Solution is easy: don’t play LoL 🤷
their “hello fellow kids” energy works better for their goofy insignificant patch notes than it does for combating bad PR.
i was very on the fence about keeping it installed on a potato windows laptop i don’t use for much else. this article absolutely convinced me fully not to. they could not have written a worse case for themselves if they had tried.
they have stated they even intend to try getting anticheat on macs as soon as possible. even if it is not possible, (which seems likely to me, considering the ecosystem?) their argument for axing linux could easily be used to just ditch macs. "we don’t know how to secure it, and there were only 800 players [on a random, cherry picked day.]"
having a section in which they claim there are zero false positives is delusional. that’s not how technology works. there will literally always be bugs, glitches, edge cases.
they claim they can currently read stuff in user mode, so it’ll be essentially analogous in invasiveness, and it’s straight bullshit.
this is several degrees of trust beyond “can read stuff in user mode when running”
this is “can read anything in user mode, in admin mode, on all other users on your computer, can restrict your bios and hardware, and has full potential to have permanent root access to any user or system you install in the future”either they do not understand what they are implementing, which is a really bad sign for trusting them with it,
or they know exactly what they are doing and lying about it, which is another really bad sign for trusting them with it.i’m gonna be honest, if they had taken the hardline “we know it’s more invasive, but we need this” and kept it straight, i might have kept playing. it’s the only multiplayer competitive game i have anymore.
but the ad hominem attacks in here, the calls to the “angry twitter mobs,” the disingenuous and extremely loose way they play with the truth,
(it’s not running all the time! well, it is, but we don’t really think it should count)that in just a few paragraphs has burned any goodwill i had towards them. they are weaponizing their own playerbase to cannibalize themselves and attack their friends for having legitimate concerns about degrees of personal invasion and that’s unconscionable. that disgusts me more than the crappy implementation and the cavalier attitude ever could.props to them, i guess, for making the only choice to be to quit a game i played happily for about a decade.
and the difficulty in securing it is only compounded by all the frustrating differences between distributions.
You DO NOT get to bitch about dIfFeReNcEs while you’re writing rootkits. Fuck off.
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Even worse, it proves that they themselves don’t understand the entire psycho-social scope and workings of cheating. Cheating is not an entirely technical problem. It’s multidimensional.
Riot is owned by Tencent. Coincidence?
Fuck Riot. Never playing their games again. If you’re going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies. Besides, they should be doing anticheat at the server level not spying on the boot sequence of client PCs. That shit is unnecessary for a fucking banking app let alone a goddamn game. It’s just a game, let us enjoy it rather than making such a ridiculously over the top response to cheating.
If you’re going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies.
This, a thousand times. I can understand requiring anti-cheat for Ranked matches, but some of us just wanna screw around. If there’s no progression tied to the match why should they care?
(Microtransactions, if I had to guess)
Yup, at the very minimum let me continue to play TFT. You can’t really cheat there, and if you could, that’s more likely due to an underlying gamplay/UX problem.
Just tried TFT on Android device, and … well, its time to let this shit go.
tldr for anyone:
They aren’t fixing it. fuck y’all.
Also - it’s not a rootkit - it just loads at boot and has higher privileges than the userspace that you can’t contr… oh. it’s a rootkit. They don’t want you to call it that though. It’s not cancer… it’s a growth.
at this point i want to cheat on an approved, bare-metal windows machine, just as a fuck you.
but then i remember this game is awful and i dont wanna touch it anyway.
Funnily enough that’s how a lot of modern cheats work. it’s on a separate box. Good luck catching that automatically vanguard. Hard to out-ring the hardware layer.
If it’s not server based detection it’s exploitable.
I’m not in that line of work but make no mistake if it hasn’t been yet: a cheat vector will probably involve patching the anti cheat software or attacking how it communicates.
there are arduino-based cheats now, you dont even need an expensive box, it hijacks your mouse for aimbots and such. thinking of putting one of mine to use.
Yep, this is what I was referencing in other responses. Purely from a solution perspective it is positively the ultimate “get bent” from the cheat community. Add in some randomness and suddenly there’s zero difference between a ‘good session’ and scripting.
Next up: sorry you don’t have xyz brand mice you can’t play our games. Consumers get forced to buy shit they don’t want or need and meanwhile the cheat / hack community release a patch to emulate it.
It’s the same old cat and mouse game. There are solutions - but a rootkit isn’t it.
not looking forward to mice DRM of all things. but then it will be funny to see their games wilt because most people don’t own the xyz hardware they require. im willing to bet arduinos can fake hardware ids too.
I can’t believe they made a shitty Dota clone based off the Arcane animation on Netflix.
I just read from that: Other OSes are inferior and they won’t tell their userbase. Cheapshots I guess.
DotA 2 works right? Just upgrade to DotA 2
Yeah, but what if I want:
- pre-2010 graphics
- a free rootkit
- a single ugly stagnant map with no skins
- a single and unchangeable and uninspired drone of an announcer
- a game whose bug-ridden, laggy client leaks memory and processes
- a game whose client prevents you from spectating pro games, past and present
- a pro scene rampant with match fixing and ads injected into the horrendous casting
If not League of Legends, where else am I gonna get all of that from?
