So yeah, I want to discuss or point out why I think Valve needs to fix Anti-Cheat issues. They have VAC but apparently its doing jackshit, be it Counter Strike 2 (any previous iterations) or something like Hunt: Showdown the prevalence of cheating players is non deniable. For me personally it has come to a point that I am not enjoying playing those games anymore, although they are great games by itself. But the amount of occurrences being killed or playing against cheaters is at a height, where I don’t see the point anymore.
- Why I think Valve is the only company able to something against cheaters?
Because they have the tools with VAC already aiming to prevent cheaters. Valve has got the resources to actually invest into something more profound which could be used for any game where anti-cheat protection needs to be implemented. And lastly Valve is the company which is interested in furthering the ability to gaming on Linux, the anti-cheat solution needs to work on both operating systems. Only Valve has the motivation and means to achieve that with their knowledge and resources. What do you guys think about the topic? Is the fight against cheaters hopeless? Do you think some other entity should provide anti-cheat protection, why? I skimmed over “anti cheat in linux kernel” posts in the net, but I have very little knowledge about the topic, what is your stance on it?
Edited: Mixed EAC with VAC. EAC seems to be part of Epic Company. Both of these tools seem unable to prevent cheating like mentioned above.
I made an anti-cheat for vanilla minecraft once, it’s REALLY easy to tell if someone is cheating it’s just developers are grotesquely incompetent when it comes to detecting that sort of thing or (more often) just don’t give a shit. They’ll just create a naïve solution then never test it. For example: minecraft’s god awful anti-fly and anti-speedhack which is just “is the player in the air for 5 seconds” or “did the player go too fast” which is notorious for false positives and doesn’t even stop people trying to cheat, just punishes players for its own fuck-ups.
It really is as simple as creating a model of what the player should be able to do, and then nudging clients towards that expected play. Normal players will not even notice (or will be pleased when it fixs a desync) but cheaters will get ENRAGED and try to cheat harder before eventually giving up. The point of a good anticheat is not to punish players for cheating, but to make it easier and more fun to play within the rules.
It’s like piracy: We had years of systems built on punishment and all they do is create resentment and people trying to break your system, but you build a system on rehabilitation and you become one of the biggest platforms for PC gaming with people willingly downloading it.
I don’t really consider Minecraft to be a game that cares much about cheaters. I don’t even get why you would cheat at Minecraft, there aren’t any rankings or anything and you can just set up your own server with every console command imaginable.
Many games servers are written with a simple goal in mind: allow as many players as possible to play as long as possible for the lowest cost. This is especially true for first-person shooters and other timing-critical games. Constantly mapping out the possible moves for a player is quite CPU intensive when you’re trying to run servers for a million concurrent players and you need to deal with the packet processing overhead to boot.
You can do some server-side cheater detection based on modelling by taking a random player sample and analysing their behaviour post-match, but you can only record so many matches before that starts to add up.
As for piracy: we now have maybe two people in the world who can crack Denuvo games, and one of them has severe mental illness so working with her to share knowledge and skills isn’t very likely. Games do get cracked, but it takes a very long time, or it doesn’t happen at all when games aren’t very popular, or it happens because developers remove Denuvo after they’ve made enough profits that they can ship the DRM removal as a magical “add 10fps” patch. I don’t even know of any popular online games that you can still play with cracked versions on PC. Denuvo and basic always-online DRM have beaten most of the piracy scene, it seems.
And yet people did. I only brought that up as an example because minecraft is like 90% client side, proving that server-sided AC is possible.