This reads like privacy-invasion propaganda directly from the Chinese state. "Look how great we are at having full control over your PC. You know, to battle cheaters!".
Kernel-level anticheat is ridiculous. Especially when your data becomes a gaping would ready for the chinese state to stick their fingers into and twist around. It's like the police installing mandatory cameras in everyones house to catch thieves (if society here is games with kernel-level cheats).
I want to go back to the days of Windows 7. When there was minimal corporate bloat in the ecosystem, no ads in the startmenu, and when game studios actually knew what they were talking about and had some balls to stand up for their values.
charcircuit · 37m ago
Riot doesn't use a kernel anticheat on mac os because Apple provides sufficient security from their OS. Once Microsoft eventually catches up Riot will not need a kernel level anticheat for Windows. The ridiculous thing is how Microsoft has failed to secure Windows from cheaters despite it being a problem for such a long time.
Neikius · 11m ago
The consequence game does not work on Linux as far as I am aware. Interesting in the time when most of the other games do.
7qW24A · 19m ago
Yeah but that’s an interesting technical point, more suited to 2015 HN - in 2025 we can’t let technical matters get in the way of our Sinophobia…
mschuster91 · 18m ago
> The ridiculous thing is how Microsoft has failed to secure Windows from cheaters despite it being a problem for such a long time.
The problem is, it's gotten hard to do drivers for custom hardware on macOS as a result for everything that can't be done with libusb as a result - and it's also gotten harder to patch over deficiencies of macOS.
You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and an OS that is secure from cheaters, software pirates and malware at the same time. Android is the best example - either you run an OS that passes Play Integrity/SafetyNet and is blessed by Google and thus can use games, Netflix, banking or a whole lot of other apps that require non-rooted phones these days, but you lose e.g. the ability to do an actual full-device backup, or you run a phone that's rooted or runs a custom OS (say, aftermarket once the manufacturer ceases providing even security updates) but you lose out on about 2/3rds of apps because they just refuse to run.
jokoon · 2h ago
I stopped playing counter strike like 2 months ago after playing for 6 months, because I was getting paranoid about closet cheaters. My trust in the game eroded, even though cheaters are not there all the time.
Closet cheaters are cheating in subtle ways, which make it impossible to know if they're really cheating.
It's a constant analysis of "is he cheating or am I bad?", and most of the time, I could not really know. It's a psychologically toxic experience as I cannot focus on the game itself. I was enjoying the game, but that paranoia made things just unbearable.
I suspect china/russia are actively paying people to make effective cheating software, as it's also a lucrative business.
Even a few pro players are cheating. Those online FPS are rotten to the core.
Apparently valve doesn't seem to care that much, because they probably know that there is a big overlap between cheaters and people who trade skins, who are a big source of income.
Too bad!
shrell · 1h ago
I sincerely doubt a single person you thought had subtle hacks was hacking.
People constantly cry that the other team is hacking and reviewing the demo shows that they almost never are.
The reality is they were just better. That seems to be hard for a large portion of the player base to handle.
Low ranks and low trust factor are full of obvious hacks because they make an account, get banned and repeat. You don't see the decent hacks until the upper ranks because you need to be good enough at the game to hide it and would just rank up fast through the middle rankd
anon22981 · 13m ago
I can’t speak for the lower ranks, but I was mid-ish on premium this season (played from 17k to 23k then stopped iirc) but a lot of the cheaters were subtle enough that not everyone realized that they were cheating, even though they pretty blatant from my perspective. (For reference, I play lvl 10 faceit and have a decent understanding of the game.)
Point being that a ”subtle hacker” might be subtle to some and obvious to others. So OP, being a newbie with only 6 mo of experience, might suspect someone being subtle about their hacking but they might be very blatant to a more experienced player.
rcxdude · 1h ago
This attitude is a bit alien to me. At the level I play games (which is in the range of like 90% of gamers), my opponents are basically anonymous, and someone obviously cheating and someone smurfing has about the same effect of ruining the fun. The points mean nothing except maybe to measure my own improvement at the game. If someone's cheating and I can't tell them from the other players, I don't care.
hoten · 43m ago
If you can't fully connect your results in the game to your skill (because you can't trust if the others cheated), then you can't trust you are improving (or how to adapt to maybe improve).
On an evolutionary level, the purpose of play is to improve your skill in something in a tight, enjoyable feedback loop. Cheating messes with that.
Though your approach is preferable, I do think cheating (or more broadly, not trusting that you can learn how to improve with further play) kneecaps the whole point of playing.
