Riot's fighting game 2XKO will use Vanguard anti-cheat
Riot's fighting game 2XKO will use Vanguard anti-cheat
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.)
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Cheating is definitely a problem in SF6, but it's a lot less of a challenge dealing with it due to match duration. You generally move on to different opponents fast enough, unless of course you're at the highest ranks.
Still agree that kernel level anti-cheat does nothing here, and I also won't be buying it due to that reason.
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.
Microsoft is already looking at preventing this stuff because of Crowdstrike. While the whole event was completely CrowdStrikes fault, so many blamed (and still seem to blame) Microsoft for it, so they have a real reason to do this.
Good. Hopefully they actually get somewhere with that.
I'm just not seeing popular opinion among gamers wising up to the risks of kernel level access.
The crowdstrike fuck up has already shown how something like vanguard can fuck your shit up easily. I'm glad league doesn't run on Linux anymore, I don't need this vanguard trash fucking up my PC.
Well, there goes my interest.
There might be hope as Microsoft might remove kernel level access after the whole Crowdstrike incident.
If this happens will the new anti cheat work on linux?
It never did work on Linux; and it won't unless the drivers are rewritten for Linux.
Why can't they just do anti-cheat the way it's always being done, which is to identify cheaters and then stick them in a lobby with each other? I appreciate it means we might have to put up with some cheaters for 5 minutes, but realistically it's hardly a high stakes situation.
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
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.
Rootkits anticheat is horrible bro, bc someone can hijack your PC directly since they own highest control in your system
I'm not saying my idea is good, but if cheater compete against other cheater & bots in secret lobby they'll grow tired on their own, finally they'll realize they got bamboozled by the game itself
Finally for countermeasures if cheater itself wanna play back in normal lobby the game itself will reset their stat/items/rewards/achievement back like they create account for the first time or make cheater pay huge sum of money to devs for harsher punishment
Okay imma head out. Better stick to Street Fighter and Guilty Gear then.
Just decide that more than X inputs per second equals cheater, and measure that on the server side. No need to riddle users systems with code waste.
Mashing is rarely a concern in fighting game cheats, it's either inhuman reactions (hard to distinguish from a lucky guess) or always guessing right on plus/oki situations.
More complex cheats don't activate every time; it's basically impossible to measure whether your opponent in Street Fighter has a "auto perfect parry 15% of the time" cheat running.
Correct, it's impossible. And anticheat will not help with identifying such complex cheats.
You can mash fighting game inputs pretty hard. That's too simple of a solution.
You can also mash them without doing much work with your fingers, and no kernel level anticheat will detect that. If you really want, that is.
"Gosh dang kernel level usurping of end user systems!" they said, typed from their Intel and AMD computers.