There aren’t exactly a wealth of games doing what Battlefield does outside of Battlefield itself.
turkalino@lemmy.yachts
on 08 Aug 19:42
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Battlebit is fantastic. The only reason it hasn’t taken off is because of gamerbros that can’t handle anything besides realistic graphics
ampersandrew@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 19:46
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It did take off for a time, and now it looks like it’s an early access game that hasn’t had an update in 19 months. And I can tell you that if they don’t let me host the server myself and play via LAN, they’re not solving any problems for me over Battlefield.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 19:54
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I love Battlebit and its a fun time, but it already did take off, sold literally millions of copies (nearly 2 million in its first 2 weeks), and then was effectively abandoned by the developers.
Yeah well too bad that ship has sailed as well. Such a shame, BF2, BC2 and BF3 were quality games, just needed a modern take of one of those instead of whatever this is we got.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 09 Aug 01:17
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It’s already dead mate. Hop on the finals, we got linux support.
northendtrooper@lemmy.ca
on 08 Aug 18:47
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Having Anti-Cheat of any kind outside of the game is laziness or lack of resources.
I believe just have physical limitations of the character or objects and verify the movement every once in a while to make sure that their movement is not super human (ie, aim bots).
You don’t need a kernal level anti-cheat.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 18:51
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It takes more work and resources to do what they’re doing. They already do server side anti cheat. And realistically, this is more effective than not doing it, though it definitely still gets defeated anyway. I would say the things that it asks of the customer are not worth the trade even if they were 100% effective, but they are more effective.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Aug 20:03
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I offer:
0.2% more effective detection of cheaters (theoretical)
You offer:
Full and total access to every single file on your computer, all of its hardware, and all connected devices, via kernel level access.
Do you accept?
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 08 Aug 20:52
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I mean… the people who play these games very regularly do accept that.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Aug 22:39
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Yep.
I would argue those people are extremely silly, but apparently some people just literally do not value privacy, data security, at all.
I guess we’ll see how well that works out with fascists running the show now, surely they’ll only go after the bad immigrants gamers!
Are you maybe a woman who had to stop using their period tracker app?
A trans person who had the audacity to exist, while being trans?
… Do you play video games on the same PC you do everything else on?
The best thing is back when Battlefield was Battlefield, it would self-regulate because most people played on self-hosted servers, so cheaters and bad actors were taken care of swiftly. But now they want their own control to put shitty bots and SBMM in the game, so here we are.
This whole game is a case of the devs making bad decisions and then instead of changing them decisions, they apply the quickest bandaid fixes they can.
Overall scope was set by EA, they wanted a more mainstream shooter to compete with the likes of Call of Duty, so they could jump into the seasonal content/battle pass grind. But the devs made all these little individual decisions that add up.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 08 Aug 19:27
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And they should just make good games too, right?
The issue with “just analyze the players” is that it is VERY expensive computationally. And it causes issues with non-official servers as it drastically increases the cost of a dedicated server and makes a listen server nigh unusable.
To be clear: I do not think the kernel level anti-cheats are a consumer friendly solution. But it takes a special kind of arrogance to insist you know better than decades worth of research and work in trying to stop hacking.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Aug 20:08
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Yeah I mean its not like Valve has been using a combination of server side and client side game file only validation to do AC for Counter Strike for 20 years or anything.
Yep yep yep, the whole industry uses Kernel AC, other than the devs of the longest running comoetetive FPS genre ever, yep yep yep!
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 08 Aug 20:51
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Valve is also barely a blip in the market when it comes to this, funny enough.
Valve’s data can be more or less officially pulled and steamdb lists them as having 1 million concurrents in whatever the default window is (looks like this month). Call of Duty claims to be closer to 70 million but most conservative estimates agree they are at least in the low 10s of millions of “active players” rather than anyone who just popped in to check their dailies to see if they wanted to do them.
Personally? I think the vast majority of games (including Battlefield…) would be perfectly fine with VAC and I like VAC. But there are reasons that the studios that make more money than some small nations on their games (as opposed to their storefront, which is what VAC actually is based on) literally pay for more invasive solutions.
Which is actually the other point worth remembering. Punkbuster and EAC and rolling their own costs money. Whereas VAC is “free” with Steam (and possibly elsewhere but that gets murky). Many of the mega games are associated with their own proprietary launchers but plenty of midtier games that ONLY care about Steam still feel the need to pay for EAC or whatever.
And… there is a reason beyond “We want to spend money to hurt our users”.
Okay. Apparently EAC is free if you sell your game on Epic but… ain’t fucking nobody considering EGS their be all end all platform. Even frigging Epic sued the hell out of Apple to get into the app store for crying out loud (not quite the same but roll with me).
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Aug 22:35
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To the first chunk:
I mean yeah, thats why I said longest lived, not ‘most popular’.
But I am glad you agree that… VAC is reasonable, and works pretty darn well.
But this leads into Part 2…
Why does VAC work pretty darn well?
Beyond the technicals of the methods of AC…
Because if you fuckup bad enough, your entire Steam Library can be deleted.
Steam is a platform.
Every single other major company that is trying to force Kernel AC on the PC market is acting as if they do, or should just also be the de facto platform, as they are on consoles.
Yep, cheat on Xbox or PS and your account can get banned there too… but a PC is more than a gaming console, has a lot more private stuff on it than one, typically.
Valve are PC natives so they never pushed for Kernel AC.
They just allow, and now warn you about Kernel AC from other mega publishers on their platform, and these other game publishers.
Their whole thing is that they want you to use their platform instead of Steam. They’ve pretty much all done it at this point, at least tried… Ubisoft, Rockstar, MSFT/GFWL, ActBlizz (now technically MSFT but w/e), etc etc etc
And they want to force Kernel AC down your throat on your PC as well as consoles… because it gives them more data, which they can use themselves, and sell to data brokers.
… Anyway, the funniest part?
EAC and BattleEye have offered full support to game devs to get their AC working on linux via Proton… for 3 to 4 years now.
It comes with their licensing agreements.
But management almost never cares to tell development to actually use this support thst they are already paying for!
… Because they get lots of money from MSFT, and MSFT hates Linux.
Also, if you go on areweanticheatyet … you can see that almost every single AC system of any kind, in the last 10 years… has at least one game that showcases it working on Linux.
This means that it is provably, entirely possible to get nearly all AC systems working on Linux, as some game dev team has done this.
Its just that most game dev teams, under most management… are not directed to.
There is no real technical reason why AC cannot be made to work in a satisfactory way on Linux.
At best, it is dev/management laziness/nonprioritization, at worst, it is publishers not wanting to upset MSFT, or still pursuing their idea of what should be normalized in terms of a gaming distribution platform, and the backend business side of profiting from dataharvesting.
Yep yep yep, the devs of the FPS game with endemic cheating so horrible the competitive scene had to introduce their own matchmaking system with kernel AC.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Aug 13:10
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So, again, Kernel level AC can be, and routinely is defeated, all the time.
This is easy to verify with a simple websearch and maybe 30 minutes of time, I don’t want to directly link to where you can purchase working cheats/hacks/methods that can defeat Kernel AC, because I do not want such things to proliferate.
But you appear to be claiming the competetive scene for CS has introduced a Kernel level AC.
I cannot find this, this does not appear to be true, but I could be wrong, could you please source this claim?
I cannot find a competetive CS community or league or tournament that has… somehow rolled their own custom version of CS, overlayed with some other AC, on top of VAC.
Frankly, I don’t see how this would be possible without somehow forking CS, and then either stripping out or modifying VAC… as … two AC systems working at the same time are nearly 100% guaranteed to fight each other, and class the actions of the other AC… as cheats and hacks.
Its essentially analagous to how, 15 to 20 years ago, if you had McAfee and Norton and whatever other realtime, always active, system level anti virus software running, simultaneously… they would fight eachother, treat the other AV system as a virus, as malware.
…
All I can find is CS communities discussing the problem broadly, mixed with a lot of speculation that a recent VAC overhaul now does include Kernel AC… despite there being no actual evidence for this, beyond the collective bias and fallacious logic that if an AC becomes more effective, the only possible explanation is that it must be because of Kernel access.
What Valve actually did, was hook up AI to greatly enhance its serverside cheat detection capabilities and accuracy… one of the rare actually good use cases of AI as it relates to cybersec.
It seems to have improved their, again, server side heuristic detection abilities… without needing Kernel level access.
…
So yeah, please source your claim.
Unlike my easily verifiable ‘claim’ that I do not wsnt to cite for cybersec reasons, your claim should not have that problem at all.
So yep, again, Kernel level AC, routinely defeated, all the time, with such regularity that it is a viable business model.
Almost like Kernel AC doesn’t do what people seem to think it does, it isn’t a panacea, and the tradeoff is that you lose all your computer security… for nothing, really.
I did not say that kernel level anti cheats makes cheating impossible. The improvement in the experience is not nothing. You would not understand unless you played both for yourself.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 20:06
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Kernel anti-cheat does absolutely nothing to prevent aimbots/triggerbots, as most are run using 2 separate machines, anyway. The first machine runs the game in a totally clean and legitimate environment, but sends its video output (either using standard streaming tools like OBS or by using special hardware) to the 2nd machine. The 2nd machine runs the cheat and processes the video to detect where to aim and/or when to shoot, and sends mouse input back to the 1st machine.
I would have thought this would introduce enough latency to make an aimbot ineffective, but I know nothing about the cheating scene
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 20:33
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Colorbots are extremely efficient and can be run on just a raspberry pi.
