I would honestly prefer if they installed a boot drive with their own sandboxed OS than install this on my primary OS.
Tim “Stop bullying grok for making cp” Sweeny strikes again
Now I wonder if he’s in the Epstein files…
The annoying part is this doesn’t stop cheating, just pisses off the regular users.
Doesn’t it? I can’t find any industry stats. One thing I count on is companies to be self-interested. I don’t think they would use these anti-cheats unless they worked.
So there’s a few ways I’ve been pondering to take this discussion.
Much like how there are users that create software cracks for games, and the game dev uses more sophisticated forms of DRM. There has been an similar arms race between software developers for game cheats. (Imagine an ouroboros) The attacker has the advantage; it’s much cheaper to attack than defend.
There has been a new trend of hardware based cheating. Aimbot controllers, expansion cards that let another computer read memory values from ram, poisoned random number generators, remote USB controller debugging, etc.
What kernel level anticheats that enforce secureboot and TPM requirements are hoping to achieve is enforcing the attestation feature of the operating system (typically Windows) that the preboot environment has not been manipulated. Manipulating the preboot environment would allow an attacker to gaslight the kernel level anticheat into believing everything’s fine.
This does little to resolve hardware level cheating. (It does help with stopping early expansion cards from loading modules into memory) What’s worse is secureboot+tpm is a defeated technology, relying on security patches to resolve these flaws. However, if your goal is to eliminate knowledgable adversaries they are just going to buy a motherboard with a secureboot issue and do it anyways, and the anticheat developer has no means to reliably triage that against an user with an older or insecure computer.
The cobra effect of anticheat tools like these are they typically eliminate linux players and users with misconfigured or legacy hardware. (such as someone who has installed Windows without using UEFI) These invasive anticheats load before windows at the same time as hardware drivers. (That spinny screen before you get into your desktop). If the anticheat tool malfunctions at this stage it take the whole computer down with it, an expensive problem for a ordinary user that needs hire tech support. And in the case of vanguard it downloads software updates at this point too, if you have slow internet or the update is huge you’re stuck waiting to use your computer. And it doesn’t even matter if you weren’t intending to play games at that point.
You might draw the conclusion that PC gaming is a dead fish from this information. But an important take away is that some of these issues are present on consoles as well thanks to how share the same framework of ordinary computers or smartphones.
For the infinityth time: Games don’t get to tell me how I use my computer
The fact that Fortnite has been going THIS STRONG for THIS LONG, and is still basically the most profitable competitive online game ever just proves that none of that shit is necessary.
I play occasionally and cheating has become more of an issue over the last 6-12 months. Some of my friends don’t even want to play anymore because of the cheating. I’m sure Epic is seeing some concerning metrics to justify implementing this because it would exclude many players which can’t meet the requirements.
They just need to add a bots only mode so players can avoid other players.
yea, it was a big thing in '16 around the same time pokemongo was released, by GO fell off as the years went on, they still have a sizable amount of people playing. but fortnite just gets more people playing because they have skins or crossovers.
Cheaters are getting more and more numerous all the time; they have to take steps to not be completely overrun.
My wife got eliminated by a 100% invisible player a week or so ago. No in-game item or event makes you completely invisible like that. The stealth splash item and the hide-and-seek event are both imperfect camoflage. So clearly this player was hacking. If she encountered players like that in every game, she’d quit, understandably.
See, this always annoys me. Game info, yes, is hard: The game needs to send info about the guy behind the wall to your client, so it can draw shadows, play their subtle footsteps, etc. But game logic, like “isPlayerInvisible”, should NOT be hackable like that. That means the hacker’s client sent game state var “Hey, I am invisible now” to the server, and the server just said “Sure, okay . Hey, player 87, you are now being shot by an invisible player.”
Imagine if you sent all state variables while banking. “I send $5 to my savings account, which leaves my checking with $8 trillion.”
It generally comes down to developer laziness; transmit all info, trust everything, and rely 100% on the anticheat, so the game code can stay flexible and run in all locations.
cheaters already have bypasses for hardware-level anticheat. in practice this just serves to restrict us.
There’s nothing that hardware-level anti-cheat can do against the monitor having a feature that highlights other people in a game, for example. The computer wouldn’t be able to tell.
The only thing that this might stop is someone using something like Cheat Engine to give themselves infinite health or something like that, but I would be a little surprised if that was the common means of cheating these days, compared to something just looking at the screen and putting a helpful overlay on top.
WTF
“Character highlighting”, “flashbang recovery”, they just had to come up with some corporate sounding names for common cheats lmao. We’re just back to LAN parties as far as I’m concerned, sucks for the competitive scene though.
Funny asterisk below the examples too
Nividia did this years ago at the driver level. Literally had wall hacks built right into the drivers. Never made it to release cause of the back lash.
Its fun that all the things that requite secure boot and TPM are things I just don’t want anyways.
Was gonna play high guard but it requires Secure Boot and I don’t even know how to turn that shit on
Fuck em, I switched to linux anyway.
I haven’t played Fortnite BUT if you haven’t already give Arc Raiders a look/go. It’s very fun.
(edit: it runs on Linux / Steam Deck too)
I’m playing it, but in Oceania there’s only a small community so I get stuck in a lot of PvP servers. lately there’s been a trio who are getting together in Solo to pick on people which is bullshit.
Not sure if The Finals (Embark’s other game) has a bigger base in oceania or not, but it’s free, proton platinum, and has also some pretty sweet gameplay.
I tried it while still on Windows and it wasn’t for me. I’ve also got overwatch 6v6 to scratch my action urge.
Yeah, that is bullshit and a real shame. I think people that PvP in Arc are weak sauce anyway (it is a PvPvE game but… If you want to PvP why not a PvP game?). Hopefully further down the line something might be done to address that.
All the more reason to not use the epic games store…
I don’t even claim the freebies anymore.
Never did. Poisoned well.
Fortnite itself isn’t good enough reason?
Another reason not to play this game. I dual booted Windows because of this game having a pretty decent PvE mode, though they don’t give a shit about it anymore.
PVE mode? You mean the original game?
Yup. The Twine Peaks storyline is still missing ltic.
I’ve heard you can play it on linux running the android version.
Unfortunately the PvE mode isn’t available there.
There’s other games in town.
And they all require secure boot too
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There’s less than 10 that require secure boot, and they’re all toxic moneygrab multiplayer shooters.
Compared to the 10’s of thousands of gamed on Steam that don’t require secure boot, that a far cry from “they all requure secure boot”.
But go ahead. Lick the boots harder
I’m sorry, I was being sarcastic. I know there’s only a handful of games that require it (for now), but I was 100% not sincere. Didn’t think this needed a /s but the downvotes tell a diff story
How are they money grabs? Fortnite and valorant(only 2 games I can think of that are / are going to do this) are completely free with the option to buy cosmetics that don’t help you in anyway competitively.
The fomo of cosmetics IS the money grab. It’s just psychological manipulation.
None of the games I’ve played have required it.
Fuck them. I played for my computer, it uses my electricity and my internet. It better do as I please!
