While I appreciate that cheating is a problem in most games, I still think these Linux ban waves are just the companies trying to appear to the complaining playerbase that they’re putting effort into a solution even though it won’t make a big difference.

Apex was one or the earliest games to support competitive multiplayer on Linux. While I hate EA for a lot of reasons, I couldn’t have fully switched to Linux years ago if Apex wasn’t playable because all the other games I played were and still aren’t.

As someone on Mastodon wisely pointed out: There aren’t enough Linux gamers to invest resources in supporting them properly, but there are enough using it to cheat to actively block them?

FYI - the owner of this site, gamingonlinux, was a mod on the [email protected] community until they were caught abusing their moderator powers. Then they deleted their account and complained on mastodon that it’s stupid design that mod logs are public. [Screenshot]

Anti-cheat is an arms race. We just find ourselves at a point where the arms race has progressed to the point where the best known strategy for securing a play session means ostracising custom hw/kernel configurations.

But I have to think it’s only a matter of time before even that’s not enough, (since there already exist ways around kernel level anticheat, including AI-based techniques that are entirely undetectable).

My guess is the logical conclusion involves a universal reputation based system, where you have an account with some 3rd party system (maybe VAC) that persists across all games you play. It will watch your gameplay, and maintain a (probably hidden) “risk of cheating” score. Then matchmaking for each game will use this score to always pair you against other accounts with a similar score.

Actually, it might not be a “risk of cheating” score so much as a “fun to play with” score. From a gameplay perspective, it’s just as fun to play against a highly skilled non-cheating human, as it is a bot that plays identically. But it’s less fun to play against a bot that uses info or exploits that even the best non-cheating players don’t have access to (ex. wallhacks). So really, the system could basically maintain some playstyle-profile for each player, and matchmaking wouldn’t be skill-based, but rather it would attempt to maximize the “fun” of the match-up. If a player is constantly killing people unrealistically fast, or people who play with them tend to drop early, this would degrade their “fun” score and they would tend to be matched only with other unfun players.

I think this would be the only practical way to fight cheating without even more invasive methods that will involve just deanonymizing players (which I think some studio will inevitably try in the near future).

well shiet 😂 seems i got unexpected +80gb storage space again, let’s see which indie studio will get a new customer. bye EA

If you can’t accept business plans that make a little less profit to include sufficient human moderation to avoid heavyhanded kernel level anti cheat - you shouldn’t be in the fucking publishing business, you greedy weasels.

I’m so torn about stories like this and GTA online. Because on one hand, people play these games, and people won’t switch to Linux if they can’t play them.

But on the other hand, I just cannot give a single fuck about live service trash like this. I struggle to understand how people play games products like these, and I absolutely don’t understand why anyone would waste their time cheating in them. And yet they’re absurdly popular.

Despite gaming being such a big hobby for me, I feel so disconnected from what the average gamer values.

I have never played that game or intended to.

But:

fuck you

That would’ve hit hard if they didn’t got my EA Account stolen via fraudulent support tickets a few months ago.