Microsoft has long wanted to get vendors out of the kernel. It’s a huge privacy/security/stability risk, and causes major issues like the Crowdstrike outage.
Most of those issues also apply to kernel anti-cheat as well, and it’s likely that Microsoft will also attempt to move anti-cheat vendors out of kernel space. The biggest gaming issues with steamOS/Linux are kernel anti-cheat not working, so this could be huge for having full compatibility of multiplayer games on Linux.
I never understood kernel level anti-cheat. People STILL cheat. lol
Yes,
but game companies also want to spy on you and potentially sell your data. Even if they aren’t selling it, the ability to do so increases the value to investors. This is the way tech companies talk about invasive software in general, FWIW.
Can you name an instance of a game company doing that?
Data brokers do exist… Who they buy from is the only privacy they respect. You know, capitalism.
So by that logic we shouldn’t be downloading any precompiled binaries from the net - they could all be spying on us!
a binary and a kernel module are not the same. And I was talking about business practices that are known. But nevermind, that was before I understood you are just trolling. Now I’ll simply wish you a wonderful reddit experience.
Not trolling at all. I’m a game developer, so I was curious to hear about instances of game devs using kernel level anticheat to harvest people’s personal (and identifiable) data to sell to data brokers.
Glad to know there aren’t any examples of it outside of people screaming about capitalism - which is, let’s be honest, quite indicative of the Lemmy experience these days.
As for actual kernel anticheat software siphoning out data, again, it’s something that we should not immediatly dismiss… The lack of evidence is not entirely on either side of this sudden ‘you vs. me’
Acxiom does sell a package of “Gaming” data. Probably coming from mobile phones for the most part, since that’s where most Studios are more aggressive (even towards children, see Tilting Point Media LLC settlement last year)
Again, knowing which Studios are selling data (identifiable or not) is impossible if no Court interferes.
I was only trying to make the point that it is feasible… That’s why I referred you to recall that “capitalism bad yadda yadda…”
To be fair, it certainly still makes cheating harder. If it didn’t exist, you’d just see even more people cheating, but it’s a pretty overkill way of system monitoring for such a relatively small benefit by comparison.
Massive privacy risk, only slightly better performance than other non-kernel monitoring.
Some games just need people back in the equation instead of relying on algorithms. Bring back the Game Master’s to MMOs etc, these people are willing to work for peanuts and be happy, yet they still decided to cut costs by replacing them…
…wait, games don’t have even a single person checking for cheaters, even casually? Like, they wholly rely on anticheat?
(PS, has been a decently long time since I played a game that needed anti cheat)
Depends on the game, really, but “relying” on anti-cheat is pretty common. Larger games tend to have teams who review cases that get flagged by the systems and players and do manual removal but these teams also tend to be quite small and unable to adequately handle the amount of cheating that occurs.
If gamers want to see cheaters less often, they need to pressure the companies to do human moderation in addition.
I’d argue the most effective anticheat is dedicated servers. Admin’ed a lot of CS, TFC, and Q3 servers growing up and it was easy enough to kick/ban any one hacking or being an unrepentant dick. Downside for the corps is, you can’t gate all that dlc as easy when users have control.
I’d argue the same, actually. It takes people to moderate people and dedicated servers make it easiest. Modern match made games could still have admins, the company needs to pay for them.
FF14 and BDO for example still have GMs but they are woefully understaffed. This is the more common reality.
Few to no mmos have zero GMs. They just frequently only work for like an hour a day doing spot checks are under staffed and mostly just are email support.
The old days of gms frequently being actively in-game to reach out to 24/7 isn’t a thing anymore.
I think people can vote to kick people but that’s it really
Sure, if you are comparing to having no anti-cheat at all… But there are tons of competitive games out there using more “traditional” anti-cheat that don’t need kernal access that are doing fine.
Did you never play Fall Guys on PC?