Human reaction time is ~200-250ms, while the cheat will be introducing easily less than 10ms of latency.
I’ve never used cheats in a video game because I don’t see the point and it would spoil the fun of playing, but as a software developer, it is interesting to learn about how they work and are implemented
that’s super impressive to me, and I guess explains why any client side anticheat is ineffective vs a determined cheater, rootkit or not.
thanks for the explanation! I miss when anti-cheating measures involved actual human beings administrating servers
count_dongulus@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 22:16
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Wall hacks could be defeated by the server only reporting the positional information about enemy players to game clients when it detects that the client player’s camera should be able to see some part of the other player’s silhouette. This is possible, albeit computationally expensive, but the main functional issue is latency. Nobody wants enemies magically popping into view when their view changes quickly because their ping was more than 6ms lol
Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 18:57
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Needlessly intrusive. Can obviously be circumvented by cheaters anyway, so quite possibly superfluous. Apart from that it protects against the kinds of attacks that typically require physical access to the computer. If you have physical access you have full access anyway. Etc.
If you have physical access you have full access anyway. Etc.
You know secure boot was specifically made to protect users for this exact use case. Any tampering of the system will prevent the system from booting.
Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works
on 08 Aug 19:23
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I get your pc, “tamper” it, then i install a fake bios that tells you all is well and that your tpm and secureboot and whatever else bullcrap they invent is still happy.
A USB keylogger is not detectable by the computer, not in firmware nor operating system. It passively sniffs the traffic between the USB keyboard and the computer, to be dumped out later.
I recently had an rfid scanner immediately rma-d back that had just been returned to us. The new issue was caused by a setting and not by a defect. I asked our IT/help desk if it WAS a setting that could be changed
“I don’t know. I get the thing, I check these settings, I check those settings, that’s all I know”
😑😑😑
So me and another person are out of our equipment for another couple weeks while the scanner is sent back for “repairs” and the repair people will go “😑 tap tap tap idiots”
(Edit: I know it’s a setting because I talked with the other person who uses it and I explained the issue and he let me know it is something he changes)
And Microsoft is shutting out most third parties in the near future because of Crowdstrike, so Linux likely won't be supporting Secure Boot in the future, even if someone did want to enable it for some odd reason.
Microsoft can’t stop you from signing images with your own keys.
That’s what I do, and it’s almost entirely automated on Linux these days.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 09 Aug 18:10
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Microsoft’s kicking third parties out of the kernel because of crowdstrike. Secure boot is a completely different thing Microsoft can’t kick people out of.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 10 Aug 13:13
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Do you have any advice for someone that dual boots SteamOS and Windows 10 on a Steam Deck?
I’ve heard online that since SteamOS manually signs keys or something, that if any changes happen to the kernel that later need to be updated by SteamOS, I’d need to re-sign the keys or whatever. Idk I’m not well versed in any of this
I’ve heard it’s as easy as downloading the M$ keys to enable Secure Boot, but I also don’t want to brick my Deck.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Aug 15:10
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Windows 10 support is ending soon so there’s no reason to have it on your steam deck. Steam will stop supporting it sooner after Microsoft does, just like steam does with Apples operating system.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 10 Aug 16:10
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Windows 10 commercial is ending, not the LTSC versions. Those are good for another 2-7 years iirc
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Aug 18:59
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No, they are killing it unless you pay and extra $30 a month and use a Microsoft account and kill local accounts.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 10 Aug 19:09
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Source?
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Aug 21:56
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Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 10 Aug 23:16
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That’s for commercial releases of Windows 10 dumbass. There are two other enterprise releases that will have free security updates for 2-7 more years.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Aug 03:32
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Which is again proving my point. Steam is selling games to people with enterprise licenses.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Aug 11:19
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You never made that point. Stop moving the goal posts.
Do we have any evidence that Steam will not supported anything Windows 10 related, given that commercial licenses are ending and many people are shifting to enterprise licenses?
And it’s not like Steam hasn’t already been doing this. People have used enterprise licenses for legit and nefarious purposes for years. I doubt they’d change anything in October. They aren’t owned by M$
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 09 Aug 00:29
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You can run more than one OS with secure boot enabled. It’s just a pain in the ass.
you can run unsigned code on a secure boot enabled system.
its 2025, what the fuck do you have that can’t secure boot by now?
THIS is your winning argument.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 09 Aug 01:31
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(3) What’s your income? What region of the world do you live in and what hardware is available to you? I’m still using an am4 platform PC as my daily driver because I can’t burn money. One of my buddies has an AM3 PC. Many people use modified surplus office PCs (especially in developing nations like South America or SEA), which don’t have secure boot as an option. Check your privilege, and maybe donate some of your spare hardware to those who need it, if you want to make this “a non issue” for everyone.
(4) Yeah. I own my hardware, I configure my software. I gut Windows like a fish and keep it on a leash for these games, and use Linux for my work and for the games that respect the ecosystem.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 09 Aug 01:43
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New keys have already been released and you can always just create and enroll your own damn keys. This is sensationalist nonsense.
“Check my privilege” over secure boot? Calm down, Karen.
I think gaming on PC is going to get interesting in the coming decade as Microsoft kicks third parties out of the kernel (thanks crowdstrike!) and more and more people just stop putting up with windows. Enterprise in the US is hooked but everyone else? Na, they are gonna drop it.
Edit: these are listed as 1,3,and 4 in my post in voyager but lemmy shows 123. Interesting.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 09 Aug 01:53
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On the list thing, it seems that adding numbers with periods in a list seems to auto configure it to ascending numbers. That’s why I used (1) (3) (4). Weird, but I guess that’s the work around.
Enrolling your keys doesn’t work btw, because battlefield checks which keys you enroll, only accepting the default MS keys. Also on the hardware front, it is a big problem for gamers on a sub-300 USD budget these days - the best deals are on legacy hardware or surplus office equipment, mainly AM3-AM4 era.
The number list is how markdown works. You can enter all 1’s and it will automatically create ordered list.
Handy when you may need to edit list items, as you dont need to renumber even in plain text.
Markdown spec should allow for explicit number by using a bracket ‘)’ instead of a dot, but it may not work everywhere.
Let’s give it a go
I don’t think he needs a winning argument. I think EA needs to justify this kernel level AC, not the other way around.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
on 09 Aug 18:08
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I’m agreeing with point 4.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
on 09 Aug 12:01
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You can run more than one OS with secure boot enabled. It’s just a pain in the ass.
Weird, for me it was just flicking the switch in UEFI and now Grub and through it Windows 10 and Fedora 43 boot in Secure Boot.
poolhelmetinstrument@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 18:53
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This is where we need dedicated servers and self moderation
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Aug 20:00
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Yep.
Things were better when private servers had actual mods and admins, they acted more like pubs where you could go see the regulars, actually form a community.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 09 Aug 01:18
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DayZ, Rust, TF2 and Minecraft were the model all along. Nice that it’s vindicated.
ohshit604@sh.itjust.works
on 09 Aug 02:53
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This is where we need dedicated servers and self moderation
My knowledge towards battlefield games ends at BF4 but I’m pretty sure people pay to host custom servers, EA refuses to open source it and only supply a handful of third parties with the actual code for them to charge hosting fees.
I’m sure there is an NDA involved.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Aug 12:58
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I won’t buy BF6 if it doesn’t have a server browser
Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 18:54
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I love the Battlefield series but I’m not turning on Secure Boot for them. If it remains a hard requirement, I’ll simply be passing altogether.
Katana314@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 20:32
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I was able to get around secure boot by installing the beta on my PS5. From then, I had the pleasure of being unable to enter due to broken menus! Can’t complain for having spent nothing and having little trust in the franchise.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Aug 00:54
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There’s nothing wrong with Secure Boot and enabling it can prevent a small subset of attack vectors with no real downsides. That being said, the things Secure Boot does protect against aren’t likely to be an issue for most users but it’s nothing to be afraid of.
Wow. Might be the first BF game I pass on even if they eventually give it away for free.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 08 Aug 19:28
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There are a lot of good reasons for secure boot both in game and in general. If your distro does not support it then that should be a complaint directed towards the maintainers. And… getting that through Proton is a different mess.
But EA have been spending the past year or so actively updating older Battlefields (I want to say all the way back to 3?) to actively block linux/proton. For whatever reason, they actively want to block anything but Windows for their games.
Secure boot can be used as part of a chain that eventually ends with unlocking your cryptographic keys only if the software stack has not been modified.
Sure, for most people that’ll make little difference, but it is an actual benefit.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 08 Aug 20:47
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Yup. Securing your “supply chain” is a VERY VERY good thing to do from a security standpoint and secure boot is one step toward that.
The problem is that I have not yet met a single human who enables a bios password. An attacker can simply boot the bios and disable it.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 08 Aug 22:26
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First, Yo. Doesn’t even need to be a good password.
Second, what you are describing is something very different. Outside of very rare situations (most of which theoretical or specifically targeting a specific system by a state level actor), to be able to “boot the bios and disable it” would generally mean the machine is already VERY compromised or the bad actor has physical access to the machine.
A good way of thinking of it is that secure boot isn’t the lock on the door. It is the peephole that you look through to make sure that the person with your pizzas is from Georgio’s AND you actually ordered pizza. Rather than just opening the door because “Yo, free food”.
On its own? It doesn’t do much. But it goes a LONG way towards improving security when combined with other tools/practices.
You can, but most everything that would let you run your own boot-time code is supposed to end up in the TPM event log, which the TPM is happy to attest to with its unique/uniquely bannable attestation key. Not too difficult to set it up so that no attestation = no access.
