[arbll]

Same here. My home computer only runs Windows because I play competitive online games. It would be incredible if Valve built some kind of certified, locked-down kernel, but I doubt that will happen.

The online discourse around this is also incredibly toxic, filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games, or that kernel anti-cheat, while not perfect, is the best solution available today.

[throw10920]

> filled with utopians who don’t understand how serious cheating is in these games

FWIW, the easiest way to dispel the fallacies pumped out by these individuals is to ask how much time they've sunk into a reasonably contemporary competitive online game. I almost never meet people who have these delusions about anticheat being ineffective that also has actually invested significant (>500) hours into the games that they're appropriate for.

(people who work with spam and fraud/abuse prevention also usually don't have these delusions, because the underlying economics are similar. turns out that actually having experience with a thing is enough to disillusion most people of stupid ideas about that thing, who know?)

[bigyabai]

"effective" and "solved" are too easily conflated, here. Consoles have the solution, if you enforce hardware attestation then you reduce the attack surface to people using XIM, Cronus and other detectable exploits. When you allow PCIe/ReBAR, hypervisors, custom bootloaders, custom mobo firmware, third-party hardware drivers, firmware macros, lagswitches, and whitelist process injection, people will always exploit you. Cheating is inherent to the architecture of PC gaming.

Ring 0 anticheat is a mitigation, and just one step down the road of enforcing fairness. The goal of erasing cheaters quickly becomes a Procrustian bed that alienates fair players and funds cheat developers, there's nothing that gamedevs can do client-side to solve this problem without redefining how PC gaming works. Out of all the games I've put 500+hrs into, votekick is the only working anticheat that I've encountered.

[arbll]

The only competitive game I’ve put serious hours into that had votekick was CS, and teams would almost never kick their own cheaters, even when they were obvious, because they wanted that sweet Elo.

[Peaches4Rent]

Counter. As a group of 4 dota players who are software engineers, we have a collective 20k hours.

All of us refuse kernel level anti cheat.

Dota overwatch is the best we have available for anti cheat. It's better than kernel level anti cheat

[arbll]

Dota isn't a very cheatable game to begin with. Even with the best micro you can't reach a high elo without the appropriate high level planning skills.

If we look at a game like Rust it's impossible for it to exist without a kernel anti-cheat today

[Lwerewolf]

...and then you have hypervisor-based cheats, hardware cheats and whatnot. I'd say that AI flagging of suspicious cases + additional targeted scrutiny is the way forward - for competitive platforms, that is. That, and trust factor - I practically never get bad games when I play alone in cs:go/cs2 (~20k mmr eu, lem/smfc prior to that) - both in terms of somebody cheating and in terms of people that are full of themselves in one way or another. I'd say that combining these techniques should be very effective.

[arbll]

The only effective approach is to use as many layers as possible to increase the cost of creating and using cheats. Kernel anti-cheat is an effective layer because it forces cheaters to either buy specialized hardware or gamble that their hypervisor won’t be detected through heuristics.

Competitive games will likely add AI-based flagging into the mix, but it still doesn’t make sense to make cheating as trivial as adding a few uprobes/kprobes on a Linux box.