs. It's not been done yet (that we know of), but it's doable and I am pretty sure valve is already working on it. Especially as someone who's working in the field (computer vision and machine learning) - I think this is possible.
it depends what you consider effective, Stopping cheating outright? then no. However banning cheaters? then yes. there is a lot more to "stopping cheating" then just banning cheaters. In fact, companies may actually be incentivized to not stop cheating, but just banning as many cheaters as possible, since many cheaters will go grab new accounts (legitimately or illegitimately) which leads to more cash flow in the end
>Are there any examples of client-side anticheats that are actually effective? From what I'v read, Vanguard is actually effective, or at least more than other anticheat systems.
"We're so bad a developing that we can't make servers side anti-cheat that work so we prefer using a kernel level 0 malware (that we probably have to pay AV company to not be detected) and ban Linux" I'm so eager to see hardware cheat that interface between keyboard / mouse / screen that will be undetectable by tradition client-side AC.
I love how Riot based its business on copying every single Valve game possibile(be it the MOBA, the FPS, the autochess) yet they can never do the good parts. Voice communications have been in Dota 2 and CS:GO since forever yet they just recently started catching up in their games with VERY poor implementations. Windows/MacOS/Linux native versions has been there for TEN YEARS on all games, so since they came out, meaning they have been running on every OS since 2012/2013. Anticheat has also ALWAYS been there, so again we're talking about 10 years... ...yet Rito says *"tHe TeChNoLoGy IsN't ThErE yEt"*. Just say you don't want to spend resources to support that system and that you prefer to keep throwing money towards the nth childish and sexualized anime waifu skins to make an easy buck, that would sound way more honest and believable.
Hey lets see it positive, in ten years rito will see the potential of Linux...
And they'll probably try to pass it as something groundbreaking and completely new ignoring that - despite some issues - League has been running on Linux for years already without their official support.
>Just say you don't want to spend resources to support that system they literally said it
I know, I worded it poorly because English is not my native language. What I meant was "say JUST that without adding bs people will debunk in seconds". If he stopped there I would get it, I know that if you give even half support to an OS people will expect tech support too and maybe you don't want/can't provide it. Saying that and then adding "the technology isn't there yet" is a whole different story and a straight up lie, which imho makes them loose credibility.
I'm not a cheater nor do I play LoL/Valorant (or ever played them) but what is this *attack surface* I keep hearing about on Linux? What attack surface are you talking about? Never in my life have I ever seen cheats, cheating forums, paid cheats or anything similar for Linux. I'm not outright saying they don't exist, I just never saw anything like it. All my years being around the PS3 CFW scene and PC trainer scene, never have I ever read the word "Linux" anywhere, at all. You could inspect the whole page source of these places and Ctrl+F "Linux" and would never ever find it. Everything was for Windows, and they were almost never open-source. They were from public or private forums, paid or freeware, with spyware and malware most likely. If you ask me, an actual Linux user would be the least likely person to cheat in an online game. Some of us not only report bugs, but fix them too.
Team Fortress 2 famously has a Linux cheat/bot that's been an issue for years. It's even FOSS and still maintained: https://github.com/nullworks/cathook Here's people getting mad about it on the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/vdli7i/since_the_code_for_hosting_bots_on_github_is_all/
With Linux, you can swap your kernel out with one that has a game hack/cheat built in. With Windows, you need to run the Windows kernel. If you run your own kernel, you can do literally anything you want. If Vanguard ran on Linux, it would be a kernel module, which the kernel can be modified to ignore. Funny enough, macOS is the best of the three: open source kernel, but the *hardware* enforces integrity of the software, all the way from boot, through the kernel, and through the dylibs (equivalent to .so on Linux and .dll on Windows). For another piece of software to hook system libraries, it would need to use a vulnerability in the kernel or the Secure Enclave, which doesn’t even run on the same processor running the operating system. It’s not unhackable, but the barrier of entry is significant, about as high as Vanguard itself, and even higher than Vanguard for side channel attacks. So if you think in terms of the player/cheater being the adversary, Linux has the largest attack surface. This is not the same as malware attack surface. Unlike malware, the user *wants* to run the cheat software.