This type of attestation is far from perfect for a lot of different reasons, and it would be really impractical to automate bans with it, but I guess it's a tool they see value in.
Yep. It would be incredibly bad if they did automatic bans for any key they don't recognize, but it's technically possible.
Edit: from what I'm reading it apparently just refuses to let you in with unrecognized/non-MS keys. Yeah that makes a lot more sense.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Aug 19:59
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I am still baffled that anyone thinks that Kernel AC is any kind of effective at stopping hacks, people have been literally making a living off of defeating it, and selling those hacks / methods for almost a decade now…
But nope, still got hordes of idiot gamers who think they work, think they’re necessary, think they can’t be spoofed.
burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 03:55
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i dont know if you know this, but generally the people buying and playing games arent the ones making the decisions about anticheat
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Aug 04:13
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Not sure how you could read this and come away with the idea that I do believe that…
I am talking about the subset of gamers that go on internet forums and discord servers and make false, unsupported claims as to the effectiveness or necessity or Kernel AC over other forms of AC, tell people this just is how it is now, get with the program, eat the bugs, play the spyware game, its fine, everyone is doing it.
Indirectly buyers are making a decision on anticheat. If someone buys a game with anticheat, they’ve made the decision to reward the developer for making the decision to include anticheat.
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
on 09 Aug 15:59
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It’s crazy to me that people cheat in online games. You really have to be a huge fucking loser to do this.
Small pp energy.
rautapekoni@sopuli.xyz
on 10 Aug 11:51
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Small pp energy.
I don’t know what energy this is, but not good either.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 10 Aug 12:20
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Sadly, I think the financial incentive is too great these days. People make decent money off this shit
The cheat developers, yes. Because there is demand. The question though was, why there is demand.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 10 Aug 13:03
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There’s demand because there’s supply.
Build it and they will come.
We have to ask the question if cheat developing wasn’t profitable, and even if developers actually operated at a loss, would there be as many cheats on the market as there are now?
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
on 13 Aug 08:44
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Small pp energy, am I right? Sad little people who want to feel big…
shiroininja@lemmy.world
on 08 Aug 23:58
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So I can’t play battlefield without TPM? I hate tech these days. My Ryzen board doesnt have it. Hence why I’m not on windows 11
JigglySackles@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 00:04
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I just refuse to enable it. It makes changing things a hassle.
Same. Keeps things simple with Linux, and Windows doesn’t even complain about it being disabled, so long as it’s present. I’ll never understand why it’s even required if you don’t even have to enable it.
So they can have an excuse to force you to upgrade to Windows 11 beyond “whoops, turns out making an operating system as a ‘buy once’ product is a bad idea.”
Joke’s on them; I already upgraded to Windows 11. I was among the first. It’s actually a solid OS once you disable all the ads and telemetry with O&O Shut Up 10.
You can still get win 11 without TPM by using Rufus and bypassing TPM which will have to be done for a lot of old PCs and we will have to do it by October this year.
mushroomman_toad@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Aug 11:45
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Why would you install Windows 11on a computer? What happens if you don’t do it before October?
Your computer will gradually get more and more filled with security holes that will be problematic to patch. Eventually, programs will stop supporting it as well.
b000rg@midwest.social
on 09 Aug 12:33
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Does this disable updates though? My wife somehow had Win11 installed on her pc without enabling secure boot, and her updates got so far behind that now it refuses to update and needs to be reinstalled.
No it doesn’t, but I’ll try putting it on one of my older PCs again and report back I only use Linux
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev
on 09 Aug 13:31
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Didn’t Microsoft stop this in a recent-ish update? I remember trying it on a machine without TPM and it just didn’t work.
Bazzite worked fine though (after some headaches setting it up).
end_stage_ligma@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 17:30
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you will own nothing and be happy
PushButton@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 01:40
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So you got the spyware without the benefits, that’s a hell of a surprise isn’t it?
But thank you for your money suckers!
mugita_sokiovt@discuss.online
on 09 Aug 02:26
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I’m glad I didn’t enable Tivoization (Secure Boot) and TPM. Those suck, and actually froze our machines. It’s literally useless at this point.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
on 09 Aug 11:56
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Secure Boot isn’t Tivoization because you can enroll your own keys.
mugita_sokiovt@discuss.online
on 09 Aug 16:42
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From my research, while I could see that being the case, “Secure Boot” is classified by the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project as Tivoization, and GPL-3 was made to fix that. That’s how I saw it, at least.
The standard thing people refer to as “Secure Boot” allows users to enroll their own keys and thus is not TiVo. The ability to enroll your own keys is the distinguishing feature here - TiVo devices don’t let you do that, so you can’t sign your own thing and run it.
The FSF has various pearl clutching articles from the days of Windows 8 fretting about whether or not users would be able to install their own keys on Secure Boot devices, but here in 2025, most devices allow this. (I’m sure there’s a handful of bizarre laptops or whatever that don’t, but the vast majority of hardware I’ve seen is fine.)
renrenPDX@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 04:28
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I only found out about this today from someone whose computer got bricked from trying to enable secure boot.
Narwhalrus@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 19:51
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My machine went into a boot loop and I had to clear CMOS to boot again.
I wonder how many people without the resources to fix a problem like that easily are going to end up without computers for an extended period of time because of this.
I had issues aswell where I couldn’t boot, and you wanna know why? Because I didn’t follow the step by step instructions EA tells you to follow. Follow those instructions, and it’ll work just fine.
Shame was really looking forward to bf6. Guess I’ll pass
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 08:10
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Pretty much the same as all the other modern BFs. They all had cheats in the Beta/early release versions. I’ve played and own literally every BF game since the original release of 1942. Cheats have always been present more or less.
massi1008@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 11:56
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That’s an (obviously) unpopular opinion around here but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt: How would AI be able to do that?
bluesheep@sh.itjust.works
on 09 Aug 12:08
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Don’t waste your time, they’re either an hardcore AI bootlicker or a shit stirrer - most likely both, looking at their post history.
pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Aug 12:31
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CSGO used to have Overwatch which is an anti cheat system that uses trusted and experienced players to go through video footage of reported players. With this method I both reported blatant spinbotters, wall hacking, and other chears. I also was on the side of watching back footage of hacking players.
Say AI trains on this data, it might work.
I’m not a fan of this though because knowledgeable and experienced players will be better than AI.
sunred@discuss.tchncs.de
on 09 Aug 12:43
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What actually exists but what I have yet to see implemented in any game I play are those server-side “AI anti-cheat” solutions like from anybrain that basically just analyse the players behavior to fit certain criteria. According to areweanticheatyet.com though there are four games using it already (the most well-known one probably being Lost Ark). In theory ai models can be very efficient and accurate at this (we are not talking about transformer models here like with the current llm craze) but that all depends on how they train a model and what the training data looks like.
I am not sure what the user above is thinking, but to play devil’s advocate:
One thing that modern AI does well is pattern recognition. An AI trained on player behavior, from beginner level all the way up to professional play, would be able to acquire a thorough understanding of what human performance looks like (which is something that games have been developing for a long time now, to try to have bots more accurately simulate player behavior).
I remember someone setting up their own litmus test using cheats in Tarkov where their main goal was just to observe the patterns of other players who are cheating. There are a lot of tells, a big one being reacting to other players who are obscured by walls. Another one could be the way in which aimbots immediately snap and lock on to headshots.
It could be possible to implement a system designed to flag players whose behavior is seen as too unlike normal humans, maybe cross-referencing with other metadata (account age/region/sudden performance anomalies/etc) to make a more educated determination about whether or not someone is likely cheating, without having to go into kernel-level spying or other privacy-invasive methods.
But then…this method runs the risk of eventually being outmatched by the model facilitating it: an AI trained on professional human behavior that can accurately simulate human input and behave like a high performing player, without requiring the same tools a human needs to cheat.
Cheating humans already perform closely enough to trick such a system. Many cheaters are smart enough to use an aimbot only for a split-second to nail the flick. With a tiny bit of random offset, those inputs indistinguishable from a high-skill player.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev
on 09 Aug 13:28
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These tricks may make it indistinguishable to a human moderator, but machine learning is actually really good at detecting that. But most companies don’t have the expertise, resources or training data to build a proper model for it.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 09 Aug 14:35
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Machine Learning is really good at CLAIMING it detected that.
The reality is that every few months there is a story about a fairly big streamer/e-sports player MAYBE getting caught cheating on stream. Sometimes it is obvious and sometimes it really becomes “Did they just know the map well enough to expect someone to come around that corner?”.
And a lot of times… it really is inconclusive. A somewhat common trope in movies is the veteran gunslinger literally aims at the wall of a stairwell and tracks where they expect the head to be and either fires a few rounds through the wall or waits for them at the bottom and… that is not entirely inconceivable considering that people tend to not crouch or move erratically down stairs. Obviously Jonathan Banks has a wallhack but Mike Ehrmantraut is just that damned good.
And false positives are a great way to basically kill a game. ESPECIALLY if they are associated with demonstrably false negatives too.
But you can be damned sure most of the major esports games are already doing this. It really isn’t expensive to train and they have direct feeds of every player in a tournament or twitch event. The issue is that there are (hopefully) tens of thousands of servers active at any moment and running Computer Vision+Inference on every single server is very costly.
And… I seem to recall there was a recent intentionally poorly defined Movement about maybe keeping user hostable dedicated servers a thing? How does that mesh with having every single server need to phone home (a fraction of) all 32 players feeds to a centralized cluster?
