Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking backlash from a segment of the player base. Protesters, unhappy with the new system, have resorted to using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt the servers, escalating tensions between the gaming giant and its community.
According to Mutahar:
-
The Anti Cheat has already been bypassed by a free cheat menu on Windows.
-
He’s fairly sure he has figured out some kind of way to temporarily bypass (as in, it’ll probably get caught in a few weeks) the linux block by some kind of custom virtualization method (requiring only one GPU) that he says he may explain in detail at some point.
In general, he’s done with playing GTO.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSagozpKPs&pp=ygUSbXV0YWhhciBndGEgb25saW5l
But yeah, obligatory reminder for BattleEye and EasyAntiCheat games that refuse to allow linux play:
All these game devs have to do is flip a switch, click a few options in their developer portals, to allow BattleEye or EAC to work on linux, through Proton.
And its been that way for 3 years, since 2021.
There is literally no reason for games that use these services to not work on linux, the devs just don’t fucking care.
Some devs sure do fear linux users.
It feels like it’s part and parcel with an overall, growing trend in software to be openly hostile to any system wherein the user has proper admin rights.
Because the potential for someone to use those rights to fuck with the software merits refusing to support systems where they can.
Further entrenching the notion that, to participate in a “modern” consumer software environment, the user must agree to be handcuffed on their own hardware.
The potential?
People are hacking the shit out of any online game without proper anticheats
*with or without
FTFY
Normal users do that on Windows, why would anyone install Linux for that
Dont blame developers. It’s never developers that make decisions. It’s the management, the shareholders, the project manager, the product owner, the whatever-mba-dipshit on top. But never the developers. They just execute and comply and if they refuse, they’re let go. A developer is a fleshy code printer. A resource. They don’t have real power. They’re a factory worker. Remember that. Don’t blame the worker, blame the boss.
Source: i’m a professional software developer.
I had been wondering why everybody was so angry at them for implementing anti-cheat software. I didn’t realize that they were locking out Linux users. That’s a bunch of bullshit.
Especially a big problem for people who play on Steam Deck. Which most game companies don’t consider it a Console, which is stupid.
-
If I played any Rockstar games, I’d be unhappy with their new anti-cheat too, since it needlessly blocks linux, but this isn’t the way this should be protested. If anything, this probably validates their decision.
The way this should be protested is to just stop playing. Stop giving them money. Stop boosting their month active user numbers that they can flaunt to investors. Hit them financially, since it’s the only hit they really care about. There’s a sea of other high-quality games you can play instead.
I did this with Blizzard/Activision years ago.
Zero impact.
Keep it up. There’s dozen(s) of us?
There’s dozen(s) of us?
Dozen(s?) Denial Of Service attack
Denial of Playing attack.
It was an impact of one.
Gamers and still buying the same old tired shit while bitching about it, name a more…
You’re absolutely right. The number of great games to play is absurd and the access to them has never been better but for some reason most people just play mediocre games that should have been put out to pasture years ago.
GTA Online has terrible monetization and Rockstar are openly hostile towards PC as a platform, but I wouldn’t call GTA mediocre at all. There’s nothing quite like the attention to detail or breadth of GTA games. If you’ve played a few GTA clones, you’ll know what the competition looks like and it’s not even close.
I’ve read that Steam is accepting refunds for GTAV - I’d recommend anyone who bought it there refund it.
Really??? Even if I bought it years ago lmao? It no longer works on my steam deck, but its not like I bought it when the deck even existed. However, I did have that idea…
Have you tried not buying something in protest? If so have you noticed they keep selling it anyway and you have no alternative? Not giving them money isn’t enough.
I’m not a fan of DoSA as it’s rather strongarm but at least this actually sends a message to them AND other users.
I’m not interested in having to fight anti-features to play what I paid for, but at least circumventing it sends a message.
I bought Crysis and didn’t like the DRM, so I haven’t bought a Ubisoft game since. How’s that working out for Ubisoft?
I think Ubisoft didn’t notice, or very likely attributed others reasons for less sales.
