This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn’t take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully… even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope…
If your cheat detection runs on the client side only, you don’t have cheat protection.
Well, there only so much in gaming that reasonably can be done server side.
Sure, the server could identify that a player shouldn’t be visible and not transit that location to a client, addressing seeing through walls, in theory.
But once a player is hypothetically visible, aimbot can happen. If you are crawling in a ghillie suit in the grass, but the other player has a client that skips rendering grass and replaces the ghillie suit model with a suit made of traffic cones…
Now intrusive anti cheat isn’t worth it, but it is an unavoidable reality that it is up to the client to preserve the integrity.
Closest you get would be streamed gameplay, where the rendering even is server side. Also not worth it. But even then I could see cheating machine vision and faked controls to get an edge unfairly.
replaces the ghillie suit model with a suit made of traffic cones
lol
Let’s do some math here, they said:
More cheaters using Linux than legit users (…) .01% of all players base
Let’s do a quick math. The maximum peak users for Rust was 259,646 concurrent users according to https://steamcharts.com/app/252490 . Let’s assume 60% (more than half) of all the .01% users were cheaters, congratulations, you got rid of all those 16 cheaters… I haven’t played much Rust, but I’m fairly confident that there’s a bit more than 16 cheaters there.
And that’s without getting into the whole client side anti-cheat doesn’t work.
You dont understand linux users have black magic hacks that ruined the game for every player on every server, their power cant be understated… Theyre a whole bunch of dangerous hardened criminals
I feel like some people think Linux is only for hackers and cybersecurity professionals
And genuine hackers and cybersecurity professionals have got way better things to do than cheat in Rust.
The cheaters are all obnoxious 12-year-olds who couldn’t land a single hit without the cheats, that’s why all the compilation videos of cheaters falling foul to fake cheat software are so funny. They’ll spend 10 minutes trying to go through a doorway without it ever occurring to them that something must be wrong.
🤣 beware the Linux users
“Do not tangle with the type of people who decide to put Linux on their PlayStations. Trust me, you are wasting your time.”
- Extra Credits host guy, like a decade ago.
every single one is a l44t hack3r bro
It was the elite hacker 4chan, they hacked all their servers and stole all their ram.
I don’t play games that require anti-cheat. Simple as that. If a game is full of cheaters, I don’t play those games either. I am not going to have a windows installation just to play games. I am not going to have a console that only plays games. I am a simple man, if it supports Linux and doesn’t have anti-cheat I play. But also I don’t have friends so…
Well the garbage takes itself out
Skill issue.
People who play games to cheat are the problem with the world. Born losers.
So many games that work flawlessly on Linux, so I just skip those that don’t:]
This is the way.
And let people run their own dedicated servers again.
There are community rust servers with EAC disabled (mainly for linux players). I don’t know what the fuss is about.
How many of them competitive multiplayer?
many. Marvel rivals, a bunch of the battlefield games, arma 3, dayz, dead by daylight, halo, hunt showdown, team fortress, war thunder, csgo, deadlock, vail vr most of these games manage to have less rampant cheating than rust while supporting linux at the same time, meanwhile rust claims that only 0.01 percent of players, only 14 people, were linux players and somehow thats causing a serious cheating problem that they cant resolve? anyone can tell how dumb that sounds…
Very obviously many. But I gotta say my reaction to your reply is just “eeew, I’m so glad I’m not one of those people” (who only play those kinds of games).
Developer of game ‘Rust’ talks about
anticheatrootkits on LinuxThis whole anticheat thing is so stupid. Remember when Sony got sued bigtime for including rootkits on their audio CDs? Why are game developers getting away with it no problem? Society is regressing and it’s frustrating to watch.
People are never interested in learning from history, they’d rather run face first into that wall.
The abusers typically.did read histor, saw what worked well, what didn’t, learned from that to become even better abusers.
This doesn’t only apply to games, it applies to politics, celebrities, religious clerks,you name it
People are never interested in learning from history, they’d rather run face first into that wall.
Just saw a comment in a topic about steam machines about “why do we even need to care about the past, its in the past, it doesnt matter anymore”
humanity is devolving to a state dumber than the chimp that scratches its ass, sniffs its finger, and falls off the log in shock at the smell.
On Windows the cheating program it’s a simple exe that will get kernel access with a simple uac request.
