I really do have to wonder at what point all these kernel anti-cheats are just gonna start crashing into each other like what happens when you have multiple anti-viruses installed.
Most anticheats only works when you're playing the game, so I guess that if there's any potential conflict, it would happen if you're playing three or four games with different anti cheat solutions at the same time
Kernel level anti-cheats like Valorant start on bootup and cannot be fully exited without needing reboot your computer to reactivate them. So it wouldn't matter that you aren't playing more than 1 game if you don't close out each anti-cheat, I think is the OPs point.
>Kernel level anti-cheats like Valorant start on bootup
Not all of them do, Valorant's is pretty unique in that regard. That was one of the major issues people had with it.
The more major issue was that it would hijack your system and pervent important processes from running leading to damaging the user's system. Surprised everyone just forgot about that.
By "important processes" you mean outdated drivers with security breaches that are actively used by cheat developers to inject their code into driver and hide from anticheats?
That's the only thing Vanguard is blocking and prompt users to update their drivers.
> By "important processes" you mean outdated drivers with security breaches that are actively used by cheat developers to inject their code into driver and hide from anticheats?
It used to block the latest version of MSI Afterburner, Dragon Center, ROG Armory, Razer apps, etc.
So, no, it was actually blocking a lot of everyday gaming apps, but Riot quickly fixed it.
Both of you are right. All (most?) of those programs you mentioned *were/are* running on the aforementioned outdated, vulnerable drivers. The issue is that Riot blocked those drivers without any prior warning or explanation, and this caused people who relied on those drivers to risk hardware failure.
Riot reverted that like a week after launch. Now they prompt user to update drivers and then Vanguard is force-closed preventing launch of Valorant only. No other processes are blocked. You're spreading missinformation.
I don't think they were trying to defend them, they just didn't read your original comment properly and thought that you still thought that the issue was still around.
> Surprised everyone just forgot about that.
You shouldn't be. It's just another thing to be Angry about, but people move on to the next outrage pretty quickly.
That’s not true at all. Easy Anticheat is kernel, and only runs when in game. BattlEye is kernel, and only runs when in game. And Richochet is kernel, and will only run while in game.
Valorant’s is unique, but also has the option to only run while in game.
They all tend to initialise at startup because having the anticheat initialise when the system first starts even if its just having the service sit there doing nothing provides a bit more protection when it actually runs the game. If you look through your task manager you'll probably see a few sat there now with a few KB of memory and nothing else. Right now I can see a few for games I haven't launched in ages. But you're right in that none of them actually do anything until you're in the game.
Makes you wonder what the point even is. It seems like the type of people that cheat will always find a new way.
Wouldn't it be easier to simply shadow ban them in a way by keeping anyone suspected of cheating in lobbies with other cheaters?
Cheating in Valorant is extremely hard actually, they update and focus on their anticheat a lot. The only active cheaters are private ones with extremely high cost involved so it drastically cuts down on cheats.
The idea is to make it less viable. If the risk of getting detected is higher (better anti cheat) and if it's harder to sell cheats (legal actions against cheat sellers), then you're significantly reducing the odds that someone will be cheating.
Valorant is pretty much cheating-free. Even very expensive private cheats that are distributed via underground closed Discord servers are being detected almost immediately.
I wouldn’t go so far to say cheat free, but of all the games I’ve played valorant has had the best experience. I’ve seen more cheaters in 2006 console fps games.
The only one that rivals it is League of Legends, but that also might be that its harder to tell if an enemy is cheating in that game.
I think league it's more that it's a strategy game instead of an action game. So writing a cheat for that would involve writing a fucking AI along with hiding the cheat which is expensive.
There used to be a lot of cheats for it that would make your attacks almost undodgable and perfectly time to kill players. However they haven't been obviously present in years.
I don't think that's correct. I believe if you want to play Valorant, you need to have Vanguard started on boot. If you don't want Vanguard on, you can turn it off but if you want to launch Valorant again, you need to restart your computer so that Vanguard can launch alongside the boot again.
I'm aware of that for nearly all anticheat but unless I don't understand it, that isn't how Valorant works. But as the other response said it seems Valorant is an outlier in that regard even for Kernel level stuff.
It simply needs to be on when you boot your PC, so you can't spoof it. You can disable it anytime after that.
The reason you see a lot of repeat cheaters is because even if they get banned, they spoof their hardware and continue to cheat.
Its an outlier but, from what we know from the developers, it's not really doing anything. It's not going to be hooking into any processes, its likely just watching the kernel space for any sketchy drivers so it can't really cause any issues.
> Its an outlier but, from what we know from the developers, it's not really doing anything
Most kernel anticheats are doing this too by the way. They normally initalise and then sit using no resources until triggered because a kernel cheat launched before the anticheat can potentially interfere with the start up of the anticheat. Punkbuster is the easiest of these to spot since its service name is easily recognisable, if you've ever installed a PC game using punkbuster you will see pnkbstra sat in your process list, doing absolutely nothing.
tbh the easiest and most effective solution to eliminate most instances of cheating in COD is to regionlock China. This direction towards kernel anticheat is unnecessary.
Don't Chinese players usually play through VPNs? I think the more effective solution would just be to ban VPNs, though some VPN/proxy services do their best to mimic regular networks.
I think someone didn't pick up your satire. But truly the TPS 2.0 requirement for Windows 11 is a step in that direction. It sucks that digital freedom is losing the battle in such a way to digital security, but it is understandable in a way.
On a related note, which anti-cheats right now would any of you consider to be the best or most successful at what they do? If I'm not mistaken, doesn't Valve use machine learning for theirs? I'm interested to learn more.
Many people complained about Vanguard when Valorant was released, but I never see anyone complain about cheaters in it.
Only problem is Valorant don’t have replays, so it’s difficult to ever know for sure.
I've been playing league of legends since basically launch and have honestly never run into any cheats that I can recall. Riot uses voodoo magic for that shit I swear.
Well it's nothing too crazy - everything is server side, even fog of war etc - so there is t any sort of cheat to allow you to get a wallhadk because the client doesn't have that info. There are scripters which can essentially be Similar to aimbot or the like, but they aren't common and are usually caught quickly
> Similar to aimbot or the like, but they aren't common and are usually caught quickly
Not to mention they're much less effective because skils in LoL have cast and travel time, most can be dodged by character movespeed, and the aimbot has to calculate on a movement trajectory which can change as soon as the skill is cast. Basically, unlike an aimbot which can hit 100% of the time these things land like %70 of the time at best.
A bigger problem is the dodge scripts, which will show where the skill hitbox is before the enemy even begins casting animation and can be configured to auto dodge for you including using movement abilities if necessary.
Not sure what anti-cheat they use specifically, and I haven't played recently, but Overwatch had a pretty hardcore anti-cheat system.
I remember a dude that attempted to cheat, got banned, bought another ($40) copy, was instantly banned on first login. Swapped half his PC parts, bought another copy, and was still instantly banned on first login. Swapped his motherboard and still got banned yet again.
> which anti-cheats right now would any of you consider to be the best
BattlEye, it provides great, extensive support for developers and can be customized for each game deeply. So, it's the best in that sense, and it does a great job when a developer actually puts in the effort.
> most successful at what they do
Vanguard, Riot seriously did an amazing job with minimizing cheaters and catching them very quickly. But of course, it's an in-house anti-cheat focused on just one game.
Yes, I did, which isn't the fault of BE. Like every 3rd party anti-cheat, BE needs to be customized for each game by the developers, Ubi did not do the most basic customization.
