I must admit I immediately questioned the credibility of the article when the author admitted they "aren't a gamer" and then started making allusions to vague political threads. Not to say these criticisms aren't valid, but they're a weird jumping off point
The reality is none of the companies want to do these things. Every step in this process locks out some subset of customers. And that's not including the ones who meet the technical requirements but are turned off enough by the decision to just avoid the games anyway
They're an unfortunate response to how utterly profitable and expansive cheating in online games has become. They cost the companies precious development time that could be spent making the game better to instead make it just vaguely "playable" for normal people
> 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.
Almost all trainers from time immemorial operate in the kernel space because they require direct access to memory addresses. The whole cheats paradigm started with altering values stored at specific addresses. Alter the right value and the player character gets infinite ammo or lives or whatnot, and it went from there. Modern day cheats embed more sophisticated logic that ultimately boils down to altering locations in memory in a specific order, which brings me to my point:
An anti-cheat mechanism can always be defeated if the cheater can access a lower order of abstraction from the mechanism. An arms race is the inevitable outcome. It's either that or competitive gaming is not viable.
The tl;dr from the post is that kernel anti-cheat presents both an attack vector for malware and a backdoor for firms. The former is already known to be exploited.
I don't know why comments here are so negative. PC gamers should be wary of installing this stuff, and PC users in general wary of attempts to lock down their computer. If game companies want a fully locked down PC, they already have one; it's called a console.
There are people who treat their PC almost like a console, cause all they use it for is video games anyway. They don't mind spending extra over a console to have whatever the PC brings. They install whatever. Kernel anti-cheat isn't even the worst thing on those, it's Windows.
Personally I keep my Mac clean. It can play a few games, which is enough for me. I also found a spare PC in e-waste, and occasionally boot it up to play Windows games, but wouldn't care if it died.
Since you're not a gamer sorry but your opinion does not means much, you don't seem to realize how cheating is a problem in online games, it's not just an inconvenience, it kills games.
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.
> I think that’s a choice people can make for themselves.
Users do not have meaningful choice. On most games that use Anticheat, it is required to play the game. I can’t choose to use a non-anticheat version of games. It’s either submit to it or don’t play. Not much of a meaningful choice.
That’s a fair point, but I think the issue is that the other players don’t want to play with you unless you’re running the anti cheat.
Some games do have servers with anti cheat disabled, but a few minutes of playing on one of those servers will reveal why self-selecting into a population not running the anti cheat is not very fun.
This is a long winded way of saying that there isn’t a good way to have a multiplayer game give you the choice while still being fun.
This rhetoric comes up all the time. It goes like this: "if you don't like it, don't buy it." / "don't play it." / "find something else." It's everywhere: don't like non-repairable devices? Well don't buy those then. don't like proprietary operating systems? Well don't use those then. don't like games with anticheats? Well don't play those then. I've found this argument to be entirely antisocial because it completely ignores the biggest problem which is that the presence of those qualities entirely taints whatever it is attached to. The problem isn't that you can't use another operating system or play another game or buy another device. The problem is that operating systems and games and devices end up unusable. Sure you can start arguing about how most people don't care and will never care so it's not / will never be a problem, but at that point you are entirely leaving advice territory and entering cargo cult mentality.
Here's an example. ARC Raiders recently added Denuvo. There's basically no game like it that doesn't have anticheat. None. You can't just go play another similar game that doesn't have anticheat, you just don't get to play those games
Linux and some BSDs are basically the only free operating systems nowadays. Maybe HarmonyOS. Too bad most anticheats don't work with it, too bad most companies only release broken windows drivers and maybe mac drivers but not linux, etc etc. You just don't get to use that hardware or play those games or etc.
Good luck getting anything like any iPhone or Android flagship that has a replaceable battery. When you choose something like pocophone you are giving up every piece of the bleeding edge to choose outdated components for their repairability. Which is repairable but not fast. Also depending on your choice of vendor you might lose out of netflix / google pay / etc because of course.
Some like framework laptop can have better value for money because their upgrade model is to replace the entire computer (logic board) so they can still vertically integrate it / be decently fast. Nobody has tried that yet with phones
It's terrible that we even have to deal with this. I don't want to be forced to accept an anticheat for games. I don't want to be forced to use any operating system for anything (even though I genuinely believe mac is best). I don't want to be forced to replace a whole device when the battery dies etc. Or spend hours removing dozens of tiny screws in order to do it myself. And I certainly wouldn't put up with a slower device just because it's repairable or just because of nearly anything ever.
