Fuck. Even if I never play EA games they might still share this anti cheat with other companies. X_x aaaaaghhh
But to be fair, if a company partners with EA their game is probably shit.
Guys guys guys- The evil corporation is getting on board. Things really ARE that bad.
Wasn’t windows on arm designed specificly to break this capability? Linux won’t ever let it in but for windows I’m pretty sure this was one of this ARM things.
I don’t and wouldn’t really play the kind of games that use it, but nice. Though also I don’t know what running this on proton means. Kernel level is not nice.
I don’t believe there is a viable path for kernel-level anti-cheat on Linux (thank god). What most developers have done is enable normal anti-cheats on Linux, even if they use kernel-level ones on Windows. This is the path they seem to be going down.
Ever since CrowdStrike, I’m a bit amazed Microsoft hasn’t taken a hard stance on the gaping security hole that is kernel-level anti-cheat. It’s bonkers such is expected or even allowed just to play a game.
Microsoft made some statements about working to close that hole, but as far as I know nothing has actually come of it. Likely just PR.
I’m not that surprised. It’s hard to make a harmful practice stop when it’s backed by so much money.
Will they finally make their games work on Linux…
Will they finally get their spyware to work on Linux …
Will we finally get a sense of pride and accomplishment?
New rootkit is about to drop. 🥰
Is it morally correct to apply for the job while deeply under qualified for it and lie on your app to ensure they make no progress at maximum cost? Yes, obviously.
While I agree that it’s morally correct let’s also not be under any delusions that a company as garbage as EA isn’t using ai to screen applications. That makes your applying not only a waste of your time but also resources that are being sucked up by ai
Perhaps I’m naive about the programming of video games, but why isn’t anti-cheat for live service games handled on the server side? We already send mouse movement and keystrokes to the server to display in multi-player environments, why not just do anomaly detection on top of that data stream?
It feels like anti-cheat isn’t my problem to solve, or to accommodate for.
Yes and I am a game designer.
They want to control your data and device fully
When the anti-cheat runs on the client workstation, it just tries to make sure the client isn’t doing something nefarious. It’s cost effective for the game company and doesn’t cost the end user much except compatibility
To do it on the server, you end up needing to run a full simulation of the game which is really expensive at scale. You can, to some extent, just look for input values and thresholds, but over the years of trying to do this, people always find ways to cheat input threshold monitoring.
An interesting take is making the end user run the client on a rented server, then they can both have the client remote and not pay for anticheat at all.
I don’t understand this bird or animal that are cheats or kernel level anti cheat. But my guess why it’s not handled server side is it’s too late to detect anything. At that point all the cheats will be well disguised as user input.
If the game state of every player at any time can be simulated entirely on server then yes, to some degree. This isn’t the case for many games that have some degree of client authoritativeness, like Apex Legends. As the other poster mentioned, this doesn’t eliminate seeing through walls still, or other cheats that expose game state that players can’t normally see but are required for the game to work.
If all games were streamed over the network, like in GeForce Now, then we would perhaps require far less client anticheat.
This is the real truth and why people clowned Apex into the ground ruining their franchise.
i’m a proponent of server-side anticheat, but there is a few reasons games do it client side.
- server-side anticheats depend on heuristics and “checks” determining if a player is doing something “impossible”.
- one example would be checking if the player somehow has perfect accuracy on every player before even shooting, or if the player moves further than is possible in a given timespan (these are very simple examples).
- this is MUCH more difficult to make accurate, since these checks are fallible to network conditions or other hiccups.
- most online games opt for client-side anticheat since it lets the devs just “trust the client” easier. it can also detect things that would be impossible server-side, like X-ray (seeing other players through walls. this is impossible to detect server side).
Seeing players through walls can be solved in other ways, though. At least partially. One fix is to only draw models that the player has line-of-sight to, often with out of LOS models drawn behind the camera. Then, pop them back into place a frame before they are expected to be in LOS. That eliminates a lot of the advantages of wall hacks and model hacks. (Model hacks add a giant stick out of the front of player faces so you can see what they are looking at and, from the size/colour/whatever, how far away they are.)
Server side, you can also measure reaction time net latency to determine overly consistent or superhuman reaction times. If players aim to headshots in under 0.3s consistently, then they’re hacking.
And rootkits can be beat anyway, so they’re pointless, like by ruining a VM or by injecting the cheat at the bootloader, before the kernel.
And there are hardware man-in-the-middle cheats, with video capture cards sending a video stream to a companion computer running an image processing model that injects mouse commands back to the host computer.
I could keep going. There are so many ways. Trusting the client is impossible, trying to force it is unethical (requiring rootkits), and it doesn’t even stop cheating! Just give up and move to server-side detection, or go back to community servers that can self moderate with human admins.
And, imho, don’t even ban the cheaters—instead, flag their account to be exclusively placed into cheater-only games (with bots for filler, if needed to keep queue times roughly matched to avoid player detection). ngl, younger me (who had more time for this kind of thing) would have loved the challenge of trying to out-hack other players using cheats.
good points. yeah, client side anticheats are still vulnerable and I think they’re mostly just popular out of pure laziness. Making a good server side anticheat takes a lot of thought into what is and isn’t possible so it’s easier for a company to just slap on some slop and get 80% of the way there.
in valorant’s case, their anticheat is also a great date collection software to beam every possible identifier straight to John Data or whoever it ends up with.
Incredibly happy to see the option, but I ain’t gonna run that shit.
No thanks EA. You’re on my never buy list.
I’m still not gonna buy games with anti-cheat, EA.
Um, yay? 🤢
Hopefully, Linux developers will create a tool to blacklist DRMed products from being installed. I don’t want to unwittingly install Enigma, Denuvo, Easy Anti-Cheat, and other foul things onto my machine.
This looks like primarily Windows on AArch64 then maybe Linux support later.
I’d be more interested in Linux IntelX86-Amd64 support for stuff like the SteamDeck. Windows on Arm is borderline non-existent
Ew. Do not want.