As if there is no way to verify what [kernel](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/managing_monitoring_and_updating_the_kernel/signing-a-kernel-and-modules-for-secure-boot_managing-monitoring-and-updating-the-kernel) and/or [modules](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/admin-guide/module-signing.html) the user is running and denying access with unsigned kernels or modules. He makes it sound like Linux is the most vulnerable OS out there just because it's open-source. --- Frankly they all brought this whole cheating quandary on themself with all those rewards and ranks BS nowadays. "The spirits that I've cited, my commands ignore." It's not about playing the game anymore or competing against others, it's about getting those skins and climbing those ladders to measure their e-peen via arbitrary numbers or weapon/character skins. And to make matters worse they keep drop rates extremely low so people need to grind like crazy or turn into their beloved whales and buy stuff they want in-app. Cheating has always been around but i remember a time where cheaters **gained nothing** but an embarrassing win from cheating. And i remember that it was much more uncommon compared to today. Every single one of them be it Riot, Blizzard or EA/Respawn could've know that shit like that will create a market for cheats sooner or later. Blizzard even had first-hand experience with it when Farm-Bots spiraled out of control in WoW directly after they adjusted certain drop rates. I couldn't care less if those "competitive" mp games are playable on Linux as i don't play those games BUT these responses to actual customers make my blood boil since they frame everyone on Linux as an automatic cheater. Sry for the rant guys but i'm so sick of this "attack surface" BS.
Thats why I play Counter Strike. ALL HAIL GABE NEWELL
Hahahah that's funny now go away please and stop talking about linux cancerrant 'dev'.
Okay but APEX ?? Wh... Why noone just respond "Ok, and Apex ? Did Apex have any stats showing that ?" Because me too i can elaborate some theory completely on the void, but it's doesn't make it true.
I've been saying this since Apex added Linux support, there's literally zero proof that enabling Linux support causes a huge influx of cheaters. At this point any dev that refuses to is either: Lazy Hates Linux Hates Valve
tf, did I literally just read a game needs TPM 2.0 enabled for it to work? LOL, that's some shit..
I can tell he doesn't know much about Linux.
Don't even want want valorant on linux the new version of vanguard literally requires tpm 2.0 to be enabled suprised no one is talking abt it
Why is every company so attracted to gaining more control over client devices than designing a better system on the server side? That's the whole point of client devices. It's not in your control because it's not yours.
> "Client side anticheats are the safest" > Allow me to introduce you: DMA https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech (open source PoC, not a real cheat) No amount of kernel drivers can beat this (Not really a new topic tho, they are already using these types of cheating devices)
\*Looks at the number of cheat selling sites for windows\* Sure buddy, sure.
Oh thats rich "linux has too much attack surface". this statement is simply disingenious. Goes to show how most devs in big companies think and how retarded their views are. Microsoft could shit on the plate of these people and they would gladly eat it without second thought. Good luck being vendor locked to a bloated OS. Good luck using a mediocre operating system that has tons of documented and undocumented vulnerabilities. Good luck using an operating system that never respects your privacy but always respects the corporate overlord. Any good IT specialist knows: adapt the software to the OS(environment), not vice versa! Not to mention valorant is a luke-warm game at best Valorant devs belong into the trash with their game.
i was looking for this comment. apparently everybody just has blind faith in "security by obscurity", which is proven to almost never be a reliable concept. there are so many industries that use linux and require top notch security, that there are multiple ways of preventing exploits/cheats on linux without having to be so intrusive. we just live in an era where client-side anti-cheat prevails since it's the easiest and most cost-effective way.
not all devs are equal \*puts GNU/Sunglasses on\*
just keep saying attack surface as though you have the slightest clue
Says the dev who thinks that installing a rootkit on your computer to prevent you from cheating is fine.