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev
on 09 Aug 17:17
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Machine learning doesn’t necessarily require a centralized cluster. Usually running those kinds of models is pretty cheap, it’s not an LLM basically. They usually do better than human moderators as well, able to pick up on very minute ‘tells’ these cheats have.
I understand your point about edge cases, but that’s not something the average player cares about much. E-sports is a pretty niche part of any game, especially the higher ranks. You just want to filter out the hackers shooting everyone each game that truly ruin the enjoyment. Someone cheating to rank gold instead of silver or whatever isn’t ruining game experiences; they’re usually detectable too, but if you get a false negative on that it’s not the end of the world. A smurf account of a very highly ranked player probably has a bigger impact on players’ enjoyment.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 09 Aug 21:12
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Depending on the model, inference can be run with CPU only. To distinguish what was originally proposed (a momentary flick consistent with aimbotting), you are either doing ray tracing (really expensive) or analyzing (effectively) video feeds. Both of which tend to put things more into the GPU realm which drastically increases the cost of a server.
But also? The only way these models can work is with constant data. Which means piping feeds back home for training which basically is never inexpensive.
Aside from that: if it was as simple as you are suggesting then this would be a solved problem. Similarly, if people don’t care about hackers outside of e-sports then there would be no reason for games to spend money on anti-cheat solutions when any match that matters would have heavy scrutiny. And yet, studios keep pumping out the cash for EAC and the like.
Since human beings are hot garbage and will always cheat, I really enjoyed playing against the AI soldiers in BF. It can also ensure that the game is playable forever OFFLINE.
Where I live I cant play BF4 anymore. Servers are down for my country, but I paid money for the game. Digital media is a scam once the servers go down. That is why I jailbroke every console I own.
Ppl are already reviving BF2 with AI bots.
The future is looking bright.
Pattern recognition anticheat vs. bot based on patterns? I don’t see anyone winning.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 09 Aug 12:21
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Why are people like this. How does this make gaming enjoyable?
Passerby6497@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 13:23
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Honestly, if I had the skills I’d be doing that as an explicit fuck you to the draconian anticheat bullshit they force on everyone, because what better fuck you than showing all that effort was for naught, especially close to launch.
EA can go fuck themselves with the world’s biggest cactus.
thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 13:51
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Your anti-cheat doesn’t work anyway so let me play in linux you cowards.
slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org
on 11 Aug 14:27
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They want to keep windows relevant so hard.
Yeah, i enable secure boot, and let some kernel level anti cheat into my system. At least i don’t have to play with cheaters. Oh there are still cheaters. So glad
MilitantAtheist@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 17:01
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Anyone with half a brain could see this coming from a mile away. My conspiracy brain almost thinks this is some concerted and calculated effort by Microsoft to artificially lock games to Windows through anti cheat. It’s disgusting, isn’t needed, and just plain isn’t effective. They can spew all the metrics out of their ass, we all know that it’s just not effective.
a year ago on Mastodon when EA started locking out games like Apex Legends, BF1, V, 2042, etc from Linux I said “I bet you Microsoft is about to launch a handheld and since they have a deal with EA and Gamepass they want EA Exclusivity on their handheld and to lockout Steamdeck/Valve” sure enough a few months later Microsoft announces their Xbox handheld with Asus.
if the players have a bad time they will leave. show them kernel level anticheat doesn’t work and its pointlessly invasive.
CtrlAltDyeet@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Aug 18:51
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And yet they have the audacity to block Linux players
ChaosSpectre@lemmy.zip
on 09 Aug 20:32
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More proof that anti-cheat and bans just isn’t a working approach.
Almost every cheater I’ve talked to or seen interviewed has said they do it because they like winning. If thats the case, pushing them away isnt getting rid of them, its making them try to win harder, and they are literally spending money to make that happen.
This means, there is a market for cheaters, one that publishers and devs simply assault instead of realizing they could replace it entirely.
Create a marketplace in your game for cheats. When a player buys a cheat in game, they can turn it on but only in a specific playlist that cheaters get to play in. You dont need to own or turn on cheats to play in that playlist, in case you feel like challenging yourself, but cheaters can use them as much as they want in that playlist. If a cheater wants to go into cheat free playlist, their cheats get turned off by the game and they have to play like everyone else. Cheat free playlists can have cheat detection, and if you are caught cheating then you get banned from cheat free playlists permanently, but you arent banned from the game or the cheat playlist.
This deters cheaters from paying third parties for cheats, gives them a space to experiment in, makes money for the company running the game, and reduces the amount of cheaters in regular public lobbies. It also creates a space of challenge for people who don’t cheat, sorta like how people will do no death runs in souls games.
Sure, it isnt a perfect solution, but its far better than punishing every player with invasive tech, while simultaneously letting a market of cheat sellers thrive. For a bunch of capitalists, its wild they haven’t realized they are missing out on money with cheats.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
on 09 Aug 21:36
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I suspect that if you’re now playing where everyone else gets the same advantages, that ruins the fun of having cheats
If not and the cheats themselves are just that fun to use, sure, add it in as another gamemode
TwigletSparkle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 10 Aug 12:29
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…alternatively just shadow ban all the cheaters into cheater only lobbies.
Electricd@lemmybefree.net
on 10 Aug 10:24
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Server side anticheats need to be considered. Clientside has been annoying users far too much, and can be bypassed. A combination of both (and I’d like a less intrusive clientside one) would be better
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
on 10 Aug 11:00
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Hm, yeah, it’s something every developer should know; client-side validation of input still needs server-side validation, because client-side is not reliable, no mather what you force on them.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 10 Aug 12:56
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I play games mostly on my Steam Deck after migrating from Xbox. Didn’t want to pay for Internet access to use the Internet I already pay for (Xbox Live).
Battlefield games like BF1 and BF4 used to run on the Deck about a year ago, but then EA toggled something and disallowed any and all Linux distros. Can’t remember their reasoning, but something something anti-cheat.
Now me, a paying customer, was fucking pissed. I purchased these games on my Steam Deck to avoid corporate walled gardens like the Xbox, and then EA lock me out of my purchase after the refund period had elapsed. What the fuck???
So I started dual booting Windows 10 on the Deck to regain access to a product I had paid for. Fucking shit I had to do this in the first place.
But now I need to enable Secure Boot to play the new shit, and I have no clue how to do this without bricking my Deck. I’m an engineer, but not the software type. I don’t want to fuck around with my gear just to play games.
Client-side AC is a poor solution to cheating that can be solved with server-side AC.
Fuck EA. Fuck M$. Fuck all the corporations that want to run spyware on my devices
Back on Reddit, there were even complaints that EA's anticheat was conflicting with Riot's anticheat. Yep, now you potentially need two different installations of Windows to run each of your games. At this point, you would need to buy several SSDs and a SSD extension (or an external USB reader, since USB speeds nowadays are relatively fast enough to afford running those games from an external drive), then install each game (and operative system) in a different one, and swap between them before booting, just like a cartridge. Same would go, of course, for your actual main GNU/Linux drive that contains your actual personal data - that way, the anticheat can't even see your personal information, as it'd physically unplugged from your computer. And since Windows checks the license per motherboard, not per drive, you should be able to recycle the activation key between your Valorant "cartridge" and your Battlefield "cartridge". At this point, paying for a dedicated game console and the online pass starts becoming attractive...
...That, or just boycott multiplayer games altogether. If your group of friends doesn't mind, of course.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
on 13 Aug 16:43
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Didn’t this only happen if you tried to run both games at the same time, which realistically should never be happening? The only time this might trigger is if one anti-cheat misses or drops the command to close for whatever reason and keeps running while the game is closed and you go to play the other game instead.
Both anti-cheats could just whitelist each other, though. Anti-cheats already have software whitelists, there is no reason they can’t add each other. That automatically solves the problem without the consumer or developer needing to do anything other than update their software to the newest version.
threaded - newest
They’re gonna kill this game aren’t they.
I have a feeling they are
Game is generic enough, so it'll keep a playerbase.
There aren’t exactly a wealth of games doing what Battlefield does outside of Battlefield itself.
Battlebit is fantastic. The only reason it hasn’t taken off is because of gamerbros that can’t handle anything besides realistic graphics
It did take off for a time, and now it looks like it’s an early access game that hasn’t had an update in 19 months. And I can tell you that if they don’t let me host the server myself and play via LAN, they’re not solving any problems for me over Battlefield.
I love Battlebit and its a fun time, but it already did take off, sold literally millions of copies (nearly 2 million in its first 2 weeks), and then was effectively abandoned by the developers.
The developers recently made a Steam post that they are coming back with a big update so... Here's hoping
I can handle the graphics, I just suck too much at the game
Yeah well too bad that ship has sailed as well. Such a shame, BF2, BC2 and BF3 were quality games, just needed a modern take of one of those instead of whatever this is we got.
That hardly makes it generic though.
If you've played any triple A shooters, you've played them all.
Very untrue, but okay.
Nah. Everyone wants tpm 2.0 Ask Microsoft
It’s already dead mate. Hop on the finals, we got linux support.
Having Anti-Cheat of any kind outside of the game is laziness or lack of resources.
I believe just have physical limitations of the character or objects and verify the movement every once in a while to make sure that their movement is not super human (ie, aim bots).
You don’t need a kernal level anti-cheat.
It takes more work and resources to do what they’re doing. They already do server side anti cheat. And realistically, this is more effective than not doing it, though it definitely still gets defeated anyway. I would say the things that it asks of the customer are not worth the trade even if they were 100% effective, but they are more effective.