(I'm badly presenting an idea I learned from Jonathan Blow re: how some game design ideas, such as opaque adaptive difficulty like rubberbanding found in racing games, destroys the purpose of playing)
bee_rider · 9m ago
I don’t think these subtle cheats make a big difference in matchmaking type games anyway. It could be finding cheat-enhanced bad players, or non-cheat-enhanced good players. If the cheats are subtle, who can tell the difference?
vips7L · 1h ago
Honestly this sounds like you’ve just over thought it. You’ve played CS for 6 months, you are bad!
skupig · 56m ago
CS has a concept of "trust factor" which groups people more likely to be cheating in the same game. If you ever queue with a friend with a low trust factor (which happens a lot if they're on a smurf account), there are cheaters in pretty much every game... seeing that many blatant cheaters has really made me think there must be a lot of smarter cheaters flying under the radar in regular games. It's basically impossible to tell whether someone is wallhacking or if they have really good game sense.
brnaftr361 · 35m ago
I've played for many years including CS1.6, CS:S, GO, and 2. I regularly snoop profiles and overwhelmingly there are accounts with 1 game, all F2P games, short account lives, low hours (CS2, GO + account), low or no commendations, low match count, blocked stat tracking... Slews of markers that these are less-than-legit, either smurfing (IMO a form of cheating) or outright hacking. Then they coincidentally overperform for their respective rank. That's without mentioning coming across numerous individuals with [sometimes multiple] bans recorded on their accounts.
My account is 20 years old. And has several games with hundreds of hours including a couple of perfect games, not to mention a hundred or more games. Also phone verified. I don't expect everyone to have similar accounts, but it's seldom I'm matched against anything even remotely similar, say 5 year old accounts with similar playtimes in non-F2P games, though many profiles are private, which itself is - I think - also suspicious since virtually everyone leverages aliases on Steam so I can't really imagine a case for this other than obscuration, though I'm certain some people do it for privacy reasons I expect that rationale is rare.
Beyond that I would say there are a lot of suspicious individuals I've been matched against in both premier and comp . Regardless of whether or not they're smurfs it makes MM obnoxious if only because you end up matched against people who rage and ruin 45m-1h of your time by competing illicitly.
The MM algo is also just shit without these considerations lumped on top of it. I regularly play with my friends who rank lower and that draws my rank down so we get matched in low ranks, resulting in violent pubstomping. Of course I play on my only account, so I'm sure I get hackusated a lot, which would ostensibly get my trust factor drug through the mud. I suppose that's a solid incentive for smurfing on its own, especially since the system is opaque.
It's all pretty bad, frankly. Faceit is hardly better, a lot of the community is pretty toxic and obnoxious salty tryhard metabangers that aren't fun to play with.
smallstepforman · 47m ago
Secure boot is a problem for users with secondary alternative OS’s (eg Haiku). I even have a DOS tool which needs high precision timing which no general purpose multitasking OS can provide. These alternative systems are hampered by secure boot.
And speaking of up to date video drivers, these checks are a plague of usability. If I have stable driver rev 235, why would I install latest buggy version 246? Eg. AMD has 2 flavours of drivers, Adrenalin which has “optimisations”, but crashes, and the Pro drivers which are older but more stable, and have 10 bit support, more colour spaces etc. I’m done dealing with experimental drivers, give me stability 100% time. Games which insist that I run experimental drivers and secure boot can get stuffed.
josephcsible · 3h ago
This article seems to be making all of the worst things about anti-cheat (kernel modules, mandatory Secure Boot/TPM, etc.) seem like good things. Why?
doikor · 3h ago
Realistically what is the alternative? That is pretty much the only way to ensure the cheats don't run at kernel level. If the cheat runs at kernel level it is very hard (or impossible) to detect it from user land outside of behavior (which mostly happens on the server side).
Only thing I can think of is Microsoft locking down Windows so hard that nothing outside of code written (well signed) by Microsoft can run with kernel level privileges but I think that is an even worse option.
If you don't like it you can always just go and play any of the titles without kernel level anti-cheat and get a cheater in ~1/5th of your games (my experience in counter strike).
jjmarr · 3h ago
Chess essentially has ID verification at a high level because the best players can go to real-life tournaments and get titles for the prestige, which grants them free premium accounts on major platforms. It's easier to analyze the subset of top-tier players that aren't verified.
I'd rather just give Riot Games my driver's licence than full access to my computer. They already know my name and where I live from metadata.
There should be a KYC solution for gaming where a company like Epic, Riot, or Valve verifies your identity and developers can gate competitive video games behind that. If you cheat, you're out for 5-10 years (so dumb teenagers aren't locked out forever). The big issue imo isn't banning cheaters, it's preventing them from creating a new account and cheating again.
Such a system would be free money & low maintenance for whatever company develops it first.
doikor · 2h ago
This is actually how cheating is "solved" to some degree in South Korea. Basically you can't play without logging in with your government provided id.
Though they do also use it for stuff like under 16 year olds not being able to play online games between midnight and 6am.