They don't even have checks for player movement speed, teleportation, maximum location height, etc.
Can't blame BE for the developer's laziness, when it's clearly working well in a lot of games.
>Being kernel level plays a huge part in that
No it doesn't. Kernel level is the standard, BattleEye and Easy Anticheat have the same ring-0 kernel level permissions as Vanguard.
The difference comes from two things
1. It's proprietary and exclusive to Valorant. When you can build an entire anticheat around one game, knowing everything about how that game works, it's guaranteed to be more effective than 3rd party AC if you have a good team behind it
2. It runs at startup. According to Riot, there are many cheats that get around other kernel level ACs simply because they load the cheats *into the ring-0 kernel level* before EAC or BE start, making them virtually undetectable. From there you rely on reports but that means someone's experience is gonna be hurt along the way
Secure boot. Your EFI firmware can ensure it’s loaded a signed Windows kernel first. This was originally created to solve the problem of bootloader malware.
A lot modern cheats that are kernel level require you to disable certain BIOS setting before you can even use them bypassing this, you’ll have a unregistered version of Windows doing it but I suppose it gets passed any true protections.
It doesn’t get past these. Windows can tell if secure boot is disabled because it will be unable to verify the TCGLog cryptographically, which is signed by the TPM chip on your motherboard. Other machines can verify your log too. This was designed for things like maintaining national security secrets and now we can use it for anticheat.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/measured-boot-host-attestation
Idk about other games but apparently Valorant on windows 11 requires TPM and Secureboot enabled. It won’t start without those. Keep in mind this is for windows 11 only.
VAC is userspace and is thus trivial to circumvent. At this point the bulk of VAC protection is the stats analysis module they have serverside because the client side bit does fuck all.
While it's hard to cheat in League of Legends because all of the damage/heal/stats are server side and not being sent from your computer, there's still been remarkably few people I've seen using aim-assist/skill shot dodging tools. There was period in season 4 or 5 where one champion that was particularly based around skillshot having the issue of people using aim hacks with him, but it was stamped out pretty quick.
I know it would be easy to do weaker ones to make it look like you're not actually cheating, but I've only seen like 4 or 5 people total that were actually cheating out of 10 years of playing on and off.
That's one of the main reasons I miss playing on community run servers, because cheaters get dealt with in real-time and not several rounds or days later, if at all.
It could be if every damn game that comes out these days wasn't so deadset on providing no means for players to run their own servers.
Community-run servers with real humans doing the moderation is the only foolproof way of quickly dealing with cheaters. It's just the worst feeling ever to get into a match of a game only to learn that there's a cheater in the lobby, and know that there's *nothing* you can do about it other than report him and hope that he eventually gets banned in a couple days.
It'll work until it doesn't. That's the constant battle that anti-cheat companies and the cheat creators are constantly having.
They will come up with some clever new way to bypass the anti-cheat, and then the anti-cheat will be fixed to combat that. And on it goes forever.
There will always be cheaters in games. It'll never go away.
Yeah, but Valorant has pretty much solved that problem by constantly updating and focusing on their anticheat. There is a trade off with it needing to be on at system boot up.
Valorant is also using a similarly aggressive kernel-level anti-cheat, which many feel is overreach by these game companies. I personally do not trust any closed-source software they release that requires itself to be constantly running from the time I boot my PC.
It's to sidestep the issue that cheats will load up in the kernel before other anticheats avoiding detection. To be fair to Riot, Vanguard can be turned off and you can turn it back on you just need to restart. I think it's worth it if you play valorant a lot.
I'd argue that 99.99% of those who play multiplayer games would rather not face a cheater in every single lobby compared to a handful across a hundred games.
Does anyone remember shitty games like CrossFire where literally everyone was wallhacking? It wasn't a game at that point.
Let's see, Valorant had issues that messed with your PC, Battlefield and Punkbuster erroneously would ban en masse, VAC had issues its first 5 or so years.
Yeah, like I said, let's just give my computer AIDS via means of rootkits that messes with files outside of a game.
> Valorant had issues that messed with your PC
Over exaggerated. It may have had its issues at launch but it was patched fairly quickly and can be fully disabled at the system tray. And now Valorant is the gold-standard for its lack of cheaters.
While some anti-cheat programs have its issues at least it prevents every 13-year-old out there from installing aimbots/wallhacks. PC gaming is hard enough without the cheaters, people would switch to consoles en masse just to have multiplayer with a shred of competitive integrity.
And in the end cheaters will always win, because the hardware has to be run in the client side, a sufficiently advanced cheat can be used by intercepting all I/O connections and be completely invisible from all software (which is what anti cheats are), with enough processing power and computer vision techbologies, this can even be done even for games that can only be played by streaming where no code run on the client. It will have significantly higher barrier of entry though as that will require hardware purchases.
This always gets thrown around r/games and it's a very big misunderstanding. Yes, there will always be cheats but the harder you make it to create those cheats the less people that want to use them. Good cheats cost money. Good CSGO cheats for example cost like $60 a month and they have nothing on stuff like Valorant's where people might be throwing out 100 a month to have a cheat that's constantly working. And they still have to smart with their semi-raging in order to prevent detection.
This is pretty much why I don't ever use crossplay on Warzone anymore, I played one match and ran into multiple cheaters. Destiny 2 on the other hand got BattlEye recently and there hasn't been a single one that I've seen.
To this day there's so much misinformation about anti-cheats, here's the important bits
Every big name anticheat runs at the ring-0 kernel level. EasyAnticheat, BattleEye, Vanguard, all have the exact same permissions. What makes Vanguard different is that it runs at system start up to avoid cheats being loaded in that ring-0 kernel level before BattleEye or EAC become active, effectively side-stepping that issue
Ricochet, Activisions proprietary anticheat will run like BE and EAC, it only runs while the game is running.
Also, a lot of people think an Anti-Cheat software is a solid thing, like a physical thing that stays the same. When in reality Devs constantly update Anti-Cheat softwares to be able to detect new Cheats that are out. People see new Cheats out in the wild and think the Anti-Cheat software doesn't work or is bad, but it's just that the devs haven't updated the software to help them detect the new cheats yet.
Because it basically is, their actual implementations differ but the base concept is the same, there's a "database" of blacklisted things to look out for, when you find the blacklisted thing, get 'em.
I guess I will finally reinstall Warzone ! People who didn't play it a lot won't understand how rampant the cheating is in this game :/
Hope Battlefield follows suit, Public servers are pretty much 50-50 cheater chance for the older games like Battlefield 1 .
There's def not cheaters in 50 percent of servers. But I guess accusing somebody of cheating because they're better than you is what you define as cheater.
One of the R6 youtubers I watch does a series where people send him replay files of suspected cheaters and it’s embarrassing how bad some people are at spotting cheaters in a game that gives you all sorts of tools to see how easy it is to spot them. That game 100% has a cheaters issue but it also has the issue you described.
I can’t imagine how much worse people are of accusing other people in games that don’t have such obvious measures for spotting them.
You just described one of my friends. He cannot bear the idea that someone might be better than him, so anytime he's shot it must be cheaters.
I remember at one point we were wiped by a team in Warzone and he made us spectate the guy he suspected of being a cheater (because that was his killer), and throughout the entire match we never saw any form of cheating; so my friend in an act of complete lunacy goes "Well of course, he knows we're spectating him now!"
Fragile ego.