ARC Raiders once forced me to update windows because it was too outdated or something, one of the system DLLs expired from their allowlist or whatever. Nobody cares, I should be able to play on windows 10 as far as they're concerned. Windows updates are a hazard nowadays, asking someone to update is asking them to risk all their data. I do everything in my power to block windows update. I never asked and I never consented.
Meanwhile I update all my apple devices the day each beta releases because apple is not a stupid bonehead
Comparing non reparable devices to games is a huge stretch. Not buying a phone or a car in many places means you can't get a job at all. But if you don't play games you lose little. There are more than enough games of all kinds to spend your time on. Plus you can always, you know, just stop staring at the screen and do something else.
Low stakes vs high stakes version of the same problem. Sure it's not catastrophic if you simply can't play some or most games. But the basic idea is the same, and the common rhetoric is the same and the choices you're given are the same. Toxic thinking taints a product, making you no longer want to use it, but if you don't use it then you have to lose out on the entire product, not just the part you don't agree with. There are so many things out in the world, that are packaged together with such toxic thinking. So many things you have to miss out on, so many things you discover you'd otherwise want.
It's related to an idea I've had for years. You know, I've always wanted a news site that only announces products that already exist. Like things you can actually buy. I'm so tired of hearing about new innovations that don't exist yet that I want to punch whoever posts about them. I'm so tired. I don't want to hear about the future ever again. I want to hear about the present. I want to hear about stuff I can actually buy.
Likewise I am so tired of hearing about products that are harboring toxicity. I'll get so excited for something that seems so cool only to find out by surprise that I can't run it or wouldn't. And then I feel worse off than if I'd never heard of that thing.
Yes there are some markets where you need something. Like now, if you're in the comcast monopoly you can no longer manage your network without a smartphone. They retired the website, and they ripped out big sections of the LAN admin panel with pointers to go to the app. If you don't have the app you just can't do it anymore. More of the world is becoming like this, it's so exhaustingly evil and it's so normalized that stuff like that's not even a footnote.
I don't think the impact of not having a phone or car or etc matters in this discussion though. You can factor that into how badly you want/need one but in the end I'm talking about how shitty it is to have to miss out on something purely because it's tainted. Like if you miss out on a phone and you need one then you might be pretty sad you have to settle for something worse than what could've been possible. Same for a car or anything. It's just with a game you're not forced to pick an alternative and you can just be sad without having to settle for having to get something lesser. But being without the game you wanted is still sad. If that makes any sense.
And I sometimes hear "vote with your wallet". Unfortunately the product I want doesn't exist so that's not possible. I can avoid paying for the one I don't want, but then I have nothing at all. And not paying for something has also never changed anything, since no one will think the same way I do, so I am the only possible difference. So I don't bother trying. A difference of 1 is so vanishingly insignificant that I couldn't even possibly be supporting anyone with all the purchases I've ever made, let alone hurting anyone with any of the purchases I could ever not make.
> I don't want to be forced to accept an anticheat for games.
I don't want to be forced to play with cheaters due to some people's philosophical concepts of what software I should be allowed to run on my computer when there's technology to radically minimize their numbers for the games I'd like to play.
If I want to have a computer that's locked down to be a platform for playing games online with a low likelihood of encountering cheaters shouldn't I have the freedom to be able to choose that?
> If I want to have a computer that's locked down to be a platform for playing games online with a low likelihood of encountering cheaters shouldn't I have the freedom to be able to choose that?
This is exactly why I choose Mac and iPhone. I actually trust Apple to do this. I do not however trust Microsoft or third-party app developers to do this. But I absolutely believe in that freedom and exercise it myself.
Overwatch is a bit different though , it's not a pure hitscan fps such as valorant, cs or r6. Cheats in Overwatch are not as useful because the gameplay is different from other fps.
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.
> 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"?
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?
No but it has largely reduced it to where you can play competitively and not run into cheaters. Go play f2p csgo and enjoy a hacker in nearly every single game blatantly spinning in spawn head shotting everyone.
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.
This article reminds me of Chesterton Fence - the author is complaining about something, without ever experiencing why it exists.