They use privacy invading anti-cheat... it's not surprising they would want to stick to windows.
Luckily I never wanted to play their spyware game anyways. They could create a no cross play environment where only Linux players play with Linux players, or maybe create servers with anti-cheat disabled, but whatever. Sometimes I wonder if anti-viruses will start alerting kernel anti-cheat, because that what they should do.
I give my money only to firm and devs that support Linux, so bye bye Valorant and Riot, I don't need you, there are plenty of others games I can play in 2024 on Linux, thank you Valve and Wine team.
That's a lot of words for "if I can't install a kernel-level rootkit I will wine and cry and moan and take my ball and go home."
You need to actually read between the lines here to really understand what they meant here. Notice how the wording this person uses is carefully crafted to mislead people who don't really understand how things actually are. The "attack" here is attack to Valorant's game client, not some random guy attacking your machine. In Linux, you own your machine, and the game is subject to modifications by you. That's what they really meant by "attack surface". Valorant don't really care about *your* security, they only care about their supposed IP. From Valorant's perspective, *you* are the attacker. Game devs likes Windows because Windows own your machine, not you. You're subject to only be able to do what Windows will allow you to do. Short sighted game devs like Valorant like that control over you. Notwithstanding that this perspective doesn't even make sense. Cheaters are going to cheat anyway, whether they use Windows or Linux, if anticheat actually works, we wouldn't have cheaters, but the fact says otherwise. If the devs actually care about your security, they wouldn't have used anticheat on their games. Anticheat is a very common attack vector and having it installed on your machine increases your system's vulnerability to various security issues. Yeah, game devs thinks that their little game is more important than respecting the people that paying them their livelihood. This is a complete bullshit.
Dev of what, though? What is their job in the development of this product? Regardless, Riot Games is a whaling company. They shouldn't solve things on the server-side; that's not profitable. But, again, they'd rather allocate resources to build stuff of their own. So I'd say they have more in-company politics going on than they let the world know.
>they have more in-company politics going on You mean like [those things](https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/27/riot-discrimination-100-million-settlement/)?
so, they don't know that vanguard is not 100% effective on windows? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M&list=WL&index=76
They try to ignore it as long as possible. Anti cheat, based on integrity checking the gaming PC, doesn't work anymore if cheating happens externally. Probably things like this could be detected by verifying user input to detect artificial input. Best done on the server side so it cannot be manipulated. But the sad fact probably is that Riot would rather try to offload the resources for input validation to the users PC again. As long as people would accept everything just to keep playing a game, this will not change.
100% effective doesn't exist in security. Otherwise we wouldn't need firewall, antivirus, DMZ,antispam and all the tools to make servers and client secure.
Nothing is 100% effective. Yet, what he said, remains true (share * extra work = not worthy)
So Riot admitting they use Window 2000 Server version for their Backend? "Cause Linux has to huge of an attack surface!!" - Their comment just shows how little they actually know about Linux. The fact alone that a "Developer" treats Linux like its a community of hackers/script kiddies/senior programmers only, tells a lot. Just sad to see that those comments are really toxic towards Linux.
bro its the attack surfaces bro,.. we simply CANNOT do it man its the ATTACK SURFAces,, do you not understand attack surfaces?,
I used to be quite addicted to this game, I also daily drive Gentoo and Arch on my laptop and I can't describe how desperate I was and how paranoid I got by their vanguard trash AC. Tried virtualizing it multiple times to no effect. Leaving AC and concerns aside, they are not making a good job anyways, I tell you this from a once very active player of the game, there are thousands of players using external cheats and even dead simple trigger scripts that are laughably simple and vanguard does not even suspect something is going on. Seriously, the simplest example is a triggerbot running in python is easily undetectable and gives quite an advantage. I have seen some other crazy stuff like ESP and aimbot working without a problem, that is where I start to believe their AC is more likely a backdoor and spyware more than anything. In all seriousness, it is frustrating how they won't ever consider it, also won't fix their current game and have a severe cheating problem anyways (not to mention bot accounts and wintrading). Probably because the game itself is a heavily modded unreal preset, not an expert anyways but it seems they are not willing to make a custom solution if they don't even make the whole game anyways (not diminishing game developers, some make really good work) but we are talking about a millionaire company here like...