> KR (Korea) requires national identity numbers for gaming, which opens up a convenient opportunity to ban cheaters at the “soul” level. It is remarkably effective at keeping them out of game for longer periods of time—cheaters have to buy whole new identities to keep playing, so the bans really stick.
jimmydorry · 1h ago
This makes the stakes for getting caught cheating, much higher. It does nothing to "solve" cheating. If someone is using additional code to gain an un-fair advantage, knowing who they are does nothing to detect this.
doikor · 1h ago
But it does lower the amount of cheaters as the consequences are bigger. Also makes manual banning/moderation much more cost effective as the bans actually stick.
At the end of the day the goal isn't 0 cheaters but having few enough that the chance of your match being ruined by one is 1 or 2% instead of 10 or 20%
bob1029 · 1h ago
I don't see why something like ChexSystems IDV wouldn't be viable here.
Acquire my identity in the same way you would if I was seeking approval for a new checking account or loan. I'd be perfectly happy to see the bar raised a few inches off the ground. The current state of competitive video games is really bad.
orbital-decay · 2h ago
>Realistically what is the alternative?
What even makes you think it's a solvable problem? Even with a totally cryptographically controlled end-to-end hardware chain that treats the player like an adversary/inmate (like in the consoles, maybe even more strict) there's always a possibility of ML-based cheats with a low-latency camera. Barely anyone does that now because there are easier methods, but trust me, it will get used if required, just like DMA is used now. People already throw crazy money into cheating.
It's a race to the bottom where everybody eventually loses except the corporations. Players never get rid of the cheaters completely, unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers, and corpos obtain the ultimate vendor lock.
The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.
doikor · 1h ago
> Players never get rid of the cheaters completely
> The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.
Obviously the goal never has been to have 0 cheaters. Just from the detection side you need to delay the bans, let in some of the previously detected cheats again, etc to keep the cat and mouse game going on (make it harder to A/B test your cheats)
> Worse still, is that we actually have to let them back in. When we outright “block” a cheating method, we are technically providing the cheater an instantaneous surface to iterate against, allowing them to A/B test their cheats until they find something that is actually undetected at that layer.
> unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers
If you think it is an issue then don't play their game. Very few companies are willing to go through the effort as it is actually quite a lot of work just from the security vulnerability aspects alone (and you also have to effectively detect the cheats too)
orbital-decay · 1h ago
Ban delay is a standard practice, as is raising the entry barrier, but everything both did was creating a culture that made cheaters adapt and get more and more involved, to the point where the cheating itself is the game. What anticheat companies brag about in your link and in the PR piece in OP is entirely irrelevant, the reality is pretty different. I know because I'm pretty familiar with it, having studied it for years in a low-energy mode.
>If you think it is an issue then don't play their game.
This is a hypothetical example which would affect everyone regardless of playing any games. Not an existing thing, thankfully.
(although I wouldn't be surprised if the pressure will eventually be enough to make this happen. The fact that you can't fix a rotten culture with authoritarian measures without affecting everyone else never stopped anyone)
doikor · 2h ago
So just because lock picking lawyer can pick the locks at your home you should just get rid of the locks? (and maybe even the doors too)
Making it hard enough is good enough. The difference in 1% of games having a cheater and 5 or 10% is massive in the player experience.
wiseowise · 2h ago
> So just because lock picking lawyer can pick the locks at your home you should just get rid of the locks? (and maybe even the doors too)
The solution is not to make the lock so hard that it inconveniences you, the user, it is to shoot intruder on sight (aka better moderation).
JadeNB · 2h ago
> So just because lock picking lawyer can pick the locks at your home you should just get rid of the locks? (and maybe even the doors too)
If the locks treated me, the legitimate owner, as a criminal and required the kind of low-level access that software that runs at the kernel level gets, and still didn't work, then maybe.
dingnuts · 2h ago
it's more like, I'm not going to spend money on a smart lock that reports my movements to a third party just so a burglar can chuck a landscaping stone through my window and unlock the door
razemio · 2h ago
It seriously isn't. Effectively you can not ban cheating. A cheater can just use virtual or modified hardware keyboards, displays and mice to cheat. How is a kernel extension going to prevent that? That is the logical next step, which is already being done by some (currently less than alpha). Once we reach this state as a default, nothing can prevent cheating, besides a real tournament with checked hardware. All the effort riot is currently putting into this will be for nothing. I do not understand, how they are missing that.
pcwalton · 2h ago
You can raise the cost of cheating so that cheating kids will get annoyed and go cheat in some other game or scroll TikTok or whatever. We're not exactly dealing with nation-states here.
orbital-decay · 2h ago
"Bored kids" is a pretty naive idea of cheating in PvP games. There's custom hardware for it, and a surprisingly large amount of people spend more than $1k/mo just to cheat in video games.
jokoon · 2h ago
Most cheating software come from china and russia, I still bet those government actively encourage cheating in games just to annoy western countries.
smallstepforman · 39m ago
Grow up, you cannot honestly think that government employees in Russian and China dont have more important things to deal with than ruining western teenage gamers experience with state funded cheat codes and hacks.
mschuster91 · 8m ago
That's the thing with psyops and "plausible deniability" stuff. Do too much of it and eventually you'll be blamed for everything that's gone bad no matter if you actually did it or not. China and Russia are in the "FO" phase of "FAFO".