I offer:
0.2% more effective detection of cheaters (theoretical)
You offer:
Full and total access to every single file on your computer, all of its hardware, and all connected devices, via kernel level access.
Do you accept?
I mean… the people who play these games very regularly do accept that.
Yep.
I would argue those people are extremely silly, but apparently some people just literally do not value privacy, data security, at all.
I guess we’ll see how well that works out with fascists running the show now, surely they’ll only go after the bad
immigrantsgamers!Are you maybe a woman who had to stop using their period tracker app?
A trans person who had the audacity to exist, while being trans?
… Do you play video games on the same PC you do everything else on?
Blind consumerism is rampant.
The best thing is back when Battlefield was Battlefield, it would self-regulate because most people played on self-hosted servers, so cheaters and bad actors were taken care of swiftly. But now they want their own control to put shitty bots and SBMM in the game, so here we are.
This whole game is a case of the devs making bad decisions and then instead of changing them decisions, they apply the quickest bandaid fixes they can.
I don’t think the devs have much to do with these decisions
Overall scope was set by EA, they wanted a more mainstream shooter to compete with the likes of Call of Duty, so they could jump into the seasonal content/battle pass grind. But the devs made all these little individual decisions that add up.
That doesn’t cover wallhacks.
And they should just make good games too, right?
The issue with “just analyze the players” is that it is VERY expensive computationally. And it causes issues with non-official servers as it drastically increases the cost of a dedicated server and makes a listen server nigh unusable.
To be clear: I do not think the kernel level anti-cheats are a consumer friendly solution. But it takes a special kind of arrogance to insist you know better than decades worth of research and work in trying to stop hacking.
Yeah I mean its not like Valve has been using a combination of server side and client side game file only validation to do AC for Counter Strike for 20 years or anything.
Yep yep yep, the whole industry uses Kernel AC, other than the devs of the longest running comoetetive FPS genre ever, yep yep yep!
Valve is also barely a blip in the market when it comes to this, funny enough.
Valve’s data can be more or less officially pulled and steamdb lists them as having 1 million concurrents in whatever the default window is (looks like this month). Call of Duty claims to be closer to 70 million but most conservative estimates agree they are at least in the low 10s of millions of “active players” rather than anyone who just popped in to check their dailies to see if they wanted to do them.
Personally? I think the vast majority of games (including Battlefield…) would be perfectly fine with VAC and I like VAC. But there are reasons that the studios that make more money than some small nations on their games (as opposed to their storefront, which is what VAC actually is based on) literally pay for more invasive solutions.
Which is actually the other point worth remembering. Punkbuster and EAC and rolling their own costs money. Whereas VAC is “free” with Steam (and possibly elsewhere but that gets murky). Many of the mega games are associated with their own proprietary launchers but plenty of midtier games that ONLY care about Steam still feel the need to pay for EAC or whatever.
And… there is a reason beyond “We want to spend money to hurt our users”.
Okay. Apparently EAC is free if you sell your game on Epic but… ain’t fucking nobody considering EGS their be all end all platform. Even frigging Epic sued the hell out of Apple to get into the app store for crying out loud (not quite the same but roll with me).
To the first chunk:
I mean yeah, thats why I said longest lived, not ‘most popular’.
But I am glad you agree that… VAC is reasonable, and works pretty darn well.
But this leads into Part 2…
Why does VAC work pretty darn well?
Beyond the technicals of the methods of AC…
Because if you fuckup bad enough, your entire Steam Library can be deleted.
Steam is a platform.
Every single other major company that is trying to force Kernel AC on the PC market is acting as if they do, or should just also be the de facto platform, as they are on consoles.
Yep, cheat on Xbox or PS and your account can get banned there too… but a PC is more than a gaming console, has a lot more private stuff on it than one, typically.
Valve are PC natives so they never pushed for Kernel AC.
They just allow, and now warn you about Kernel AC from other mega publishers on their platform, and these other game publishers.
Their whole thing is that they want you to use their platform instead of Steam. They’ve pretty much all done it at this point, at least tried… Ubisoft, Rockstar, MSFT/GFWL, ActBlizz (now technically MSFT but w/e), etc etc etc
And they want to force Kernel AC down your throat on your PC as well as consoles… because it gives them more data, which they can use themselves, and sell to data brokers.
… Anyway, the funniest part?
EAC and BattleEye have offered full support to game devs to get their AC working on linux via Proton… for 3 to 4 years now.
It comes with their licensing agreements.
But management almost never cares to tell development to actually use this support thst they are already paying for!
… Because they get lots of money from MSFT, and MSFT hates Linux.
Also, if you go on areweanticheatyet … you can see that almost every single AC system of any kind, in the last 10 years… has at least one game that showcases it working on Linux.
This means that it is provably, entirely possible to get nearly all AC systems working on Linux, as some game dev team has done this.
Its just that most game dev teams, under most management… are not directed to.
There is no real technical reason why AC cannot be made to work in a satisfactory way on Linux.
At best, it is dev/management laziness/nonprioritization, at worst, it is publishers not wanting to upset MSFT, or still pursuing their idea of what should be normalized in terms of a gaming distribution platform, and the backend business side of profiting from dataharvesting.
Yep yep yep, the devs of the FPS game with endemic cheating so horrible the competitive scene had to introduce their own matchmaking system with kernel AC.
So, again, Kernel level AC can be, and routinely is defeated, all the time.
This is easy to verify with a simple websearch and maybe 30 minutes of time, I don’t want to directly link to where you can purchase working cheats/hacks/methods that can defeat Kernel AC, because I do not want such things to proliferate.
But you appear to be claiming the competetive scene for CS has introduced a Kernel level AC.
I cannot find this, this does not appear to be true, but I could be wrong, could you please source this claim?
I cannot find a competetive CS community or league or tournament that has… somehow rolled their own custom version of CS, overlayed with some other AC, on top of VAC.
Frankly, I don’t see how this would be possible without somehow forking CS, and then either stripping out or modifying VAC… as … two AC systems working at the same time are nearly 100% guaranteed to fight each other, and class the actions of the other AC… as cheats and hacks.
Its essentially analagous to how, 15 to 20 years ago, if you had McAfee and Norton and whatever other realtime, always active, system level anti virus software running, simultaneously… they would fight eachother, treat the other AV system as a virus, as malware.
…
All I can find is CS communities discussing the problem broadly, mixed with a lot of speculation that a recent VAC overhaul now does include Kernel AC… despite there being no actual evidence for this, beyond the collective bias and fallacious logic that if an AC becomes more effective, the only possible explanation is that it must be because of Kernel access.
What Valve actually did, was hook up AI to greatly enhance its serverside cheat detection capabilities and accuracy… one of the rare actually good use cases of AI as it relates to cybersec.
It seems to have improved their, again, server side heuristic detection abilities… without needing Kernel level access.
…
So yeah, please source your claim.
Unlike my easily verifiable ‘claim’ that I do not wsnt to cite for cybersec reasons, your claim should not have that problem at all.
www.faceit.com/en
Ah, ok, thanks for providing the source, I genuinely appreciate that.
So, now, I’ll break my public safety rule, to prove a point.
If any mods are reading this, I totally understand if you remove these links
www.faceit-cheats.com techbullion.com/cs2-faceit-cheats-the-hidden-thre…
So yep, again, Kernel level AC, routinely defeated, all the time, with such regularity that it is a viable business model.
Almost like Kernel AC doesn’t do what people seem to think it does, it isn’t a panacea, and the tradeoff is that you lose all your computer security… for nothing, really.
Found that in actually 15 seconds btw.
I did not say that kernel level anti cheats makes cheating impossible. The improvement in the experience is not nothing. You would not understand unless you played both for yourself.
Kernel anti-cheat does absolutely nothing to prevent aimbots/triggerbots, as most are run using 2 separate machines, anyway. The first machine runs the game in a totally clean and legitimate environment, but sends its video output (either using standard streaming tools like OBS or by using special hardware) to the 2nd machine. The 2nd machine runs the cheat and processes the video to detect where to aim and/or when to shoot, and sends mouse input back to the 1st machine.
I would have thought this would introduce enough latency to make an aimbot ineffective, but I know nothing about the cheating scene
Colorbots are extremely efficient and can be run on just a raspberry pi.
Human reaction time is ~200-250ms, while the cheat will be introducing easily less than 10ms of latency.
I’ve never used cheats in a video game because I don’t see the point and it would spoil the fun of playing, but as a software developer, it is interesting to learn about how they work and are implemented
that’s super impressive to me, and I guess explains why any client side anticheat is ineffective vs a determined cheater, rootkit or not.
thanks for the explanation! I miss when anti-cheating measures involved actual human beings administrating servers
Wall hacks could be defeated by the server only reporting the positional information about enemy players to game clients when it detects that the client player’s camera should be able to see some part of the other player’s silhouette. This is possible, albeit computationally expensive, but the main functional issue is latency. Nobody wants enemies magically popping into view when their view changes quickly because their ping was more than 6ms lol
beautiful. fuck secureboot.
Why?
Needlessly intrusive. Can obviously be circumvented by cheaters anyway, so quite possibly superfluous. Apart from that it protects against the kinds of attacks that typically require physical access to the computer. If you have physical access you have full access anyway. Etc.
You know secure boot was specifically made to protect users for this exact use case. Any tampering of the system will prevent the system from booting.
I get your pc, “tamper” it, then i install a fake bios that tells you all is well and that your tpm and secureboot and whatever else bullcrap they invent is still happy.