I don’t like DRM so I don’t use streaming services like Netflix. If friends or work colleges keep talking about some show then I read Wikipedia plot section to get an idea 💀
And I think their board is panicking trying to figure out how they can regain me, specifically, as a customer.
More seriously, I apparently am not the only one who eventually got their fill of Ubisoft games. I think Ubisoft has planted resentment in the minds of all their customers, and as soon as they slipped a little in game quality their customers were more than happy to leave, just for the sake of leaving.
if so have you noticed they keep selling it anyway and you have no alternative?
You seem to have missed the point. The alternative is not playing the game at all.
Be an adult, have some self-control.
As an adult you may notice you spend less time with your friends. So if you’ve tried that you’d know how sad it is when you can’t play games with your friends because of your values. When you care about video games then your interpretation of “the point” leaves a lot to be desired. I aspire for a better gaming industry.
Get friends with better values.
I’m pretty sure it’s not Linux gamers doing this.
It’s cheaters.
Cheat creators probably, they gotta protect their revenue
Yeah, I’m actually supportive of some kind of anti cheat on GTA online, because with all the cheating it’s just unplayable. Unfortunately I was playing on steam deck so I haven’t been able to play it since. Presumably it can be supported relatively easy so I hope they fix that issue.
The fact that it’s a top 10 seller on steam deck for years and they just fucked over everyone on Linux, they deserve it. We all paid them and they completely screwed all of us. I feel so cheated. I only run Linux and I have a steam deck. I left a bad review on steam and I contacted their support from all my rockstar accounts, but it’s not enough. Battleye is compatible with Linux, they just had to send an email, but rockstar keeps lying that it’s not compatible.
Even if it’s not compatible, “ok then where’s my damn refund?”
Basically theft, really.
You can request a refund. An earlier post last week said they are offering refunds for rug-pulled players.
One important thing to add is that the refund is offered by Valve, not by Rockstar.
I guess Valve being the escrow, they may hold future revenue payout from sale of other R* games
But I don’t believe at the scale of thousands of players for >1 year.
Remember, they are (supposedly) offering it even if you played a 100 hundred hours. I don’t think that comes only from Valve. They’d burn bridges with publishers should they deduct it from their pay as a “You rugpulled our user base. We are now offering refunds if requested and will take it from your cut as compensation”.
Well at least that’s good tbf.
I was thinking this, because that’s what Facepunch did when they stopped Linux support. If you had played Rust at all on Linux, regardless of hours, you were eligible for a refund.
I still blame valve a lot for this. Their TOS offer us no protection. Publishers should not be able to retroactively lock down a game. Diminishing the game performance or adding unwanted DRM after purchase should be a refundable offense. People choose whether or not to buy games based on properties like these.
Valve has consistently offered refunds in these scenarios. They’re offering them for GTA V, and they also offered refunds for Monster Hunter when Capcom decided to switch their DRM bullshit and broke it on the Steam Deck. I think Valve has done their part.
Valve is going beyond any point in comparison to any other software company I know.
What is the basis of consistently here. Take2 broke Linux support for bioshock infinite a couple years back and valve refused my refund request. IME they have not done so. If they are for GTAV that’s great. Maybe they only started doing this after the steamdeck came out but really they should have protections in the TOS to safeguard consumer purchases.
I’m unsure if GTA V was ever Steamdeck Certified, but I imagine it might have to do with that. They may only offer this for games they said were certified and the devs broke it after the fact. I know Monster Hunter was.
Stop making every fucking game and open world mmo wanna be. Bring back single player with couch co op or make private lobby setups so we don’t have to fuck with every douche who wants to make everyone else’s life as sad as their own. I’m a big GYA fan but have refused to buy for this specific reason. Have almost given in repeatedly but just go watch some YouTube’s on it and it reminds me not to contribute to this shit every time.
If a game offers multiplayer, they should also offer a dedicated server that people can setup for themselves.
For MMOs, they can make the servers optionally federated.
