Now that Stop Killing Games is actually being taken seriously - maybe we need to take a look at Stop Fucking Around In Our Kernels
I haven’t really been personally affected by it before - I don’t play any competitive multiplayer games at all. But my wife had her brother over, and he’s significantly younger than us. So he wanted to play FortNite and GTA V, knowing I have a gaming PC. FortNite is immediately out of the question, it’ll never work on my computer. Okay, so I got GTA V running and it was fun for a while, but it turns out all of those really cool cars only exist in Online. But oh look, now they’ve added BattlEye and I can no longer get online.
While this seems like a trivial issue (Just buy a third SSD for Windows and dual boot), it’s really not. Even if I wanted to install Windows ever again, I do NOT want random 3rd party kernel modules in there. Anyone remember the whole CrowdStrike fiasco? I do NOT want to wake up to my computer not booting up because some idiot decided to push a shitty update to their kernel module that makes the kernel itself shit the bed. And while Microsoft fucks up plenty, at least they’re a corporation with a reputation to uphold, and I believe they even have a QA team or 2. CrowdStrike was unheard of outside of the corporate world before the ordeal and tbh nobody has ever heard of it afterwards again.
So I think this would be a good angle to push. That we should be careful about what code runs in our OS kernels, for security and stability reasons. Obviously it’d be impossible to just blanket ban 3rd party kernel modules to any OS. However, maybe here in the EU at least we could get them to consider a rule that any software that includes a component running in the OS kernel, MUST justify how that part is necessary for the software to function in the best possible way for the user of the computer the software is running on. E.g I expect a hardware driver to have a kernel module, and I can see how security software needs to have a kernel module, but I do NOT see how a video game needs to have an anti cheat with a kernel module. How does that benefit me, the customer paying to be able to play said video game?
This will take a rogue agent to send malware or otherwise brick all machines by kernel injection.
The crowd strike event poked a hole in the dam.
This needs a full exploit to get major traction beyond game studios moving to the next kernel level drm/exploit engine.
This doesn’t work. It will never work. You can’t shame conscious consumers into voting with their wallets while the other 99% keeps buying the bad practices.
Thing is, if nobody on Lemmy, and literally nobody in general who cares about anticheat, buys GTA 6, you know what effect that would have on the company’s bottom line? None, they’ll make record profits.
So now you try to convince the 99% of players that are buying the bad practices, that a magic (to them) program that prevents cheaters is bad (since “has too much access” doesn’t really explain anything). They don’t care and won’t care.
Money mumbles. Don’t buy the game, and also actively notify the company of your decision and why. Twitter, feedback form, steam review, whatever channel lets you get that message across.
Why would they listen to your personal complaint if you, singular, are going to buy it anyway? Your voice only matters to a company if it means you won’t buy their product otherwise. Don’t buy the game, then tell them why you didn’t.
You’re not listening to what I said. I said that most people will buy the game and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Most people are fucking idiots. You can morally decide not to support it by not buying the game, and that’s perfectly reasonable. But it won’t do fucking shit because all the idiots will still buy the game. That’s just how the world works because most people don’t give a fuck. Unless you can personally convince millions of people to change their behavior and agree with you, you not buying the game doesn’t matter.
There is a network effect to popular games.
However as more people stop buying the network effect gets weaker.
Its happening visibly with the new Call of Duty. Many i know bought it and then stopped playing shortly after because much of their friends are waiting for sales now or just find the game bad.
Those people will be thinking twice before buying next year.
Exactly, every time I say ‘I’m thinking of putting up a Factorio server, you want in?’, they are significantly less likely to be playing (or paying for) the newest game that has kernel-level access. Why, because we are playing Factorio for the next few weeks together and Factorio is fun.
Factorio isn’t the only game we play, but the point is to reinforce yours. If you are playing fun game x, your friends are more likely to play x instead of something else. Even if they have no care about Kernel-Level access, the fact you do affects their buying (and playing) patterns.
The ship named “software does shit I don’t like on my own hardware” sailed the day proprietary software became a thing.
Mind you, it’s scary how many people applaud kernel-level anticheat. “This game was just ruined by hackers until they added kernel-level anticheat. Now it’s great again!”
How would a campaign against kernel-level anticheat “succeed” exactly? More awareness? More people boycotting kernel-level anticheat? Laws prohibiting the practice?
