Probably not evil, just incompetent. Many internet multiplayer games today place trust in the client in order to grant a smoother experience on higher latency internet connections, which makes it easier to implement cheating mechanisms. The fight against this is all about verifying the client and the environment it is running in. WINE is quite hackable, so one can see why they'd want to blacklist the platform outright. Doing it in such a trivially bypassed way is pretty silly though.

They probably prevent it from starting and later do self checks (checksums), check for wine using other methods and then game-ban accounts in waves to hide how they detected cheating/wine.

There isn't a general way to prevent cheating on open platforms with this kind of game, so it ends up being a kind of cat and mouse game. Think of an aimbot (instantly moves your mouse cursor to an enemy as soon as the enemy is seen) or a wall hack that makes enemies visible behind obstacles. The only way to detect those is to check if your runtime environment is being modified by known methods. Opening a wine front (where you'd somehow have detect Linux processes/a modified wine or even a modified kernel etc.) is probably too costly compared to the number of non-cheating players on Linux.

CSGO (where leagues and MM use third-party anti-cheat) is an example where the community deems the vendor's AC insufficient. The most extreme example is Rockstar Games / GTA V, the multi-billion-dollar revenue AAA title where anyone with a free to download menu has far more power than all Rockstar administrators combined.

CSGO VAC is garbage though, and can't not be garbage without being granted extreme levels of access to the system. On Linux you can just run your cheats as root, and they will never get detected.

The slippery slope of giving companies higher access is also seen in CSGO where (Faceit/ESEA, dont remember who exactly) put a bitcoin miner in their anti-cheat. Capcom put a rootkit into Street Fighter V to check for cheaters. Is that acceptable?

>Probably not evil, just incompetent.

Incompetent, or rational decision in terms of bang-for-buck to reduce cheats?

That's a fair distinction here I suppose. From my perspective as a hobbiest game developer, and of course player, any benefits of trusting the client are far outweighed by the problems, but that's a matter of opinion I suppose.

Evil is a strong word. Can you explain?

I guess the GP refers to treating all linux gamers as "cheaters" is not cool.

Like another comment says, maybe it's easier to cheat using Wine, and thus banning the platform is faster/cheaper, even though they might end up catching a lot of legit users in this broad dragnet.

Not evil - it's what has been attracting users to their platforms. PUBG had terrible anti-cheat, really hurt them for a while. In all these claims a reminder that client is trusted. EPIC does "ok" with anti-cheat - be curious to hear others impressions. Cheaters are a TOTAL drag to online multiplayer, so calling efforts to fight cheating "evil" is silly.

Yeah, but how does running a Windows game on Linux = cheating? I understand the need for modern multiplayer games to have anticheat (however unfortunate, and I still refuse to play games that use literal rootkit-esque anticheat [1]), but just trying to run a game on Linux isn't cheating in itself. Does Wine help cheats cloak themselves?

[1] e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NProtect_GameGuard

Wine is a fully open implementation of Windows APIs on Linux. The game cannot assume that the API's behavior is fixed on WINE because anyone can change any of the functions to do something unexpected with a quick patch. One example may be hacking up the DirectX implementation to draw some objects as transparent rather than opaque.

Of course, it's possible (if much harder) to go in and hack up the DLLs on Windows. Anti-cheat addresses that by whitelisting known-good MS hashes and/or requiring some type of signing. There's a lot more overhead involved in doing something like that for WINE, since every distro's build would be different, it's common for users to have their own builds with game-specific patches enabled, etc.

I've been out of the WINE scene for a while, but I'll say that I don't believe many WINE users are trying to exploit the platform to cheat. I think it's purely a cost-benefit tradeoff. The vendor doesn't feel supporting a legitimate WINE use case is worth the expense of figuring out a reasonable way to validate behavior, handle integration with distro builds, support debugging/custom patchsets, etc.

Well, using Tor doesn't mean you're looking to abuse a website. But you may find out that 99% of your Tor traffic is abuse and decide it's worthwhile to you and your users to block it.

I would imagine Wine is in a similar predicament.

I find it hard to believe that a majority of people running Fortnite under Wine would be attempting to cheat. Even if Wine would make cheating somewhat easier, would it really be that significant?

It seems far more likely to that most players are just using Wine for its intended purpose—to play Fortnite on Linux.

>Does Wine help cheats cloak themselves? Obviously it could, because it is providing windows API from an uncontrolled source. It would be significantly more difficult to provide hacked system libraries on a windows host.

> calling efforts to fight cheating "evil" is silly

their method (blocking Wine) is questionable though. it reminds me of websites that block Central/Eastern European IP's "because of bots" (yeah, it happens). the goal is nice, but the method hurts many honest users.

As far as I understand, the problem with wine is that the wine sandbox prevents other anticheat mechanism from working.