This relates closely to the EU Initiative from https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
Around the time gta 5 came out, i lived with two guys and had 3 neighbours and we would often play video games together, but we never really found a game that we all liked. Gtao was just around the corner and the trailers looked so fun. People doing silly shit, skydiving together, play some golf, race around the city. When it actually came out and worked, oh boy. Leave the house, get shot, drive around, get shot, try to do something with friends, get blown up by a fighter jet. The answer is always: it’s GTA, of course you get shot, play mario part, or shot like that. Yeah, i get that, but i always felt like it’s just people who enjoy to make other people’s experience worse, and it’s not about pvp. Gta draws such a weird crowd.
Every online game is like that now. I avoid all of them for that reason. It doesn’t matter the game, if it starts to get popular the massive group of trolls shows up and goes out of there way to figure out the methodology to ruin the gameplay for others.
It sucks because there have been a few fun games that a lot of people won’t touch due to the online nature of garbage humans. Helldivers 2, SM2, and Deep Rock Galactic (sorry, your community is also filled with shitters) are all ruined because in order to really advance in the game you HAVE to play with others. It’s piss poor game design.
I played WoW right when it came out, on a PvP server.
There was already a subset of the crowd just like there back then - some people rushed game progression to have higher levels as soon as possible only to then hang out in beginner areas and “pwn” significantly lower level players.
That’s around the time when the term “griefer” was coined.
In these things the real difference is how the servers are structured rather than the human beings: if the architecture is designed so that there is some way to filter players (smaller servers with moderation or some kind of kick voting system that bans repeat offenders), griefers end up in their own griefer instances griefing each other and the rest can actually play the game, otherwise you get a deeply beginner (or people with less time, such as working adults) unfriendly environment.
As somebody else pointed out environments were people run their own servers tend create those conditions at least for some cases (basically if there’s some kind of moderation) whilst massive world centralized server environments tend to give free right to people whose pleasure in a multiplayer games derives mostly from making it unpleasent for others (in game-making, griefing is actually recognized as one of the 4 core types of enjoyment - along with achiving, exploring and socializing - people can derived from multiplayer games)
It’s amazing to me that Blizzard spent 15 years with the PvP realms in such a broken state. It was only when they introduced “war mode” and the option to turn it off that people finally had some relief.
What finally made them address the problem was that many PvP realms had become 95% one faction and 5% the other faction. That meant that any PvP encounters were very one-sided, and they were also very rare, because the outnumbered faction just avoided any areas where they might be attacked.
Even if you lived for griefing, being on the dominant side in a 95% your-side realm sucked because there weren’t enough victims to pick on.
I guess they wanted to make griefers happy because making the game fair for people who enjoyed PvP but didn’t want to grief others would have been relatively easy.
I wish more games came with couch co-op. It was a lot of fun in Halo and Diablo.
wait, can you not play GTA single player anymore?
But how can we milk you for subscription money that way?
Couch co-op gta san andreas was the best, so sad it’s not more common in present games.
Articles a joke since it doesn’t mention that the people pissed off are the linux players. Not the cheaters but the linux users.
That’s why one never pisses off a Linux user.
There’s a patch for proton for Battleye. My understanding is that it’s really easy for developers to support Linux with it, but I think they’re using their own engine, so things may be harder. Regardless, that’s bullshit if they added something without considering Linux users.
time for refunds.
Steam has refunded games that added anti-cheat that broke linux playability in the past iirc
They have also denied refunds if a game is running in the background and you have 100 hours while editing a spreadsheet, so tread lightly
I’ve been denied a refund for a game I played for 2 minutes and realized was trash. When I quit it went back to a popped-under splash screen instead of quitting to desktop. I turned off the monitor for the night and the next day when I requested the refund, Steam said I played it for too long and denied my refund.
It was a game under $10 so I didn’t lose much but it was still bullshit.
Not related to the refund at all, but: Why would you turn off the monitor and not the computer? Even when idling it eats way more power than a monitor in standby.
I’d always leave my computer on but turn off the monitor. Usually it would go to sleep or hibernate, but certain programs would keep it awake. Keep in mind this was during the Win 7 era so it wasn’t foolproof and it would just stay on.
Didnt hear about that one, but I do recall some stories of people playing hundreds of hours, dev making a major catastrophic change, and steam still giving the refund.
