Valve has spoken about potential anti-cheat issues on the Steam Machine which uses SteamOS and is not compatible with certain anti-cheats
An article from this weekend that seemingly got buried by soundbites about the Steam Machine price in the same interview, but given that we have no information on price, this seems way more interesting to me. I mean…I basically self-select games that don’t use these kinds of anti-cheat at all, but this is important information for a lot of people, especially if you’re looking for an off-ramp from Windows and still want to play some of the most popular live service titles.
In case this is serious, kernel-level AC has been shown to not be particularly effective. There were people with hacks for BF6 before it released, for example. Them blocking an operating system doesn’t prevent cheaters. It only prevents consumers from having options.
Of course I’m serious. “Not 100% effective” is not the same as “not effective”. And to be clear, I hate it and do not endorse it. I will not buy any game that goes as far as to use that kind of anti-cheat. But developers use it because it’s more effective at catching cheaters than not using it. All downvoting me does is cover your ears to what’s actually going on. There are a number of big live service games that once enabled Proton and have now disabled it after cheaters took advantage of the more lax security. They would not cut off a portion of their customer base if they didn’t have to because user space in Linux was somehow just as effective as the Windows variant that lives at ring 0 in the OS kernel.
In this instance not effective is 100% not effective.
Both kernel and non kernel anti cheat are equally effective in actual practice. In both cases your preventing kids, lazy and low knowledge users from cheating. But anyone who is willing to spend any amount of money to cheat can easily find someone who will provide them with a bypass.
In both cases the anti cheat is only as good as the on going support from the devs of both the anti cheat and the game.
You can’t control what a client does end of the day
I wish you the best in convincing devs with the data in front of them that there’s no difference between the two, but they seem to have data that indicates that they see fewer cheaters with ring 0 anti-cheat than when they let Linux players in with user space anti-cheat. If it were true that there’s no difference, surely Valve’s engineers could convince them of that, too, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
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In case this is serious, kernel-level AC has been shown to not be particularly effective. There were people with hacks for BF6 before it released, for example. Them blocking an operating system doesn’t prevent cheaters. It only prevents consumers from having options.
Of course I’m serious. “Not 100% effective” is not the same as “not effective”. And to be clear, I hate it and do not endorse it. I will not buy any game that goes as far as to use that kind of anti-cheat. But developers use it because it’s more effective at catching cheaters than not using it. All downvoting me does is cover your ears to what’s actually going on. There are a number of big live service games that once enabled Proton and have now disabled it after cheaters took advantage of the more lax security. They would not cut off a portion of their customer base if they didn’t have to because user space in Linux was somehow just as effective as the Windows variant that lives at ring 0 in the OS kernel.
In this instance not effective is 100% not effective.
Both kernel and non kernel anti cheat are equally effective in actual practice. In both cases your preventing kids, lazy and low knowledge users from cheating. But anyone who is willing to spend any amount of money to cheat can easily find someone who will provide them with a bypass.
In both cases the anti cheat is only as good as the on going support from the devs of both the anti cheat and the game.
You can’t control what a client does end of the day
I wish you the best in convincing devs with the data in front of them that there’s no difference between the two, but they seem to have data that indicates that they see fewer cheaters with ring 0 anti-cheat than when they let Linux players in with user space anti-cheat. If it were true that there’s no difference, surely Valve’s engineers could convince them of that, too, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.