Like, obviously I’m never running any software that involves kernel-level anticheat, but I’m a Gentoo neckbeard with an EFF-approved tinfoil hat surgically attached to my scalp.
(Hell, I think it would be great if most of the games out there had cheater and bot servers where it was encouraged to run your cheat tools and/or bots. If they allowed that but just kept it separate from non-tool/non-bot players, that’d be a fantastic way to get kids more interested in STEM.)
(Also, if anyone made and sold a boardgame that made players want to cheat (in a bug-not-feature kind of way), it would get negative reviews and no one would buy it. In a way, kernel-level anticheat can almost be considered a type of “externality”. The game studio, rather than going to the trouble to tune their game to make cheating less appealing, they break their users’ computers and invade their privacy. And the game studio then rakes in more money as a result.)
But how would we get through to normie 12-year-olds who just want to play Valorant and not have their face constantly rubbed in the dirt by “hackers”?
likely only way this is going to change is if someone starts exploiting the kernel level anticheats and causes noticeable consequences for people who dont care they have it installed. In essence, its just (hopefully) difficult to use rootkit waiting to be used anyway.
It is going to be hard to potentially have to make GTA 6 the first one I skip entirely (minus II and London I guess, I never got around to playing those. Or the stories).
I had 2000 hours in SA:MP in the ~one year I actively used xFire. I am an absolute GTA nerd.
I’ll survive it, maybe borrow the console version off a friend who ends up buying it or something. But I know for sure I’ll hate myself for having principles. Or I’ll cave in and hate myself for having principles and caving in.
I plan on waiting until they just make it free 12 times like they did GTA 5,I haven’t enjoyed GTA 5 anyway, they scrapped what made single player good and had a super buggy multiplayer if you had a slower internet, the amount of times it froze and hot stuck in the multiplayer tutorial at my parents because they had a 5/5 so it struggled internet side was insane for something that was already on the system and was still SP
Arguing that buying something means you own it is much more digestible for the general public. Arguing that the video game codes run slightly different on your machine than you would like is esoteric and a non-starter. This is not a matter for the government, just don’t buy shitty games. Literally no game is required to be bought.
I think it should also be noted that the games industry is not audited for security to the same degree as a lot of other industries. So vulnerabilities may not be found until years after launch and then go unpatched indefinitely because the company has already moved on to the next thing.
Hell, one of the older CoD games had an RCE vulnerability that as far as I’m aware is still not patched.
Plus, major publishers like EA are now pushing to create their own kernel-level anticheat in-house. Why should anyone trust them to create a secure piece of software that runs with the highest permissions possible when they can’t even be trusted to create stable, functional games?
Someone discovered Dark Souls games had a RCE but they never responded to the person that kept emailing them about it for months. The security guy then started invading streamers and crashing the game while doing fun stuff like showing text on the screen. Only then did Fromsoft take down the servers and patch things up - which took a few months.
Yes, game companies really don’t take security seriously.
This issue would be solved / non existent if matchmaking was not the only option for playing online game, which wouldn’t be an issue if publishers stopped being so greedy and predatory when it comes to player retention, which wouldn’t be an issue if the economic system we live in didn’t promote this toxic behaviour.
So yeah, kernel based anticheats are mostly just a symptom of a larger problem, the rotten video games industry
This issue would be solved / non existent if matchmaking was not the only option for playing online game
This is incredibly false.
Back in the day? Counterstrike 1.6 was SO good that we played through it with rampant hackers everywhere. Finding the rare server where people weren’t using aimbots and wallhacks was a bigger find than a hyper attractive alien asking you to teach it what love is. Same with UT and Quake.
I encourage you to explore the wonderful world of indie games, and free yourself from the shackles and shitty anti-cheat implementations of the AAA/AAAA gaming industry
I can cite way more than 5 excellent games from this decade from the top of my head, We’re almost in 2025, so I’ll limit to games released in or after 2015:
Factorio
RimWorld
Stellaris
Fallout 4
Overcooked 2 (and all you can eat)
Life is Strange
Cyberpunk 2077
Before your eyes
Dead Cells
Shadow Tactics
Cities Skylines
The outer worlds
Two point hospital
I can keep going, but this is just from the top of my head, there are always good games getting released, and very rarely they’re AAA.
