Whelp…I’m out. (I expected this to happen before they said anything though, honestly.)
Kernel mode anti-cheat guarantees I will never buy your game. Not even as a gift for someone else.
Assurances like “we will never abuse this power” are laughably unrealistic, and even if they defied the history of humanity and somehow turned out to be true, that issue is made irrelevant by additional realities:
- The risks come not only from corporate abuse of power, but also from vulnerabilities in their code that will eventually be exploited by third parties.
- Beyond the risk of nosy corporations snooping on users’ private information, there are major security risks. An exploit at the kernel level means game over for the integrity of your entire system, all the data on it or passing through it, and every other system accessed from it. Bank accounts, for example.
- Client-side anti-cheat is conceptually wrong thinking and doomed to fail. Even at the kernel level, it’s an arms race. Cheaters will find ways to weaken or circumvent it (such as running cheats on an external device that captures game video and generates input events) or even defeat it completely.
I guess this incredibly invasive and fundamentally flawed attempt to manage cheating might be acceptable to someone whose computer is used for nothing else but playing that game… —shrug— …but for me, it’s a hard nope.
Not only that, but cheating isn’t exactly a huge problem in this genre, so it’s a heavy handed solution already and one that’s even less necessary to consider.
This likely has less to do with cheating and more to do with making sure players use the game shop, whether it’s blocking third-party skins or bots that automate currency grinds.
I mean league still allows 3rd party skins, like the devs told the skin makers what guidelines to follow and they probably wouldn’t get hit
I feel like even Valve Anti-Cheat can handle that level of concern though, no?
Cheating is definitely a problem in SF6, but it’s a lot less of a challenge dealing with it due to match duration. You generally move on to different opponents fast enough, unless of course you’re at the highest ranks.
Still agree that kernel level anti-cheat does nothing here, and I also won’t be buying it due to that reason.
How would cheating in a fighter even look like? Those games are mostly about reading your opponent. Unlike a fps or moba, all info is on the screen etc :/
Auto combo-ing? Auto reponse? Legit curious as i dont think ive seen cheaters in fighters before, but ive been out of the loop since sf4 hahaHow would cheating in a fighter even look like?..Auto combo-ing? Auto reponse?
Generally the cheat will do something like, read the input the server just said you did, and then send a faster move that will beat it. It can be a bit more obvious in SF6 because usually your best move against a heavy attack is a DI (drive impact) reaction, and cheats will be suspiciously consistent and inhumanly fast. Here’s a video from Diaphone that explains how he can tell.
Thanks! I will take a listen at that video! I imagine in sf3 it could also have been obvious with the parry system
Since you mention it, here is the same guy using it for perfect parries and jump-ins as well.
Thanks!
That was hilarious to see, and the player was good. He went into defensive mode on the second round on the first game, and in the second game he went into faking attacks to trigger reactions and punish when responding wrong. Loved it haha
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From the article:
Tony stated the following, “A lot of the cheats we see in fighting games are either about reading inputs, reading game state, or injecting inputs. They involve modifying the game binary in some way. Vanguard is really good at that, right? It’s a kernel-level anti-cheat, so it can detect and prevent a lot of those things happening.”
Auto block, auto parry, auth whiff punish, auto anti-air, auto drive impact on big moves, etc.
Right, so basically things that decent skills would also get you?
Also, if you feel being aggressive doesnt help you, you start playing defensively and thats when you can strike back. Cheats or not, it still has to attack and is still stuck on the frame limits of the move right? Thats when you can strike back, no?Im not saying cheating isnt bad, and im not saying its not annoying either, but in general fighters are different and they are completely skill based unless the cheater changes things that the other can never do.
In hindsight, pretty sure ive fought cheaters back in the day in sf4 before, but that was never that bad because i still had options to fight them back…No, a lot of those things are simply not possible for a human being, perfectly parrying a 4 frame move on reaction is impossible.
Same with throws and other 50/50, they can defend perfectly in situations where a player is meant to guess.
The situation where the player is meant to guess is exactly where you’re most likely to get a legitimate perfect parry; that’s what the mechanic is there for. Those situations are often auto timed. It’s in neutral where the cheats stick out.
They exist, but they’re so rare that I wouldn’t call it a problem, and definitely not worth solving with the nuclear option.
It’s going to require a crowdstrike type fuckup, exploit, or privacy scandal on a widely used AC like EAC before public opinion changes on this.
So many games are making the trade-off and it only makes sense because players don’t understand what they are giving in to.
Microsoft is already looking at preventing this stuff because of Crowdstrike. While the whole event was completely CrowdStrikes fault, so many blamed (and still seem to blame) Microsoft for it, so they have a real reason to do this.
Good. Hopefully they actually get somewhere with that.
I’m just not seeing popular opinion among gamers wising up to the risks of kernel level access.
The crowdstrike fuck up has already shown how something like vanguard can fuck your shit up easily. I’m glad league doesn’t run on Linux anymore, I don’t need this vanguard trash fucking up my PC.