After having talked to some on the GTA V SCUD, so many think we are in support of the cheaters and are framing our frustration around us just wanting the cheaters back.
Don’t buy games with invasive user-side anti-cheats that hamper performance, and demand refunds on any game that adds it after purchase.
I don’t understand why this is so hard for people. If everyone gave a shit, we could end this. But instead, people would rather just complain while still forking over the money to these companies.
There are so many good indie games without this kind of bullshit. We have better choices.
They implemented this 10 years after the game’s release. It’s harder to vote with your wallet at that point.
and demand refunds on any game that adds it after purchase.
The way I see it, adding it, even this late, is changing the terms of the agreement and thus justification for a refund. Steam will often see it that way too if you word it as such. And if not, hell, you can still badger the publisher for a refund incessantly so at least it still costs them the equivalent in man hours even if you don’t get the refund. The point is not to be passive, even if we don’t get to win every single battle.
Companies like Rockstar certainly would meet any requests for refunds outside of very recently purchased with “Go kick rocks.”. For sure they changed the rules/ experience after the fact, but you can bet it’s covered in the small print of the EULA. Even if they received (and denied) 100,000 requests, they would care a bit unless they saw a significant slump in their overall sales. Sadly, a lot of their customers will be pissed about this but will be first in line buying other Rockstar games.
deleted by creator
What rights?
You’re buying a license to play a game. Rockstar is not obligated to ensure it’s available to you indefinitely.
“What!? You don’t like the erosion of ownership rights? You’re an asshole!” - you.
They’re trying to argue that an EULA isn’t binding because they can’t sign away their rights, and thats legally incorrect in this case.
Recognizing reality is different than endorsing it.
Sadly, a lot of their customers will be pissed about this but will be first in line buying other Rockstar games.
Then they aren’t pissed enough. But yes, talking the talk is completely meaningless if you don’t also walk the walk, I agree.
Companies like Rockstar certainly would meet any requests for refunds outside of very recently purchased with “Go kick rocks.”
If you let them, sure. The reason we use phrases like “fight for a refund” is because these things are hard and they take effort. Like yes it sucks to have to do that and yes I understand our time is valuable, but as I see it there is value in both having your voice heard and punitively costing an offending company manhours in having to deal with you - even if you ultimately do not win the fight.
Again, the point isn’t about winning or getting your money back, it’s about not being passive and just accepting the things that happen to you as if you do not have autonomy.
Depends on your country/jurisdiction. Consumer protection is weak in the USA, but much stronger in some other countries. It’d depend on how much it changes the experience. For example, if you buy a product because it advertises a particular feature, but then the manufacturer removes the feature in the future, that can be a reason to get a refund, at least in Australia and some European countries.
I won’t be buying other Rockstar games if they do this with other Rockstar games, since it means I won’t be able to play them since I use Linux and they don’t want to use the checkmark to enable BattlEye on Linux/Proton.
Probably testing it for gta6.
And that’s the one we can refuse to buy.
But let’s be honest - people won’t. They’ll buy it in record numbers - just not on Linux.
Right, I bought that shit in 2014 I think. Haven’t played it in several years.
It didn’t have “invasive user side anti-cheat” on day one you doughnut
That’s why Linux users bought it. This was added YEARS after release
Where did I even remotely imply otherwise?
“Don’t buy games with invasive user-side anti-cheats that hamper performance, and demand refunds on any game…”
1st point: AC Wasn’t there at purchase
2nd point: AC was added decades later so how can one return the game?
and demand refunds on any game that adds it after purchase.
This, which is in my original fucking message, applies here. If you think the effort is futile, fine, whatever, don’t try. But my statement was made with full understanding of the timeline, and I stand by it. Feel free to read the rest of the comments in the thread for further discussion of the timeline, or feel free to fuck off, I guess; I’m not in the mood to indulge a pedant clearly just looking for an argument.
No it doesn’t, at least not everwhere.
If you wanna be an idoitic asshat, and get all pissy because someone points out a flaw in your argument, thats not my problem.
Is “get rid of all anti-cheat” a popular position outside of Lemmy? I don’t really play these sorts of games but was under the impression that most competitive multiplayer would be unplayable without anti-cheat measures.