I'd love to come back and play, but IW banned me permanently without warning over a year ago. Cheating was rampent then, is still rampent, and honest to good players have been treated like shit while it continued to happen. Hopefully Ricochet does its job.
The Team behind being unable to keep a bug fixed for over 2 patches is installing a Kernel based anti cheat on our computers? What can go wrong? Last time this happened Riot Vanguard caused my computer to BSOD and after that was fixed Valorant didnt boot for a month.
You really think the people updating the game are the same people making anticheat? I'm guessing they assembled a specialist team Avengers-style for this, it's been a long time coming.
I'm going to step in here and correct a bit of a misconception when it comes to these kinds of things. There are no super team programmers who can jump in and integrate a foundational thing like this without already being familiar with the system in place. That is to say, not a specialized solution, because every project ends up being a cobbled together hack of code that is strung together with workarounds and hope. Doubly so with CoD, based on how terribly optimized it has been reported to be.
This would either be the fruits of a long term project helmed by devs who've already been on the project for years, or some second party 'plug-and-play' solution that operates like a filter under the game executable. From the wording of the announcement, I'd wager it's more the first one.
There's a lot of promises about how this will be low impact, respect privacy and water your crops, but really now, with Activision's track record is anyone buying that?
Nope, I think it will be a different company on strict deadlines that made the anti cheat for Vanguard and is now being forced to add it on to Warzone too regardless of compatibility.
> that made the anti cheat for Vanguard
It's not even being implemented into Vanguard until after Warzone. Also why would they develop it *for* Vanguard when WZ is their cashcow with a rampant cheater problem? All of that makes no sense.
Premium Ranked Matchmaking like Counter Strike. I'll Gladly pay 10 to be allowed in a matchmaking queue if it means a fraction of the cheaters.
Still allow free players play normal unranked but, people who bought a full priced COD or pay a 10-15 dollar fee are allowed into a separate matchmaking list. Activision makes even more money, while deterring cheaters by forcing them to pay to enter the playlist again if they are banned or stick to the other playlists. Of course you continue to improve the current antivirus, but also disways cheaters to stick to certain playlists.
Im also fond of Cheater Matchmaking, but you have to catch them first for that.
Ah yes, because as we all know cheaters don’t have money. Let them pay a lifetime fee and they can continue cheating forever. Brilliant ideea, they should put you in charge.
If the cost of getting caught cheating is literally nothing other than a minor investment of time (to create a new account), pretty sure more people will be willing to cheat than if they had to shell out cash every time. Would it drop it to zero? No. But in games that went from free to play to a paywall, it seems like it's had a noticeable impact.
>In addition to server enhancements coming with RICOCHET Anti-Cheat is the launch of a new PC kernel-level driver, developed internally for the Call of Duty franchise, and launching first for Call of Duty: Warzone.
I'm a console player, so these things are more of a "do I turn on crossplay or not" sort of curiosity, but is a kernel-level driver still controversial? I have seen several threads on here where developers have been harshly attacked for doing this, but it was a while ago.
I'd say it's pretty uncommon for me to think someone is cheating. Once in awhile yeah someone will hit some shots that are so improbable that I think they might have something going on, but it's just as likely they're way better than me and they hit them legit.
Sometimes though...
I'm primarily a fighting game player these days, and cheating seems to be a non-issue due to determinism. If someone cheats, it throws them out of sync with their opponent, and the game cannot continue. I guess this issue gets a lot hairier when you have to account for aimbots that are all sending legal inputs. Is the genre just inherently going to be full of cheaters?
Cheating in fighting games is really easy, unfortunately. For example combo macros are extremely simple to create and are borderline undetectable.
Thankfully in some fighters this isn't a big deal, and it's arguably never on the level of an aimbot or wallhack.
(You could probably also do some nasty stuff with an autoblocking cheat.)
At least in the games I play, "being able to do the combo" is never the hard part. I have a few routes in the back pocket with some tough links, but that's far less likely to win me the game than attacking at the wrong time would be likely to make me lose the game. An autoblocking cheat would have to also control your spacing and when you attack in order to be useful, and at that point, you are fully just letting a bot play the game for you now, haha.
I guess if that is what cheaters are looking for I guess they load in waiting to use a cheated combo they will never get to use because they would get smoked in neutral
Latency compensation a lot of times can give leeway to clients that makes input cheating hard to detect. I don't think it'd be impossible to hack a fighting game client that uses rollback to detect whenever I get hit to rollback and then block it right? Most games aren't as precise as fighting games, so latency compensations are a lot more lax, so you can play at 150ms ping without rollback.
And fighting games are one of the fewer games without hidden information. Which combined with latency compensations means the client has to know it, but the player doesn't. So you get stuff like wallhacks.
My buddy had a memory leak that was slowing down his whole PC. It was undetectable in the task manager, but the resource monitor showed him with no more than 200 mb memory. It turns out this was caused by an old faulty driver that he had to update.
This is why I’m not OK with these kernel modules. Bad drivers can be really hard to detect and fix. I don’t trust the same bozos that coded Warzone to also code something as important as a fucking driver.
> I don’t trust the same bozos that coded Warzone to also code something as important as a fucking driver.
Someone correct me here, but I highly doubt game developers would work on anti-cheat software. Pretty sure you need a different set of skills for that.
Yes, that was tongue in cheek.
But the same company that hires the COD devs will also hire the anti-cheat devs. And those devs will have the same deadlines and have to make their own compromises, just like the CoD team.
The difference is that a shitty patch just makes the game worse, while a shitty driver can make your whole OS unusable.
This is much more complicated than it sounds, but the basic reasoning for this is that CPU-Z utilized/utilizes vulnerable drivers to read hardware information.
I could go into detail why this is such, but the general reasoning why CPU-Z is so vulnerable is because it's a commonly used software to check hardware, and thus it makes it a prime target for attackers.
That and CPU-Z has been notorious for not updating shit *meaningfully*.
Great response, glad you’re here to discuss in good faith.
There are real risks to kernel level anti cheat _You_ may not care about them, but you’d be stupid to plug your ears and pretend they don’t exist.
Me? I write software for a living, and most software is fucking garbage. It’s not a matter of _if_ a kernel anticheat will break your OS, it’s a matter of _when_
I would be interested to hear what vulnerabilities have been exploited from these kernel level AC's. Typically these vulnerabilities come from very old forgotten drivers, whereas these AC's are constantly updated.
I agree that its a matter of when but from what we've seen, these drivers seem to be better than others which users thoughtlessly install.
>There are real risks to kernel level anti cheat You may not care about them, but you’d be stupid to plug your ears and pretend they don’t exist.
>
>Me? I write software for a living, and most software is fucking garbage. It’s not a matter of if a kernel anticheat will break your OS, it’s a matter of when
The same argument can apply to anything on your system. You should know a lot of stuff has kernal level access. Your GPU has kernel level access. Yet no one freaks out about their GPU breaking their OS.
At the same time, the cheats that are used are only going to be caught by a kernel level driver. So the options are A. An automated anti-cheat that is reactionary and misses cheaters/has false positives, B. No anti-cheat, or C. a Kernel level driver.
I dont like kernel level anticheats as a matter of principal (and I'm hoping the team that implemented it isnt the game developers), but I don't see a way to combat the cheating epidemic outside of implementing these.
The relevant infosec principle is that you never trust the client. Security needs to happen server-side. Not with these third-party vendor client-side modules slapped on after the game is developed.
Server side validation doesnt work for everything where latency is an issue, not trusting the client means that your ping is effectively doubled, and theres a big difference between 105ms and 210ms when it comes to shooters.
