I hear Dota is better anyways and I think it runs natively.
It runs but the Vulcan implementation is shit so you will have worse performance.
DotA 2 works right? Just upgrade to DotA 2
Yeah, but what if I want:
- pre-2010 graphics
- a free rootkit
- a single ugly stagnant map with no skins
- a single and unchangeable and uninspired drone of an announcer
- a game whose bug-ridden, laggy client leaks memory and processes
- a game whose client prevents you from spectating pro games, past and present
- a pro scene rampant with match fixing and ads injected into the horrendous casting
If not League of Legends, where else am I gonna get all of that from?
I love that you mentioned that abomination they call a client. Something so bad a developer solo wrote a better one only to have them hire that person and quietly kill the project.
Fuck Riot. Never playing their games again. If you’re going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies. Besides, they should be doing anticheat at the server level not spying on the boot sequence of client PCs. That shit is unnecessary for a fucking banking app let alone a goddamn game. It’s just a game, let us enjoy it rather than making such a ridiculously over the top response to cheating.
If you’re going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies.
This, a thousand times. I can understand requiring anti-cheat for Ranked matches, but some of us just wanna screw around. If there’s no progression tied to the match why should they care?
(Microtransactions, if I had to guess)
Yup, at the very minimum let me continue to play TFT. You can’t really cheat there, and if you could, that’s more likely due to an underlying gamplay/UX problem.
Just tried TFT on Android device, and … well, its time to let this shit go.
The issue with this entire statement is that despite the amount of system access they want, and the complexity of the software they’ve made, cheating is as rampant as it was before. The fact that they continue treating Linux as an issue, just as Ubisoft do with Siege, or Bungie with Destiny, just shows that there is a much larger issue at hand
Even worse, it proves that they themselves don’t understand the entire psycho-social scope and workings of cheating. Cheating is not an entirely technical problem. It’s multidimensional.
So … do we have any evidence that rootkits actually decrease the amount of cheating? Like… At all?
The awnser is a firm no. Cheaters have moved to hardware based cheats with DMA boards. On valorant some cheaters have started exploiting remote play services to use machine vision based aim bots. Neither of those two methods can be detected by a kernel level anti cheat.
And now they have more fun working with hardware than software. No needing to reverse engineer the game either since you’re just processing display output and executing inputs on separate hardware like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi
With DMA based cheats I disagree as if you were developing a DMA based cheat you would still need to understand how the game works so you can figure out what memory adresses are for what part of the game.
You’re assuming the anti cheat won’t refuse to run if a DMA device is installed.
Pfft… that’s easy to solve. Just ask them to identify all the fire hydrants.
it totally decreases the amount of cheating by a lot. Like the biggest decrease in history. That’s right. It’s huge. /trumpvoice
Also
trust me bro
I wouldn’t trust you if you were a valid SSL cert, bro
Come oooon. I’m google.com. really! Would I lie to you?
If you’re google.com, then yes. But then that would mean you are not google.com, which would mean you are google.com.
tldr for anyone:
They aren’t fixing it. fuck y’all.
Also - it’s not a rootkit - it just loads at boot and has higher privileges than the userspace that you can’t contr… oh. it’s a rootkit. They don’t want you to call it that though. It’s not cancer… it’s a growth.
at this point i want to cheat on an approved, bare-metal windows machine, just as a fuck you.
but then i remember this game is awful and i dont wanna touch it anyway.
Funnily enough that’s how a lot of modern cheats work. it’s on a separate box. Good luck catching that automatically vanguard. Hard to out-ring the hardware layer.
If it’s not server based detection it’s exploitable.
I’m not in that line of work but make no mistake if it hasn’t been yet: a cheat vector will probably involve patching the anti cheat software or attacking how it communicates.
there are arduino-based cheats now, you dont even need an expensive box, it hijacks your mouse for aimbots and such. thinking of putting one of mine to use.
Yep, this is what I was referencing in other responses. Purely from a solution perspective it is positively the ultimate “get bent” from the cheat community. Add in some randomness and suddenly there’s zero difference between a ‘good session’ and scripting.
Next up: sorry you don’t have xyz brand mice you can’t play our games. Consumers get forced to buy shit they don’t want or need and meanwhile the cheat / hack community release a patch to emulate it.