There are plenty of anti-cheat measure that doesn’t require invasive access to your system or performance hits. The objection is not to fighting cheating, it is with the specific overreaching methodology chosen to do so.
Also I personally rarely play multiplayer so it’s even more frustrating to have bullshit installed on my system for a feature that doesn’t even apply to me.
Anti-cheat measures should be baked into the server side. 99 percent of the multiplayer cheating problem is not adhering to the golden rule of server security: Never Trust the Client
It is perfectly possible to run anti-cheat that are roughly as good (or as bad, as it often turns out) without full admin privilege and running as kernel-level drivers. Coupled with server-side validation, which seems to be a dying breed, you’d also weed out a ton of cheaters while missing the most motivated of them.
As someone who lurks around in different communities (to some extent; Steam forums, reddit, lemmy, mastodon, and a few game-centered discord servers), the issue is not much against anti-cheat for online play. It’s the nature of these piece of software that is the issue. It would not be the same if the anti-cheat was also forced on solo gameplay, but it is not the case here.
(bonus points for systems that allow playing on non-protected servers, but that’s asking a bit too much from some publishers I suppose)
It’s not even popular on Lemmy. People are fine with the anti-cheat. They draw the line at enforced third-party accounts, though, which is commendable.
I legitimately avoided rockstar for years because they force you to use their store even when you buy on steam. I still haven’t played rdr2, despite critical acclaim. I finally caved and got GTAV on sale cause I realised none of this shit works. Consumers using purchasing power to enforce standards is a losing battle. The storefronts or legislators need to enforce this shit. I think it should be valve. They have the market position and userbase to actually succeed or at the very least convince publishers to not break shit that was already working fine.
Name one war which was ever fought on a single battlefield.
Yes, we should be pushing for both regulatory changes and changes on platforms like Steam, but we should also being doing our part.
If there is anything I’ve learned over time it is that nobody is coming to save you. Ever. If you are holding out for someone to swoop in and make things better, you will be waiting forever. Either we do it ourselves, or it doesn’t get done.
Couldn’t we avoid all this by giving players the option to host and moderate their own servers?
Removed by mod
That would lose a ton of profits!
deleted by creator
Things like FiveM exist, which is exactly that. I’m not sure if that is at all affected by the anticheat though, I didn’t read the article.
I sure hope not cause GTA Online is trash if you want to do anything other than Free Mode. I got so sick and tired of all the loading screens, disconnects, and empty lobbies.
Even when they apparently “fixed” the loading issue, all it did was speed up the connection to Free Mode. Hosting/joining a mission still takes ages and nobody ever joins any of my games anymore so I gave up and went to FiveM full-time. If that gets shut down by anti-cheat then I’m going back to GTA IV. Cops N’ Crooks is more fun than anything GTA Online has to offer, anyway.
I’ve heard rockstar recruited fivem developers
Most of them got kicked from the project
And owns everything now
Rockstar has apparently bought FiveM.
Can’t release a sequel or single player update in a decade - can impose cheat engines. Something about a surprised pikachu when they get flak
I bought Red Dead Redemption for myself and three friends, super excited about the game, the lore. I had never spent that much money on a game.
We all played through the single player tutorial, and finally into the open world. We meet up and begin exploring and trying to complete quests when suddenly one of us just … drops dead.
Then another is hit by a meteor and caught on fire?
I am thrown up into the sky.
An alien ship?! Appears and messes with us for a while. I try begging in pub chat for the hacker to please leave us so we can play, which seems to goad them further. This continued for an hour.
A quick look around the internet told us that this was par for the course for RDR and GTA and Rockstar couldn’t/wouldn’t do anything about it.
We ended up refunding all the games through steam. Sad times.
Firstly, yeah… RDRO is utterly plauged with all sorts of cheaters using trainers and all kinds of cheats is full of crap, at least for PC.
The standard strategy you basically have to employ is that whenever you see something nonsense like that happen is you have to jump to another instance/lobby. Depending on your luck, you may have to do this every 15 to 60 minutes aaaand some cheats allow the cheater to follow you to your new lobby.
