Helldivers 2 will use a rootkit anti-cheat, nProtect GameGuard
Helldivers 2 will use a rootkit anti-cheat, nProtect GameGuard
50/50 chance this breaks Deck and linux support, especially since the commenters' inquiries about it have gone unanswered.
Bogles my mind why a PvE game needs an anti-cheat at all - let alone something as invasive as a rootkit.
Source is the dev's post on, unfortunately, reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/19dp2qw/helldivers_2_nprotect_gameguard_anticheat/
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Depending on the hosting of things by the game, anti cheat can make sense. Payday 2, for example, is almost entirely peer to peer in games, and cheats allow you to be quite mean in game, even if you're not the host.
But I can't help but think PvE anti cheat is more about locking people out of skins/events/dlc/things than actually being to prevent cheating. Else you could just have a button that invalidated the gains of the cheated match.
But I can’t help but think PvE anti cheat is more about locking people out of skins/events/dlc/things than actually being to prevent cheating. Else you could just have a button that invalidated the gains of the cheated match.
Absolutely, the original sin of computers is that the concept of scarcity is totally foreign to the way computers work and it is nauseating how much work is put into trying introduce scarcity into software and games.
The developer lays out their reasons:
HELLDIVERS 2 is a co-op/PvE game, why do we even need Anti-Cheat?
That's a great question, and there's two related but separate points to it:
First, we want everyone to have a great time playing HELLDIVERS 2, with friends, ex-friends or randoms. What we've seen in some of our and others' games is that rampant cheating tends to have a very negative effect on players openness to playing, especially with randoms.
There's an anecdote from HELLDIVERS 1 I'd like to share:
When we released HELLDIVERS 1 on PC there was effectively no anti-cheat implemented. Additionally HELLDIVERS 1 uses a peer-to-peer networking model, and that means, from a security perspective, each game client will blindly trust each other.
Shortly after release we noticed there was a cheat going around which granted 9999 research samples. Unfortunately any non-cheaters in the same mission would also be granted 9999 research samples. These non-cheating players now had their entire progression ruined through no fault of their own.
We were able to deal with a lot of these early issues without using a third party solution, but it took a lot of work, and most of it was done reactively.
Incidentally HELLDIVERS 2 also uses a peer-to-peer networking model, but this time around we're trying to be more proactive and make sure everyone can play the intended experience.
Second is the Galactic War. There's this huge metagame going in the cloud which all players (and game clients) participate in. Even though we have other countermeasures in place, a cracked game client could make it easier to disrupt the Galactic War, which would sour everyone’s experience
I think those are reasonable explanations for anti cheat having a place in their game. I've been hit with that example scenario before in other games and it just ruins the fun entirely for a lot of progression-driven players, like me.
What I haven't seen a good answer for is the reason for this AC solution specifically. It seems like they could have gone for something much more popular and compatible than what they did. If it was for cost reasons, I think that's a short sighted decision. Regardless, it has me thinking twice about a game I was fairly certain about trying, so that's disappointing.
I'm also a progression-driven player yet I'm suspicious of a game that introduces anti-cheats alongside microtransactions. When microtransactions are involved, the pace of progression tends to be affected to incentive people to pay, and at that point I'd rather play in a hacked server that has a more reasonable progression.
If it was just about letting the player maintain the pace of progression however is most satisfying, I'm sure there are better ways to do that client-side. But these days game companies are all too happy to equivocate "company controlled" with "fair" or "fun", and it's curious that in this framing nothing is unfair as long as they get money.
Hey, I'm not arguing that mtx are a good thing for consumers or anything like that, and I'm with you that they've had an adverse effect on progression systems. I just see the logic in their reasoning for having anticheat. Anything client side could be subverted by those same cheats, and it still wouldn't address the second issue of the impact on the shared galactic conflict feature. All that said, this was a poor choice of implementation and I don't think it will pay off for them. I don't think you'd be seeing the same backlash if it was something like EAC. Maybe from the techy crowd on Lemmy, but not from the average consumer.
Just because we don't usually see backlash it doesn't mean it's a good thing. The average player puts up with absolutely rigged games which treat paying for advantages as fairness.
Personally I only see cheating as a problem if it affects people who haven't agreed to it, but the solution is not preventing all modification. Games are better off for modding and customization. They could cut off modified games from having matchmaking or any input on a global game mode while still allowing players to run their own servers however they want.
I'm not arguing that anything is good or bad. I'm all for people modding their single player games. I've played Frankenstein Skyrim myself many times. I'm a big fan. All that said, this game has a multiplayer element through Galactic Warfare and matchmaking co-op. I think anticheat is entirely reasonable in those scenarios. You can say the multiplayer-lite GW feature isn't worth the limitation (I would probably share that view), but AC is not evil in all situations. It's just kind of entwined with certain online multiplayer features, to avoid the equivalent of "Boaty McBoatFace" happening when trolls hit critical mass in your game.
each game client will blindly trust each other.
In my spare time I work on some networked applications, and so have had to look into security and all that. The one thing they tell you is to NEVER FUCKING TRUST ANYTHING AT THE OTHER END OF A NETWORK CONNECTION. No, anticheat rootkits doesn't allow you to ignore this, and it's massively irresponsible to rely on anticheat as your main way of ensuring security.
If someone gets past rootkit anticheat on a "normal" game where it is being used as a replacement for proper server side anticheat, it's no big deal. Just have a reporting system in place, and ban them. The worst you'll get is people on Reddit complaining about "rampant cheating" or whatever.
If someone gets past rootkit anticheat on a game where it is used as a replacement for network security fundamentals, you're suddenly going to have to find a way to explain to all your customers (and possibly lawyers) that due to your negligence, other people have had full access to their computers.
I'm a DevOps engineer by trade, and do a lot of work with network security. "Never trust anything on the other side of a connection" is fine and all as a rule of thumb, but real solutions have more nuance than that. What is "trust"? Should I just never connect to anything? Obviously we have to, so we're already assuming some level of "trust". There are always degrees of trust, and a peer to peer game server is a higher degree than browsing a site hosted by a server, is what I think the developer meant.
Now, I agree with you, this shouldn't be some full substitute for proper network security or whatever, but I don't think they've given any indication that's the case. I can also speak from experience that certain choices in tooling are thrust upon dev teams at times, for cost or "political" reasons. It's also fully possible it's just a bad call from a techie who worked on a prior project with it or something.