See the problem?
It won’t boot though, because the keys to decrypt the system are stored in the TPM.
Sure you could replace the whole OS, but that’s going to be very obvious and won’t allow you access to the data.
Isnt it possible to have a recovery key? Isnt that technically a backdoor? Maybe the terms are not correct but there is a way in physically.
If you have physical access you could go into the bios and turn off secure boot
If you enable Secure Boot you should also set a BIOS password for this very reason.
I think you can reset a bios password by taking the CMOS battery out or something?
Not sure if this works these days, but on older systems there was a reset bios config jumper and pulling the cmos battery.
So, if you set a bios password either way, which benefit does secureboot give?
Can’t access the bios with secure boot on (at least I could not on an old laptop I was refurbishing, thank god the owner could login into windows)
That’s unusual, I think. Every computer I’ve had that had it on, I was able to turn it off when I went to install Linux.
A person with physical access can tamper with the OS, then tamper with the signing keys. Most secure boot systems allow you to install keys.
Secure boot can’t detect a USB keylogger. Nothing can.
The signature checks will immediately fail if ANY tampering has occurred.
Adding a USB keylogger that has not been signed will cause a signature verification failure during boot.
A USB keylogger is not detectable by the computer, not in firmware nor operating system. It passively sniffs the traffic between the USB keyboard and the computer, to be dumped out later.
If your keys are stored in the TPM for use during the secure boot phase, there will be nothing for it to log.
No, encrypt your drives.
It fucks with Linux. I literally just disabled it to resolve a driver install issue before this announcement was made.
Linux can run with secure boot just fine though. Use your distros documentation to set it up.
Secureboot doesn't "fuck with Linux". It does protect you from malware trying to install unsigned kernel modules.
Apparently that driver is unsigned, which is not the normal case nowadays.
Good to know, thanks
I was trying to install an Nvidia driver on Linux Mint, so I think I am safe.
Is that a realistic attack scenario that end users need to be concerned about?
Yes. That's how you get undetectable rootkits.
This happens to roughly 1/3rd of all pc’s. But if you put secureboot ON and the FBI cant touch your pc
This type of attack has been seen in the wild for quite some time. Ultimately it’s a security vs convenience decision.
Im fairly certain any legacy hardware that doesn’t have secure boot as an option is going to struggle loading BF6 regardless.
The first two points are not related to secure boot at all.
you think loading my own kernel modules is not related to secure boot? i guess you don't work in IT then.
It doesn’t matter which kernel modules are used, as long as you have signed those changes before rebooting.
Most people who work IT don’t even know what a kernel is, tbf
I recently had an rfid scanner immediately rma-d back that had just been returned to us. The new issue was caused by a setting and not by a defect. I asked our IT/help desk if it WAS a setting that could be changed
“I don’t know. I get the thing, I check these settings, I check those settings, that’s all I know”
😑😑😑
So me and another person are out of our equipment for another couple weeks while the scanner is sent back for “repairs” and the repair people will go “😑 tap tap tap idiots”
(Edit: I know it’s a setting because I talked with the other person who uses it and I explained the issue and he let me know it is something he changes)
You can’t install most linux distributions with secure boot enabled.
Really? Which would those be? So far I haven't come upon one.
Yeah that simply isn't true. I use Secure Boot on all my Linux installs - both in the deb and rpm ecosystem system.
Sorry, I read it backwards – we agree, most Linux distributions do support Secure Boot
This is outdated information. Linux has supported secure boot for quite a while now.
And Microsoft is shutting out most third parties in the near future because of Crowdstrike, so Linux likely won't be supporting Secure Boot in the future, even if someone did want to enable it for some odd reason.
Microsoft can’t stop you from signing images with your own keys.
That’s what I do, and it’s almost entirely automated on Linux these days.
Microsoft’s kicking third parties out of the kernel because of crowdstrike. Secure boot is a completely different thing Microsoft can’t kick people out of.
Do you have any advice for someone that dual boots SteamOS and Windows 10 on a Steam Deck?
I’ve heard online that since SteamOS manually signs keys or something, that if any changes happen to the kernel that later need to be updated by SteamOS, I’d need to re-sign the keys or whatever. Idk I’m not well versed in any of this
I’ve heard it’s as easy as downloading the M$ keys to enable Secure Boot, but I also don’t want to brick my Deck.
Windows 10 support is ending soon so there’s no reason to have it on your steam deck. Steam will stop supporting it sooner after Microsoft does, just like steam does with Apples operating system.
Windows 10 commercial is ending, not the LTSC versions. Those are good for another 2-7 years iirc
No, they are killing it unless you pay and extra $30 a month and use a Microsoft account and kill local accounts.
Source?
tomshardware.com/…/microsoft-no-longer-permits-lo…
That’s for commercial releases of Windows 10 dumbass. There are two other enterprise releases that will have free security updates for 2-7 more years.
Which is again proving my point. Steam is selling games to people with enterprise licenses.
You never made that point. Stop moving the goal posts.
Do we have any evidence that Steam will not supported anything Windows 10 related, given that commercial licenses are ending and many people are shifting to enterprise licenses?
And it’s not like Steam hasn’t already been doing this. People have used enterprise licenses for legit and nefarious purposes for years. I doubt they’d change anything in October. They aren’t owned by M$
(1) Yeah, well the secure boot keys needed for Linux distributions expire in September (tomshardware.com/…/microsoft-signing-key-required…), so that seems like a sustainable solution, sure buddy.
(3) What’s your income? What region of the world do you live in and what hardware is available to you? I’m still using an am4 platform PC as my daily driver because I can’t burn money. One of my buddies has an AM3 PC. Many people use modified surplus office PCs (especially in developing nations like South America or SEA), which don’t have secure boot as an option. Check your privilege, and maybe donate some of your spare hardware to those who need it, if you want to make this “a non issue” for everyone.
(4) Yeah. I own my hardware, I configure my software. I gut Windows like a fish and keep it on a leash for these games, and use Linux for my work and for the games that respect the ecosystem.
Edit: these are listed as 1,3,and 4 in my post in voyager but lemmy shows 123. Interesting.
On the list thing, it seems that adding numbers with periods in a list seems to auto configure it to ascending numbers. That’s why I used (1) (3) (4). Weird, but I guess that’s the work around.
Enrolling your keys doesn’t work btw, because battlefield checks which keys you enroll, only accepting the default MS keys. Also on the hardware front, it is a big problem for gamers on a sub-300 USD budget these days - the best deals are on legacy hardware or surplus office equipment, mainly AM3-AM4 era.
The number list is how markdown works. You can enter all 1’s and it will automatically create ordered list.
Handy when you may need to edit list items, as you dont need to renumber even in plain text.
Markdown spec should allow for explicit number by using a bracket ‘)’ instead of a dot, but it may not work everywhere.
Let’s give it a go
Hmm not quite what that should look like
I don’t think he needs a winning argument. I think EA needs to justify this kernel level AC, not the other way around.
I’m agreeing with point 4.
Weird, for me it was just flicking the switch in UEFI and now Grub and through it Windows 10 and Fedora 43 boot in Secure Boot.
This is where we need dedicated servers and self moderation
Yep.
Things were better when private servers had actual mods and admins, they acted more like pubs where you could go see the regulars, actually form a community.
DayZ, Rust, TF2 and Minecraft were the model all along. Nice that it’s vindicated.
CS 1.6
My knowledge towards battlefield games ends at BF4 but I’m pretty sure people pay to host custom servers, EA refuses to open source it and only supply a handful of third parties with the actual code for them to charge hosting fees.
I’m sure there is an NDA involved.
I won’t buy BF6 if it doesn’t have a server browser
I love the Battlefield series but I’m not turning on Secure Boot for them. If it remains a hard requirement, I’ll simply be passing altogether.
I was able to get around secure boot by installing the beta on my PS5. From then, I had the pleasure of being unable to enter due to broken menus! Can’t complain for having spent nothing and having little trust in the franchise.
You paid for Ps+ though
Actually, right now I’m not. Maybe that was the issue? The UI was a bad missed up so I can’t tell.
There’s nothing wrong with Secure Boot and enabling it can prevent a small subset of attack vectors with no real downsides. That being said, the things Secure Boot does protect against aren’t likely to be an issue for most users but it’s nothing to be afraid of.
If you want to install Linux, secure boot limits the distributions you can use. If you don’t then it’s whatever.
I’ve tested the beta yesterday and only had to enable SB and leave it in custom mode - no need to sign & enroll the linux kernel(s) too
Zero issues on the mighty gecko distro. Not sure why’d you use anything else ^/s^
Wow. Might be the first BF game I pass on even if they eventually give it away for free.
There are a lot of good reasons for secure boot both in game and in general. If your distro does not support it then that should be a complaint directed towards the maintainers. And… getting that through Proton is a different mess.
But EA have been spending the past year or so actively updating older Battlefields (I want to say all the way back to 3?) to actively block linux/proton. For whatever reason, they actively want to block anything but Windows for their games.
Name one.
Secure boot can be used as part of a chain that eventually ends with unlocking your cryptographic keys only if the software stack has not been modified.
Sure, for most people that’ll make little difference, but it is an actual benefit.
Yup. Securing your “supply chain” is a VERY VERY good thing to do from a security standpoint and secure boot is one step toward that.
The problem is that I have not yet met a single human who enables a bios password. An attacker can simply boot the bios and disable it.
First, Yo. Doesn’t even need to be a good password.