Secondly…
A few years back I was in RDRO and was attacked by a cheater.
I had a broke ass level 15ish character with the just a few of the least expensive guns.
They had infinite ammo. Teleport hopping. Spawned 10 additional NPCs versions of themselves, then of my character, then zombies, then legendary animals (basically fucking monsters).
All the while they’re scrambling their name in the scoreboard every minute and create spoofs to make it harder to actually do a report or have the grievance system actually work correctly.
I killed them all. I died over and over again, but I kept killing them. Whittled down the fake names and spoofs and kept doing the grievance thing until it was actually landing on one consistent name.
Then the cheater began spawning gigantic props like boats attached to their character, which rotated and hit with physics force when they rotated, which they could shoot out of but I could not shoot into.
But uh, I managed to juke my way through cracks in the collision mesh, then shoot him.
He got tired of this at some point… and just turned himself invisible.
But, by this point I’d been killed enough times that I’d managed to get him showing up on my radar.
I’d by then long since run out of ammo… and began stalking him, via radar, with just a knife and lasso, sometimes the running tackle with the lasso that leads into a hogtie, other times actually managing to sneak up behind him, executing an invisible foe.
After an hour and a half of this, he started slipping up, and I could see him attempting to flee me, teleport half a klik away and just stand there for 30 seconds, then move a bit, then pause again, presumably fiddling around in his menus.
I killed him a few more times in this state, and he quit, he left.
… I would have just jumped to another instance if he had not killed my horse.
Do not fuck with a man’s horse lol.
… anyway, yeah. hung up my hat after that. fucking nonsense.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
You really made an account just to post this singular comment?
No? I’ve had an account for a long time?
Oh, this is the first time you’ve left either hexbear or ml then.
Never been to either. Sorry that you’re feeling so defensive about a simple joke response to your hilarious video game/internet tough guy/I am very badass rant.
Not sure how that makes me someone from either of those instances but it is genuinely funny to see someone go straight to some dumb tankie or communist or what-the-fuck-ever they are name calling shit over something so silly 😂
As if laughing at your totallyhappened story makes someone a Russian plant or a Chinese Holocaust denier or whatever dumb thing ignorant people are going on about now.
Tl:Dr
Stay mad. Touch grass.
You could have made a private lobby. Although RDR Online isnt too exciting anyway.
Odd, I don’t recall private lobbies being a thing, and a quick google shows lots of people asking for them and a few “workarounds”. Perhaps they are a recent addition or a console thing?
Maybe I used a mod or something, I dont know, wasnt very memorable aha (well all I remember is excessive amounts of fog), quickly gave up on it.
Before private lobbies in GTA, I remember blocking ports for GTA in my firewall except to my friends’ IP addresses, which worked for a while.
I haven’t played in a few years but this is how I remember the system working: RDO matches people into separate lobbies based on what version of the game they’re running and this check is done by hashing one or more files in the install directory. By adding junk data to one of those files you more or less guarantee that you’ll only ever encounter other people who have the same junk data added. It’s basically the dark souls password system with extra steps.
This is actually really effective as a form of protest. From a business perspective, Rockstar probably won’t roll anticheat back, but future companies will assess it as part of the risk when looking to add AC
Bitchy cheaters throwing a hissy that they can’t keep creating an unfair advantage for themselves in an online environment. I hope their mothers take away their internet connection for the month.
Probably a few Linux/Steam Deck players pissed that Rockstar just nuked their ability to play without warning or reason as well.
Those are legitimate victims, fuck the cheaters.
The cheaters have already found a way to bypass this stupid shit. It only affects legitimate users and cheaters too stupid to figure out the seemingly trivial workaround.
Eh, I was playing it on steam deck, GTA online was just not worth it with all the cheating anyway.
What I don’t get is why they went with the most invasive kernel level stuff instead of doing even the most basic server side checks to check for users doing physically impossible stuff.
Because it’s cheaper than actually implementing working anti heat instead of just stealing control of your computer and leaving gaping vulnerabilities on it.
After all, why would they care? It’s not their computer.
