[craftinator]

Yeah! We don't negotiate with terrorists! I want to install this game, except for the parts I don't like, even though they do what I want them to! It's wrong of them to include stuff I don't like in their thing I want to use!

Seriously man, it's a game. If you don't like their methods of anticheat implementation, feel free not to play! It's easy. You won't be missed by those millions of internet strangers. I like that Riot was so upfront about this. They did a great job of describing what they were doing, why they were doing it, how it was being done, and did it in a way that wasn't dry as a chalk ball in the Sahara... So don't "sacrifice your computer freedom". Freedom to choose what's running on your OS is the same freedom they have choosing to use kernel level anticheat. Your attack of that freedom is pretty distasteful.

[matheusmoreira]

> We don't negotiate with terrorists!

It's not like they're open to negotiation either. They only offer the game on their non-negotiable terms.

Fighting back without compromising is actually the only way to deal with these one-sided take-it-or-leave-it deals. It worked for obnoxious pop-up ads on the internet, it's likely to work for invasive ads and tracking and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't also work in this case.

> I want to install this game, except for the parts I don't like, even though they do what I want them to! It's wrong of them to include stuff I don't like in their thing I want to use!

Nothing wrong with any of this. If I don't like something, I should be able to get rid of it. It's software.

Anti-cheating software actually used to be optional. I used to have the option to host or search for servers with anti-cheating disabled. During installation, many games offered me the option to install the anti-cheating module. Battlefield 2 comes to mind.

Once installed and in use, it was still pretty invasive. However, it wasn't straight up forced on players like it is now.

> Freedom to choose what's running on your OS is the same freedom they have choosing to use kernel level anticheat.

People also have the freedom to get rid of the anti-cheating software and make it look like nothing's been tampered with. Banning someone who did this and proceeded to play without cheating would be a false positive. People are already getting banned for the crime of running an online game on Linux.

[claudiawerner]

>Anti-cheating software actually used to be optional. I used to have the option to host or search for servers with anti-cheating disabled. During installation, many games offered me the option to install the anti-cheating module. Battlefield 2 comes to mind.

It was the same with Enemy Territory, you could choose not to enable PunkBuster. It worked quite well, since when PunkBuster stopped providing anti-cheat servers for ET, server admins had to be more proactive with banning - and it worked (and works) pretty well. The issue with games like Overwatch is that you don't host your own server, and you therefore can't choose to ban a certain player if you know they're a cheater.

If Blizzard were to implement host-your-own-server, like older MP games, it would fundamentally change their game dynamic, which is balanced matchmaking with other people in the queue. I'm not a fan of the random matchmaking model (it has destroyed the local community spirit of MP servers), but it does solve some problems - I can now be confident that I'll only be playing with people ranked similarly to me, and it provides a region ranking system where you can gain a higher skill rating and play against more experienced people. In ET, you could join your favourite server and spend a long time getting rolled by a really good player, consistently, and your only recourse would be to abandon that server and find another one, and hope there's not a really good player there either. It's not fun to consistently play against people miles ahead of you.