Douglas Kilpatrick

@melpomenesclevage (my personal investment in windows? 0%? I don’t have a windows PC, at home or work. I’ve been Linux primary since … shit, 1994 or something? I’ve got some “bought in store” style linux games? I remember when pre-compiled packages were a feature. I’m an old.

I’m trying to help explain the incentives driving the behavior toward kernel-level anti-cheat so that arguments against it can be well formed. I don’t want that stuff infecting linux gaming)

@A_Random_Idiot Yes, I think everybody has a reactive component to their plan? In the current situation, being reactive in some form appears to be table stakes.

But keeping higher barriers (is believed?) to make it easier to do that, and keeps some of the initial noise down, and pushes the timing off.

AND PUSHING THE TIMING IS A GAIN (to the makers of competitive PvP games)

@KrokanteBamischijf @hperrin (my wife suggested auditing suspected cheats in games like battlefield by forcing them to play in real world paintball tournaments.

I think her experience as a teacher is impacting her suggestions)

@melpomenesclevage sacrifice 100% of 2% balanced against 5% of 98%? Are you sure that’s math you want them doing?

(And based on my 2nd hand experience, “5% enjoyment” kinda seems low. The cheaters do ruin things)

@A_Random_Idiot That’s … not entirely wrong, but doing more to raise the barriers higher keeps the game fun longer before the cheaters ruin it.

(Again, … limiting discussion to competitive PvP-style games)

@A_Random_Idiot That’s basically a form of @sugar_in_your_tea 's suggestion about making cheating more expensive: “We’ll find your cheat program later, and retroactively find that you were cheating and ban you. Well after the match ended and everyone else’s game was ruined”

@sugar_in_your_tea Your response about wall-hacks is my “don’t tell the game anything” comment. It’s really really damn slow. You typically don’t want to do frame-by-frame determination of if an opponent is just in view or not (because that’s a full render), so you send the info to the client once it’s possible… at which point the client knows.

Even if the game isn’t hacked, the video pipeline “knows”, and hacks have moved to be outside of the game space (thus the move to kernel-based)

@sugar_in_your_tea Private servers exclude MMOs as a class of game. That works well for death-match style (or BG3 style) 4-player games, but doesn’t work for 30-300-3000 people games.

Anti-cheat server-only allows too many cheats. There’s already enough trouble distinguishing someone using wall-hacks from someone with good headphones in a game that does 3d-spacial-sound… trying to do that on the server side … just won’t work. Same applies for other ways of increasing the costs if detected

@KrokanteBamischijf @hperrin Protecting code from the computer it runs on is either impossible or really really hard, depending.

https://multicians.org/thvv/mirror/obfreport.pdf
https://www.iacr.org/archive/crypto2001/21390001.pdf

@KrokanteBamischijf @hperrin But it needs to stop in a way that keeps those competitive games fun…
- Trusted Computing-based solutions
- Don’t tell the game anything-based solutions…
- ??

Trusted-Computing requires a more locked down system than any distro provides, and also (effectively) everyone going along with some MS-controlled standards for TPMs and so forth.

Ignorant-Games approaches perform terribly.

What else ya got?