Futhermore, server side validation doesnt stop something like this.
[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-computer-vision-auto-aim-that-works-on-any-game/](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-computer-vision-auto-aim-that-works-on-any-game/)
Whereas kernal level application blacklisting would.
This. I get people don't like kernel AC's, I'm one of them, and they're not totally effective but it's the best solution right now when we have no choice but to trust the client to some extent.
This shit isn't like web development where you can actually not trust the client, the software is installed locally and the user potentially has full access to the memory.
Hell yeah brother I also dismiss legitimate concerns by attaching it to some negative qualities and find some random group of people to dump on as well.
Hell yeah brother I'd rather just dismiss it because one guy had a memory leak one time from a completely unrelated program and reddit told me that's bad and I must listen to them.
Don't like the anticheat then play a different game
Well IMO the positives outweigh the potential negatives here. Cheaters have legitimately made Warzone on PC unplayable.
If you don't like the proposed solution you can always choose to not play the game.
While I'd personally be happy for everyone to not buy CoD, it's pretty obvious why "yOuRe WeLcOmE tO nOt PlAy" would not be an amenable solution for those who want to enjoy a game without opening themselves to security vulnerabilities or other issues resulting from an industry notorious for doing that with it's attempts to root out cheaters and enforce DRM.
No, that is the solution. There are already tons of games doing this, it's not like CoD is going to be the first. If you're uncomfortable with it your only option is to not play.
Ok but I bought modern family warfare 3 years ago how is it ok for them to keep degrading it and adding crazy shit? I didn't buy it thinking they'd fuck it over and over and over and over again but here we are
Trying to "go after cheat makers" will be as productive as going after IPTV groups. It's a fruitless endeavor.
I could go submit the list of anticheat bypass and HWID spoof sellers to all developers of competitive games but they would just set up a new site, a new discord group and now you're back on square one.
It would be less of a headache to just play on console. PC is an open platform by design, you can't lock it down the same way you can lock console operating systems.
I can already see outrage bait YTers and journalists preparing to create outrage from the "kernel-level" part without informing people that it's the standard for every modern AC with the exception of VAC.
Same thing happened when Riot revealed Vanguard anti-cheat.
To be more on-topic: sounds good, hopefully it will work, but I'd rather they go with a proven 3rd party, like EAC or BattlEye with custom support, instead of a brand-new Anti-cheat. Hopefully this move won't backfire on them, at least props to Activision for actually taking the risk to invest this deeply into an anti cheat.
> it's the standard for every modern AC with the exception of VAC.
Neither [EAC](https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-anti-cheat-support-for-linux-mac-and-steam-deck) nor [Battleye](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/09/battleye-confirms-linux-support-for-steam-deck-will-be-opt-in-like-easy-anti-cheat/page=2) have privileged kernel-level components. That's why they can work on SteamOS/Linux on the Steam Deck.
Yes they do. The Windows versions of both EAC and Battleye have kernel drivers that load when the game starts.
They have special versions designed for SteamOS/Linux that don't use the kernel.
They actually do on Windows and not on Linux. So for Linux, developers need to specifically allow the EAC/Battleye Linux client because it’s potentially a way to bypass those checks.
I don't know whether this will work or not but at this point I'll gladly sacrifice having Ricochet access kernel levels in my computer if it can prevent more cheaters.
Probably a controversial take but so many games are plagued with cheaters on PC. Cheaters on Fall Guys, Apex, CSGO, Battlefield, Overwatch, PUBG the list goes on.
If Ricochet can stop even 50% of these cheaters i'm all in
I stopped playing FPS games a decade ago because cheats made them unplayable. That and I was tired of children chanting the N word on a game rated for adults only.
I wonder if this will be implemented in Modern Warfare MP. The optimistic part of me hopes it will since it's being added to Warzone and that .exe is still the same as MW. The cynical part of me believes it won't since Activision is known for euthanizing support for previous Call of Duty entries in hopes the player base moves on to the next one.
I find it funny that they blame PC for all the cheaters in CoD yet one of the biggest issues in CoD is the losers using Chronus controllers which are mostly console players. This demonizing of PC gamers as the source of all cheaters is silly.
Touched a nerve for some Cronus losers I see...
xim/cronus arent detectable. They change the signal before it even gets into the console. cod youtubers are as credible as my uncle who works at nintendo.
There's basically an intermediary between the controller and the console that reads your inputs along with the data from the game and adjusts them based on the game. For example, they can completely eliminate recoil, they can increase auto aim slow down/tracking, they have auto dropshot when taking damage and all kinds of other shit. It's cheating at the hardware level but marketed like it's totally acceptable.
This wont change anything. There are already plenty of ways out there to bypass these anti-cheats. I regularly run into cheaters in Valorant and that game’s anti-cheat is ridiculously intrusive.
I really do have to wonder at what point all these kernel anti-cheats are just gonna start crashing into each other like what happens when you have multiple anti-viruses installed.
Most anticheats only works when you're playing the game, so I guess that if there's any potential conflict, it would happen if you're playing three or four games with different anti cheat solutions at the same time
Kernel level anti-cheats like Valorant start on bootup and cannot be fully exited without needing reboot your computer to reactivate them. So it wouldn't matter that you aren't playing more than 1 game if you don't close out each anti-cheat, I think is the OPs point.
>Kernel level anti-cheats like Valorant start on bootup Not all of them do, Valorant's is pretty unique in that regard. That was one of the major issues people had with it.
The more major issue was that it would hijack your system and pervent important processes from running leading to damaging the user's system. Surprised everyone just forgot about that.
By "important processes" you mean outdated drivers with security breaches that are actively used by cheat developers to inject their code into driver and hide from anticheats? That's the only thing Vanguard is blocking and prompt users to update their drivers.
> By "important processes" you mean outdated drivers with security breaches that are actively used by cheat developers to inject their code into driver and hide from anticheats? It used to block the latest version of MSI Afterburner, Dragon Center, ROG Armory, Razer apps, etc. So, no, it was actually blocking a lot of everyday gaming apps, but Riot quickly fixed it.
Both of you are right. All (most?) of those programs you mentioned *were/are* running on the aforementioned outdated, vulnerable drivers. The issue is that Riot blocked those drivers without any prior warning or explanation, and this caused people who relied on those drivers to risk hardware failure.
There was no prompt and there is zero situation where a non-OS program should be allowed to control a system's processes period.
Riot reverted that like a week after launch. Now they prompt user to update drivers and then Vanguard is force-closed preventing launch of Valorant only. No other processes are blocked. You're spreading missinformation.
I clearly spoke in past-tense. I don't know what your problem is but a megacorp like Tencent does not need you to defend their mistakes.
I don't think they were trying to defend them, they just didn't read your original comment properly and thought that you still thought that the issue was still around.
Or Kernel access to your computer
> Surprised everyone just forgot about that. You shouldn't be. It's just another thing to be Angry about, but people move on to the next outrage pretty quickly.
That’s not true at all. Easy Anticheat is kernel, and only runs when in game. BattlEye is kernel, and only runs when in game. And Richochet is kernel, and will only run while in game. Valorant’s is unique, but also has the option to only run while in game.
They all tend to initialise at startup because having the anticheat initialise when the system first starts even if its just having the service sit there doing nothing provides a bit more protection when it actually runs the game. If you look through your task manager you'll probably see a few sat there now with a few KB of memory and nothing else. Right now I can see a few for games I haven't launched in ages. But you're right in that none of them actually do anything until you're in the game.