It’s the same old cat and mouse game. There are solutions - but a rootkit isn’t it.
not looking forward to mice DRM of all things. but then it will be funny to see their games wilt because most people don’t own the xyz hardware they require. im willing to bet arduinos can fake hardware ids too.
So basically, “it’s too hard, and our engineers are not good at their jobs.”
It’s Harder to solve than you think. I came upon a documentary a while ago where they go a bit more in depth on the subject and what cheaters can do nowadays.
No company has solved the problem tbh. Even games like counter strike are riddled with cheaters and even on faceit there’s plenty of people that are dodgy AF and likely cheat.
It’s not an easy problem to solve and it is, AFAIK, still an unsolved problem in shooters. So your comment is a bit salty. Might as well claim every game engineer worldwide isnt good at their job because nobody has solved this yet. Not that I’m defending riot.
The rootkit “solution” is complete bullshit. It is completely disproportionate and a massive security/privacy risk. And to top it off it’s not even a solution that’s good enough.
This is the documentary I saw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M&
It did remove my appetite for playing PvP shooters for a while.
I’m sorry but I just don’t buy that.
First of all, you can’t solve a problem you’re not willing to work on.
Second, no one is expecting a solution that bans 100% of cheaters and has zero false positives. We all know that’s unrealistic. So saying no one has solved it yet is kind of misleading. There are existing solutions that work well enough for most people.
Third, there are solutions that can run entirely on the server side that would work for every system. Riot just isn’t willing to use them.
My comment stands. Bad engineers that can’t solve a problem other people have already come up with solutions for.
The rootkit isn’t a solution. It’s a bandaid - and a bad one at that. Moba and FPS hacks have already moved outside the hardware of the PC or into the virtual space. It’s a beware of dog sign on the fence meant to scare users… while ultimately doing very little (besides providing a vector real hackers and tools can exploit to gain access to your system.)
Seriously anyone willing to install a rootkit on their system that that company is behind deserves whatever comes their way next.
I fully agree with that. It’s why I quoted “solution” in the first place.
Given the user always has a deeper access to the client (i.e. hardware access) than the anticheat dev does, eliminating cheating is probably unsolvable.
Best bet is probably always going to be a decently funded team dedicated to find and ban cheaters, rather than attempting to prevent them all with a rootkit.
If you have to put a root kit on the client to prevent cheating you have no idea how to implement correct anti-cheat and you should be flogged.
The “distributions” argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)
Beyond that: I don’t play LoL, but the fact that they need such an aggressive rootkit as anti-cheat hints poor game design. As in, why are your players so eager to cheat?
Others might do it for them if they shared the source code 🤷
Typical for a group of people that probably dedicated their whole careers to Windows. Could have just put it plainly that they don’t want to pay engineers that have the skills to do this on Linux.
The “distributions” argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)
My thoughts exactly. It is not unheard of at all for Linux ports to only be guaranteed to function on specific distros. It’s well within the realm of possibility and this is not a real stumbling block at all.
It’s more likely an admission they have to trampoline every gpl function in the kernel which isn’t really easy to do and would let that kernel module run on any other kernel. Otherwise they would have to do a shim like nvidia which would mean a whole other level of issues like saying we support Linux but only Ubuntu which as a non Ubuntu user would mean to me they do not in fact support Linux. I’d vote with walle here but I already don’t own this game as my friends said the user base is terrible years ago but this just means there is no reason to buy any of their games.
I’m guessing that people just like feeling superior to others and video games are a convenient outlet for that. There’s no changing that via game design unless LoL ceases to be a competitive game.
Stop stealing our CPU cycles for high risk rootkits and start mitigating and detecting cheating on the server.
It’s that easy.
I stopped playing games that want this bullshit. Don’t need that shit in my life.
This. Server side anticheat is the only correct detection method. And it’s only part of the solution. Pure automation is pure garbage.
But that wastes their clockcycles to make sure you’re not cheating. So much easier to make everyone’s experience worse so they don’t have to upgrade and build out more servers.
I’ve long believed that the main point of client-side anti-cheat is to serve as security theater.