Second, what you are describing is something very different. Outside of very rare situations (most of which theoretical or specifically targeting a specific system by a state level actor), to be able to “boot the bios and disable it” would generally mean the machine is already VERY compromised or the bad actor has physical access to the machine.
A good way of thinking of it is that secure boot isn’t the lock on the door. It is the peephole that you look through to make sure that the person with your pizzas is from Georgio’s AND you actually ordered pizza. Rather than just opening the door because “Yo, free food”.
On its own? It doesn’t do much. But it goes a LONG way towards improving security when combined with other tools/practices.
No, they can’t. The BIOS prompts the user to confirm the change on reboot. If the change is not confirmed, it doesn’t happen.
Hi, I’m cadekat, and I have a bios password and custom keys in my secure boot. Pleasure to meet you :3
I admire you, friend!
The fuck is ea doing here though, overreaching like Mastercard. My machine is machine.
Certainly not cheat prevention if this video is anything to go by lol
You didn’t skip 2042??
I got it for free. 🤷♂️
I haven’t paid for a BF game since BC2. 🤣
Can’t you load your own keys into your BIOS, letting you sign whatever you want anyway?
You can, but most everything that would let you run your own boot-time code is supposed to end up in the TPM event log, which the TPM is happy to attest to with its unique/uniquely bannable attestation key. Not too difficult to set it up so that no attestation = no access.
This type of attestation is far from perfect for a lot of different reasons, and it would be really impractical to automate bans with it, but I guess it's a tool they see value in.
So long story short, the anti-cheat software can detect if you’re using a different signing key?
Yep. It would be incredibly bad if they did automatic bans for any key they don't recognize, but it's technically possible.
Edit: from what I'm reading it apparently just refuses to let you in with unrecognized/non-MS keys. Yeah that makes a lot more sense.
I am still baffled that anyone thinks that Kernel AC is any kind of effective at stopping hacks, people have been literally making a living off of defeating it, and selling those hacks / methods for almost a decade now…
But nope, still got hordes of idiot gamers who think they work, think they’re necessary, think they can’t be spoofed.
i dont know if you know this, but generally the people buying and playing games arent the ones making the decisions about anticheat
Not sure how you could read this and come away with the idea that I do believe that…
I am talking about the subset of gamers that go on internet forums and discord servers and make false, unsupported claims as to the effectiveness or necessity or Kernel AC over other forms of AC, tell people this just is how it is now, get with the program,
eat the bugs, play the spyware game, its fine, everyone is doing it.Indirectly buyers are making a decision on anticheat. If someone buys a game with anticheat, they’ve made the decision to reward the developer for making the decision to include anticheat.
It’s crazy to me that people cheat in online games. You really have to be a huge fucking loser to do this.
Small pp energy.
I don’t know what energy this is, but not good either.
Sadly, I think the financial incentive is too great these days. People make decent money off this shit
The cheat developers, yes. Because there is demand. The question though was, why there is demand.
There’s demand because there’s supply.
Build it and they will come.
We have to ask the question if cheat developing wasn’t profitable, and even if developers actually operated at a loss, would there be as many cheats on the market as there are now?
Small pp energy, am I right? Sad little people who want to feel big…
So I can’t play battlefield without TPM? I hate tech these days. My Ryzen board doesnt have it. Hence why I’m not on windows 11
I just refuse to enable it. It makes changing things a hassle.
Same. Keeps things simple with Linux, and Windows doesn’t even complain about it being disabled, so long as it’s present. I’ll never understand why it’s even required if you don’t even have to enable it.
So they can have an excuse to force you to upgrade to Windows 11 beyond “whoops, turns out making an operating system as a ‘buy once’ product is a bad idea.”
Joke’s on them; I already upgraded to Windows 11. I was among the first. It’s actually a solid OS once you disable all the ads and telemetry with O&O Shut Up 10.
Yeah I did the same using WinUtil. Still, I only fire up windows when I need to use software without native Linux support.
Might be a requirement in some companies for security reasons…?
It’s understandable for companies. But for a home user…reasoning is pretty minimal.
You can still get win 11 without TPM by using Rufus and bypassing TPM which will have to be done for a lot of old PCs and we will have to do it by October this year.
Why would you install Windows 11on a computer? What happens if you don’t do it before October?
Microsoft will be releasing custom viruses that only infect 10.
Your computer will gradually get more and more filled with security holes that will be problematic to patch. Eventually, programs will stop supporting it as well.
Does this disable updates though? My wife somehow had Win11 installed on her pc without enabling secure boot, and her updates got so far behind that now it refuses to update and needs to be reinstalled.
No it doesn’t, but I’ll try putting it on one of my older PCs again and report back I only use Linux
Didn’t Microsoft stop this in a recent-ish update? I remember trying it on a machine without TPM and it just didn’t work.
Bazzite worked fine though (after some headaches setting it up).
you will own nothing and be happy
So you got the spyware without the benefits, that’s a hell of a surprise isn’t it?
But thank you for your money suckers!
I’m glad I didn’t enable Tivoization (Secure Boot) and TPM. Those suck, and actually froze our machines. It’s literally useless at this point.
Secure Boot isn’t Tivoization because you can enroll your own keys.
From my research, while I could see that being the case, “Secure Boot” is classified by the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project as Tivoization, and GPL-3 was made to fix that. That’s how I saw it, at least.
The standard thing people refer to as “Secure Boot” allows users to enroll their own keys and thus is not TiVo. The ability to enroll your own keys is the distinguishing feature here - TiVo devices don’t let you do that, so you can’t sign your own thing and run it.
The FSF has various pearl clutching articles from the days of Windows 8 fretting about whether or not users would be able to install their own keys on Secure Boot devices, but here in 2025, most devices allow this. (I’m sure there’s a handful of bizarre laptops or whatever that don’t, but the vast majority of hardware I’ve seen is fine.)
I only found out about this today from someone whose computer got bricked from trying to enable secure boot.
My machine went into a boot loop and I had to clear CMOS to boot again.
I wonder how many people without the resources to fix a problem like that easily are going to end up without computers for an extended period of time because of this.
Just clear the CMOS.
I had issues aswell where I couldn’t boot, and you wanna know why? Because I didn’t follow the step by step instructions EA tells you to follow. Follow those instructions, and it’ll work just fine.
Shame was really looking forward to bf6. Guess I’ll pass
Pretty much the same as all the other modern BFs. They all had cheats in the Beta/early release versions. I’ve played and own literally every BF game since the original release of 1942. Cheats have always been present more or less.
Only AI will be able to root this out in future
That’s an (obviously) unpopular opinion around here but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt: How would AI be able to do that?
Don’t waste your time, they’re either an hardcore AI bootlicker or a shit stirrer - most likely both, looking at their post history.
CSGO used to have Overwatch which is an anti cheat system that uses trusted and experienced players to go through video footage of reported players. With this method I both reported blatant spinbotters, wall hacking, and other chears. I also was on the side of watching back footage of hacking players.
Say AI trains on this data, it might work.
I’m not a fan of this though because knowledgeable and experienced players will be better than AI.
What actually exists but what I have yet to see implemented in any game I play are those server-side “AI anti-cheat” solutions like from anybrain that basically just analyse the players behavior to fit certain criteria. According to areweanticheatyet.com though there are four games using it already (the most well-known one probably being Lost Ark). In theory ai models can be very efficient and accurate at this (we are not talking about transformer models here like with the current llm craze) but that all depends on how they train a model and what the training data looks like.
I am not sure what the user above is thinking, but to play devil’s advocate:
One thing that modern AI does well is pattern recognition. An AI trained on player behavior, from beginner level all the way up to professional play, would be able to acquire a thorough understanding of what human performance looks like (which is something that games have been developing for a long time now, to try to have bots more accurately simulate player behavior).
I remember someone setting up their own litmus test using cheats in Tarkov where their main goal was just to observe the patterns of other players who are cheating. There are a lot of tells, a big one being reacting to other players who are obscured by walls. Another one could be the way in which aimbots immediately snap and lock on to headshots.
It could be possible to implement a system designed to flag players whose behavior is seen as too unlike normal humans, maybe cross-referencing with other metadata (account age/region/sudden performance anomalies/etc) to make a more educated determination about whether or not someone is likely cheating, without having to go into kernel-level spying or other privacy-invasive methods.
But then…this method runs the risk of eventually being outmatched by the model facilitating it: an AI trained on professional human behavior that can accurately simulate human input and behave like a high performing player, without requiring the same tools a human needs to cheat.
Cheating humans already perform closely enough to trick such a system. Many cheaters are smart enough to use an aimbot only for a split-second to nail the flick. With a tiny bit of random offset, those inputs indistinguishable from a high-skill player.
These tricks may make it indistinguishable to a human moderator, but machine learning is actually really good at detecting that. But most companies don’t have the expertise, resources or training data to build a proper model for it.
Machine Learning is really good at CLAIMING it detected that.
The reality is that every few months there is a story about a fairly big streamer/e-sports player MAYBE getting caught cheating on stream. Sometimes it is obvious and sometimes it really becomes “Did they just know the map well enough to expect someone to come around that corner?”.
And a lot of times… it really is inconclusive. A somewhat common trope in movies is the veteran gunslinger literally aims at the wall of a stairwell and tracks where they expect the head to be and either fires a few rounds through the wall or waits for them at the bottom and… that is not entirely inconceivable considering that people tend to not crouch or move erratically down stairs. Obviously Jonathan Banks has a wallhack but Mike Ehrmantraut is just that damned good.
And false positives are a great way to basically kill a game. ESPECIALLY if they are associated with demonstrably false negatives too.