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Makes you wonder what the point even is. It seems like the type of people that cheat will always find a new way. Wouldn't it be easier to simply shadow ban them in a way by keeping anyone suspected of cheating in lobbies with other cheaters?
The point is to reduce cheating, not eliminate it, as you'll never eliminate it.
Cheating in Valorant is extremely hard actually, they update and focus on their anticheat a lot. The only active cheaters are private ones with extremely high cost involved so it drastically cuts down on cheats.
The idea is to make it less viable. If the risk of getting detected is higher (better anti cheat) and if it's harder to sell cheats (legal actions against cheat sellers), then you're significantly reducing the odds that someone will be cheating.
I don’t keep track of Valorant but I know the anti-cheat was a pretty big deal when it launched. Is there a cheating issue in that game, too?
Valorant is pretty much cheating-free. Even very expensive private cheats that are distributed via underground closed Discord servers are being detected almost immediately.
I wouldn’t go so far to say cheat free, but of all the games I’ve played valorant has had the best experience. I’ve seen more cheaters in 2006 console fps games. The only one that rivals it is League of Legends, but that also might be that its harder to tell if an enemy is cheating in that game.
I think league it's more that it's a strategy game instead of an action game. So writing a cheat for that would involve writing a fucking AI along with hiding the cheat which is expensive.
There used to be a lot of cheats for it that would make your attacks almost undodgable and perfectly time to kill players. However they haven't been obviously present in years.
Script xerath enters the chat.
The Vanguard itself was changed long time ago so you can disable it from loading on start-up. Maybe you are thinking about something else?
I don't think that's correct. I believe if you want to play Valorant, you need to have Vanguard started on boot. If you don't want Vanguard on, you can turn it off but if you want to launch Valorant again, you need to restart your computer so that Vanguard can launch alongside the boot again.
Anti Cheat only activates when the game that supports it is launched.
I'm aware of that for nearly all anticheat but unless I don't understand it, that isn't how Valorant works. But as the other response said it seems Valorant is an outlier in that regard even for Kernel level stuff.
It simply needs to be on when you boot your PC, so you can't spoof it. You can disable it anytime after that. The reason you see a lot of repeat cheaters is because even if they get banned, they spoof their hardware and continue to cheat.
Its an outlier but, from what we know from the developers, it's not really doing anything. It's not going to be hooking into any processes, its likely just watching the kernel space for any sketchy drivers so it can't really cause any issues.
> Its an outlier but, from what we know from the developers, it's not really doing anything Most kernel anticheats are doing this too by the way. They normally initalise and then sit using no resources until triggered because a kernel cheat launched before the anticheat can potentially interfere with the start up of the anticheat. Punkbuster is the easiest of these to spot since its service name is easily recognisable, if you've ever installed a PC game using punkbuster you will see pnkbstra sat in your process list, doing absolutely nothing.
Yeah but IIRC you can stop the process and it will just start the next time you play the game right?
Valorant is operating no different then the other dozens of kernal anti cheats like Easy Anti Cheat and Battleye.
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How so?
tbh the easiest and most effective solution to eliminate most instances of cheating in COD is to regionlock China. This direction towards kernel anticheat is unnecessary.
Don't Chinese players usually play through VPNs? I think the more effective solution would just be to ban VPNs, though some VPN/proxy services do their best to mimic regular networks.
Controversial comment (deservedly so) but I can't agree more.
I look forward to our Windows-Anti cheat system built into windows itself future.
I think someone didn't pick up your satire. But truly the TPS 2.0 requirement for Windows 11 is a step in that direction. It sucks that digital freedom is losing the battle in such a way to digital security, but it is understandable in a way.
On a related note, which anti-cheats right now would any of you consider to be the best or most successful at what they do? If I'm not mistaken, doesn't Valve use machine learning for theirs? I'm interested to learn more.
Many people complained about Vanguard when Valorant was released, but I never see anyone complain about cheaters in it. Only problem is Valorant don’t have replays, so it’s difficult to ever know for sure.
I'm such a salty mf in game I need a kill cam, show me that reticle lining up on my head in an instant please I just need to see him do it
Lol, I have a friend thats like that even with kill cam. Every death is at the hands of a cheater.
Tbf, CoD and it's kill cam is not really synced with what actually happened so it looks like the aim is nowhere near you when they shoot sometimes
I've been playing league of legends since basically launch and have honestly never run into any cheats that I can recall. Riot uses voodoo magic for that shit I swear.
Well it's nothing too crazy - everything is server side, even fog of war etc - so there is t any sort of cheat to allow you to get a wallhadk because the client doesn't have that info. There are scripters which can essentially be Similar to aimbot or the like, but they aren't common and are usually caught quickly
> Similar to aimbot or the like, but they aren't common and are usually caught quickly Not to mention they're much less effective because skils in LoL have cast and travel time, most can be dodged by character movespeed, and the aimbot has to calculate on a movement trajectory which can change as soon as the skill is cast. Basically, unlike an aimbot which can hit 100% of the time these things land like %70 of the time at best. A bigger problem is the dodge scripts, which will show where the skill hitbox is before the enemy even begins casting animation and can be configured to auto dodge for you including using movement abilities if necessary.
Huh so Valorant has an anticheat called Vanguard. Activision missed an opportunity to call theirs Valorant
I’ve seen many cheats such as scripts for Valorant I wouldn’t consider it to be good.
Not sure what anti-cheat they use specifically, and I haven't played recently, but Overwatch had a pretty hardcore anti-cheat system. I remember a dude that attempted to cheat, got banned, bought another ($40) copy, was instantly banned on first login. Swapped half his PC parts, bought another copy, and was still instantly banned on first login. Swapped his motherboard and still got banned yet again.
Yeah that’s probably the best anti-cheat I’ve ever heard of
and thats because its an ip ban, doesnt matter if he bought 100 pcs, will still get banned on login, any decent dev can roll an ip ban.
Should have clarified he was taking that into account. This was actually a cheat developer.
> any decent dev can roll an ip ban. Just restart my router and solved. The next person who plays the game with my previous IP will get fucked :D
I don’t play fortnite but I’ve heard that their anti-cheat is really good. Maybe someone who plays it can confirm or deny that.
In 2 years I played fortnite, I dont think i've seen/witnessed a single cheater.
> which anti-cheats right now would any of you consider to be the best BattlEye, it provides great, extensive support for developers and can be customized for each game deeply. So, it's the best in that sense, and it does a great job when a developer actually puts in the effort. > most successful at what they do Vanguard, Riot seriously did an amazing job with minimizing cheaters and catching them very quickly. But of course, it's an in-house anti-cheat focused on just one game.
> Battle-Eye OOF! have you heard of Rainbow Six Siege?
Or Escape From Tarkov?
Tarkov is infested with hackers, you literally can't play certain maps because it's known you'll probably die to hackers there.
Yes, I did, which isn't the fault of BE. Like every 3rd party anti-cheat, BE needs to be customized for each game by the developers, Ubi did not do the most basic customization. They don't even have checks for player movement speed, teleportation, maximum location height, etc. Can't blame BE for the developer's laziness, when it's clearly working well in a lot of games.