If the player sees “PROTECTED BY ACME ANTI-CHEAT” on the boot screen of a game, they’re less likely to cry wolf when they get their ass kicked. At least, until they see a blatant example of hacking and lose all faith in the ability of the platform to protect them from it; from that point on, everyone better than them must be cheating from their perspective (speaking from firsthand experience here).
Given how infamously toxic and high-strung the LoL community is, I can only imagine that Riot’s basically at the end of their rope here. If you read the original forum post, they sure make this sound like a Hail Mary. “Sorry, it’s just what we have to do to make sure the game is fair.”
Hilariously, they even undercut their own points in the FAQ:
Q: If Vanguard is so good, why do I still see cheats on VALORANT?
For starters, we do not action every cheat or account instantly. Every ban is like broadcasting a signal to the developer that their cheat has been detected and that they need to “update” it. In order to slow the progression of our “cheat arms race,” we delay bans based on the sophistication and visibility of the cheat and cheater, respectively.
But also, cheaters gonna cheat. [Emphasis mine.] We’ve really driven our preventative layer as far as we can feasibly go without colliding with existing setups and hurting legitimate players. [Linux players aren’t legitimate I guess?]
Also, they’re apparently not bothering enabling Vanguard on OS X because apparently few people have actually developed cheats on it yet. Really tells you what’s the more developer friendly platform, Linux or OS X, doesn’t it? Or maybe the OS X market share is too small to care.
They do also mention using machine learning to detect cheating server-side but lament that it’s not always enough information, and that cheat developers have added “humanization” elements that play more like humans.
My thought is… if a cheat doesn’t make someone obviously better than a human player of a certain skill level, then what does it really matter? Congratulations, you made a bot that’s indistinguishable from a human, thanks for padding our player numbers.
The real problem is that botters don’t pay for microtransactions. And players who buy bot-leveled accounts probably don’t spend a ton either. Why would they? They got everything unlocked for them, they didn’t have to grind for it. That’s all Riot really gives a shit about.
In practice, client side anti cheat is essentially DOA because hardware cheats that analyse the player’s screen on a 2nd computer and proxy inputs to your mouse USB have made it so cheat clients are never actually executing code on the host machine.
At that point, even players cant tell someone is cheating because the cheats aren’t modifying the game state in a noticeable way- they’re still weak to effects that obscure your vision and have inputs that are difficult to differentiate from a “real” player.
IMO cheating is a social problem and one that is totally impossible to beat with rootkits by design.
It’s not easy. And league is free. So banning people won’t work well either. They can’t ban ip addresses either without banning college campuses, some apartment buildings, and Internet cafes.
It’s that easy.
I’m guessing you’re not a programmer yourself? Because it’s really really not that east to /just/ detect in the server side, hacks can be super sofisticsted these days and there are often many client side exploits that you simply cannot detect serverside.
Actually, I am.
Using rootkit anti-cheat is a shortcut that reduces cost for both dev time and hosting time at the expense of your customers’ security and CPU. You also have to lay your cards on the table for those who are attacking you. It is not the right solution for this problem.
Authoritative servers. Never trust the client, especially with information the player shouldn’t have right now. Look at behaviors and group players based on if you think they cheat or not - let the cheaters play together, no need to spoil their fun and let them realize you know they cheat.
People do some or all of this on the server now, but root kitting all machines to try to solve this problem to play video games is one of the dumbest approaches ever and we will realize it one day when a state level actor pops their zero day against a big install base.
This. Having worked on some in-house anti-cheat solutions myself, it absolutely is just offsetting the processing and security cost to the players. The attack vector of having such a rootkit running on so many devices is just not even close to be worth the trade off of catching marginally (if really measurably at all?) more cheaters.
Never trust the client, especially with information the player shouldn’t have right now.
This is a big part of the problem, but it’s not the only problem. If you do all of that stuff right, you can’t build a responsive first person shooter. There’s some level of trust you need to put in the client.
Disclaimer: This is based on my experience playing shooters and as a programmer. I have not worked on anticheat systems hands on.
We see less and less of the “god mode” hacks where players can send the packet for a carpet bomb and the server just blindly trusts it. Or the ludicrous spinbots that spin at an extreme speed and headshot anyone that comes into line of sight.