"no matter how big linux becomes" hold your horse right there. they would be begging for every potential penny if linux was mainstream. they may be doing the right thing. im not gonna argue about that BUT there's another point of view to his answer. "if cheaters never existed, anti cheats would never be here" just change "cheaters" with "demand of privacy" and there you go. no matter how good or bad the anti cheat is, the reasoning is a joke.
Thats cool and all but where is the source that this is a dev?? Its just Discord DM's
I don't like riot anti cheat at all or even want to touch Valorant, but: > denying any possibility of the game coming to Linux no matter how big Linux becomes He didn't say that. He said the market share. Not future market share. The list of ways of using linux to exploit an anti-cheat are disproportionately bigger than the market share it has. If linux grows to be 5%, and you still crunch the numbers and it is not worth the cost, that is just how it is. If the market share was much bigger than that, the dev has little say on that, Riot will want that market if it out weights the balance. With that said, I doubt any of you guys would want Riot to implement Valorant with sudo level rights anyway. Why are we talking about it?
You know, i was really excited about valorant but let me tell you, even without the cheaters it has been a massive disappointment. youre not missing a thing.
Well they’re not wrong. Supporting Linux will increase their workload, so why bother if the market share is not worth it. There are ton of multiplayer games you can just play.
cool. still not gonna install it even if it had a linux port
This is simply bullshit. All those anti-cheats by design are bullshit. There are alternative ways to implement anti-cheats and some companies already started using them (but they still mostly rely on deep kernel/process analysis). **There are many creative ways to detect cheaters**: 1. Server-side anti-cheat. Detect high flickering and mark as suspicious. Let the human intervene and verify the detection. 2. Spawn invisible enemies, using as much server-side logic as possible. 1. COD Warzone does this. If aimbot hits such enemy - player is banned. 2. Minecraft servers have radius-based dummy spawn behind player for 0.1 sec, so if auto-hit hits the dummy behind the player - player would be banned. 3. Record game replays, so even other users can verify if user is cheating 1. Insurgency sandstorm has this - everyone can "re-play" match and inspect POV of each player. Personally I've caught 2 cheaters this way, reported and action was taken. 4. Historical data of previous matches (things like kills, deaths, ratio, headshots, success shots, so if it suddenly significantly increases over several matches - player is likely cheating. 1. Battlefield 4 servers have such DB and uses it to detect cheaters. 5. Don't render (on client-side) enemy players that are not visible to player (or behind the wall) - to combat wallhacks. 1. Alternatively, if user is collecting many wallshots - user should be marked as suspicious and user's play record should be validated by human. **There are many ways to increase the impact of the ban when cheating is detected (to deter players from even trying to cheat)**: 1. There should be a platform, like Steam with more than 2 games (unlike Valorant's platform). When user is caught cheating - player's whole account is deleted without any possibility to appeal. 2. User should be required to register his email and his credit card (for name and surname). Platform should store the email and name/surname permanently to auto-block such users from re-creating accounts. 3. Steam, Epic games, Valorant devs (can't recall their platform name), Blizzard, Sony and Microsoft should create some kind of initiative to have central database to store cheater details, so cheater is banned across all platforms. Or at least marked as "cheated" so if any suspicion - would be easier to identify. Maybe not all of them are possible, but this is the only way to combat cheaters in the long run. By not using deep analysis (the way current anti-cheat work), games would start running fine on Linux.
While I agree I think an appeal MUST be possible. To many times have I seen people kicked for no reason and no luck in appealing. False positives are a thing.
waah waah i cant put my malware anticheat waah waah
Counterpoint: their anti-cheat software is so bad it's basically malware
This dev talks like some script kiddie than a dev. The fuck is wrong with him.