Yeah, but it didn’t affect gamers. People don’t care until something either does affect them, or in a VERY in your face kind of way, could.
Crowdstrike, unfortunately, is a funny “lol the corporates fucked their own shit up” case and the average gamer simply won’t connect the dots.
Yeah I mean that’s fair, but I’m taking every win I can get.
Well, there goes my interest.
There might be hope as Microsoft might remove kernel level access after the whole Crowdstrike incident.
If this happens will the new anti cheat work on linux?
It never did work on Linux; and it won’t unless the drivers are rewritten for Linux.
Why can’t they just do anti-cheat the way it’s always being done, which is to identify cheaters and then stick them in a lobby with each other? I appreciate it means we might have to put up with some cheaters for 5 minutes, but realistically it’s hardly a high stakes situation.
Why not make secret lobby for cheater & transfer all cheater there without raising any suspicion from cheater so they can compete against among other cheater (and bots of course) instead banning them.
For cheat detector system why not analyze gameplay on the fly or easy access report button
Not that I’m defending Vanguard, but Riot’s choosing to invest in developer resources for Vanguard (and in finding cheat developers) so they don’t have to invest in server capacity or developer resources to support cheater only lobbies.
As long as their anticheat is effective, every cheater they can repel is some amount of server capacity that legitimate players can use.
Also, cheaters in the types of games Riot makes will cause some amount of opponents to simply leave the game in frustration. So part of this is just trying to keep players who are willing to install the game happy.
They’ve chosen to make free to play games, so this tradeoff actually makes sense for Riot. But again, kernel level hacks aren’t something everyone will or even should install.
It’s all about tradeoffs.
I may be preaching to the choir, but if the tradeoff you’re willing to make is to defend against cheats by installing a rootkit, that won’t even make cheating impossible as some kind of consolation, you should go back to the drawing board and try again.
In infosec it’s known that there is no impenetrable system. If someone wants the break in they will find a way to break in. Security is built around the idea of deterrence. Make it as annoying as possible so people thinking about breaking in would think it’s not worth the effort.
Same principle applies to cheating. Anyone really wanting to cheat will find a way to cheat. The purpose of anticheat isn’t to make cheating impossible, it’s to deter the low effort cheaters. If you had two identical games, but one doesn’t have anticheat then the game without the anticheat will have more cheaters.
In the same vein anticheat isn’t a magic bullet against cheating. There goes so much more into preventing cheating including specifically developing the game in a way that makes cheating harder.
In consumerism it’s known that there’s overreach, and I won’t buy their bullshit when a company has far too much control over my machine just because I want to play a video game.
Fighting games, as a genre, are already designed in such a way that reduces cheating. Every action you take makes you vulnerable, and cheats are usually built around automatic responses. Cheaters can often enough still lose just because the cheater wants to press buttons too and not let the computer do literally all of the work. Cheaters exist in games like Guilty Gear and Street Fighter, but they’re so rare and obvious that they become fodder for YouTube content.
Don’t get it twisted. We definitely agree.
This will effectively add any computer it’s installed on to a botnet and create another attack vector (via Vanguard).
The tradeoff I described, tho, is one on the Riot side. And as much as this form of anticheat is ridiculous, it makes sense given Riot’s business model. A bunch of cheaters can easily waste their money and engineering effort. They made the deliberate choice to narrow their market of potential players to those who are willing to install Vanguard and feel that Vanguard pushes most cheaters out of that narrow market. It makes sense.
Re: That tradeoff, tho, users aren’t involved. The tradeoff users have is between installing the game or not.
And again we both agree, installing this to an important computer or on your home network carries a tonne of risk.
Rootkits anticheat is horrible bro, bc someone can hijack your PC directly since they own highest control in your system
I’m not saying my idea is good, but if cheater compete against other cheater & bots in secret lobby they’ll grow tired on their own, finally they’ll realize they got bamboozled by the game itself
Finally for countermeasures if cheater itself wanna play back in normal lobby the game itself will reset their stat/items/rewards/achievement back like they create account for the first time or make cheater pay huge sum of money to devs for harsher punishment
Okay imma head out. Better stick to Street Fighter and Guilty Gear then.
Just decide that more than X inputs per second equals cheater, and measure that on the server side. No need to riddle users systems with code waste.
Mashing is rarely a concern in fighting game cheats, it’s either inhuman reactions (hard to distinguish from a lucky guess) or always guessing right on plus/oki situations.
More complex cheats don’t activate every time; it’s basically impossible to measure whether your opponent in Street Fighter has a “auto perfect parry 15% of the time” cheat running.
Correct, it’s impossible. And anticheat will not help with identifying such complex cheats.
You can mash fighting game inputs pretty hard. That’s too simple of a solution.
You can also mash them without doing much work with your fingers, and no kernel level anticheat will detect that. If you really want, that is.
“Gosh dang kernel level usurping of end user systems!” they said, typed from their Intel and AMD computers.
