What an interesting day when you see a site you've worked on for the past 2 (3?) years get posted …

To play the devil's advocate here, do you think enabling EC on Linux systems makes it easier for players to cheat ?

I disagree with the onclient kernel stuff. Just like with any website, any checking MUST be server side. Kernel stuff not only makes clients inherently less secure and stable, but also for cheat coders it's only a matter of finding vulnerable driver they can use to avoid being caught.

> This is a big misunderstanding, and I feel like those more technically inclined should understand that anti-cheat is a "defense-in-depth" type of approach. Where it is just one of many lines of defense. Some anti-cheats are pretty useless, and don't do much, but some actually do try and protect the game you're playing. As a serious player of many multiplayer games I disagree. All it takes is one cheat to circumvent the protections and soon enough every cheater will use that circumvention. Meanwhile, I, the legitimate player suffer from degraded performance, disconnections (looking at you Amazon Games - you've not been able to fix your (most likely) Easy Anticheat disconnection issue in 2 years!), or outright inability to play. Perhaps the cheating situation would be worse without anticheats, but considering how rampant it seems to be in fast-paced or grindy games I play, I kind of dou…

I don't think the point is to argue anti-cheat isn't effective, the point is to draw a line in the sand and say, this is where it stops. Take the analogy of enabling better police work by granting unlimited access to our private communications. No one doubts it would be effective, but the cost and the threat is too much. This is the line we draw in the sand: get out of the kernel, anti-cheat has no business being there. The cost and threat are too great. This acceptance is the same situation that brought us the Crowdstrike incident. It's unacceptable. We fail as an industry and as a society when we accept these compromises.

Anti cheat is DRM. It's added specifically to make it so modifications are DRM circumvention and therefore copyright infringement. This isnt to protect the player, but forced by big suit investors to "protect their investment". The best anti cheat is proper net code. Games rarely do this because it's expensive and difficult. Consumers will buy it anyways. Anti cheat overtop is like calling an open window with a loud Weiner dog guarding it "defense in depth".

Putting a government monitored streaming video camera in every bedroom and bathroom in the country to detect sexual assault would also be "defense in depth". But it would be a terrible thing to do, both because it's easily evaded (do your rape someplace else) and because of the intrusion. Any kind of defense in depth argument has to consider how easily bypassed the defense is and the cost it comes at. Believe it or not, most people don't play video games against strangers. Anti-cheat is not of any value to them. Even for people who do play video games against strangers even uncompromised anti-cheat doesn't stop many forms of cheating like macro-mouses. Especially now with all the success being shown at machine learning playing video games with nothing more than a video feed and the button inputs, the amount that anti-cheat can help is clearly quite bounded and getting worse over time. An…