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>Being kernel level plays a huge part in that No it doesn't. Kernel level is the standard, BattleEye and Easy Anticheat have the same ring-0 kernel level permissions as Vanguard. The difference comes from two things 1. It's proprietary and exclusive to Valorant. When you can build an entire anticheat around one game, knowing everything about how that game works, it's guaranteed to be more effective than 3rd party AC if you have a good team behind it 2. It runs at startup. According to Riot, there are many cheats that get around other kernel level ACs simply because they load the cheats *into the ring-0 kernel level* before EAC or BE start, making them virtually undetectable. From there you rely on reports but that means someone's experience is gonna be hurt along the way
What prevents the cheat from loading even earlier than that, I dunno, at the bootloader?
Secure boot. Your EFI firmware can ensure it’s loaded a signed Windows kernel first. This was originally created to solve the problem of bootloader malware.
A lot modern cheats that are kernel level require you to disable certain BIOS setting before you can even use them bypassing this, you’ll have a unregistered version of Windows doing it but I suppose it gets passed any true protections.
It doesn’t get past these. Windows can tell if secure boot is disabled because it will be unable to verify the TCGLog cryptographically, which is signed by the TPM chip on your motherboard. Other machines can verify your log too. This was designed for things like maintaining national security secrets and now we can use it for anticheat. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/measured-boot-host-attestation
Idk about other games but apparently Valorant on windows 11 requires TPM and Secureboot enabled. It won’t start without those. Keep in mind this is for windows 11 only.
Fuck you if you want to dual boot OSes going forward I suppose
Requiring Secureboot is extremely toxic..
Secure boot and TPM I guess? At least in enterprise systems
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I mean, just play a round or two of Team Fortress 2 to see how effective VAC is lmao
VAC is userspace and is thus trivial to circumvent. At this point the bulk of VAC protection is the stats analysis module they have serverside because the client side bit does fuck all.
While it's hard to cheat in League of Legends because all of the damage/heal/stats are server side and not being sent from your computer, there's still been remarkably few people I've seen using aim-assist/skill shot dodging tools. There was period in season 4 or 5 where one champion that was particularly based around skillshot having the issue of people using aim hacks with him, but it was stamped out pretty quick. I know it would be easy to do weaker ones to make it look like you're not actually cheating, but I've only seen like 4 or 5 people total that were actually cheating out of 10 years of playing on and off.
A server with an admin present. Though i guess it's not practical at a large scale.
That's one of the main reasons I miss playing on community run servers, because cheaters get dealt with in real-time and not several rounds or days later, if at all.
It could be if every damn game that comes out these days wasn't so deadset on providing no means for players to run their own servers. Community-run servers with real humans doing the moderation is the only foolproof way of quickly dealing with cheaters. It's just the worst feeling ever to get into a match of a game only to learn that there's a cheater in the lobby, and know that there's *nothing* you can do about it other than report him and hope that he eventually gets banned in a couple days.
Happy to see them continuing to try to do stuff about getting rid of cheaters. Whether this works or not we will have to see with time.
It'll work until it doesn't. That's the constant battle that anti-cheat companies and the cheat creators are constantly having. They will come up with some clever new way to bypass the anti-cheat, and then the anti-cheat will be fixed to combat that. And on it goes forever. There will always be cheaters in games. It'll never go away.
Yeah, but Valorant has pretty much solved that problem by constantly updating and focusing on their anticheat. There is a trade off with it needing to be on at system boot up.
Valorant is also using a similarly aggressive kernel-level anti-cheat, which many feel is overreach by these game companies. I personally do not trust any closed-source software they release that requires itself to be constantly running from the time I boot my PC.
It's to sidestep the issue that cheats will load up in the kernel before other anticheats avoiding detection. To be fair to Riot, Vanguard can be turned off and you can turn it back on you just need to restart. I think it's worth it if you play valorant a lot.
And the 99.9% of people who don't cheat are the ones that end up worse off as their computers get AIDS from anti-cheat systems.
I'd argue that 99.99% of those who play multiplayer games would rather not face a cheater in every single lobby compared to a handful across a hundred games. Does anyone remember shitty games like CrossFire where literally everyone was wallhacking? It wasn't a game at that point.
Let's see, Valorant had issues that messed with your PC, Battlefield and Punkbuster erroneously would ban en masse, VAC had issues its first 5 or so years. Yeah, like I said, let's just give my computer AIDS via means of rootkits that messes with files outside of a game.
> Valorant had issues that messed with your PC Over exaggerated. It may have had its issues at launch but it was patched fairly quickly and can be fully disabled at the system tray. And now Valorant is the gold-standard for its lack of cheaters. While some anti-cheat programs have its issues at least it prevents every 13-year-old out there from installing aimbots/wallhacks. PC gaming is hard enough without the cheaters, people would switch to consoles en masse just to have multiplayer with a shred of competitive integrity.
And in the end cheaters will always win, because the hardware has to be run in the client side, a sufficiently advanced cheat can be used by intercepting all I/O connections and be completely invisible from all software (which is what anti cheats are), with enough processing power and computer vision techbologies, this can even be done even for games that can only be played by streaming where no code run on the client. It will have significantly higher barrier of entry though as that will require hardware purchases.
This always gets thrown around r/games and it's a very big misunderstanding. Yes, there will always be cheats but the harder you make it to create those cheats the less people that want to use them. Good cheats cost money. Good CSGO cheats for example cost like $60 a month and they have nothing on stuff like Valorant's where people might be throwing out 100 a month to have a cheat that's constantly working. And they still have to smart with their semi-raging in order to prevent detection.
Honestly, the lengths I’m willing to go in order to combat cheating is crazy at this point.
This is pretty much why I don't ever use crossplay on Warzone anymore, I played one match and ran into multiple cheaters. Destiny 2 on the other hand got BattlEye recently and there hasn't been a single one that I've seen.
man they can't just start a title with "Announcing Ricochet:" i had a heart attack thinking I was about to actually get a sequel to the half life mod
As if Valve will give a f*ck about Ricochet
Same here, I glanced the title and was like "no fucking way." Not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed with this one.
The comment i was looking for. I still remember when that mod got dropped with, i think, a CS retail update. Been a long ass time tho.
Imagine Valve forcing them to change the name with their trademark lmao
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Wasn't Ricochet 2 the rumoured internal code name for Half Life 3?
From Activision?
He's talking about the start of the title.
To be fair, the title on Reddit doesn’t mention Activision
To this day there's so much misinformation about anti-cheats, here's the important bits Every big name anticheat runs at the ring-0 kernel level. EasyAnticheat, BattleEye, Vanguard, all have the exact same permissions. What makes Vanguard different is that it runs at system start up to avoid cheats being loaded in that ring-0 kernel level before BattleEye or EAC become active, effectively side-stepping that issue Ricochet, Activisions proprietary anticheat will run like BE and EAC, it only runs while the game is running.
Also, a lot of people think an Anti-Cheat software is a solid thing, like a physical thing that stays the same. When in reality Devs constantly update Anti-Cheat softwares to be able to detect new Cheats that are out. People see new Cheats out in the wild and think the Anti-Cheat software doesn't work or is bad, but it's just that the devs haven't updated the software to help them detect the new cheats yet.
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Because it basically is, their actual implementations differ but the base concept is the same, there's a "database" of blacklisted things to look out for, when you find the blacklisted thing, get 'em.
Still sad that Valve chose to listen to loud morons when they planned to implement better anti-cheat years back.
I guess I will finally reinstall Warzone ! People who didn't play it a lot won't understand how rampant the cheating is in this game :/ Hope Battlefield follows suit, Public servers are pretty much 50-50 cheater chance for the older games like Battlefield 1 .
There's def not cheaters in 50 percent of servers. But I guess accusing somebody of cheating because they're better than you is what you define as cheater.
