THE FINALS announced they are updating to a kernel-based anti-cheat, and despite the change, they will continue to support Linux/Proton
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They did say and/or steamdeck
Yes but they did not say Linux. Some devs are making their games available on Steam Deck while blocking them from wider Linux compatibility.
What? Who? I haven't seen anything like this and I don't understand how it would be possible.
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But didn't Windows just announced that they wish to stop kernel-level security?
I’m glad we agree that anti-cheat is a security measure.
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What? Who? I haven't seen anything like this and I don't understand how it would be possible.
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This was their reasoning for kernels based anti-cheat:
Security
With every big update comes a renewed commitment from our Anti-Cheat team:
Cheat makers operate in a low-risk, high-reward world. They profit by selling cheats, oftentimes packing them with malware that harms their own customers, and they face very little consequences for their actions. Meanwhile, players who use their cheats risk losing everything: their accounts, their money, their time, and their chance to participate in events and competitions.
Our strategy for combating this is simple: raise the cost, difficulty, and time required to develop and distribute cheats.
As mentioned in the 7.0 patch notes, a lot of cheats these days use a kernel-driver to read and write memory to gain an unfair advantage. This means that they run in a privileged mode in the Windows operating system, making it unlikely and in some cases impossible to detect via Anti-Cheat in the game client. The technical solution to combat this is kernel-driver Anti-Cheat. We believe that this is, and will be, a requirement for every competitive multiplayer game for the foreseeable future.
We’re also using machine learning to analyze player behavior, and we have been doing so since the launch of THE FINALS. Machine learning provides valuable insights, especially when detecting cheats such as aimbot usage.
In the coming months, we will also begin an incremental rollout of a new kernel-based anti-cheat solution, intended to significantly raise the bar for cheat makers.
Cheat makers exploit everyone: players, developers, and the community itself. We’re committed to protecting fair play and adapting to new threats.
Despite claims from cheat developers that they’re “undetectable,” every cheat leaves breadcrumbs and we’ve been following them. Closely.
Honestly, the game had so many bugs in its lifetime so far I fear running their buggy code on the kernel level will irreversibly kill my operating system.
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Honestly, the game had so many bugs in its lifetime so far I fear running their buggy code on the kernel level will irreversibly kill my operating system.
Damn, at least you won't have to play it anymore, right?
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Damn, at least you won't have to play it anymore, right?
I've got over 1000 hours in the game. I can't stop. Please send help.
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I've got over 1000 hours in the game. I can't stop. Please send help.
You and me both brother.
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They did say and/or steamdeck
Yes but they did not say Linux. Some devs are making their games available on Steam Deck while blocking them from wider Linux compatibility.
wrote last edited by [email protected]They said wine/proton and/or steam deck. That's "anything that runs wine/proton" and/or steam deck, not "steam deck and block anything else".
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I’m glad we agree that anti-cheat is a security measure.
kernel anticheats feel more like a anti security feature some random company has code execution in yout kernel
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
Yes, but that exponentially increases ongoing costs for hosting servers for the game to perform those extra checks, and unless you're one of the Valves of the world, you aren't going to have enough data for an automated system to work properly.
Counter Strike effectively has had a server-sided anticheat since the latter half of Global Offensive's lifespan, but there are simply too many gaps in the armor - difficult to determine what counts as a violation with 99% certainty, false positives, automated peripherals used by players that "copy" real human players, and so on.
In a perfect world, the answer to this problem would be community hosted servers ran by independent admins who could audit player activity and exercise human judgements. But that would severely limit the scale of games like the Finals, since both those who could stomach the cost of hosting and the quality of matchmaking would diminish. Even after those measures, it's not bulletproof. Ask RUST players, TF2 players, DayZ/Arma players, and so forth.
Windows users are far more likely to be technically naive enough to install a cheat that will be detected by the kernel level anticheat, and the existence will also act as a deterrent and price increase on the cheat maker's side. The subset of Linux users who desire to cheat may not be affected by those changes, but other methods, like reporting, active memory checks, and pattern detection can still keep fair play.
This can't just be a one stop solution. It has to be hybrid. Otherwise the scale of PVP multi-player games we see today is impossible to maintain.
