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Battledield now throwing an error because Valorant is already sitting in kernel memory. Time to buy your EA Battlefield PC but don't forget your Valorant PC

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[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 67 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Proof is in cheaters existing on day one of battlefield 6 open beta. Client side anti-cheat will never work. It's good to have some basic preventative measures client-side, but server-side anti cheat is the only way to properly prevent cheaters.

Unfortunately companies keep investing in garbage client side anticheat that just pokes security holes into our machines.

Only Valve to my knowledge is investing money into their server side anti cheat, no other big player is to my knowledge.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 36 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It needs to be a mix. Have your clientside anti-cheat look for obvious attack vectors, have your serverside anti-cheat look for suspicious play, and let users report others. Then have humans review suspected cheaters and make the final call.

But that's expensive, and off-the-shelf anti-cheat gives them someone else to blame.

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I agree, there's definitely some checks you can only do on the client and only some that work server-side. Ideally everything that can be checked on either, are checked.

Currently it's just all wrong, the client-side can't be relied upon as heavily as it is.

The benefit factor to the rootkits they install on our machines is nil. Just bloats our systems with garbage that is just waiting to be exploited by hackers.

[–] Goodeye8@piefed.social 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You're viewing from the perspective of what would be best for the playerbase. These decisions are made based on what's the cheapest possible solution to have the playerbase shut up about cheaters so they wouldn't drive away potential customers.

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Good eye.

I would think there's money to gain by keeping your players engaged longer by having less cheaters, but I guess theres also an incentive to keep just enough cheaters that you can steadily ban them for more game sales (not that I think that's happening, i hope not).

Anyways they take our money, we expect whats best for us, within reason of course.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I doubt the revenue from sales to cheaters is that significant compared to the risk of losing players. I think the simplest explanation is that catching cheaters is hard (read: expensive), so they're happy with catching the most obvious cheaters with off the shelf solutions (i.e. the Pareto principle).

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah as I mention I don't really believe it either, just brought it up because it's a thought.

And yup the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

I do wish they would stop invading our systems with their current anti-cheats (invasive ones) though, that's the main thing I am worried about.

I refuse to play them. If they want kernel level anticheat, they can submit the source under the GPL to the Linux kernel devs for consideration, because that's the only way I'd consider using it. No game is worth compromising my system's security.

[–] cannon_annon88@lemmy.today 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Valves anti-cheat doesn't really do anything though, at least not in CS2. It does like to boot me from the game from time to time because I'm playing on Linux though.

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

True VAC alone is not great (nothing really is), but CS2 (in my opinion) has one of the best systems against abuse, even though legit players like myself can get stuck in low trust factor sometimes.

VAC, trust factor, overwatch (player report reviewing, not sure if this was discontinued) all work together.

Hopefully a big improvement is to come soon with the VAC Live agents that monitor games using AI to predict likely cheaters.

Valve obviously has a big interest in keeping cheaters out, because their skin economy makes them boatloads (literally hehe) of money. I think they are the only company going down this road right now of AI agents, which is unobtrusive to users and should hopefully keep up VACs high accurate ban rate (which is at least a good thing about VAC, when you are banned, in almost all cases, you were indeed cheating (low fase positives)).

I do recognize though that AI agents likely comes with a high cost and may only be implemented in other highly competitive games that make lots of money.

There probably exist other methods, but it'll take more investment in designing adaptable systems that can work on many games.

[–] cannon_annon88@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I do report a lot of cheaters, but I never know if it even does anything. I pretty much only play casual anyways. The worst is when someone is obviously cheating, and no one votes to kick them, or some special types actually vote against kicking the cheater so they can win ...

ETA: the AI agents sounds cool, as long as legit players don't get mistakenly banned. I didn't realize cheating was such a huge problem these days until I started playing CS2 again. I used to scrim 1.6 Back in the day and never really had that problem that I can remember.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Web developers work this out years ago. If you want to put content behind a paywall don't do it client side because it will get bypassed.

This was me working out of a tiny office. Yet apparently I was more advanced than AAA game developers.

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Hopefully they start to learn from this at some point.. they should realise that their current anti-cheat systems are not working as intended at some point right?

Battlefield will lose sales, every game definitely loses players because of cheater infestations. Lots of money lost in my eyes, is it enough to make them see straight?

[–] CptBread@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's only proof that it will never be enough to stop all cheating. But if the metric is if it reduces cheating then that proves nothing. Not saying I have proof that it does reduce cheating but I would personally bet on it reducing it somewhat at least.

[–] dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

It definitely reduces cheating, but mostly just by raising the bar of entry (not by that much as evident in day 1 cheats being present). I doubt it's effectiveness though, since most games you can do some quick research and find $5 cheats that will go undetected (hell even free cheats can work if you do a little more research on doing the injection part manually yourself).

You can also never stop cheating, but the anti-cheat they install on your computer is just an extra attack vector for hackers, etc at this point, since it obviously doesnt work as intended.