Man, that sounds familiar. I gave up on Escape from Tarkov for the same reason.
It’s just ridiculous the stuff you see that should be easy to catch with basic server checks (even if you were to run them after the fact). Players conjuring money and vehicles out of thin air, moving impossibly fast, vehicles/players with seemingly unlimited hit points, etc. You could easily catch that shit on the server side and ban the cheaters, but instead they go for the most invasive client side shit.
Sure, if you want to stamp out stuff like aim bots and whatever eventually you’ll need to look at the client side of things, but in a decade they didn’t seem to do anything at all.
That kind of stuff catches legitimate users all the time. In Rust for example it’s common to get kicked for “fly hacking” while jumping on vehicles. The more open-ended the game the more weird edge cases become very relevant. Especially if it has a halfway decent physics sim. Tons of ways to give players weird velocities. Then it has to account for the variance ping introduces…
Some stuff, yeah. Should be easy to check if a player has too much HP. But spoofed communication between the client and server is a tough nut to crack when you can only see what the client wants you to see. Keeping everything server-side would help but that introduces latency to every input, unacceptable for anything even moderately paced.
All thay said, it would be a lot easier to swallow the “necessary evil” argument if it actually fucking worked.
I’m pretty sure there’s not a valid reason for players to be able to spawn giant Ferris wheels in people’s garages, that seems like a fairly easy one to test for
Use a more holistic approach. Combine heuristics like the average speed and aim hit percentage with reports from other players.
Review player reports, if a player makes a false allegation in their reports, mark that player as having less reliable reports. If a player reports someone who turns out to be a definite cheater, mark whoever reported the cheater as having more reliable reports. Etc etc.
Like, if the report just says “player was moving fast outside a vehicle”, maybe they were cheating, or maybe they were just goofing off trying to stand on top of vehicles the whole game. If the report says “player was moving fast the whole game, had the highest kill count, and was also reported by 5 other players in the match for cheating”, it’s a little more clear what’s happening.
None of that helps low-level play or games without meaningful progression. Continuing to use Rust as an example, because I’m most familiar with it among games with controversial anticheat: people get banned all the time. All the time. And they keep coming back with brand new Steam accounts, and continue to cheat until someone notices and an admin happens to be online. Rinse and repeat. Seemingly an infinite pool of cheaters, or finite cheaters with infinite money for new copies of the game. And it only takes a few minutes to ruin someone’s week.
The most effective prevention method is probably strict gatekeeping: require a minimum hours played in wild west servers or a certain value of games owned in an account before a player can be whitelisted. Proof of investment, that kind of thing.
Server-side checks cost processing power and memory hence they need to spend more on servers.
Client side kernel-level anti-cheat only ever consumes resources and cause problems to the actual gamers, not directly to Rockstart’s bottom line (and if it makes the game comms slightly slower on the client side it might even reduce server resource consumption).
If Rockstar’s management theory is that gamers will endure just about any level of shit and keep on giving them money (a posture which, so far, has proven correct for just about every large game maker doing that kind of shit) then they will logically conclude that their bottom line won’t even suffer indirectly from making life harder for their existing clients whilst it will most definitelly suffer if they have more server costs due to implementing server side checks for cheating.
Battleye is supported on steam deck
But honestly FUCK kernel level ACs
Battleye is, but they didn’t enable it for Linux. Literally a switch, and they failed to do so.
Heh, I would say the cheaters are generally much more immature and likely to DDOS. I think there is a lot of overlap over video game cheaters and script kiddies, especially when the cheaters are called hackers
Qnd cheaters have money (the same they use to buy cheats) to pay for botnets
I’m upset they nuked Linux support, my PC is Linux and have a steam deck
I’m still not going to fucking ddos them for it
Yeah that’s shitty. I’d rather the cheaters ruin the game for a subsection of the populace rather than all of them though.
Linux users playing dirty? Not a good look.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattlEye
Interacts with the game at the kernel level.
Fuck cheaters, but also FUCK kernel level shit, it’s possible to make a good AC without fucking around in the kernel.