What we’re seeing is increasingly sophisticated cheats that provide “buffs” to a player’s ability. An AI enhanced aimbot that when you click gently nudges your hand to “auto correct” the shot and then clicks is borderline impossible to detect server side. It looks just like a player moved the mouse and fired.
The “best” method to prevent these folks from cheating seems to be to detect the system or the game has been tampered with.
Maybe the way to deal with that is to just let it happen and deal with smurfs down ranking… So these “soft” cheaters just exist in the “pro tier” where the pros can possibly stand a chance.
One strategy I have seen that I wish more developers would do is sending “honeypot” information to the game client (like a player on the other side of the wall that isn’t really there but an aimbot or a wall hack might incorrectly expose).
Maybe the increasing presence of hardware cheats will result in new strategies that make these things unnecessary. I keep wondering if a TPM could be used to solve this problem someday… But I’m not sure exactly how/we may need faster TPMs.
You don’t necessarily need to detect the cheat itself, you can look at things like players having suddenly higher kill rates and put them into a queue for observation by either more advanced (more expensive) automation to look for cheating or eventually involve a human in the loop.
Even on consoles after a while it becomes obvious that you cannot control the hardware, let alone the software on the client side. Those are the very best argument for this kind of approach and they get cracked eventually.
You don’t necessarily need to detect the cheat itself, you can look at things like players having suddenly higher kill rates and put them into a queue for observation by either more advanced (more expensive) automation to look for cheating or eventually involve a human in the loop.
That’s true, if the player suddenly has higher kill rates. However, that doesn’t work if they’ve been using the cheat from the start on that account. A sufficiently advanced AI powered aim bot would also be nearly indistinguishable from a professional player. Kind of similar to how Google created the CAPTCHA that uses mouse movement … but had to go back to (at least in some cases) the additional old school captcha.
I think by the end of your message you were starting to arc around a little bit to the right way you need to think about clients: as outside your security envelope. (TPM is a joke in my mind, just like client side anti-cheat.)
There are many ways to try to identify and stop cheating on the server side that have not been explored because executives have directed use of off-the-shelf anti-cheat because they do not understand why it is snake oil.
TPM is a joke in my mind
I thought this at first as well, but they have an interesting property.
They have a manufacturer signed private key. If you get the public key from the manufacturer of the TPM, you can actually verify that the TPM as it was designed by the manufacturer performed the work.
That’s a really interesting property because for the first time there’s a way to verify what hardware is doing over the network via cryptography.
Or, if I can extract that key from the hardware, I can pretend to be that hardware whenever I want, right?
Hmmm… I was going to say no because it’s asymmetric crypto, but you’re right if you are somehow able to extract the signed private key, you can still lie… Good point
But… have you considered having control of 0-ring software that runs on hundreds of millions of computers, that can perform targetted updates to change behaviour on just a select few computers, even interact with the network adapters unbeknownst to the OS.
I’m not talking about zero days popping up for this. But rather, this being part of the design?
A less nefarious application: The root kit anti cheats already continuously monitor processes. Say it finds a crypto mining one. It can request the instructions needed to search for a wallet and snatch that off.
A more nefarious one: RK is known to be in the device owned by the kid of a military contractor. Etc.
Trusting the client is a fools errand. So we are in complete agreement. I never understood why the effort isn’t placed on server side. People are very good at knowing when others have cheated. They know this from information that exists on the server side, so with the correct classifier, the server should also be able to know this.
Could they harden their clients somehow or maybe randomize memory locations for things? Seems like their should be a better solution than installing malware to prevent cheating.
I’m a programmer, yes it is. It’s not easy in the sense of easy to implement, it’s easy in the sense that everything else is impossible. Client-side anti-cheat is impossible, and by that I don’t mean hard, I mean perpetual-motion level of impossibility. If someone tells you they implemented a foolproof client-side anti-cheat you should be just as skeptical as if someone tells you they created a perpetual motion. It’s impossible, never going to happen, want an example? Robot using a camera to watch the screen and directly moving the mouse and keyboard, completely undetectable from the client side.