Everyone, especially 12 years olds, are able to run it. (And maybe get malware/ransomware disguised as a cheating program)
None of the losers that need a cheating program to feel validated in online multiplayer games will have the skills to recompile the kernel in Linux to add support for that
None of the losers that need a cheating program to feel validated in online multiplayer games will have the skills to recompile the kernel in Linux to add support for that
aha! so you admit, IT’S POSSIBLE! Well aren’t we lucky we have microshoft who won’t let anyone recompile their colonels! shows you mr silly yunix!
;D
They dropped Linux before proton was invented. Go on any cheat website and the requirements will always say to have windows. Maybe proton is exploited by some cheaters, news to me. You should just ban windows, no more cheaters.
It’s not proton that is exploited. It’s the kernel itself that cannot be monitored by anti-cheats, meaning cheaters could install a modified kernel to mess with the anti-cheat
as if the cheaters can’t already evade anti-cheats even on windows.
Exactly. There are two methods that bypass kernel-level anticheat fairly easily, and there isn’t really any way around them.
You can run the game in a virtual machine, with cheats running at the hypervisor level. This level is more privileged than the virtual machine’s kernel, and can thus read or modify the active program without detection.
The other way is to load the hack into the bootloader, so the cheat loads before the kernel and, again, can thus be in a more privileged permissions state.
The only effective solution is to detect cheating server side, or change the game engine so cheats don’t work (like loading all models with no line of sight behind the player, so wall hacks and modified game models don’t matter.
There’s another whole category that also doesn’t care about what the game is running on the kernel: seperate device cheats. They act as a man in the middle for the input and output signals, and can auto shoot when you’ll hit or adjust your aim if you’re close but not quite there. Or just play for you entirely if it’s that good at processing the output.
And blocking that isn’t likely possible without killing streaming for the game or convincing all users to get input devices with encrypted connections or they can’t play your game.
I’d respond to the original comment that anyone who doesn’t have server side cheat detection isn’t serious about stopping cheaters. In any case, I just removed that game from my wishlist. Not that I needed another survival builder game anyways, though they do tend to catch my eye.
Good point. I remember seeing one about a monitor that can give edge-of-screen glow to indicate proximity of enemies in LoL or DOTA2 based on minimap information.
Fascinating.
I will never understand, how people use their ingenuity to fake being good at a game.
Like, I get the hacker aspect of it: developing a cheat, breaking the game, exploit and find ways around the counter measures. Fair enough. But then you would do it once and showcase it, that wouldn’t disrupt a game’s community.
So there are people out there, who load cheats with the bootloader, in order to pretend being better than some randos in an online game. Wow.
Just look at sports. All those antidrug tests are there for a reason.
Feels a bit different to me though. I mean, while doped in sports it is still you who brings in the results. You can also take, idk, focus-enhancing drugs in esports to have the advantage (I wouldn’t, but I’ve never been very competitive and don’t get it in general). But cheating, like e.g. using aimbots, it detaches the results somehow from you. The equivalent, to me, in sports would be to have somebody go through all the hustle to get competitive and then pretend to be you, so you can get the cup and the pictures afterwards. Just strange ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s the same as being the only one to use steroids. Or using methanol in the fuel. Or having a card in your sleeve.
I mean as a electrical engineering student who likes to program, building such a system seems like fun but playing with it not so much. If there was a game that was purly made for cheaters with the goal of beating the anticheat without detection i would love to try that. I feel like this could be something like the capture the flag competitions some groups make where you have to hack a website faster than others or break some encryption.
Desstroying other players without effirt is like playing a game in easy mode and i dont get that at all, where is the fun if there is no challenge?
Same kind of people who lie all the time to look good to others. Some people want to be awesome but know they suck, or even more pathetic don’t suck but can’t stand not being the best, and cheating is their pathway to getting the social results of being awesome without needing to develop the skills.
The way I’ve seen it for ages now, being a loser isn’t just about losing games, it’s how you handle losing games and how much you internalize that. I see it as short for “sore loser”. Cheaters are losers in that sense.
Though it makes the idea of them still losing despite cheating even more hilarious, which is why I love the idea of games that detect cheaters but stick them in cheating queues instead of just banning them.
Maybe it’s mostly kids? Like the genre of kid that told you their dad works for Nintendo so they have Mario 5.
Kids, and people making a profit.
Easier to make a profit off RMT if you bot and cheat.
They probably gave up on preventing cheat entirely, and are just trying to reduce the amount of cheaters by making cheating as annoying as possible.
