Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games
Client-side anti-cheat is useless. It’s not a necessary evil, it’s just evil. The minute the cheater/hacker has direct access to the system, you’ve already lost.
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mang0@lemmy.zip 2 weeks agoAnti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games. No one wants to play a game against cheaters since they typically have an unfair advantage. If you can’t combat cheating then you might as well not make the game since no one will want to play it. Fine by me since I don’t care for such games but I could imagine people who like playing them might prefer to play against as few cheaters as possible. What are the alternatives?
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
mang0@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Much like every form of security measure, the intention is not to completely eliminate the possibility of an attack (which is impossible in most cases). Instead, the intention is to increase the amount of effort that’s required to make an attack.
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What you’re referring to is deterrence, and it doesn’t apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn’t ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.
And the efficacy being so bad is the reason why client-side anti-cheat keeps getting more and more invasive to the point of being literally, by definition, a type of malware and system rootkit. And yet it’s still not enough to defeat cheaters, because the cheaters have full access to the system itself.
And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.
mang0@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
What you’re referring to is deterrence, and it doesn’t apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn’t ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.
Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong person?
And the efficacy being so bad…
Source?
full access to the system itself.
What do you mean by system in “full access to the system”? Too vague to even say anything about.
And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.
The potential guys that can write the cheat software and how quickly it can be developed is the part that matters. Much like when it’s easy to use an exploit once it’s already discovered. Someone still has to discover the exploit.
dovahking@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Battlefield and cod have cheaters running rampant in their official servers despite using anti cheats. They could employ a team to monitor cheating reported by players. But clearly they just don’t want to expend resources to combat that.
Ziglin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So just don’t let them join/kick them from your server?
mang0@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Before you can do that, you need to determine whether someone is cheating. This is the purpose of anti-cheat software.
Ziglin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Do you have spies behind you when playing cards too?
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
EvE Online doesn’t use root access anticheat software. I know it doesn’t because it runs on Linux just fine. That particular player base is the worst hive of scum and villainy that you’ll find outside of government. Clearly the anticheat software isn’t as essential as game studios would have you believe. The only major cheating I’m aware of in EvE was the BoB scandal, and that involved Devs cheating because they were Devs.
mang0@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Can the EvE online method be applied to dissimilar games like e.g. fps games?
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No clue, I just know that it exists and seems to work with the scammiest scammers that ever scammed