Besides, sowing discontent is a tried and true propaganda strategy.
johnnyanmac · 2h ago
In all fairness, anti-cheat is like a lock. No lock will prevent a determined thief from just breaking your window, but the point is to keep out the majority of "easy thieves". For them the goal isn't the be perfect but to not be the easy target.
Now is a kerbal level anti-cheat overkill? Hard to say from the outside but it does seem like installing a steel vault for your door. While the window is still right there as normal.
doikor · 2h ago
That is what you use behavior detection for. If you don't give human like inputs from the cheat it is detectable and if you limit yourself to what a human can do then the cheat is not very desirable.
> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”
But if you read the article they do have some way to detect (some) DMA based hacks too where the actual cheat runs on a different computer and use DMA through a pci-express card to read/write directly into memory.
> “I think we detect the majority of it today, but it’s kind of iterative,” said Koskinas.
Though most cheaters "rage cheating" after losing really badly and using cheats to "get back" and those are much easier to detects. This kind of "download random cheat from the internet" at the best only get you banned and at worst your computer is super duper hacked (you are effectively manually downloading a virus and manually giving it admin/kernel level access)
> Thanks to all these techniques and strategies, most cheaters can now be roughly divided into two categories. The first, representing the majority of cheaters, is made up by those who are “rage cheating” by using cheap tools that are easy to detect. Riot employees sarcastically call these cheats “download-a-ban,” according to Koskinas.
At the end of the day all I know from my own experience is that the difference in the amount of cheaters I run into between Counter Strike and Valorant is massive and the main claimed difference being kernel level stuff in Valorants anti cheat (or Valve is just really really bad at making anti cheats)
jimbob45 · 2h ago
This
CS2 is entirely unplayable now due to hackers. I’m told Valorant isn’t much better. There’s probably just no solution unless you design your game to not benefit from hacking (e.g. Hearthstone, MTG)
doikor · 2h ago
I play both and in my experience Valorant is way better. Better as in "less cheaters" not "better game".
Though as I understand the amount of cheaters in both games varies based on how high/low in the ranked rating you are.
candiddevmike · 55m ago
Community servers that people can host and create hacker-free spaces.
dfxm12 · 41m ago
We can play online games on purpose made hardware, leaving more freedom over our PC's
squigz · 55m ago
Is there any actual data on how prevalent cheating really is? In my experience, it's not remotely as big of an issue as some people make it out to be...
nekitamo · 3h ago
The alternative is that the online games they're protecting become infested with cheaters, players depart, and the game closes down because it's no longer a viable business.
It's not nice, I don't like running a kernel mode anti-cheat any more than you do, but I can see why it's necessary for preserving the competitive integrity of free-to-play shooter games like Valorant.
__alexs · 2h ago
They are already full of cheaters. DMA cards are undetectable even from kernel anti cheat.
doikor · 2h ago
The DMA card still needs to be installed, have drivers installed, firmware, etc. The anti cheat tests for that (the cheaters do mask the device spoofing the name/vendor/etc). Having to make new driver/firmware every time the anti cheat starts to detect it is way slower then just new software. Though at some point they will probably just automate it so that every customer gets their own driver and firmware matched with only their cheat software making this way harder but we are not there yet (and you would have to get all of these signed so following the cert chain should make it easier to find at least whos stolen cert they are using)
Also the amount of people willing to buy another pc and DMA cards is way smaller making the chance of running into cheater in your match smaller.
__alexs · 1h ago
Giving every customer their own firmware is already automated.
Computer vision based cheats are also rapidly on the rise. You don't get wall hacks but you do top 1% reaction times and perfect tracking.
az09mugen · 2h ago
That's a good idea indeed.
abigail95 · 1h ago
are you writing your own firmware or hotwiring the bus? there are many methods to detect this.
imchillyb · 2h ago
If one must give up kernel level security of their system to an untrusted 3rd party, was it really free?
Hikikomori · 2h ago
Stuff you run as your user can already read all your files and memory of processes of that user so you're already very exposed.
johnnyanmac · 2h ago
Insert the quote about freedom vs securities. This author (or his sponsors) clearly made their choice.
