EA expanding EA Anti-Cheat - bad news for Steam Deck / Linux
www.gamingonlinux.com
EA (Electronic Arts) are continuing to expand their home-grown EA Anti-Cheat, with an announcement that Battlefield 2042 is also moving over to it.

EA anticheat is a kernel level anticheat, which are generally bad for consumers due to them giving malware new targets to get full control of an infected system. Genshin Impact’s kernel anticheat is famously targeted by ransomware as an easier way to gain control of user’s PCs for example. They also don’t work on Linux, which is an obvious problem for Steam Deck users.

  • Bob
    58•9 months ago

    How invasive do you have to be to ask your users to install a Kernel driver just for a stupid anti cheat that will still get bypassed within a week… like… I only see negative points with this. Cheaters still exist on Valorant and they won’t go away any time soon. Even if one day they ask you to change your CPU to an anti cheat approved one, it will still get bypassed.

    These Kernel anti cheats are useless because they run on the client side. As a developer, anything that doesn’t run on your computers is out of your control.

    Which raises the point, why don’t they just improve their server side cheat detection? Something like sending the mouse movement data + accuracy etc. in between each round and scan it. If it comes out positive then have the community review the footage. CSGO does this very well IMO. Especially since now we have AI and people have made pretty good cheat analysis models for server side anti cheats

    • @[email protected]
      15•9 months ago

      How invasive do you have to be to ask your users to install a Kernel driver just for a stupid anti cheat that will still get bypassed within a week.

      Oh, don’t worry attestation is just around the corner.

      Attestation is basically every software companies wet dream: it allows software to cryptographically verify that *everything" from the software to the hardware is legitimate and unmodified. Android has been rolling this out for years (making it difficult to run your banking app on your rooted phone) . It’s the same concept that Google wants to use to know if you’ve been blocking ads in chrome.

      … fun times ahead.

      • @[email protected]
        1•9 months ago

        If people keep buying that crap, what’s going to stop the companies doing that? I’m at a point where I don’t care anymore to be honest. I have so many games on my library that I haven’t played yet olus all the emulated stuff, that’s going to be sufficient for the rest of my life. There will be really good AAA games by nice companies once in a while, like Baldur’s Gate 3 right now. Then there are really good indie games like Stardew Valley, Minecraft (in the early days), and so on.

    • ShadowRam
      10•9 months ago

      More work needs to be on the server side.

      A ton of cheating can be stopped dead in it’s tracks if you spend some time filtering out data being sent to the clients, that have no business knowing about.