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.
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.
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.
How would cheating in a fighter even look like? Those games are mostly about reading your opponent. Unlike a fps or moba, all info is on the screen etc :/
Auto combo-ing? Auto reponse? Legit curious as i dont think ive seen cheaters in fighters before, but ive been out of the loop since sf4 haha
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.
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.
Yeah, but it didn’t affect gamers. People don’t care until something either does affect them, or in a VERY in your face kind of way, could.
Crowdstrike, unfortunately, is a funny “lol the corporates fucked their own shit up” case and the average gamer simply won’t connect the dots.
Well, there goes my interest.
There might be hope as Microsoft might remove kernel level access after the whole Crowdstrike incident.
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.