Makes me glad I prefer mostly single player content and never tolerate this stuff on my PC. If I gotta be locked down I'll just pick up a console.
jokoon · 2h ago
It can be seen as a Chinese backdoor on western computers.
I am not expert, but I think it's not necessarily the case?
Cheating is really a plague right now, and the only way to mitigate it is using kernel anti cheat.
ronsor · 2h ago
And now AI can pretend to be input devices and need only video output. Kernel anti-cheat will be useless, and we'll be better off for it.
If your solution is bad, it doesn't deserve to work. Find something else.
doikor · 2h ago
Though if the AI is only as good as a human can be it is not that desirable. If the cheat does "super human" stuff it can be detected from behavior on the server side though this is after the fact from processing some replay files and thus not that "great" for players as the cheater gets to ruin at least one game.
> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”
But it is something they acknowledge will be an issue at some point in the future. Personally I think for now AI is way too slow as all the computation needs to happen in a few milliseconds to really be effective.
> Koskinas says he often worries about the use of AI for screen classification, to learn what human inputs look like, and how to reproduce them.
az09mugen · 2h ago
Since AI is everywhere you think it can be used to spot cheaters behaviours ?
int_19h · 2m ago
The fundamental problem is that a subtle enough cheater is indistinguishable from a good enough human player.
> “Behavior” refers to an ML suspension (also called “server-sided” anti-cheat), often given to ragehackers.
But then you can just teach an AI to act like a human. Anti cheats in computer games is and always will be a cat and mouse game and AI/ML is just another tool in the bag of many tools (most bans seem to be fingerprinting based basically rebanning previous offenders who failed to get around the fingerprinting system)
ronsor · 2h ago
Yes, that's the real solution, not rootkits.
mschuster91 · 16m ago
AI certainly is not the solution. It has its issues, false positives, and there's barely any way to get support for that case as support agents are instructed with the AI being infallible.
mvdtnz · 2h ago
They're neither inherently good nor bad but unfortunately necessary.
doikor · 1h ago
One thing to note is that Microsoft is planning some kind of kernel anti tampering system in future that hopefully will give us user level anti cheats that actually work. Though some will very likely see this as some kind of "we don't control our computers anymore" move.
> "As was foretold, a future will eventually arrive where we can rely on the security features of Windows to protect its own kernel, instead of protecting it from boot with a driver. This will allow us the opportunity to start our anti-cheat services when the game client runs, provided the end-user has opted into all of these features. We’ll have more communication on this topic early next year, but if you’re on Windows 11 and on relatively recent hardware, we wanted to let you know that you won’t have to tolerate the taskbar icon forever (even though we worked very hard on Vanguard’s logo)."
> "To help our customers and partners increase resilience, we are developing new Windows capabilities that will allow security product developers to build their products outside of kernel mode. This means security products, like anti-virus solutions, can run in user mode just as apps do. This change will help security developers provide a high level of security, easier recovery, and there will be less impact to Windows in the event of a crash or mistake. A private preview will be made available for our security product ecosystem in July 2025."
to-too-two · 2h ago
This might be a terrible idea, and likely would never work for a multitude of reasons, but I was wondering if everyone in the future were gaming via streaming services that way players wouldn’t be running the game on their own hardware or software.
doikor · 1h ago
Very unlikely to happen anytime soon in competitive shooters like Valorant where gamers spend thousands of dollars just to get a few millisecond advantage from faster monitor, mouse, etc.
Adding an extra 5 or 10ms of delay would be a massive issue (especially bad if it is an inconsistent delay)
jauntywundrkind · 1h ago
Part of what scares me about React Server Components is that it very directly matches the web down this path. Instead of APIs and data and a front end app, the web becomes a view screen for computetion running far far away.
The Flutter vision feels very similar, treating the web as a big canvas to draw pixels on.
bee_rider · 3h ago
It is really ridiculous that we’ve allowed all this kernel level spyware bullshit in the interest of something so frivolous as video game fairness.
Matchmaking seemed like a neat idea in, like, 2007. In retrospect, it has damaged the industry substantially. All the oxygen has been sucked out of the community server space, etiquette is non-existent, and the aforementioned spyware.
unclad5968 · 2h ago
Then don't play those video games. Seems simple to me. Community servers are doing fine in games where that makes sense, Minecraft for example. Counter strike has community servers too and people cheat there all the time.
johnnyanmac · 2h ago
I don't and won't. But it seems fair to miss the old days of your mall and board game shop in response to the torn down remains you abandoned.
squigz · 51m ago
Except it's not a matter of community servers not being supported in games "because it doesn't make sense" - there are plenty of games where private community servers would be beneficial, but all we get is online matchmaking that gets shut down when the company decides it's done.