I must admit I immediately questioned the credibility of the article when the author admitted they "aren't a gamer" and then started making allusions to vague political threads. Not to say these criticisms aren't valid, but they're a weird jumping off point
The reality is none of the companies want to do these things. Every step in this process locks out some subset of customers. And that's not including the ones who meet the technical requirements but are turned off enough by the decision to just avoid the games anyway
They're an unfortunate response to how utterly profitable and expansive cheating in online games has become. They cost the companies precious development time that could be spent making the game better to instead make it just vaguely "playable" for normal people
Unlike the Fence, kernel anti-cheat wasn't always there and won't be effective in the future with new AI-powered cheats growing.
> 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.
Almost all trainers from time immemorial operate in the kernel space because they require direct access to memory addresses. The whole cheats paradigm started with altering values stored at specific addresses. Alter the right value and the player character gets infinite ammo or lives or whatnot, and it went from there. Modern day cheats embed more sophisticated logic that ultimately boils down to altering locations in memory in a specific order, which brings me to my point:
An anti-cheat mechanism can always be defeated if the cheater can access a lower order of abstraction from the mechanism. An arms race is the inevitable outcome. It's either that or competitive gaming is not viable.
I mean the assumption here is that administration needs to be automated. Cheating is an intermittent problem at worst on moderated servers.
long beforehand naturally. the arms race is as good of an excuse as any to trample user rights though
The tl;dr from the post is that kernel anti-cheat presents both an attack vector for malware and a backdoor for firms. The former is already known to be exploited.
I don't know why comments here are so negative. PC gamers should be wary of installing this stuff, and PC users in general wary of attempts to lock down their computer. If game companies want a fully locked down PC, they already have one; it's called a console.
There are people who treat their PC almost like a console, cause all they use it for is video games anyway. They don't mind spending extra over a console to have whatever the PC brings. They install whatever. Kernel anti-cheat isn't even the worst thing on those, it's Windows.
Personally I keep my Mac clean. It can play a few games, which is enough for me. I also found a spare PC in e-waste, and occasionally boot it up to play Windows games, but wouldn't care if it died.
Since you're not a gamer sorry but your opinion does not means much, you don't seem to realize how cheating is a problem in online games, it's not just an inconvenience, it kills games.
what a goof. yes it's a privacy risk, but so is half the things people do on the internet.
cs2 is infested with hackers, arc raiders died because of hackers... many games I've played and loved are dead because of hackers.
> 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.
I would still rather have that than let some game run in ring 0 TBH.
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.
> I think that’s a choice people can make for themselves.
Users do not have meaningful choice. On most games that use Anticheat, it is required to play the game. I can’t choose to use a non-anticheat version of games. It’s either submit to it or don’t play. Not much of a meaningful choice.
That’s a fair point, but I think the issue is that the other players don’t want to play with you unless you’re running the anti cheat. Some games do have servers with anti cheat disabled, but a few minutes of playing on one of those servers will reveal why self-selecting into a population not running the anti cheat is not very fun.
This is a long winded way of saying that there isn’t a good way to have a multiplayer game give you the choice while still being fun.
This rhetoric comes up all the time. It goes like this: "if you don't like it, don't buy it." / "don't play it." / "find something else." It's everywhere: don't like non-repairable devices? Well don't buy those then. don't like proprietary operating systems? Well don't use those then. don't like games with anticheats? Well don't play those then. I've found this argument to be entirely antisocial because it completely ignores the biggest problem which is that the presence of those qualities entirely taints whatever it is attached to. The problem isn't that you can't use another operating system or play another game or buy another device. The problem is that operating systems and games and devices end up unusable. Sure you can start arguing about how most people don't care and will never care so it's not / will never be a problem, but at that point you are entirely leaving advice territory and entering cargo cult mentality.
Here's an example. ARC Raiders recently added Denuvo. There's basically no game like it that doesn't have anticheat. None. You can't just go play another similar game that doesn't have anticheat, you just don't get to play those games
Linux and some BSDs are basically the only free operating systems nowadays. Maybe HarmonyOS. Too bad most anticheats don't work with it, too bad most companies only release broken windows drivers and maybe mac drivers but not linux, etc etc. You just don't get to use that hardware or play those games or etc.
Good luck getting anything like any iPhone or Android flagship that has a replaceable battery. When you choose something like pocophone you are giving up every piece of the bleeding edge to choose outdated components for their repairability. Which is repairable but not fast. Also depending on your choice of vendor you might lose out of netflix / google pay / etc because of course.
