Citation needed.
Whose these gamers ? I surely didn't ask for this neither any of the gamers I know, nor seen any demand about that in gaming forums.
> The game companies couldn't care less if there are cheaters in the game, but it's the players which put huge pressure on the game companies to detect and ban cheaters.
The jump from this to "requiring TPM" is quite a long one.
Hell, blatant cheaters literally stream themselves cheating and their own communities do not recognize the cheating till the stream makes a mistake and selects the wrong scene. This also means that VAC methods of sending footage to random players is ineffective, as some streamers who are very obviously actually cheating do so in front of tens of thousands of people, and those people do not recognize the obvious cheating happening.
We also know game companies don’t care about cheating, as activision admitted in their lawsuit that they leave cheaters on a safe list so long as the cheaters have any semblance of an audience streaming.
That is absolutely wild, and completely characteristic of Activision.
Do you have a link that I can share with my CoD-playing friends?
It really doesn’t even take that many viewers. Zemie, for example, is a straight up cheater that runs a button activated aimbot and wall hacks. He only averages a couple thousand viewers and is safe listed by a number of game companies.
Truth be told, if the exploiter-class of your game would even consider a kernel-level exploit, your game is fucked from the start. Seriously, go Google "valorant cheating tool" and your results page will get flooded with options. You cannot pretend like it's entirely the audience's fault when there are axiomatically better ways to do anticheat that developers actively ignore.
There plenty of way to mitigate cheating in game, but the game industry is focusing on the ones where they don't bear the cost and only the customer will (and this view is in part due to the model of F2P games, where banning cheater is useless as it doesn't cost them anything to create a new account).
Letting game developer having complete control and spying on the device playing the game is fine in a physical tournament were they provide the device, but it's insanity when it's the user own device in its home.
I'm not really sure I buy this. I can't really give a way that can guarantee no cheating but I know for example games like Genshin Impact run almost all the code (dmg calculation etc) server-side. Perhaps something that's an extension of Geforce Now might be the best "anti-cheat" technically speaking.
But as you are pointing out, forcing client-side intrusive anti-cheat is cheaper, thus this as nothing to do about preventing cheating, but about reducing cost.
Ideally player A shouldn't be networked player B if there is a wall between them but what happens when they're at the edge of the wall? You don't want them to pop in so you need some tolerance. But having that tolerance would also allow cheaters to see players through walls near edges. Or your game design might require you to hear sounds on the other side of the wall (footsteps, gunshots, etc.) which allows cheats to infer what what may be behind the wall better than a person would.
Yes, and you cannot prevent this except in in-person tournament.
Any output send toward the player, even a faint audio queue could be analyzed, and use to trigger an action or display an overlay to the screen, and no amount of kernel-level stuff will prevent that, as you can do this outside of the computer running the game.
You will own nothing and like it.
You can even do this calculation on community-run private server.
Now everything is matchmaking, private servers, live service and that sense of community is gone.
Small communities still exist, it's just that vacant places are now filled with strangers.
Perhaps secure boot by itself isn't enough, but I would imagine it would be a relatively large bump, when combined with a kernel-level anti-cheat. I presume such anti-cheats would e.g. disable the debugger access of game memory or otherwise debugging it, accessing the screen contents of the game or sending it artificial inputs.
What vectors remain? I guess at least finding bugs in the game, network traffic analysis, attempting MitM, capturing or even modifying actual data in the DRAM chips, using USB devices controlled by an external device that sees the game via a camera or HDMI capture.. All these can be plugged or require big efforts to make use of.
VALORANT also adds TPM to the mix alongside SB and a kernel AC and yet is still trivially easy to cheat in as long as you have a driver you can use. Granted, it needs to be signed (=financially unreachable by a big part of the community), but if stubborn enough...
That's akin to saying that, as people want security on the street, mandatory strip search as soon as your exit your home is fair game.
Asking for a result doesn't give a blank-check for all the measures taken toward this result.
Those technical shenanigans clearly aren't working, be ready to be disappointed if you thought that a TPM would help against cheaters. Cheaters always find a way, what those game needs is proper moderation.