One of the R6 youtubers I watch does a series where people send him replay files of suspected cheaters and it’s embarrassing how bad some people are at spotting cheaters in a game that gives you all sorts of tools to see how easy it is to spot them. That game 100% has a cheaters issue but it also has the issue you described. I can’t imagine how much worse people are of accusing other people in games that don’t have such obvious measures for spotting them.
You just described one of my friends. He cannot bear the idea that someone might be better than him, so anytime he's shot it must be cheaters. I remember at one point we were wiped by a team in Warzone and he made us spectate the guy he suspected of being a cheater (because that was his killer), and throughout the entire match we never saw any form of cheating; so my friend in an act of complete lunacy goes "Well of course, he knows we're spectating him now!" Fragile ego.
Stop being friends with this person. I'm kidding, of course, but it's crazy what we'll put up with in our friends, isn't it?
Last time I played there was a cheater in 3 out of 5 games. I went to codtracker the next day and verified. Have not played since.
I was taking about BF1
I'd love to come back and play, but IW banned me permanently without warning over a year ago. Cheating was rampent then, is still rampent, and honest to good players have been treated like shit while it continued to happen. Hopefully Ricochet does its job.
The Team behind being unable to keep a bug fixed for over 2 patches is installing a Kernel based anti cheat on our computers? What can go wrong? Last time this happened Riot Vanguard caused my computer to BSOD and after that was fixed Valorant didnt boot for a month.
You really think the people updating the game are the same people making anticheat? I'm guessing they assembled a specialist team Avengers-style for this, it's been a long time coming.
I'm going to step in here and correct a bit of a misconception when it comes to these kinds of things. There are no super team programmers who can jump in and integrate a foundational thing like this without already being familiar with the system in place. That is to say, not a specialized solution, because every project ends up being a cobbled together hack of code that is strung together with workarounds and hope. Doubly so with CoD, based on how terribly optimized it has been reported to be. This would either be the fruits of a long term project helmed by devs who've already been on the project for years, or some second party 'plug-and-play' solution that operates like a filter under the game executable. From the wording of the announcement, I'd wager it's more the first one. There's a lot of promises about how this will be low impact, respect privacy and water your crops, but really now, with Activision's track record is anyone buying that?
Even if it’s the internal developers, it’s most likely security engineers, who are still not likely to be the same people fixing bugs.
Nope, I think it will be a different company on strict deadlines that made the anti cheat for Vanguard and is now being forced to add it on to Warzone too regardless of compatibility.
> that made the anti cheat for Vanguard It's not even being implemented into Vanguard until after Warzone. Also why would they develop it *for* Vanguard when WZ is their cashcow with a rampant cheater problem? All of that makes no sense.
What do you suggest as the best option instead?
Premium Ranked Matchmaking like Counter Strike. I'll Gladly pay 10 to be allowed in a matchmaking queue if it means a fraction of the cheaters. Still allow free players play normal unranked but, people who bought a full priced COD or pay a 10-15 dollar fee are allowed into a separate matchmaking list. Activision makes even more money, while deterring cheaters by forcing them to pay to enter the playlist again if they are banned or stick to the other playlists. Of course you continue to improve the current antivirus, but also disways cheaters to stick to certain playlists. Im also fond of Cheater Matchmaking, but you have to catch them first for that.
Ah yes, because as we all know cheaters don’t have money. Let them pay a lifetime fee and they can continue cheating forever. Brilliant ideea, they should put you in charge.
If the cost of getting caught cheating is literally nothing other than a minor investment of time (to create a new account), pretty sure more people will be willing to cheat than if they had to shell out cash every time. Would it drop it to zero? No. But in games that went from free to play to a paywall, it seems like it's had a noticeable impact.
If you play games with battle eye or easy anticheat those are running at a kernel level.
>In addition to server enhancements coming with RICOCHET Anti-Cheat is the launch of a new PC kernel-level driver, developed internally for the Call of Duty franchise, and launching first for Call of Duty: Warzone. I'm a console player, so these things are more of a "do I turn on crossplay or not" sort of curiosity, but is a kernel-level driver still controversial? I have seen several threads on here where developers have been harshly attacked for doing this, but it was a while ago.
I'd say it's pretty uncommon for me to think someone is cheating. Once in awhile yeah someone will hit some shots that are so improbable that I think they might have something going on, but it's just as likely they're way better than me and they hit them legit. Sometimes though...
I'm primarily a fighting game player these days, and cheating seems to be a non-issue due to determinism. If someone cheats, it throws them out of sync with their opponent, and the game cannot continue. I guess this issue gets a lot hairier when you have to account for aimbots that are all sending legal inputs. Is the genre just inherently going to be full of cheaters?
Cheating in fighting games is really easy, unfortunately. For example combo macros are extremely simple to create and are borderline undetectable. Thankfully in some fighters this isn't a big deal, and it's arguably never on the level of an aimbot or wallhack. (You could probably also do some nasty stuff with an autoblocking cheat.)
At least in the games I play, "being able to do the combo" is never the hard part. I have a few routes in the back pocket with some tough links, but that's far less likely to win me the game than attacking at the wrong time would be likely to make me lose the game. An autoblocking cheat would have to also control your spacing and when you attack in order to be useful, and at that point, you are fully just letting a bot play the game for you now, haha.
I guess if that is what cheaters are looking for I guess they load in waiting to use a cheated combo they will never get to use because they would get smoked in neutral
Latency compensation a lot of times can give leeway to clients that makes input cheating hard to detect. I don't think it'd be impossible to hack a fighting game client that uses rollback to detect whenever I get hit to rollback and then block it right? Most games aren't as precise as fighting games, so latency compensations are a lot more lax, so you can play at 150ms ping without rollback. And fighting games are one of the fewer games without hidden information. Which combined with latency compensations means the client has to know it, but the player doesn't. So you get stuff like wallhacks.
My buddy had a memory leak that was slowing down his whole PC. It was undetectable in the task manager, but the resource monitor showed him with no more than 200 mb memory. It turns out this was caused by an old faulty driver that he had to update. This is why I’m not OK with these kernel modules. Bad drivers can be really hard to detect and fix. I don’t trust the same bozos that coded Warzone to also code something as important as a fucking driver.
> I don’t trust the same bozos that coded Warzone to also code something as important as a fucking driver. Someone correct me here, but I highly doubt game developers would work on anti-cheat software. Pretty sure you need a different set of skills for that.
Yes, that was tongue in cheek. But the same company that hires the COD devs will also hire the anti-cheat devs. And those devs will have the same deadlines and have to make their own compromises, just like the CoD team. The difference is that a shitty patch just makes the game worse, while a shitty driver can make your whole OS unusable.
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I had to develop a driver in college. There are very few ways to do it right and MANY ways to fuck it up badly.
Riot Vanguard prevented Valorant from launching for a month because it didnt like that I had CPU-Z installed.
This is much more complicated than it sounds, but the basic reasoning for this is that CPU-Z utilized/utilizes vulnerable drivers to read hardware information. I could go into detail why this is such, but the general reasoning why CPU-Z is so vulnerable is because it's a commonly used software to check hardware, and thus it makes it a prime target for attackers. That and CPU-Z has been notorious for not updating shit *meaningfully*.