Some like framework laptop can have better value for money because their upgrade model is to replace the entire computer (logic board) so they can still vertically integrate it / be decently fast. Nobody has tried that yet with phones
It's terrible that we even have to deal with this. I don't want to be forced to accept an anticheat for games. I don't want to be forced to use any operating system for anything (even though I genuinely believe mac is best). I don't want to be forced to replace a whole device when the battery dies etc. Or spend hours removing dozens of tiny screws in order to do it myself. And I certainly wouldn't put up with a slower device just because it's repairable or just because of nearly anything ever.
ARC Raiders once forced me to update windows because it was too outdated or something, one of the system DLLs expired from their allowlist or whatever. Nobody cares, I should be able to play on windows 10 as far as they're concerned. Windows updates are a hazard nowadays, asking someone to update is asking them to risk all their data. I do everything in my power to block windows update. I never asked and I never consented.
Meanwhile I update all my apple devices the day each beta releases because apple is not a stupid bonehead
Comparing non reparable devices to games is a huge stretch. Not buying a phone or a car in many places means you can't get a job at all. But if you don't play games you lose little. There are more than enough games of all kinds to spend your time on. Plus you can always, you know, just stop staring at the screen and do something else.
Low stakes vs high stakes version of the same problem. Sure it's not catastrophic if you simply can't play some or most games. But the basic idea is the same, and the common rhetoric is the same and the choices you're given are the same. Toxic thinking taints a product, making you no longer want to use it, but if you don't use it then you have to lose out on the entire product, not just the part you don't agree with. There are so many things out in the world, that are packaged together with such toxic thinking. So many things you have to miss out on, so many things you discover you'd otherwise want.
It's related to an idea I've had for years. You know, I've always wanted a news site that only announces products that already exist. Like things you can actually buy. I'm so tired of hearing about new innovations that don't exist yet that I want to punch whoever posts about them. I'm so tired. I don't want to hear about the future ever again. I want to hear about the present. I want to hear about stuff I can actually buy.
Likewise I am so tired of hearing about products that are harboring toxicity. I'll get so excited for something that seems so cool only to find out by surprise that I can't run it or wouldn't. And then I feel worse off than if I'd never heard of that thing.
Yes there are some markets where you need something. Like now, if you're in the comcast monopoly you can no longer manage your network without a smartphone. They retired the website, and they ripped out big sections of the LAN admin panel with pointers to go to the app. If you don't have the app you just can't do it anymore. More of the world is becoming like this, it's so exhaustingly evil and it's so normalized that stuff like that's not even a footnote.
I don't think the impact of not having a phone or car or etc matters in this discussion though. You can factor that into how badly you want/need one but in the end I'm talking about how shitty it is to have to miss out on something purely because it's tainted. Like if you miss out on a phone and you need one then you might be pretty sad you have to settle for something worse than what could've been possible. Same for a car or anything. It's just with a game you're not forced to pick an alternative and you can just be sad without having to settle for having to get something lesser. But being without the game you wanted is still sad. If that makes any sense.
And I sometimes hear "vote with your wallet". Unfortunately the product I want doesn't exist so that's not possible. I can avoid paying for the one I don't want, but then I have nothing at all. And not paying for something has also never changed anything, since no one will think the same way I do, so I am the only possible difference. So I don't bother trying. A difference of 1 is so vanishingly insignificant that I couldn't even possibly be supporting anyone with all the purchases I've ever made, let alone hurting anyone with any of the purchases I could ever not make.
> I don't want to be forced to accept an anticheat for games.
I don't want to be forced to play with cheaters due to some people's philosophical concepts of what software I should be allowed to run on my computer when there's technology to radically minimize their numbers for the games I'd like to play.
If I want to have a computer that's locked down to be a platform for playing games online with a low likelihood of encountering cheaters shouldn't I have the freedom to be able to choose that?
> If I want to have a computer that's locked down to be a platform for playing games online with a low likelihood of encountering cheaters shouldn't I have the freedom to be able to choose that?
This is exactly why I choose Mac and iPhone. I actually trust Apple to do this. I do not however trust Microsoft or third-party app developers to do this. But I absolutely believe in that freedom and exercise it myself.
Overwatch is a bit different though , it's not a pure hitscan fps such as valorant, cs or r6. Cheats in Overwatch are not as useful because the gameplay is different from other fps.
> 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.
I’m actually surprised how a lot of commenters here are defending kernel-level anticheat.
> 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"?
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?
>it hasn’t stopped cheating
No but it has largely reduced it to where you can play competitively and not run into cheaters. Go play f2p csgo and enjoy a hacker in nearly every single game blatantly spinning in spawn head shotting everyone.
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.