Epic Games Announces Easy Anti-Cheat For Linux - Including Wine/Proton

[ezst036]

.......and also because it benefits Linux, which Tim Sweeney seems to despise.

I can't think of many instances where Sweeney was personally wronged by Linux. Now, Apple/(MacOS) is a whole other issue. That whole mess might give Sweeney some slight favoritism to Linux over anything Apple.

Besides, the calls and questions and requests for Linux compatibility by users are only going to keep increasing over whatever exists today. So why not?

[doomie]

The goal of anticheat is not to stop cheating, it is to ban the cheaters. there is a fairly significant difference. as a competitive gaming company, stopping cheaters don't make much financial sense when you can sell them the game 10x times and more. to stop cheating, anticheat is nothing but a part of a necessary solution. anticheat software universsally sucks. Client side anticheat is easy enough to bypass. and server side anticheat isn't viable unless you are running a private server.

You sound reasonable. Makes me think of government and policy.. It's also a matter of how far you have to go if your goal is to STOP people with free will from offending to begin with... sky is the limit, really. "No, you're not allowed to eat that toast, and your illegal desire has been reported." saith your implant. Really it's the price we pay for haxxor-free utopia...

I despise DRM, but anti-cheating measures have their place... depends on what you want to play for recreation. No, we can't really have nice things.

[mrazster]

Oh great, Chinese Tencent spyware now compatible with Linux.

Oh great, more Tinfoil Hats in the beautiful world of Linux, yay !

[ColdDistance]

Well done, Epic. Now you are supporting the only true Open Platform among big desktop systems. Is it the first time that you are consistent with your own principles?

[doomie]

Well done, Epic. Now you are supporting the only true Open Platform among big desktop systems. Is it the first time that you are consistent with your own principles?

They have principles? I'm legit ignorant, I've only heard some noise about Valve's sales cut, but I don't remember hearing any underlying principles...

[oiaohm]

VAC = Valve allows cheats

I just hope that it won't be a new Epic Allows Cheats too.

https://www.iwantcheats.net/cronus-zen-hacks-aimbot-ps4-xbox-one/

That is too late. Cheaters have moved passed client side software cheating.

[mdedetrich]

The only anti-cheat is server-side sanity checking, everything else is just a minor annoyance. Client-side anti-cheat is purely just for marketing to make companies feel better.

Well until everyone gets fiber optic internet with 3ms ping time, you cannot just fully rely on server side checking (especially if we are talking about FPS games).

[JPFSanders]

The goal of anticheat is not to stop cheating, it is to ban the cheaters. there is a fairly significant difference. as a competitive gaming company, stopping cheaters don't make much financial sense when you can sell them the game 10x times and more.

Well from personal experience (Child playing Fall Guys) cheaters can really ruin a game's experience, selling multiple copies of your game to cheaters is not as important as to keeping the player community happy and playing your game so the kids convince other kids to get the game and you get a nice momentum with a stable player base.

My kid convinced most of his friends to get the game after they implemented EAC, he nearly abandoned the game initially due to the prevalence of people cheating and getting to the goal line using speed hacks or hacks to fly across the map straight to the goal line.

He used to play in Linux at the beginning, once Fallguys implemented EAC it stopped working on Linux and I had to install a copy of Windows so he could double-boot and keep playing, EAC made 99% of the cheating stop on its tracks and he's had tons of fun with it since.

I'm delighted he will be able to play in Linux again so I can get rid of the dreaded Windows partition.

I'm not so sure this is Epic really embracing Linux & Steam Deck. I think it's more indicative of their feelings of where Microsoft is going with Windows, and their recent experience with Apple. I think they realized the "closed garden" ecosystem of hardware & software that many are going to is ultimately going to harm their profits.

Well he annoyed Apple, Google is not very happy either, what's good old Tim do? Annoy Valve too and lose another platform?

Losing the ruse against Apple has probably made Sweeney reconsider his market position. If my memory serves me right Sweeney's hostility towards Linux has more to do with him thinking Linux as a platform for gaming has no commercial value rather than real animosity or hate.

I bet if the Steam Deck sells decent numbers Epic will somehow make Fortnite available in some official fashion for the SteamDeck, not necessarily by Steam but they will think of something, perhaps even porting the Epic store.

[oiaohm]

The server's computational power is usually divided to serve many clients. Thus, the server is, computationally, a less powerful machine than the client. Client-side can report an artificially slower CPU to the server and thus run the app in an emulated environment. It is always possible for the client to force the server-side to a less accurate model of the client than the client machine has about itself, thus the client will always have a more accurate timing model than the model running on the server.

The goal of anticheat is not to stop cheating, it is to ban the cheaters. there is a fairly significant difference. as a competitive gaming company, stopping cheaters don't make much financial sense when you can sell them the game 10x times and more. to stop cheating, anticheat is nothing but a part of a necessary solution. anticheat software universsally sucks. Client side anticheat is easy enough to bypass. and server side anticheat isn't viable unless you are running a private server.

https://www.iwantcheats.net/cronus-zen-hacks-aimbot-ps4-xbox-one/

The today nightmare is that a client side anticheat does not need to be bipassed for a person to cheat. The appearance of the cronus zen shifted the game. Using the cronus zen in combination with a second pc doing screen capture that is generating wall hacks and auto aim is another form of cheater these days as well.

The reality here is client side anticheat is coming totally ineffective solution because cheaters no longer need to modify the client side software to cheat.

Of course as more and more cheaters use hardware to cheat the number of times old school security risk client side anti-cheat catches cheats will reduce. Yes this idea of sell the game 10x times by the game maker equals to the cheater to cheat spending 100 dollars on a zen or equal device to avoid getting caught as much is worth it.

Server side anticheat not being higher expensive is not in fact true. http://timepath.github.io/scratchspa...qc_source.html Yes this is a open source game Xonotic turns out to be resistant from server side to many cheats. How it is resistant is simple a human player physically can only move the controller so fast. Cheat software and cheat hardware both will normally break this. There are quite a few very highly effective anti-cheat methods that can be deployed server side. There are even ways of detecting ESP.

[oiaohm]

Well until everyone gets fiber optic internet with 3ms ping time, you cannot just fully rely on server side checking (especially if we are talking about FPS games).

This only partly true we have open source games FPS that have been used in competition play that have server side anticheat that do not depend on 3ms ping time. These server side anti-cheats have turned out to be just as more worthy as client side anti-cheats and more trust worthy than combination client side anti-cheats and server side anti-cheats(as in ones designed to work with each other).

No anti-cheat is perfect other than having the person play in front of certified staff on certified hardware to see if they really have the skill or not and to abstract a real player profile.