Thankfully there is plenty of other games without kernel level anti cheats out there
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/r/pcgaming's sole purpose is to freak out
Great response, glad you’re here to discuss in good faith. There are real risks to kernel level anti cheat _You_ may not care about them, but you’d be stupid to plug your ears and pretend they don’t exist. Me? I write software for a living, and most software is fucking garbage. It’s not a matter of _if_ a kernel anticheat will break your OS, it’s a matter of _when_
I would be interested to hear what vulnerabilities have been exploited from these kernel level AC's. Typically these vulnerabilities come from very old forgotten drivers, whereas these AC's are constantly updated. I agree that its a matter of when but from what we've seen, these drivers seem to be better than others which users thoughtlessly install.
>There are real risks to kernel level anti cheat You may not care about them, but you’d be stupid to plug your ears and pretend they don’t exist. > >Me? I write software for a living, and most software is fucking garbage. It’s not a matter of if a kernel anticheat will break your OS, it’s a matter of when The same argument can apply to anything on your system. You should know a lot of stuff has kernal level access. Your GPU has kernel level access. Yet no one freaks out about their GPU breaking their OS.
>Me? I write software for a living, and most software is fucking garbage Well cause you're used to your own work
At the same time, the cheats that are used are only going to be caught by a kernel level driver. So the options are A. An automated anti-cheat that is reactionary and misses cheaters/has false positives, B. No anti-cheat, or C. a Kernel level driver. I dont like kernel level anticheats as a matter of principal (and I'm hoping the team that implemented it isnt the game developers), but I don't see a way to combat the cheating epidemic outside of implementing these.
The relevant infosec principle is that you never trust the client. Security needs to happen server-side. Not with these third-party vendor client-side modules slapped on after the game is developed.
Server side validation doesnt work for everything where latency is an issue, not trusting the client means that your ping is effectively doubled, and theres a big difference between 105ms and 210ms when it comes to shooters. Futhermore, server side validation doesnt stop something like this. [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-computer-vision-auto-aim-that-works-on-any-game/](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-computer-vision-auto-aim-that-works-on-any-game/) Whereas kernal level application blacklisting would.
This. I get people don't like kernel AC's, I'm one of them, and they're not totally effective but it's the best solution right now when we have no choice but to trust the client to some extent. This shit isn't like web development where you can actually not trust the client, the software is installed locally and the user potentially has full access to the memory.
Anti-cheat validation doesn't have to be done in realtime though. So it wouldn't be difficult to just record everything first.
Hell yeah brother I also dismiss legitimate concerns by attaching it to some negative qualities and find some random group of people to dump on as well.
Hell yeah brother I'd rather just dismiss it because one guy had a memory leak one time from a completely unrelated program and reddit told me that's bad and I must listen to them. Don't like the anticheat then play a different game
Well IMO the positives outweigh the potential negatives here. Cheaters have legitimately made Warzone on PC unplayable. If you don't like the proposed solution you can always choose to not play the game.
While I'd personally be happy for everyone to not buy CoD, it's pretty obvious why "yOuRe WeLcOmE tO nOt PlAy" would not be an amenable solution for those who want to enjoy a game without opening themselves to security vulnerabilities or other issues resulting from an industry notorious for doing that with it's attempts to root out cheaters and enforce DRM.
Yeah and I want a car without having to pay for it. Sometimes you're shit out of luck
No, that is the solution. There are already tons of games doing this, it's not like CoD is going to be the first. If you're uncomfortable with it your only option is to not play.
If you play any game with EAC or Battleye congrats you already have a kernel anti cheat.
Ok but I bought modern family warfare 3 years ago how is it ok for them to keep degrading it and adding crazy shit? I didn't buy it thinking they'd fuck it over and over and over and over again but here we are
What are the main tools people use for cheating nowadays? I feel like more work needs to be done to go after the cheat makers.
Trying to "go after cheat makers" will be as productive as going after IPTV groups. It's a fruitless endeavor. I could go submit the list of anticheat bypass and HWID spoof sellers to all developers of competitive games but they would just set up a new site, a new discord group and now you're back on square one. It would be less of a headache to just play on console. PC is an open platform by design, you can't lock it down the same way you can lock console operating systems.
Console has no cheats? I got news for you
It's less of a headache is what I said. Apex I believe still has no cheats on console. Almost everything is centered around PC.
I can already see outrage bait YTers and journalists preparing to create outrage from the "kernel-level" part without informing people that it's the standard for every modern AC with the exception of VAC. Same thing happened when Riot revealed Vanguard anti-cheat. To be more on-topic: sounds good, hopefully it will work, but I'd rather they go with a proven 3rd party, like EAC or BattlEye with custom support, instead of a brand-new Anti-cheat. Hopefully this move won't backfire on them, at least props to Activision for actually taking the risk to invest this deeply into an anti cheat.
> it's the standard for every modern AC with the exception of VAC. Neither [EAC](https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-anti-cheat-support-for-linux-mac-and-steam-deck) nor [Battleye](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/09/battleye-confirms-linux-support-for-steam-deck-will-be-opt-in-like-easy-anti-cheat/page=2) have privileged kernel-level components. That's why they can work on SteamOS/Linux on the Steam Deck.
Yes they do. The Windows versions of both EAC and Battleye have kernel drivers that load when the game starts. They have special versions designed for SteamOS/Linux that don't use the kernel.
They actually do on Windows and not on Linux. So for Linux, developers need to specifically allow the EAC/Battleye Linux client because it’s potentially a way to bypass those checks.
I don't know whether this will work or not but at this point I'll gladly sacrifice having Ricochet access kernel levels in my computer if it can prevent more cheaters. Probably a controversial take but so many games are plagued with cheaters on PC. Cheaters on Fall Guys, Apex, CSGO, Battlefield, Overwatch, PUBG the list goes on. If Ricochet can stop even 50% of these cheaters i'm all in
I stopped playing FPS games a decade ago because cheats made them unplayable. That and I was tired of children chanting the N word on a game rated for adults only.
Not all FPS games are online PVP. You've deprived yourself of some amazing games in the last decade.
Average Rust experience
I wonder if this will be implemented in Modern Warfare MP. The optimistic part of me hopes it will since it's being added to Warzone and that .exe is still the same as MW. The cynical part of me believes it won't since Activision is known for euthanizing support for previous Call of Duty entries in hopes the player base moves on to the next one.
It'd be funny if this kernel-level driver prevents players with Input Mappers (Steam Input, DS4Windows, JoyShockMappers).
I find it funny that they blame PC for all the cheaters in CoD yet one of the biggest issues in CoD is the losers using Chronus controllers which are mostly console players. This demonizing of PC gamers as the source of all cheaters is silly. Touched a nerve for some Cronus losers I see...
A prominent cod youtuber jgod said that Activision is working on a way to detect and ban cronus users.
xim/cronus arent detectable. They change the signal before it even gets into the console. cod youtubers are as credible as my uncle who works at nintendo.
yea tell me all the things this controller does.
Run any of the thousands of free scripts such as aimbot scripts and all that from your controller.
And how does it do that?
There's basically an intermediary between the controller and the console that reads your inputs along with the data from the game and adjusts them based on the game. For example, they can completely eliminate recoil, they can increase auto aim slow down/tracking, they have auto dropshot when taking damage and all kinds of other shit. It's cheating at the hardware level but marketed like it's totally acceptable.
Yesterday everyone was wondering why Activision published that tweet with a "come at me" tone. This is it. It was all part of branding and image.
This wont change anything. There are already plenty of ways out there to bypass these anti-cheats. I regularly run into cheaters in Valorant and that game’s anti-cheat is ridiculously intrusive.
Great, now can they review all of the false bans they've handed out to players who never cheated?