Yes that does cost money but that's the only known thing that works in the long run.
It’s like saying seatbelts are useless because some people still get hurt, so instead of seatbelts we need a lot more ambulances and hospitals.
Like any complex system, games have a funnel. These technical measures reduce (but not to zero) the number of cheaters. Then moderation can be more effective operating against a smaller population with a lower percentage of abuse.
Alternatively, it's like saying poisoning your customers is a bad way to reduce complaints, because some of them survive. Matter of perspective.
Isn't this the argument used against non-kernel-level anticheat and server-side anticheat in the first place ?
On the other hand, all the games / servers I've seen which are successful against cheater have some very good moderation.
Look at Counterstrike with regular VAC based matchmaking and then with kernel level anti cheat in FACEIT. One is overrun with cheaters and one isn't. It's the same game.
Riot has a pretty indepth blogpost about their anti-cheat systems, they've had years to mature them on some of the most demanding competitive gaming platforms ever made. Requiring players install kernel anti-cheat was very far down the list of possible solutions, but that's what it came to. It was either this or stop being free to play.
It's impossible to tell in-game if a baseball player is using steroids, yet there's a laundry list of banned substances and players who got banned for taking them because the MLB believes it gives them an unfair advantage. It's called competitive integrity.
Since it sounds like you don't play games, at least not competitively, I'll clarify that "cheating" in this case isn't the obvious stuff like "my gun does 100x damage" or "I move around at 100mph" or "I'm using custom player models with big spikes so I know everyone's location" that you would've seen on public Counter-Strike 1.6 servers in 2002. Cheating is aim assistance that nudges your cursor to compensate for spray patterns in CS, it's automatic DPs and throw breaks in Street Fighter 6 that are just at the threshold of human reaction timing, it's firing off skillshots in League of Legends with an overlay that says if it's going to kill the enemy player or not. All of this stuff is doable by a sufficiently skilled/lucky human, but not with the level of consistency you get from cheating.
This is relative to meat-space, not videogame, but we could go there and say caffeine or Adderall use is cheating, thus making anti-cheat a little more invasive…
And there another difference, you're referring to professional sport. I have no problem with invasive anti-cheat for professional gamer, even better it the gaming device is provided by tournament organization.
But we're talking about anti-cheat used for all players, akin to asking people playing catch in their garden or playing baseball for fun an the local park to take a blood sample for drug test.
> All of this stuff is doable by a sufficiently skilled/lucky human, but not with the level of consistency you get from cheating.
That's the point, there no difference for the other players between playing against a cheater and playing against a better player. Any ELO-based matchmaking will solve this, cheater will end-up playing against each-other or against very skilled player.
You could argue that they could create new account or purposely cripple their ELO ratting, but this is the exact same problem as smurfing.
> Any ELO-based matchmaking will solve this, cheater will end-up playing against each-other or against very skilled player.
Well, first, you're wrong, because cheating only makes them good at one part of the game, not every part of the game. e.g. in League of Legends, a scripting Xerath or Karthus who hits every skillshot is going to win laning phase hard. However, scripting isn't going to help if they have bad macro and end up caught out in the middle of the game, causing their team to lose. Most cheaters don't end up at the top of the ladder, they end up firmly in the upper-middle.
Secondly, you're basically saying "cheating is OK because they'll end up at the top of the ladder." You don't realize how ridiculous this sounds?
Third, ranked and competition aside, playing against someone who's cheating isn't fun, even if you end up winning because they make mistakes that their cheats can't help them with.
You don't play competitive games, that's fine, but a lot of people do and they demand more competitive integrity than casual players.
Little difference : I don't play competitive game with completes strangers on company run servers.
I've played competitively on community based server, with people being screened by other players and the community able to regulate itself (ban or unban players).
The problem space is vastly different, you don't need intrusive ring 0 anti-cheat for this.
The whole kernel-level anticheat stuff is a poor solution to a self-made problem by the developer : they wanted to be the one in charge of the game and servers, so they needed to slash human moderation need. They also wanted to create a unique pool of player and didn't want the community to split between itself and play how they want.