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This will take a rogue agent to send malware or otherwise brick all machines by kernel injection. The crowd strike event poked a hole in the dam. This needs a full exploit to get major traction beyond game studios moving to the next kernel level drm/exploit engine.
https://www.pcgamer.com/ransomware-abuses-genshin-impacts-kernel-mode-anti-cheat-to-bypass-antivirus-protection/
Money talks.
Don’t buy the game.
This doesn’t work. It will never work. You can’t shame conscious consumers into voting with their wallets while the other 99% keeps buying the bad practices.
Thing is, if nobody on Lemmy, and literally nobody in general who cares about anticheat, buys GTA 6, you know what effect that would have on the company’s bottom line? None, they’ll make record profits.
So now you try to convince the 99% of players that are buying the bad practices, that a magic (to them) program that prevents cheaters is bad (since “has too much access” doesn’t really explain anything). They don’t care and won’t care.
They applaud it even.
…still not buying it, tho.
Exactly.
It’s like promoting Linux to people: Why would I care that my operating system is open source? Or free for that matter if I pirate it anyway?
Some people never will care.
Right, well they are trying to start a campaign to popularize the comment you just made. Or at least that’s my understanding
Money mumbles. Don’t buy the game, and also actively notify the company of your decision and why. Twitter, feedback form, steam review, whatever channel lets you get that message across.
Absolute dogshit strategy. 99% of people will always buy the game so you not buying won’t matter in the slightest. Unfortunate but true.
Why would they listen to your personal complaint if you, singular, are going to buy it anyway? Your voice only matters to a company if it means you won’t buy their product otherwise. Don’t buy the game, then tell them why you didn’t.
You’re not listening to what I said. I said that most people will buy the game and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Most people are fucking idiots. You can morally decide not to support it by not buying the game, and that’s perfectly reasonable. But it won’t do fucking shit because all the idiots will still buy the game. That’s just how the world works because most people don’t give a fuck. Unless you can personally convince millions of people to change their behavior and agree with you, you not buying the game doesn’t matter.
There is a network effect to popular games.
However as more people stop buying the network effect gets weaker.
Its happening visibly with the new Call of Duty. Many i know bought it and then stopped playing shortly after because much of their friends are waiting for sales now or just find the game bad.
Those people will be thinking twice before buying next year.
Exactly, every time I say ‘I’m thinking of putting up a Factorio server, you want in?’, they are significantly less likely to be playing (or paying for) the newest game that has kernel-level access. Why, because we are playing Factorio for the next few weeks together and Factorio is fun.
Factorio isn’t the only game we play, but the point is to reinforce yours. If you are playing fun game x, your friends are more likely to play x instead of something else. Even if they have no care about Kernel-Level access, the fact you do affects their buying (and playing) patterns.
So do mega-corporations with more money than God, like Microsoft.
And they already said no to root-level anti-cheats.
Yes
That’s not trivial at all. Don’t let anyone let you think otherwise.
The ship named “software does shit I don’t like on my own hardware” sailed the day proprietary software became a thing.
Mind you, it’s scary how many people applaud kernel-level anticheat. “This game was just ruined by hackers until they added kernel-level anticheat. Now it’s great again!”
How would a campaign against kernel-level anticheat “succeed” exactly? More awareness? More people boycotting kernel-level anticheat? Laws prohibiting the practice?
Like, obviously I’m never running any software that involves kernel-level anticheat, but I’m a Gentoo neckbeard with an EFF-approved tinfoil hat surgically attached to my scalp.
(Hell, I think it would be great if most of the games out there had cheater and bot servers where it was encouraged to run your cheat tools and/or bots. If they allowed that but just kept it separate from non-tool/non-bot players, that’d be a fantastic way to get kids more interested in STEM.)
(Also, if anyone made and sold a boardgame that made players want to cheat (in a bug-not-feature kind of way), it would get negative reviews and no one would buy it. In a way, kernel-level anticheat can almost be considered a type of “externality”. The game studio, rather than going to the trouble to tune their game to make cheating less appealing, they break their users’ computers and invade their privacy. And the game studio then rakes in more money as a result.)
But how would we get through to normie 12-year-olds who just want to play Valorant and not have their face constantly rubbed in the dirt by “hackers”?
its never too late to start resisting something. Though it is too late if no one cares to do anything about it, not even yourself.
But we are a minority. The vast majority of gamers hate us.
