[matheusmoreira]

Cheaters aren't a strong enough reason to ship malware to users to monitor them. This sort of thing ought to be unacceptable.

This is 100% on the games industry. They engaged in an arms race with cheaters and now their ineffective solutions are worse than the problem they're attempting to solve.

[episteme]

Who decides that though? I would bet the vast majority of players would be very happy to be monitored if it meant less cheaters. Look at Valorant, that anti cheat is way beyond what HN would deem acceptable and the game is very popular.

[matheusmoreira]

> Who decides that though?

We do. We used to have choice. Online games back then had the option to search for servers with no requirements for any of this bullshit. Now we're lucky if we even get dedicated servers.

> I would bet the vast majority of players would be very happy to be monitored if it meant less cheaters.

Honest players letting themselves be monitored does nothing to help matters. Cheaters will work around the system and evade monitoring.

> Valorant

> they scan all of the software that has loaded up on the individual’s computer

> Vanguard operates from system start-up, constantly operating on your PC unless you forcefully close it or uninstall it from your computer.

> Vanguard also operates a Kernel level driver, which has access to the entire computer system

And now it requires TPM and secure boot. It's disgusting really. It's like all that stuff RMS warned us about is becoming reality. All for what, a video game? No video game is worth this.

From what I'm reading it's not just me either. People are concerned about the kernel module:

> Can people trust a piece of software that has so much access?

> it appeared as if they were just brushing off anyone’s concerns about it

> The concerns people had weren’t exclusively from people scared of Riot Games or their parent company Tencent from performing “spying” operations on a computer and harvesting endless amounts of personal data.

> A noted subsection was worried that if the Vanguard kernel component was compromised, it could be accessed by people with less pure intentions than Riot Games simply wishing to prevent cheating in their title.

This has happened before with capcom.sys, it was literally a backdoor into the kernel that any user space program could use to execute functions in ring zero:

https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...

The games industry cannot be trusted to write kernel code! They need to stay in user space where they belong. If that means more cheaters so be it.

[baby]

What's your proposed solution?

[matheusmoreira]

Play with trusted friends instead. Modding the game in these circumstances can even be fun. The online gaming model where you play with internet randoms is broken.

[baby]

Haha, go tell that to the esport community :) honestly I feel like your comment is out of touch. You're basically telling me: don't play competitive games or games online with strangers. Some people actually enjoy these things believe it or not.

[matheusmoreira]

> You're basically telling me: don't play competitive games or games online with strangers.

That's exactly what I'm saying.

> Some people actually enjoy these things believe it or not.

Those people will just have to live with cheaters as well as game company malware that doesn't actually work.

It's simple. The only way to prevent cheating is for the game company to own your machine. They can't. Not on PC where we have software freedom.

[baby]

> That's exactly what I'm saying

Oh well, end of the argument then :)

[no_time]

His reply does make sense. In the age of self hosted game servers you could ping an admin on irc/xfire and have him decide if someone is following you through walls etc etc. Sure he couldn't possibly catch every player being smart about aimbots but it was a remarkably good system because unlike now, there was a human element in all stages of the conversation.

If you were wrongly accused you could just move over to a different server with little downtime instead of pleading customer support for weeks that Process Explorer is NOT a game hacking tool.

Minimal anticheat, human support from your friendly neighbourhood admin is all you need.

[matheusmoreira]

> pleading customer support for weeks that Process Explorer is NOT a game hacking tool

Yeah, it's such a humiliating experience. They'll never believe whatever you say anyway, your only option is to sue them. One person actually did that in my country. Can't imagine it ever happening in corporation-friendly USA.

Pay hard earned money for a game only to get banned when their idiotic systems flag our software developer tools as cheats. Looks like you have a debugger running, citizen. We permaban people for that here. What's that? A virtual machine? You naughty user.

It makes me want to cheat out of spite.

[episteme]

It wouldn't work these days though, cheats are much more subtle and harder to detect by eye now. If the player just shoots the head of every opponent on screen then a human being involved doesn't always help, they won't be able to distinguish between a great player and a cheat sometimes.

[baby]

It doesn’t make sense for competitive gaming.

[phendrenad2]

You act like you can have your cake and eat it too. The alternative is: No one buys the game (except a small segment of the population who are privacy-conscious enough to accept that the lobbies will be full of cheaters), and the game company declines to update the game on Linux, since no one is buying it anyway.