I do actually believe them when they say that cheating on Linux can be made significantly easier and more comfortable than on Windows. I think it’s a real fundamental issue for Linux, multiplayer games with toxic playerbases can be unplayable due to users being able to do what they want. They would have to make systems to allow for playing in smaller human-moderated servers, or rely purely server-side solutions
And that it self is measurable. Never understood the attempt to have total control on byod setups. Its never going to happen lol
Minecraft is actually a good example.
Server owners pay very little to nothing for anticheat, and cheaters have dozens of extremely elaborate clients to choose from, all interfacing with the very open and moddable game. And still, servers that do give a fuck have basically zero rage cheating. ESP? Sure, but that can be solved as well. But beyond that, everything can and is detected. And that in a game as sandboxy and freedomy as MC. It was designed to have a lot of slack in movement and actions, yet ACs are extremely good.
literally when i thought about it for even a few seconds i was like this is some bullshit minecraft has better cheat moderation than rust… the biggest servers all manage to do so completely adequately and theyre just community servers…
One of the biggest Minecraft servers I know of had basically no anti-cheat and just relied on user reports and bans. And it was extremely effective. It was a PvP based server, and I only encountered cheaters in like 0.1% of games, and even then they were usually banned before the match finished.
Unfortunately this usually requires a dedicated mod team. For smaller servers it’s not much a problem but when that scales up, companies often decide paying for an enormous dedicated mod team to review reports and make bans isn’t worth it when there are cheaper (albeit shittier) options.
And then there is 2b2t where everyone cheats as much as possible.
I think the main tool is private self hostable servers. The big public ones have to think about anti cheat (more out of preservation of there own economy) but if you just whant to build with your mates. Have at it.
Can’t you cheat in MC by just removing a pixel in a block to make it transparent?
But I only ever played it coop, so it doesn’t really matter.
Basically, yes. There are many ways. But:
An anti-xray plugin is nowadays as common for servers as lithium or essentials. It either removes all important blocks from view, inserts fake blocks (eg. ores) or just makes everything appear as only stone. The middle option can even serve as evidence of a player using xray. For preventing ESP, you can do effectively the same but with players: Hide them and their particles until they’re in view, and randomize their sounds’ position, so that a client mod does not provide any more advantage than having decent headphones.
Server-side culling essentially.
The ones that modify the world’s blocks often cause a lot of lag unfortunately.
The game doesn’t render blocks that aren’t exposed to air. So that trick let’s you see caves and some ores, but not most ores.
Copius maximus
So Linux users were 0.01% - one in 10,000 players - and also the main cheating problem?
Some odd math there.
No, he said he saw more cheat users using Linux than legitimate users using Linux. He also said Linux is another vector to cheats, not that its the main one.
He said he saw more cheaters than legitimate players on Linux after they stopped support. I mean, no shit?
He said when they stopped. That could mean at the moment of the stop or starting from the point they stopped the support. Both are a possibility, yet only one makes more sense than the other.
Hardware level cheat detection has always been a losing game. I’m a professional in similar area (not games) but it’s fundamentally impossible to do when you dont control physical hardware, it’s stupid. The only way to detect cheaters is machine learning based behavior analysis, period.
TL;DR: skill issue
The only way to detect cheaters is machine learning based behavior analysis, period
Either the entire game industry is incompetent, or you’re wrong. Machine learning is a powerful tool, but the only way? No chance.
Entire game industry is incompetent as in “willfully not doing the best as long as it keeps selling, or not having resources to do it anyway”. I can believe that
Yes they are willingly incompetent because kernel anti cheat costs nothing while ML pipelines would cost thousands if not millions usd in compute and engineering every year.
Luckily now with AI boom it brought down many machine learning costs significantly as well so we’ll see much more server side anti cheat.
Never heard of Rust, but it sounds like something I can afford to ignore.
OS shouldn’t even matter to prevent cheating; do your anticheat validation server side. Anyone who knows anything about security knows the client side can never be trusted.
Ultra toxic survival game where you build a base, get raided by 4 guys with rocket launchers and bombs while yelling slurs at you. Then rinse and repeat.
Yeah Rust is super toxic indeed, bit I think that’s part of the appeal
Did you ever try getting gud?
Oh, I’m very good at avoiding games like that.
I thought that was the trans crab programming language
I mean, Linux player base is only .01%, even if they are all cheaters, they will literally have no impact… You can’t say “Linux user base is too small”, and “if you support Linux you want cheaters” at the same time if you want to make sense.
Yeah, but saying “Our codebase is so terrible Linux keep showing us new bugs we won’t fix” or “We can’t sell your personal data with Proton” is worse PR…