But you can be damned sure most of the major esports games are already doing this. It really isn’t expensive to train and they have direct feeds of every player in a tournament or twitch event. The issue is that there are (hopefully) tens of thousands of servers active at any moment and running Computer Vision+Inference on every single server is very costly.
And… I seem to recall there was a recent intentionally poorly defined Movement about maybe keeping user hostable dedicated servers a thing? How does that mesh with having every single server need to phone home (a fraction of) all 32 players feeds to a centralized cluster?
Machine learning doesn’t necessarily require a centralized cluster. Usually running those kinds of models is pretty cheap, it’s not an LLM basically. They usually do better than human moderators as well, able to pick up on very minute ‘tells’ these cheats have.
I understand your point about edge cases, but that’s not something the average player cares about much. E-sports is a pretty niche part of any game, especially the higher ranks. You just want to filter out the hackers shooting everyone each game that truly ruin the enjoyment. Someone cheating to rank gold instead of silver or whatever isn’t ruining game experiences; they’re usually detectable too, but if you get a false negative on that it’s not the end of the world. A smurf account of a very highly ranked player probably has a bigger impact on players’ enjoyment.
Depending on the model, inference can be run with CPU only. To distinguish what was originally proposed (a momentary flick consistent with aimbotting), you are either doing ray tracing (really expensive) or analyzing (effectively) video feeds. Both of which tend to put things more into the GPU realm which drastically increases the cost of a server.
But also? The only way these models can work is with constant data. Which means piping feeds back home for training which basically is never inexpensive.
Aside from that: if it was as simple as you are suggesting then this would be a solved problem. Similarly, if people don’t care about hackers outside of e-sports then there would be no reason for games to spend money on anti-cheat solutions when any match that matters would have heavy scrutiny. And yet, studios keep pumping out the cash for EAC and the like.
The same way it’s automodderating Reddit to a point that nobody can post anything anymore LOL
Since human beings are hot garbage and will always cheat, I really enjoyed playing against the AI soldiers in BF. It can also ensure that the game is playable forever OFFLINE.
Where I live I cant play BF4 anymore. Servers are down for my country, but I paid money for the game. Digital media is a scam once the servers go down. That is why I jailbroke every console I own. Ppl are already reviving BF2 with AI bots. The future is looking bright.
Keep that AI horseshit out of video games, thanks.
Pattern recognition anticheat vs. bot based on patterns? I don’t see anyone winning.
Why are people like this. How does this make gaming enjoyable?
Honestly, if I had the skills I’d be doing that as an explicit fuck you to the draconian anticheat bullshit they force on everyone, because what better fuck you than showing all that effort was for naught, especially close to launch.
EA can go fuck themselves with the world’s biggest cactus.
I prefer “fuck you with an anchor”
m.youtube.com/watch?v=th4Czv1j3F8
I love that track, but have to skip it regularly with my kid in the car lol
There’s a kid friendly version. Flipped with a sausage.
And one for dogs as well.
I have ‘for dogs’ on my radio already, but I might put the sausage one on too, that’s great
A lot of hacking in valorant is about this tbf (and to more efficiently sell boosts)
For some people the only things that brings them joy are 1) winning 2) making other people suffer
Or developing cheats. It sounds really fun and you get to grow by keeping on top of the anticheat.
It’s fun to cheat in games, that’s why we have cheat codes.
Also there’s the competitive side of it where not getting caught is a skill and glitching is just game knowledge.
Cheat codes and cheating in online games is obviously the same thing. You cheat because you’re a cunt.
I don’t cheat, I play online games to get into flame wars not to play the games.
Oh no! Ch43t3Rzzzz!
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/64ba9f44-3721-47bf-82aa-d59fc830680f.gif">
Your anti-cheat doesn’t work anyway so let me play in linux you cowards.
They want to keep windows relevant so hard. Yeah, i enable secure boot, and let some kernel level anti cheat into my system. At least i don’t have to play with cheaters. Oh there are still cheaters. So glad
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e47f26b4-c170-4343-a2bb-997485db6d25.jpeg">
Anyone with half a brain could see this coming from a mile away. My conspiracy brain almost thinks this is some concerted and calculated effort by Microsoft to artificially lock games to Windows through anti cheat. It’s disgusting, isn’t needed, and just plain isn’t effective. They can spew all the metrics out of their ass, we all know that it’s just not effective.
I am not sure about this conspiracy theory of yours: Microsoft does not want third party applications in the kernel space anymore.
theverge.com/…/microsoft-windows-kernel-antivirus…
Not entirely;
github.com/microsoft/ebpf-for-windows
Microsoft just want that 3rd party code to interact in a more predictable way with the kernel
a year ago on Mastodon when EA started locking out games like Apex Legends, BF1, V, 2042, etc from Linux I said “I bet you Microsoft is about to launch a handheld and since they have a deal with EA and Gamepass they want EA Exclusivity on their handheld and to lockout Steamdeck/Valve” sure enough a few months later Microsoft announces their Xbox handheld with Asus.
And what’s the one thing they are getting fucking torched over even by Xbox loyalists? The price (Steam Deck has a cheaper SKU)
at this point i just wanna cheat the hell out of these crappy games out of spite.
That’s punishing legit players, not the developers. Not playing this shit is the correct spiteful choice.
i already don’t, feels like they need more spite.
if the players have a bad time they will leave. show them kernel level anticheat doesn’t work and its pointlessly invasive.
And yet they have the audacity to block Linux players
More proof that anti-cheat and bans just isn’t a working approach.
Almost every cheater I’ve talked to or seen interviewed has said they do it because they like winning. If thats the case, pushing them away isnt getting rid of them, its making them try to win harder, and they are literally spending money to make that happen.
This means, there is a market for cheaters, one that publishers and devs simply assault instead of realizing they could replace it entirely.
Create a marketplace in your game for cheats. When a player buys a cheat in game, they can turn it on but only in a specific playlist that cheaters get to play in. You dont need to own or turn on cheats to play in that playlist, in case you feel like challenging yourself, but cheaters can use them as much as they want in that playlist. If a cheater wants to go into cheat free playlist, their cheats get turned off by the game and they have to play like everyone else. Cheat free playlists can have cheat detection, and if you are caught cheating then you get banned from cheat free playlists permanently, but you arent banned from the game or the cheat playlist.
This deters cheaters from paying third parties for cheats, gives them a space to experiment in, makes money for the company running the game, and reduces the amount of cheaters in regular public lobbies. It also creates a space of challenge for people who don’t cheat, sorta like how people will do no death runs in souls games.
Sure, it isnt a perfect solution, but its far better than punishing every player with invasive tech, while simultaneously letting a market of cheat sellers thrive. For a bunch of capitalists, its wild they haven’t realized they are missing out on money with cheats.
I suspect that if you’re now playing where everyone else gets the same advantages, that ruins the fun of having cheats
If not and the cheats themselves are just that fun to use, sure, add it in as another gamemode
Nullsec
…alternatively just shadow ban all the cheaters into cheater only lobbies.
Server side anticheats need to be considered. Clientside has been annoying users far too much, and can be bypassed. A combination of both (and I’d like a less intrusive clientside one) would be better
Hm, yeah, it’s something every developer should know; client-side validation of input still needs server-side validation, because client-side is not reliable, no mather what you force on them.
I play games mostly on my Steam Deck after migrating from Xbox. Didn’t want to pay for Internet access to use the Internet I already pay for (Xbox Live).
Battlefield games like BF1 and BF4 used to run on the Deck about a year ago, but then EA toggled something and disallowed any and all Linux distros. Can’t remember their reasoning, but something something anti-cheat.
Now me, a paying customer, was fucking pissed. I purchased these games on my Steam Deck to avoid corporate walled gardens like the Xbox, and then EA lock me out of my purchase after the refund period had elapsed. What the fuck???
So I started dual booting Windows 10 on the Deck to regain access to a product I had paid for. Fucking shit I had to do this in the first place.
But now I need to enable Secure Boot to play the new shit, and I have no clue how to do this without bricking my Deck. I’m an engineer, but not the software type. I don’t want to fuck around with my gear just to play games.
Client-side AC is a poor solution to cheating that can be solved with server-side AC.
Fuck EA. Fuck M$. Fuck all the corporations that want to run spyware on my devices
Back on Reddit, there were even complaints that EA's anticheat was conflicting with Riot's anticheat. Yep, now you potentially need two different installations of Windows to run each of your games. At this point, you would need to buy several SSDs and a SSD extension (or an external USB reader, since USB speeds nowadays are relatively fast enough to afford running those games from an external drive), then install each game (and operative system) in a different one, and swap between them before booting, just like a cartridge. Same would go, of course, for your actual main GNU/Linux drive that contains your actual personal data - that way, the anticheat can't even see your personal information, as it'd physically unplugged from your computer. And since Windows checks the license per motherboard, not per drive, you should be able to recycle the activation key between your Valorant "cartridge" and your Battlefield "cartridge". At this point, paying for a dedicated game console and the online pass starts becoming attractive...
...That, or just boycott multiplayer games altogether. If your group of friends doesn't mind, of course.
Didn’t this only happen if you tried to run both games at the same time, which realistically should never be happening? The only time this might trigger is if one anti-cheat misses or drops the command to close for whatever reason and keeps running while the game is closed and you go to play the other game instead.
Both anti-cheats could just whitelist each other, though. Anti-cheats already have software whitelists, there is no reason they can’t add each other. That automatically solves the problem without the consumer or developer needing to do anything other than update their software to the newest version.