I think it would be good for them to be told the truth: you aren’t being killed by hackers, you just suck.
likely only way this is going to change is if someone starts exploiting the kernel level anticheats and causes noticeable consequences for people who dont care they have it installed. In essence, its just (hopefully) difficult to use rootkit waiting to be used anyway.
On the contrary, I think kernel level anticheat should be illegal
I know it’s easy to say, especially in your case when its a kid, but just dont buy or play games with kernel AC.
These companies only understand money.
Anti cheat should be server side.
It is going to be hard to potentially have to make GTA 6 the first one I skip entirely (minus II and London I guess, I never got around to playing those. Or the stories).
I had 2000 hours in SA:MP in the ~one year I actively used xFire. I am an absolute GTA nerd.
I’ll survive it, maybe borrow the console version off a friend who ends up buying it or something. But I know for sure I’ll hate myself for having principles. Or I’ll cave in and hate myself for having principles and caving in.
I plan on waiting until they just make it free 12 times like they did GTA 5,I haven’t enjoyed GTA 5 anyway, they scrapped what made single player good and had a super buggy multiplayer if you had a slower internet, the amount of times it froze and hot stuck in the multiplayer tutorial at my parents because they had a 5/5 so it struggled internet side was insane for something that was already on the system and was still SP
On areweanticheatyet.com it seems like the percentage of denied/broken keeps getting higher and higher :(
I guess it makes sense, new games come out with anticheat, and rarely do new games come out without anticheat.
Arguing that buying something means you own it is much more digestible for the general public. Arguing that the video game codes run slightly different on your machine than you would like is esoteric and a non-starter. This is not a matter for the government, just don’t buy shitty games. Literally no game is required to be bought.
This IS a matter for the goverment. “just don’t buy shitty X” is “just use magic” argument.
The point is not enough people understand it to gain any momentum
I think it should also be noted that the games industry is not audited for security to the same degree as a lot of other industries. So vulnerabilities may not be found until years after launch and then go unpatched indefinitely because the company has already moved on to the next thing.
Hell, one of the older CoD games had an RCE vulnerability that as far as I’m aware is still not patched.
Plus, major publishers like EA are now pushing to create their own kernel-level anticheat in-house. Why should anyone trust them to create a secure piece of software that runs with the highest permissions possible when they can’t even be trusted to create stable, functional games?
Someone discovered Dark Souls games had a RCE but they never responded to the person that kept emailing them about it for months. The security guy then started invading streamers and crashing the game while doing fun stuff like showing text on the screen. Only then did Fromsoft take down the servers and patch things up - which took a few months.
Yes, game companies really don’t take security seriously.
oh, so that was what it was about. they sure were really quiet about not caring about it in the first place.
This issue would be solved / non existent if matchmaking was not the only option for playing online game, which wouldn’t be an issue if publishers stopped being so greedy and predatory when it comes to player retention, which wouldn’t be an issue if the economic system we live in didn’t promote this toxic behaviour.
So yeah, kernel based anticheats are mostly just a symptom of a larger problem, the rotten video games industry
Hah. Good luck with that :)
Games that have community hosted servers also needs anticheat. You can’t expect an admin to be around 24/7 to ban cheaters.
This is incredibly false.
Back in the day? Counterstrike 1.6 was SO good that we played through it with rampant hackers everywhere. Finding the rare server where people weren’t using aimbots and wallhacks was a bigger find than a hyper attractive alien asking you to teach it what love is. Same with UT and Quake.
And none of those did “matchmaking”.
600k signatures to go. Link for EU citizens.
I usually solve this issue by… just playing something else.
It sounds hard, but I assure you, nothing is impossible.
There’s about 5 games a decade that are exciting anymore even, unfortunately. I might just have to give up gaming then.
False.
There are tons of good games always coming out even recently, unless you only like multi-player games.
If you spend a little time on the dark alleyways of Steam, you will occasionally come up with hidden gems. The indies scene is currently thriving.
You’re obviously looking in the wrong place for games then…
Baldurs Gate 3
That’s one yeah
I encourage you to explore the wonderful world of indie games, and free yourself from the shackles and shitty anti-cheat implementations of the AAA/AAAA gaming industry
I can cite way more than 5 excellent games from this decade from the top of my head, We’re almost in 2025, so I’ll limit to games released in or after 2015:
I can keep going, but this is just from the top of my head, there are always good games getting released, and very rarely they’re AAA.
I was boycotting it before it was even in the news.