Pretty unfair to paint this as the users choice when the companies are taking our choices away.
snkzxbs · 45m ago
If you think fairness in videogame competitions is frivolous then do not participate in them. Is it frivolous to not want dopers in cycling competitions?
ndriscoll · 18m ago
As someone who doesn't participate in those, your comparison seems poor to me. Like my mom asked a while back if I'd get into valorant with her and my sister on weekends sometime, but I'm not going to dual boot or buy another computer just for this game. Why do they require rootkits for casual play? It'd be like bicycle manufacturers subjecting you to drug tests and access to random home inspections to ride around your neighborhood.
If you need to protect competitive play, keep it to actual competitions/make it optional for free play. I'm not giving you unrestricted access to my brokerage account, all of my files, all of my emails/text messages, etc. (which root access on my computer has) so you can prevent cheating in a Sunday night video game.
giancarlostoro · 3h ago
I refuse to buy a ton of games because they are hot garbage these days. Its pretty obvious what gamers want and they will shower their money at it. Look at Oblivion remastered. It had bare minimum marketing if you can even claim it had any marketing.
johnnyanmac · 2h ago
Tbf, a part of the issues causing since rampant cheating comes from the fact that those Riot games are indeed "what gamers want". There's definitely a divide in community between single player darlings like BGS's output and these "free" competitive service games like League or Apex or whatnot.
ziggure · 2h ago
Are these rootkits?
ronsor · 2h ago
Yes. That's the point.
OrvalWintermute · 2h ago
I just uninstalled ALL Riot Games from my Gaming Computer.
Reason: Vanguard was crashing another Unity based game I play nonstop. It also seemed to decrease system stability in general.
I will never play another Riot Game so long as this software is a part of it.
jokoon · 2h ago
I wonder who makes that anticheat, I mean in what country.
Obviously they have so many users, they might need to fix it.
I can imagine that Microsoft might try to help them doing things right.
Kernel-level anticheat is ridiculous. Especially when your data becomes a gaping would ready for the chinese state to stick their fingers into and twist around. It's like the police installing mandatory cameras in everyones house to catch thieves (if society here is games with kernel-level cheats).
I want to go back to the days of Windows 7. When there was minimal corporate bloat in the ecosystem, no ads in the startmenu, and when game studios actually knew what they were talking about and had some balls to stand up for their values.
The problem is, it's gotten hard to do drivers for custom hardware on macOS as a result for everything that can't be done with libusb as a result - and it's also gotten harder to patch over deficiencies of macOS.
You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and an OS that is secure from cheaters, software pirates and malware at the same time. Android is the best example - either you run an OS that passes Play Integrity/SafetyNet and is blessed by Google and thus can use games, Netflix, banking or a whole lot of other apps that require non-rooted phones these days, but you lose e.g. the ability to do an actual full-device backup, or you run a phone that's rooted or runs a custom OS (say, aftermarket once the manufacturer ceases providing even security updates) but you lose out on about 2/3rds of apps because they just refuse to run.
Closet cheaters are cheating in subtle ways, which make it impossible to know if they're really cheating.
It's a constant analysis of "is he cheating or am I bad?", and most of the time, I could not really know. It's a psychologically toxic experience as I cannot focus on the game itself. I was enjoying the game, but that paranoia made things just unbearable.
I suspect china/russia are actively paying people to make effective cheating software, as it's also a lucrative business.
Even a few pro players are cheating. Those online FPS are rotten to the core.
Apparently valve doesn't seem to care that much, because they probably know that there is a big overlap between cheaters and people who trade skins, who are a big source of income.
Too bad!
People constantly cry that the other team is hacking and reviewing the demo shows that they almost never are. The reality is they were just better. That seems to be hard for a large portion of the player base to handle. Low ranks and low trust factor are full of obvious hacks because they make an account, get banned and repeat. You don't see the decent hacks until the upper ranks because you need to be good enough at the game to hide it and would just rank up fast through the middle rankd
Point being that a ”subtle hacker” might be subtle to some and obvious to others. So OP, being a newbie with only 6 mo of experience, might suspect someone being subtle about their hacking but they might be very blatant to a more experienced player.
On an evolutionary level, the purpose of play is to improve your skill in something in a tight, enjoyable feedback loop. Cheating messes with that.
Though your approach is preferable, I do think cheating (or more broadly, not trusting that you can learn how to improve with further play) kneecaps the whole point of playing.
(I'm badly presenting an idea I learned from Jonathan Blow re: how some game design ideas, such as opaque adaptive difficulty like rubberbanding found in racing games, destroys the purpose of playing)
My account is 20 years old. And has several games with hundreds of hours including a couple of perfect games, not to mention a hundred or more games. Also phone verified. I don't expect everyone to have similar accounts, but it's seldom I'm matched against anything even remotely similar, say 5 year old accounts with similar playtimes in non-F2P games, though many profiles are private, which itself is - I think - also suspicious since virtually everyone leverages aliases on Steam so I can't really imagine a case for this other than obscuration, though I'm certain some people do it for privacy reasons I expect that rationale is rare.