I don’t even install third party Antivirus’ that hook into the kernel because of all the issues it causes. 80% of all BSODs I’ve traced back have always had a root cause because of some shit piece of software fucking around in the kernel. 15% is shitty drivers.
Kernel AVs and ACs actually act like malware in of itself with the types of hooks and interactions it performs. Anything operating at the kernel level can basically see just about everything you or your computer is doing
Fuck kernel level AC
80% of all BSODs I’ve traced back have always had a root cause because of some shit piece of software fucking around in the kernel
CrowdStrike has entered the chat.
it’s possible to make a good AC without fucking around in the kernel.
What if the cheat runs in the kernel? I am also against these extremely invasive anti-cheat measures, but it must be clear to everyone that the cheat developers and users have no qualms about this.
A user level AC can do shit all against that if the cheat runs in ring 0.
A) They can actually invest in server-side detection
B) Cheats running at ring0 aren’t invisible, unkillable maybe, but AC just needs to detect to ban/kick user
There’s no excuse for kernel AC, it’s just a cheap, lazy shortcut
Cheats running at ring0 aren’t invisible
Every rootkit ever disagrees with that statement.
They can actually invest in server-side detection
I’m not deep enough in the topic to be able to judge this, but i would guess the needed extra hardware is simple not worth it. especially in games with many players or complex physics i would guess that could lead to considerable load on the servers.
Plus, server side is not able to catch things the client manipulates on his side. e.g. graphical data to make walls transparent. The server could at most catch the player abusing this knowledge, but if he is smart about it, the server has no way to ever notice.
Cheats running at ring0 aren’t invisible
Every rootkit ever disagrees with that statement.
Clarification, to the game client, the cheat has to interact with the actual game process at some point. Rootkits try to interact with other processes as little as possible until instructed otherwise
I’m not deep enough in the topic to be able to judge this, but i would guess the needed extra hardware is simple not worth it. especially in games with many players or complex physics i would guess that could lead to considerable load on the servers.
Nope, the servers are already beefed up to just handle the players and physics as-is, adding detection routines to determine “Hey, this player is flying 100s of feet in the air and there’s no flying in this game” would be like a drop in the bucket
Plus, server side is not able to catch things the client manipulates on his side. e.g. graphical data to make walls transparent. The server could at most catch the player abusing this knowledge, but if he is smart about it, the server has no way to ever notice.
Do you realize how much cheating just some server-side checks would cut down? The most egregious ones are the ones people complain about, and hate, the most. The ones who instakill you or fling you far above the map or shoves you underground. The “smart ones” can be taken care of manually based on reports.
There will never ever be a 100% cheat proof game kernel AC or not. Nothing is unhackable.
It’s all about doing it as cheaply as possible and offloading to a third party to handle so they can wash their hands
You would also think that Rockstar would want to stop those kinds of cheats just for greedy reasons. If there is some kind of ultra-powerful flying saucer item available, it’s probably something that they sell to players for money. At the very least, when someone spawns something like that, check to see if their account purchased it.
So much of the rest of the stuff could be handled using heuristics. The average player gets X headshots an hour, this player is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe they’re just very good, but let’s flag that account and see if there’s anything else suspicious about their playing. That’s the thing about an MMO, you have vast amounts of data about players so there’s a lot of stuff you can use to see if something is normal.
I guess if they’re not doing it they’ve done some business calculations and decided that investing $X in techniques to ban cheaters won’t result in at least $X more in revenue from happy players who want to play more now that the cheating has been reduced. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re counting on making money off the cheaters somehow – maybe they periodically do get detected and banned and have to buy a new copy of the game. So, the math now says you don’t want to be too aggressive about the cheaters because they’re a good, reliable source of revenue.
That’s disgusting! Where do those criminals gather, so I could go an express my utter disappointment to them directly?
Their mom’s basement, most likely.
Good.
Sounds like it’s working
The most confusing part about this is that people are still playing GTA Online. Why…?
Because it keeps getting updates?
People enjoy video game, more news at 11
I’m still playing old school RuneScape.
Nobody ever stops playing osrs, we just take breaks
something that perplexes me to this day
Hardcore normies.
Cash cow
