Kernel anti-cheat systems are currently the bane of Linux/Steam Deck gaming, haven’t actually proven to be effective at stopping cheaters (see Valorant for an example), and lead to various security concerns from giving 3rd parties full access to your machine to being used to install ransomware and malware.
Windows tried to restrict kernel access years ago, but backed down under pressure from various companies. However Crowdstrike’s outages have shown the sever consequences of leaving kernel access open, and we might finally see kernel access to be cut off.
Server side is beatable too.
My point is anti cheat will never be perfect, and you just rattled off a bunch of text to say that.
Anti-cheat efforts do make an impact on the pervasiveness and culture of cheating, general hacking and griefing.
Server side is beatable as in, you could inflate your skill to that of a professional player.
The optimal serverside anti cheat would be able to recognize what gameplay is human level, and what gameplay is impossible or very unlikely to be human, and make punishment decisions based on that.
Then, the best cheat would just be almost perfectly simulating a pro player, and at that point the cat and mouse game of anti cheat and cheating would be far far less relevant.
Something like blatant tf2 spinbotting, or scoping someones head through a wall right before peeking them in r6, are absolutely detectable serverside with heuristics or machine learning models or etc, and that should be worked on rather than embedding some spyware into my uefi firmware or whatever.
Anything is beatable, hackable and abusable given the time and resources, and it shouldn’t be my system because some idiotic management took the decision to enforce ring0 access anti cheat to ban some percent more hackers.
No one said that anti cheat efforts do not make an impact, but the impact of ring0 anti cheats is massively overrated
haven’t actually proven to be effective at stopping cheaters
This is what OP said, and it’s completely correct. It’s not that much impact in comparison to “regular” anti cheat systems. And both of those only detect either cheap/bad or known hacks.
Server-sided and data based anti cheats is what would actually be a huge step up. You’re running a 8 K/D in a game where the best players are between 1-2? Banned. You just flicked two enemies within 100ms? Banned. Suspicious activity that’s not that blatant needs to be reviewed.
The thing is - that’s fucking expensive, complicated and needs to be done one a per-game basis, and since its just cheaper to throw you under the bus with a kernel anticheat and claim it’s the best one, that’s being done.
Even if we play make believe that they make any difference at all (they don’t), it would still be unforgivable to install malware on someone’s computer to prevent cheating in a computer game.
