Speaking to VG247, 2XKO technical lead Tony Cannon reveals the game will feature Riot's Vanguard kernel-level anti-cheat.

Whelp…I’m out. (I expected this to happen before they said anything though, honestly.)

  • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    It’s going to require a crowdstrike type fuckup, exploit, or privacy scandal on a widely used AC like EAC before public opinion changes on this.

    So many games are making the trade-off and it only makes sense because players don’t understand what they are giving in to.

  • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Kernel mode anti-cheat guarantees I will never buy your game. Not even as a gift for someone else.

    Assurances like “we will never abuse this power” are laughably unrealistic, and even if they defied the history of humanity and somehow turned out to be true, that issue is made irrelevant by additional realities:

    1. The risks come not only from corporate abuse of power, but also from vulnerabilities in their code that will eventually be exploited by third parties.
    2. Beyond the risk of nosy corporations snooping on users’ private information, there are major security risks. An exploit at the kernel level means game over for the integrity of your entire system, all the data on it or passing through it, and every other system accessed from it. Bank accounts, for example.
    3. Client-side anti-cheat is conceptually wrong thinking and doomed to fail. Even at the kernel level, it’s an arms race. Cheaters will find ways to weaken or circumvent it (such as running cheats on an external device that captures game video and generates input events) or even defeat it completely.

    I guess this incredibly invasive and fundamentally flawed attempt to manage cheating might be acceptable to someone whose computer is used for nothing else but playing that game… —shrug— …but for me, it’s a hard nope.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Not only that, but cheating isn’t exactly a huge problem in this genre, so it’s a heavy handed solution already and one that’s even less necessary to consider.

      • Ashtear@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        This likely has less to do with cheating and more to do with making sure players use the game shop, whether it’s blocking third-party skins or bots that automate currency grinds.

  • devilish666@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Why not make secret lobby for cheater & transfer all cheater there without raising any suspicion from cheater so they can compete against among other cheater (and bots of course) instead banning them.

    For cheat detector system why not analyze gameplay on the fly or easy access report button

    • cttttt@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Not that I’m defending Vanguard, but Riot’s choosing to invest in developer resources for Vanguard (and in finding cheat developers) so they don’t have to invest in server capacity or developer resources to support cheater only lobbies.

      As long as their anticheat is effective, every cheater they can repel is some amount of server capacity that legitimate players can use.

      Also, cheaters in the types of games Riot makes will cause some amount of opponents to simply leave the game in frustration. So part of this is just trying to keep players who are willing to install the game happy.

      They’ve chosen to make free to play games, so this tradeoff actually makes sense for Riot. But again, kernel level hacks aren’t something everyone will or even should install.

      It’s all about tradeoffs.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I may be preaching to the choir, but if the tradeoff you’re willing to make is to defend against cheats by installing a rootkit, that won’t even make cheating impossible as some kind of consolation, you should go back to the drawing board and try again.

        • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          In infosec it’s known that there is no impenetrable system. If someone wants the break in they will find a way to break in. Security is built around the idea of deterrence. Make it as annoying as possible so people thinking about breaking in would think it’s not worth the effort.

          Same principle applies to cheating. Anyone really wanting to cheat will find a way to cheat. The purpose of anticheat isn’t to make cheating impossible, it’s to deter the low effort cheaters. If you had two identical games, but one doesn’t have anticheat then the game without the anticheat will have more cheaters.

          In the same vein anticheat isn’t a magic bullet against cheating. There goes so much more into preventing cheating including specifically developing the game in a way that makes cheating harder.

          • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            01·
            2 months ago

            In consumerism it’s known that there’s overreach, and I won’t buy their bullshit when a company has far too much control over my machine just because I want to play a video game.

            Fighting games, as a genre, are already designed in such a way that reduces cheating. Every action you take makes you vulnerable, and cheats are usually built around automatic responses. Cheaters can often enough still lose just because the cheater wants to press buttons too and not let the computer do literally all of the work. Cheaters exist in games like Guilty Gear and Street Fighter, but they’re so rare and obvious that they become fodder for YouTube content.