Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

64% Positive

Analyzed from 759 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#game#cheat#play#cheats#kernel#run#games#every#players#anti

Discussion (8 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ChocolateGodabout 2 hours ago
> Riot went as far as pushing a UEFI firmware update to Valorant players to close a hardware attack — the first time an anti-cheat has reached below the operating system to change your firmware

I don't believe Vanguard did this at all? It told users they need to update their firmware to play, it didn't touch the firmware itself.

> Cheats started in user space, so anti-cheat moved into the kernel to see them. Cheats followed into the kernel, and then below it into hypervisors

I think cheats moved into kernel space before anti-cheats did.

_aavaa_about 2 hours ago
> So I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater than run un-auditable ring-0 software on the same machine I use for anything private.

Yeah except that’s not the options here. Even with ring-0 there are lots of cheaters. Without it the game would be completely infested with them.

bigstrat2003about 1 hour ago
I would still rather have that than let some game run in ring 0 TBH.
anon7000about 1 hour ago
I think that’s a choice people can make for themselves. Thing is, cheating is an existential threat to the entire business model. Games like Valorant rely on a player base that keeps coming back, and a competitive scene where if you work hard, you can move up the ranks and maybe even make money one day. Players quit over cheating. You log in, you play hard and good, but you just can’t win because there are cheaters. These are games you’re trying to be good at… It’s incredibly demoralizing. Happens enough times, and you’ll find a different game not plagued by the same issue. And then your game is dead. You make money off it being a live service, and so maybe your business is dead too.

So it makes a lot of sense for a company releasing a new FPS game centered around competitive gaming to pull out all the stops to prevent that issue.

Now, the bigger question here is why can I play a game like Overwatch 2 on Linux, but not Valorant? Does Overwatch have a bigger cheating problem? If not, then Valorant should take a look at why their anticheat is just as effective without requiring kernel access.

vel0cityabout 1 hour ago
> Does Overwatch have a bigger cheating problem?

Yes, considerably.

One can also look at Counterstrike running on Valve's matchmaking which uses userland cheat detection versus Faceit's kernel level anticheats for the exact same game. It's been incredibly rare for me to run into obvious cheaters on Faceit but I'll often run into cheaters in Valve's matchmaking. It's the same game, the same executables.

vel0cityabout 1 hour ago
> I want to preface this with the fact that I’m not a gamer.

So you're prefacing it as someone who has never really dealt with the games you like to play getting totally infested with and nearly unplayable with so many cheaters in practically every lobby.

Its easy to think its something that's not needed if one never spends any time in the space.

Do they stop all cheats? No. Do they make the bar extensively higher to cheat? Absolutely. Even they point this out: "A DMA cheat is a separate FPGA card that sits in a PCIe slot and reads the game’s memory directly over the bus, while a second computer processes what it sees and feeds back aim and wallhacks..." Any random person can go run some executable they found on a forum, what percentage of the playerbase has these FPGA cards and a second computer to properly run these cheats? And even then, more modern systems can even detect these kinds of things.

Are there lots of problems with these anti-cheat platforms? Sure. Are they now often developed with ties to countries many wouldn't want have that deep of access to their computers? Sure. Is kernel-level anti-cheat overall as a concept overreach? Probably not for what a lot of players actively want. Players want systems to ensure everyone is playing on a somewhat equal playing field. Other than the games being rendered in the cloud I don't know any other real way to begin to enforce it.

> I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater

What if it wasn't "the occasional cheater" and instead was "nearly every match of every game you like to play"?

pibakerabout 1 hour ago
Yes, it is very rich for someone with no skin in the literal game to police what others do to their computers.

I don't play any games that use anticheat. But I also don't go out of my way to tell other players who knowingly, consensually installs games with anticheat so they can play them. It's like saying it is an invasion of privacy for cycling athletes to be subjected to doping tests. It's their game. Why does it bother you?

facepalmz33 minutes ago
I'm not a gamer and I carry a smartphone with location services on with me everywhere I go every single day and I have an account on every social media app ever made and I never close discord and I've made every single purchase in the last 15 years on a credit card I got from fucking Amazon and I post constantly on this cool little forum just for us tech savvy hackers with all my personal info right in my bio and I know that the tiny little tech company Y COMBINATOR would never scrape this or my posts and I know this because the forum doesn't use much CSS (real hackers don't need CSS) and I'm here to tell you that checking cryptographic signatures on boot is a massive invasion of privacy and I will NEVER allow something insidious like that be installed on my hardware, EVER! Anyway, back to posting under my real name on Twitter and hanging out with my friends on Discord kek. I like Discord cus it's free :) I'm so smart.