People don't consider playing around with your friends to be competitive. You don't get to choose who else is competing in the game or what strategies they use. This is just an area that you are clearly not familiar with.
> The whole kernel-level anticheat stuff is a poor solution to a self-made problem by the developer : they wanted to be the one in charge of the game and servers, so they needed to slash human moderation need. They also wanted to create a unique pool of player and didn't want the community to split between itself and play how they want.
This wasn't self-made by the developer, it was demanded by the players. Competitive games have almost exclusively moved to online, skill-based matchmaking with a ladder system because that's what players want.
I didn't say friends. Please don't modify my argument to refute it.
> You don't get to choose who else is competing in the game or what strategies they use.
I, as a single player, no, but us, as a community, yes, and it's the same for any game or sport, different group run different tournament with different rules about who play and how.
> This is just an area that you are clearly not familiar with.
Please refrain to use ad hominem, especially when you have no idea who you are talking with.
> This wasn't self-made by the developer, it was demanded by the players.
I don't know any players who asked for the disappearance of community run server or human moderation, neither that wanted do lose agency on the way they play. I don't they these players doesn't exist, but I don't make gross generality about players.
> Competitive games have almost exclusively moved to online, skill-based matchmaking with a ladder system because that's what players want.
They're not a hive mind, lots of them didn't or doesn't like matchmaking in any form, and even for the ones that wanted it, that doesn't mean developers have to remove other mean of play, like server browser and private server.
The state of game cheating has professionalized A LOT, it is extremely competitive and cheating companies produce extremely good quality tools compared to what we had 20 years ago. There is a lot of money to be made, we are at the point where you can just pay a cheap monthly subscription and you get access to actively maintained cheating tools. I know people working on the anti-cheat side, it is a really messy, highly dynamic (the bad actors are constantly adapting), complicated problem that isn't solved once and for all. We are far from the situation where just a few people are using some hacked-together software that will obviously be spotted as cheaters.
Game dev companies (at least US/European ones) have zero interest in developing or paying for kernel-level anti-cheat. That's a massive barrier of entry for the player base and they know this. It's also far from being cheap.
(Note: ignoring geopolitical factors, Chinese companies such as Tencent or Russian companies could definitely have interests in developing kernel-level anti-cheat for information gathering)
I will comment on a game I used to play though: Escape from Tarkov. The game costs somewhere between 40$ and 250$+tax, depending on what pack you buy. Banning cheaters for this game is literally a profit center. Every time you ban a cheater and they re-buy the game, you made at least 40$. The majority of cheating in the game was due to real money trading - cheaters would make in-game millions quickly, sell them, get banned, buy the game again at a profit.
The solution to this is brain-dead simple - more manual moderation (these cheaters are very obvious to spot). What the developers did instead just killed the game.
The reasonable, fair, common-sense pro-consumer thing to do is to split the online play in two: a non-anticheat server and an anti-cheat server. Players can opt-in to installing a rootkit/sharing their SSN/whatever if they want to play on the hardened server. This costs nothing, and makes all types of gamers happy.
But doing this has less upside for the publisher than forcing anti-cheat on everyone. The only risk is that they might get dragged through the mud by a handful of influencers peddling impotent rage to viewers who are just looking for background noise while sleepwalking on their Temu dopamine treadmill live service of the month.
This is a very good point! And I'd like to point out that there is an analogue to the problem of smurfing in online video games, and the corresponding solution, which is to require semi-unique ID to play (e.g. a phone number which can only be tied to one account at a time with a cool-off period when transferring between accounts). Valve does this for Dota 2, and smurfing is far, far less common than it is in League of Legends.
Some League players complain that they don't want to give their phone number to Riot (which is entirely reasonable given that it's a subsidiary of Tencent), but if enough people don't want that, then Riot could simply split the ranked queue into two: one where (soft, ie phone #) identity verification is required, and one where it isn't.
Riot won't do this, though, not because it wouldn't fix the problem (it would, as demonstrated by Valve), but because they profit from smurf accounts buying skins.
The phone number requirement is only there if you want to play Clash. Normal ranked play works flawlessly with no number.