Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers.

It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% solve the problem.

The only multiplayer game I currently play is Beyond All Reason (a RTS game).

It's a free and open-source game, so creating a cheat client would be especially easy. But I've never encountered cheating.

I think there's a few reasons for this:

1) The playerbase is small and there is no auto-matchmaking, just a traditional list of servers. This results in the same group of people always playing together. People don't want to cheat when they're playing with acquaintances they see frequently.

2) Spectators are allowed in every game. The top-ranked games usually have several spectators.

You might think this would result in even more cheating, but in practice the spectators would prefer to watch a sneak attacks succeed, because it's funny. It's boring to be whispering the enemy secrets to you buddy on a private Discord, it's more fun to watch your buddy die in a surprising and funny way.

Also, the spectators can spot if a player does something that suspiciously well timed or lucky. The spectators see all, so they have the information needed to spot suspicious behavior.

3) Official servers create an official record of what happened in every game. The entire community has access to all the recordings. If someone thinks cheating is happening they can link to the official game recording on Reddit (or whatever) and everyone can see what happened.

4) An active moderator team reviews every report of cheating. There are official moderators that do the banning, but also volunteer moderators which can watch the recordings and create a trusted written account of what happened; this makes the official moderators have an easier job.

As most of you know, these anti-cheat systems are functionally equivalent to rootkits. There is zero visibility into how these privileges are used for targeted attacks. Due to geographic location of the large game companies this has a geopolitical angle. Fingerprinting of devices and the networks they are in provides a lot of metadata that is most definitely fed into their intelligence apparatus.

I'm ordering a new laptop to work on LLM stuff, and while I thought about jumping through the hoops to get Linux running with secure boot...

I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well

I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally hyperinvasive maleware.

I don't need gaming that much.

And if I do I'll stream it with Gamepass or another cloud service.

It's funny that game makers make a fuss about anti-cheat not working on Linux but then publish Switch versions of their games. That platform has almost zero security and is commonly emulated with cheats even in multiplayer these days.

At this point - you would think that cheaters could be detected on the server side by either training a model to flag abnormal behavior or do some type of statistics on the movement patterns over time - is a client-side anti-cheat really required?

Is there really no way to make anti-cheat on Linux that can't be bypassed? I don't know much about this, but it seems very difficult to make an anti-cheat for a platform where you can make changes in the kernel.

I used to dual boot, but I that there are so many games on Linux, I just don't buy or play incompatible games. So EA lost a BF6 sale for being assholes.

But can it run Crysis? No. Not on Linux :-(

I actually really liked Crysis for its open maps where you can approach a goal using different tactics. It had a lot of flaws and I hated the alien ship along with everything after as it was way too linear. Though I really want to play it again but alas, no more Windows for me.

The only game I miss when I moved to Linux was League of Legends. Everything else pretty much works. I get that it’s not worth it for them to deal with more potential cheating, but it’s a bummer.

Cheats aside, are there any competitive games that include Uber-like rating system? Meaning that you'd need to provide feedback whether you'd play with your opponents/teammates again after a game.

Hm, most of these seem updated 3-4 years ago, is this list relevant any more?

Thank you, I prefer my Linux without rootkits.

It'd be nice to have the publisher of the games...

Between Windows being so unbearably bloated and no way to make anti-cheat really work on Linux, it looks like the consoles win!

It's so disappointing that the halo master chief collection still doesn't support split screen. Nothing compared to the joy of playing halo with friends in the same room.

While some anti cheat supports Linux they're mostly useless as you can much more easily bypass them on Linux compared to windows. I guess enabling them for competitive games is one way to increase Linux users.

Well, that's just silly. Hook up a Raspberry Pi as your keyboard, mouse input and video output and all the anti-cheat fails. Same (largely) for VMs, same for many emulators.

And if nothing works you can always build a robot pushing mouse, buttons, etc.

Of course you can raise the bar, but if anything has been shown it's that cheating is not something that anyone has been able to prevent yet.

In many situations you can also interfere on the packet level. Of course maybe you need to extract some key, but in many situations that's not exactly hard. And then you can hook something into network.

kernel anti-cheat are notoriously inefficient and are weaponized by hackers.

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