Beyond that I would say there are a lot of suspicious individuals I've been matched against in both premier and comp . Regardless of whether or not they're smurfs it makes MM obnoxious if only because you end up matched against people who rage and ruin 45m-1h of your time by competing illicitly.
The MM algo is also just shit without these considerations lumped on top of it. I regularly play with my friends who rank lower and that draws my rank down so we get matched in low ranks, resulting in violent pubstomping. Of course I play on my only account, so I'm sure I get hackusated a lot, which would ostensibly get my trust factor drug through the mud. I suppose that's a solid incentive for smurfing on its own, especially since the system is opaque.
It's all pretty bad, frankly. Faceit is hardly better, a lot of the community is pretty toxic and obnoxious salty tryhard metabangers that aren't fun to play with.
And speaking of up to date video drivers, these checks are a plague of usability. If I have stable driver rev 235, why would I install latest buggy version 246? Eg. AMD has 2 flavours of drivers, Adrenalin which has “optimisations”, but crashes, and the Pro drivers which are older but more stable, and have 10 bit support, more colour spaces etc. I’m done dealing with experimental drivers, give me stability 100% time. Games which insist that I run experimental drivers and secure boot can get stuffed.
Only thing I can think of is Microsoft locking down Windows so hard that nothing outside of code written (well signed) by Microsoft can run with kernel level privileges but I think that is an even worse option.
If you don't like it you can always just go and play any of the titles without kernel level anti-cheat and get a cheater in ~1/5th of your games (my experience in counter strike).
I'd rather just give Riot Games my driver's licence than full access to my computer. They already know my name and where I live from metadata.
There should be a KYC solution for gaming where a company like Epic, Riot, or Valve verifies your identity and developers can gate competitive video games behind that. If you cheat, you're out for 5-10 years (so dumb teenagers aren't locked out forever). The big issue imo isn't banning cheaters, it's preventing them from creating a new account and cheating again.
Such a system would be free money & low maintenance for whatever company develops it first.
Though they do also use it for stuff like under 16 year olds not being able to play online games between midnight and 6am.
edit: Some extra details about this from a few months ago https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617
> KR (Korea) requires national identity numbers for gaming, which opens up a convenient opportunity to ban cheaters at the “soul” level. It is remarkably effective at keeping them out of game for longer periods of time—cheaters have to buy whole new identities to keep playing, so the bans really stick.
At the end of the day the goal isn't 0 cheaters but having few enough that the chance of your match being ruined by one is 1 or 2% instead of 10 or 20%
Acquire my identity in the same way you would if I was seeking approval for a new checking account or loan. I'd be perfectly happy to see the bar raised a few inches off the ground. The current state of competitive video games is really bad.
What even makes you think it's a solvable problem? Even with a totally cryptographically controlled end-to-end hardware chain that treats the player like an adversary/inmate (like in the consoles, maybe even more strict) there's always a possibility of ML-based cheats with a low-latency camera. Barely anyone does that now because there are easier methods, but trust me, it will get used if required, just like DMA is used now. People already throw crazy money into cheating.
It's a race to the bottom where everybody eventually loses except the corporations. Players never get rid of the cheaters completely, unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers, and corpos obtain the ultimate vendor lock.
The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.
> The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.
Obviously the goal never has been to have 0 cheaters. Just from the detection side you need to delay the bans, let in some of the previously detected cheats again, etc to keep the cat and mouse game going on (make it harder to A/B test your cheats)
https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617
> Worse still, is that we actually have to let them back in. When we outright “block” a cheating method, we are technically providing the cheater an instantaneous surface to iterate against, allowing them to A/B test their cheats until they find something that is actually undetected at that layer.
> unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers
If you think it is an issue then don't play their game. Very few companies are willing to go through the effort as it is actually quite a lot of work just from the security vulnerability aspects alone (and you also have to effectively detect the cheats too)
>If you think it is an issue then don't play their game.
This is a hypothetical example which would affect everyone regardless of playing any games. Not an existing thing, thankfully.
(although I wouldn't be surprised if the pressure will eventually be enough to make this happen. The fact that you can't fix a rotten culture with authoritarian measures without affecting everyone else never stopped anyone)
Making it hard enough is good enough. The difference in 1% of games having a cheater and 5 or 10% is massive in the player experience.
The solution is not to make the lock so hard that it inconveniences you, the user, it is to shoot intruder on sight (aka better moderation).
If the locks treated me, the legitimate owner, as a criminal and required the kind of low-level access that software that runs at the kernel level gets, and still didn't work, then maybe.