From the server perspective the person is cheating or is behaving like a human. If they’re behaving like a human their behavior is completely indistinguishable from a human, so who cares if they’re cheating?, whatever they’re doing has them still at human level so if the game has skill based matchmaking (which most of these games do) he’ll rise up until his cheating puts him in the same level of more skilled humans and everyone has fun. If he keeps rising forever he’s not on a human level, therefore a cheater. More importantly this also penalizes people who buy bot leveled accounts, because their matches will be all against people they can’t hope to win and the game will not be fun.
Server side can also trick clients into giving up that they’re cheating, e.g. sending ghosts behind walls to check for wall hacks or other similar things to gauge player responses.
But what do I know? I’m just a senior programmer who’s been working on servers for some years. l never worked on the client side anti-cheat though, also never tried to build a perpetual motion machine.
It’s not easy, but it’s really not worth the massive gaping security vulnerability you are giving your users. One disgruntled employee giving out the keys to the castle or one programmer plugging in an infected USB, and every user now has a persistent malicious rootkit. The only way to fix an issue that deep after it gets exploited is to literally throw away your hard drive.
The only way to fix an issue that deep after it gets exploited is to literally throw away your hard drive.
This can’t be right.
Don’t throw your hard drive in the trash. Quarantine the infected computer, and then wipe that hoe and slap your choice of OS back on it and scan/monitor to see if any issues arise.
I’m sorry to disappoint, but with rootkits, that is very real. With that level of permissions, it can rewrite HDD/SSD drivers to install malware on boot.
There’s even malware that can rewrite BIOS/UEFI, in which case the whole motherboard has to go in the bin. That’s much less likely due to the complexity though, but it does exist.
not all rootkits are made to do that. So yes in some cases, throw it in the trash. In others, remediate your machine and move on.
Outside of monitoring individual packets outside of your computer (as in, man in the middle yourself with a spare computer and hoping the malware phones home right when you’re looking) there’s no way of knowing.
Once ring 0 is compromised, nothing your computer says can be trusted. A compromised OS can lie to anti-malware scanners, hide things from the installed software list and process manager, and just generally not show you what it doesnt want to show you. “Just remediate” does not work with rootkits.
Dude… That’s fucked. They should really go a little more in depth on rootkits in the CompTIA A+ study material. I mean, I get that it’s supposed to be a foundational over view of most IT concepts, but it would have helped me not look dumb.
Riot is owned by Tencent. Coincidence?
How far is the company willing to go to prevent cheating? Cameras in people’s homes to make sure they’re not using another computer that you have no access to?
If players tolerate that then competitive gaming is going in a deeper dark pit of proprietary spyware in the name of fighting cheating, an arms race with no end.
I can’t believe they made a shitty Dota clone based off the Arcane animation on Netflix.
I’ve never actually noticed cheaters during the time I played the game. If they cheat and matchmaking puts me against them, it just means that me without cheats and them with cheats are equivalent in skill level, so it’s a fair and fun game. So I don’t see the point in preventing cheats in the first place unless you’re at the very top of the ladder, and there’s so few people up there that it should be easy to just manually ban the cheaters.
I think a part of it is the difference to losing to something “reasonable” vs “unreasonable.”
If you’re clearly really bad at the game when we are in a fight with line of sight but somehow you keep picking off my teammates through walls… That’s the kind of thing where cheating really starts to get annoying.
You may still be on the same skill level overall, but for specific parts of the game they have super powers, and it just feels ridiculous.
Smurfing is also a real issue because cheaters seem to overlap with trolls that just want everyone else to have a bad time, so they’ll spend a bunch of time down ranking, so they can spend a little time giving a lot of players a bad day.
I think a part of it is the difference to losing to something “reasonable” vs “unreasonable.”
Yeah, that’s understandable. I just don’t think there’s an equivalent in LoL that would feel particularly unfair. At worst, someone just knows where you are at all times. What do you do with that information? That requires good game knowledge. You can only influence a small portion of the map yourself and teammates tend to like acting independently even if you provide them with extra info.
Smurfing is a bigger problem, but I’ve found that Riot tends to be very good at gauging your skill level even if you intentionally sandbag. LoL is just one of those game where it’s really hard to convincingly pretend to be bad at it.
I just read from that: Other OSes are inferior and they won’t tell their userbase. Cheapshots I guess.
