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b1temytoday at 5:33 AM4 repliesview on HN

> they should provide built-in anti-cheat support in the OS.

As much as I dislike anti-cheat in general (why incorporate it instead of just having proper moderation and/or private servers? Do you need a sketchy third-party kernel level driver to police you to make sure you're "browsing the internet properly in a way that is compliant with company XYZ's policies", or even when running other software like a photo editor, word processor, or anything else? It's _your_ software that you bought.) something similar is already happening with, e.g, Widevine bundled in browsers for DRM-ed video streaming.

I agree that having some first-party or reputable anti-cheat driver or system, is probably preferable than having different studios roll out their own anticheat drivers. (I am aware there are studio-level or common third party common anti-cheat solutions already, such as Denuvo or Vanguard. But I would prefer something better)


Replies

ThatPlayertoday at 7:55 AM

> why incorporate it instead of just having proper moderation and/or private servers?

No one wants to become a moderator, they do it out of necessity. So it's pretty much the other way around: a lot of anticheats were, and are, originally developed by community members for private servers (because you're not deploying a 3rd party anti-cheat onto first party servers). BattleEye was originally for Battlefield games. Punkbuster for Team Fortress. EasyAntiCheat for Counter Strike. I even remember Starcraft Brood War 3rd party server ICCUP with a custom 'anti-hack' client requirement.

You still see this today with Counter Strike 2 private servers Face-IT: they have additional anti-cheat not less. Same with GTA V modded private server, FiveM have anti-cheat they call adhesive.

And then game developer saw that players are doing that, so they integrate the anti-cheat so that players do not have to go downloading/installing the anti-cheat separately. Quake 3 Arena added Punkbuster in an update for example.

ronsortoday at 5:45 AM

> I agree that having some first-party or reputable anti-cheat driver or system, is probably preferable than having different studios roll out their own anticheat drivers. (I am aware there are studio-level or common third party common anti-cheat solutions already, such as Denuvo or Vanguard. But I would prefer something better)

Only Apple really has enough platform lockdown to achieve that. Whatever Microsoft ships would have more holes than swiss cheese (not that I'm opposed to that or anything).

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user34283today at 12:28 PM

Would that not create the issue that you would only need to find one bypass for said official anti-cheat that then works for all games out there?

I heard with Denuvo reverse engineering work needs to be done for each individual target to unprotect it, but I'm not sure how this will be the case with a first party anti-cheat driver.

stackghosttoday at 5:58 AM

>why incorporate it instead of just having proper moderation and/or private servers?

Because game studios these days are all about global matchmaking. Private servers aren't really a thing any more except in more niche games. Instead you (optionally with a party) queue for matchmaking. Every game has to have a ranked ladder these days, it seems.

I miss the days of Tribes 2 or CS1.6 when games had server browsers

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