Recently, i had to move from nixos to windows against my will simpy because of anti cheats. While i dont game that much, the few games i enjoy playing are all online with some kind of anti cheat. I used to dual boot but i was tired of having to wait for my slow hdd to load windows (i only have one ssd). I literally used linux for everything else but because of anti cheats i am forced to move to windows. I managed to make it a little better by using wsl2 and removing bloatware but it will never be the same as linux
I think it’s an inherent limitation of client-side anticheat.
I think initiatives like Valve’s Overwatch system is a much better approach because it relies on players who have a stake in eliminating cheaters instead of a constant war against whatever flavor of the week cheating engine people are using. Pair that with an AI model that looks for patterns (both whether players fit cheating patterns or don’t fit expected patterns) and player-jurors will have enough information to make a call.
But that kind of initiative takes more effort than just integrating an off-the-shelf anti-cheat system, it forces companies to actually care about how their game runs on customer machines.
Personally I find Overwatch a horrible idea. It’s not terribly effective and relies on players, who are particularly unreliable at determining if someone is cheating. I believe those decisions should be entirely out of the hands of the players.
AI is still to expensive to run checks on every action that every player makes. Also any sort of automated system can’t be clearly banning people.
It doesn’t need to be realtime, as long as the cheaters get caught after some days. So take samples from every player and run them through a learning algorithm and take more samples the more suspicious someone is.
The more important thing is how you deal with cheaters once you find them. I really like the idea of increasing lag to cheaters instead of outright banning them so you waste their time more than anything. And then if you find out they’re not cheating, it’s easy to just drop them from the pool.