Besides, sowing discontent is a tried and true propaganda strategy.
Now is a kerbal level anti-cheat overkill? Hard to say from the outside but it does seem like installing a steel vault for your door. While the window is still right there as normal.
> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”
But if you read the article they do have some way to detect (some) DMA based hacks too where the actual cheat runs on a different computer and use DMA through a pci-express card to read/write directly into memory.
> “I think we detect the majority of it today, but it’s kind of iterative,” said Koskinas.
Though most cheaters "rage cheating" after losing really badly and using cheats to "get back" and those are much easier to detects. This kind of "download random cheat from the internet" at the best only get you banned and at worst your computer is super duper hacked (you are effectively manually downloading a virus and manually giving it admin/kernel level access)
> Thanks to all these techniques and strategies, most cheaters can now be roughly divided into two categories. The first, representing the majority of cheaters, is made up by those who are “rage cheating” by using cheap tools that are easy to detect. Riot employees sarcastically call these cheats “download-a-ban,” according to Koskinas.
At the end of the day all I know from my own experience is that the difference in the amount of cheaters I run into between Counter Strike and Valorant is massive and the main claimed difference being kernel level stuff in Valorants anti cheat (or Valve is just really really bad at making anti cheats)
CS2 is entirely unplayable now due to hackers. I’m told Valorant isn’t much better. There’s probably just no solution unless you design your game to not benefit from hacking (e.g. Hearthstone, MTG)
Though as I understand the amount of cheaters in both games varies based on how high/low in the ranked rating you are.
It's not nice, I don't like running a kernel mode anti-cheat any more than you do, but I can see why it's necessary for preserving the competitive integrity of free-to-play shooter games like Valorant.
Also the amount of people willing to buy another pc and DMA cards is way smaller making the chance of running into cheater in your match smaller.
Computer vision based cheats are also rapidly on the rise. You don't get wall hacks but you do top 1% reaction times and perfect tracking.
Makes me glad I prefer mostly single player content and never tolerate this stuff on my PC. If I gotta be locked down I'll just pick up a console.
I am not expert, but I think it's not necessarily the case?
Cheating is really a plague right now, and the only way to mitigate it is using kernel anti cheat.
If your solution is bad, it doesn't deserve to work. Find something else.
> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”
But it is something they acknowledge will be an issue at some point in the future. Personally I think for now AI is way too slow as all the computation needs to happen in a few milliseconds to really be effective.
> Koskinas says he often worries about the use of AI for screen classification, to learn what human inputs look like, and how to reproduce them.
https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617
> “Behavior” refers to an ML suspension (also called “server-sided” anti-cheat), often given to ragehackers.
But then you can just teach an AI to act like a human. Anti cheats in computer games is and always will be a cat and mouse game and AI/ML is just another tool in the bag of many tools (most bans seem to be fingerprinting based basically rebanning previous offenders who failed to get around the fingerprinting system)
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-...
> “On Demand” Vanguard
> "As was foretold, a future will eventually arrive where we can rely on the security features of Windows to protect its own kernel, instead of protecting it from boot with a driver. This will allow us the opportunity to start our anti-cheat services when the game client runs, provided the end-user has opted into all of these features. We’ll have more communication on this topic early next year, but if you’re on Windows 11 and on relatively recent hardware, we wanted to let you know that you won’t have to tolerate the taskbar icon forever (even though we worked very hard on Vanguard’s logo)."
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/11/19/windo...
> "To help our customers and partners increase resilience, we are developing new Windows capabilities that will allow security product developers to build their products outside of kernel mode. This means security products, like anti-virus solutions, can run in user mode just as apps do. This change will help security developers provide a high level of security, easier recovery, and there will be less impact to Windows in the event of a crash or mistake. A private preview will be made available for our security product ecosystem in July 2025."
Adding an extra 5 or 10ms of delay would be a massive issue (especially bad if it is an inconsistent delay)
The Flutter vision feels very similar, treating the web as a big canvas to draw pixels on.
Matchmaking seemed like a neat idea in, like, 2007. In retrospect, it has damaged the industry substantially. All the oxygen has been sucked out of the community server space, etiquette is non-existent, and the aforementioned spyware.
Pretty unfair to paint this as the users choice when the companies are taking our choices away.
If you need to protect competitive play, keep it to actual competitions/make it optional for free play. I'm not giving you unrestricted access to my brokerage account, all of my files, all of my emails/text messages, etc. (which root access on my computer has) so you can prevent cheating in a Sunday night video game.
Reason: Vanguard was crashing another Unity based game I play nonstop. It also seemed to decrease system stability in general.
I will never play another Riot Game so long as this software is a part of it.
Obviously they have so many users, they might need to fix it.
I can imagine that Microsoft might try to help them doing things right.