SteamOS is on the verge of huge growth to its player base with the Steam Machine's arrival, and that's why this one factor can't be ignored by game developers.
i cannot possibly justify kernel level anticheat. cheating in games is just not that serious, sorry. there are much smarter ways to tackle that and i certainly don’t have evidence for this by any means but i’ve always assumed that kernel level anticheat is just spyware being justified by saying it’s to stop cheating in multiplayer games. insane to me that people are willing to play games w it.
I understand your argument and it’s completely justified but ultimately the only reason I own a personal computer at all is to play video games and a computer that cannot play the video games I want to play is in chocolate teapot territory.
In school we had a talk from a guest speaker who professionally developed malware. He said kernel-level anticheat was indistinguishable from malware. He said the same thing about (3rd-party) antivirus.
The solution is simple: gaming on a separate device from your regular PC, which does not have any of your personal data to spy on. We could call it a gaming console!
I mean I don’t play brand new AAA games. I have old consoles, I use emulation. I basically have every game I’d ever want already. Tens of thousands of games.
I don’t know where you get discrimination out of that. Only if you’ve convinced yourself that you need to play the newest AAA games, I guess.
I see lots of people playing new games, with multiplayer, on their phones. Ubiquitous computing everywhere.
What do you mean by “cheating in games is just not that serious”?
If you mean viewing life in general, it’s not much of an issue: for sure.
If you mean for specific games it’s not much of an issue, disagree. There really are games that are being completely ruined by cheaters, and that’s what they’re trying to combat.
And if you ask my solution, why have games boot into their own OS where they can do anticheat in that kernel, instead of the kernel i use for other things too. Something that would achieve that conveniently would be awesome, it’s not as if pc’s still take ages to boot.
I think they were viewing it from a risk justification perspective. Giving anything kernel level access is high risk, and game publishers have not even remotely earned that level of trust.
Video games are not that important. That’s why cheating in them is not that serious. It is not worth the security and privacy risks of putting rootkits in people’s machines to address cheating.
Many people in gaming communities advocate physical and sexual violence towards people who cheat, there is a perception that gaming is more important than it actually is.
Games aren’t important enough to ever outweigh the risks, just like they aren’t actually important enough to justify physical and sexual violence against those who break their rules.
People trying to argue for this as some paramount issue that needs to be combated no matter the cost need to get some perspective.
I see. So games using something like Photon are out of luck? Dedicated authoritative servers are mandatory?
It seems like authoritative dedicated servers are out of fashion these days. Especially in the indie scene. But maybe that should change to support more fair multiplayer spaces with less grief from hackers.
GTAO is the most profitable game in the history of games, and it does not use dedicated authoritative servers. Even though they could afford it.
And if you are correct, Valve can’t push this solution. They can’t implement it for developers. Valve is shit out of luck with that approach.
Using GTA online as an example of anything secure isn’t great, given it was losing to cheat engine early on. Surely if they put any effort into anticheat at all, cheat engine would fail
I was using it as an example of a huge failure. They added anti-cheat recently. After a decade. And I’m pretty sure it’s one of the kernel level ones…
They may have even avoided adding it because they didn’t want to piss off users with kernel level. And they didn’t want to spend the money on dedicated servers. But who knows why they let it be a hackers playground for a decade.
So they didn’t do what is claimed to be the right path. And my point was developers don’t want to spend the money on the right path.
Where did I suggest they were an example of good security?!
i cannot possibly justify kernel level anticheat. cheating in games is just not that serious, sorry. there are much smarter ways to tackle that and i certainly don’t have evidence for this by any means but i’ve always assumed that kernel level anticheat is just spyware being justified by saying it’s to stop cheating in multiplayer games. insane to me that people are willing to play games w it.
I understand your argument and it’s completely justified but ultimately the only reason I own a personal computer at all is to play video games and a computer that cannot play the video games I want to play is in chocolate teapot territory.
In school we had a talk from a guest speaker who professionally developed malware. He said kernel-level anticheat was indistinguishable from malware. He said the same thing about (3rd-party) antivirus.
Most people aren’t aware of it
Most people don’t know how a computer does anything, let alone the kernel.
The solution is simple: gaming on a separate device from your regular PC, which does not have any of your personal data to spy on. We could call it a gaming console!
Right so the solution is that people should own multiple expensive devices. That seems discriminatory to me
I mean I don’t play brand new AAA games. I have old consoles, I use emulation. I basically have every game I’d ever want already. Tens of thousands of games.
I don’t know where you get discrimination out of that. Only if you’ve convinced yourself that you need to play the newest AAA games, I guess.
I see lots of people playing new games, with multiplayer, on their phones. Ubiquitous computing everywhere.
What do you mean by “cheating in games is just not that serious”? If you mean viewing life in general, it’s not much of an issue: for sure. If you mean for specific games it’s not much of an issue, disagree. There really are games that are being completely ruined by cheaters, and that’s what they’re trying to combat.
And if you ask my solution, why have games boot into their own OS where they can do anticheat in that kernel, instead of the kernel i use for other things too. Something that would achieve that conveniently would be awesome, it’s not as if pc’s still take ages to boot.
I think they were viewing it from a risk justification perspective. Giving anything kernel level access is high risk, and game publishers have not even remotely earned that level of trust.
Video games are not that important. That’s why cheating in them is not that serious. It is not worth the security and privacy risks of putting rootkits in people’s machines to address cheating. Many people in gaming communities advocate physical and sexual violence towards people who cheat, there is a perception that gaming is more important than it actually is.
Games aren’t important enough to ever outweigh the risks, just like they aren’t actually important enough to justify physical and sexual violence against those who break their rules. People trying to argue for this as some paramount issue that needs to be combated no matter the cost need to get some perspective.
Wait, what’s the smarter effective way that they are ignoring? Why hasn’t Valve pushed this solution in the name of Linux support improving?
I have interest in the problem of hacking in social games. And I’m not sure if I’m aware of the smarter solution you alluded to.
Server-side anti-cheats, like Polar for Minecraft.
I see. So games using something like Photon are out of luck? Dedicated authoritative servers are mandatory?
It seems like authoritative dedicated servers are out of fashion these days. Especially in the indie scene. But maybe that should change to support more fair multiplayer spaces with less grief from hackers.
GTAO is the most profitable game in the history of games, and it does not use dedicated authoritative servers. Even though they could afford it.
And if you are correct, Valve can’t push this solution. They can’t implement it for developers. Valve is shit out of luck with that approach.
Using GTA online as an example of anything secure isn’t great, given it was losing to cheat engine early on. Surely if they put any effort into anticheat at all, cheat engine would fail
I was using it as an example of a huge failure. They added anti-cheat recently. After a decade. And I’m pretty sure it’s one of the kernel level ones…
They may have even avoided adding it because they didn’t want to piss off users with kernel level. And they didn’t want to spend the money on dedicated servers. But who knows why they let it be a hackers playground for a decade.
So they didn’t do what is claimed to be the right path. And my point was developers don’t want to spend the money on the right path.
Where did I suggest they were an example of good security?!