I love that you mentioned that abomination they call a client. Something so bad a developer solo wrote a better one only to have them hire that person and quietly kill the project.
I’ve never actually noticed cheaters during the time I played the game. If they cheat and matchmaking puts me against them, it just means that me without cheats and them with cheats are equivalent in skill level, so it’s a fair and fun game. So I don’t see the point in preventing cheats in the first place unless you’re at the very top of the ladder, and there’s so few people up there that it should be easy to just manually ban the cheaters.
I think a part of it is the difference to losing to something “reasonable” vs “unreasonable.”
If you’re clearly really bad at the game when we are in a fight with line of sight but somehow you keep picking off my teammates through walls… That’s the kind of thing where cheating really starts to get annoying.
You may still be on the same skill level overall, but for specific parts of the game they have super powers, and it just feels ridiculous.
Smurfing is also a real issue because cheaters seem to overlap with trolls that just want everyone else to have a bad time, so they’ll spend a bunch of time down ranking, so they can spend a little time giving a lot of players a bad day.
I think a part of it is the difference to losing to something “reasonable” vs “unreasonable.”
Yeah, that’s understandable. I just don’t think there’s an equivalent in LoL that would feel particularly unfair. At worst, someone just knows where you are at all times. What do you do with that information? That requires good game knowledge. You can only influence a small portion of the map yourself and teammates tend to like acting independently even if you provide them with extra info.
Smurfing is a bigger problem, but I’ve found that Riot tends to be very good at gauging your skill level even if you intentionally sandbag. LoL is just one of those game where it’s really hard to convincingly pretend to be bad at it.
“linux does not allow us a good enough ability to confirm boot state”
Skill issue, L for riot games.
Realistically, if this is true, it’s because of security. Shocker on that one really. Also, there are probably only 800 players on linux because the anti cheat doesnt fucking work. But that doesnt count apparently
Yeah I didn’t know I could play it.
i was convinced that LOL didn’t boot under linux, im still trying to figure out how they’re getting these numbers.
Right?
Skill issue, L for riot games.
I’m no expert here, but couldn’t they rely on SEV/SME or similar? My understanding is those features encrypt RAM, which would make it a lot more difficult for an attacker to do memory-based attacks when the game is running within a VM. I expect “physical attacks” would include attacking a VM’s memory, but again, I’m not an expert.
I also wonder if this could work in a containerized environment instead of a VM, so players could just run a lightweight container and preserve direct access to resources like the GPU. I don’t know if GPU access can be required to be encrypted as well, but surely this is a massive step forward.
i have no clue myself frankly. Realistically, doing literally anything is probably going to be better than what riot claims is possible. I think a fundamental part of the problem is stuff outside the control of the game, the OS already has segmented ram for instance, it’s all supposed to be virtually privatized, that way you don’t get these kinds of problems On the fly encryption would probably help, though they would probably just use shitty encryption anyway. Regardless, if you get something to hook into the game code itself, rather than just abusing memory values, it wouldn’t matter. Because at that point it’s going to be running inside the game.
I hear Dota is better anyways and I think it runs natively.
It runs but the Vulcan implementation is shit so you will have worse performance.
So … do we have any evidence that rootkits actually decrease the amount of cheating? Like… At all?
it totally decreases the amount of cheating by a lot. Like the biggest decrease in history. That’s right. It’s huge. /trumpvoice
Also
trust me bro
I wouldn’t trust you if you were a valid SSL cert, bro
Come oooon. I’m google.com. really! Would I lie to you?
If you’re google.com, then yes. But then that would mean you are not google.com, which would mean you are google.com.
The awnser is a firm no. Cheaters have moved to hardware based cheats with DMA boards. On valorant some cheaters have started exploiting remote play services to use machine vision based aim bots. Neither of those two methods can be detected by a kernel level anti cheat.
Pfft… that’s easy to solve. Just ask them to identify all the fire hydrants.
And now they have more fun working with hardware than software. No needing to reverse engineer the game either since you’re just processing display output and executing inputs on separate hardware like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi
With DMA based cheats I disagree as if you were developing a DMA based cheat you would still need to understand how the game works so you can figure out what memory adresses are for what part of the game.
You’re assuming the anti cheat won’t refuse to run if a DMA device is installed.
So basically, “it’s too hard, and our engineers are not good at their jobs.”
It’s Harder to solve than you think. I came upon a documentary a while ago where they go a bit more in depth on the subject and what cheaters can do nowadays.
No company has solved the problem tbh. Even games like counter strike are riddled with cheaters and even on faceit there’s plenty of people that are dodgy AF and likely cheat.
It’s not an easy problem to solve and it is, AFAIK, still an unsolved problem in shooters. So your comment is a bit salty. Might as well claim every game engineer worldwide isnt good at their job because nobody has solved this yet. Not that I’m defending riot.
The rootkit “solution” is complete bullshit. It is completely disproportionate and a massive security/privacy risk. And to top it off it’s not even a solution that’s good enough.
This is the documentary I saw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M&
It did remove my appetite for playing PvP shooters for a while.
Given the user always has a deeper access to the client (i.e. hardware access) than the anticheat dev does, eliminating cheating is probably unsolvable.
Best bet is probably always going to be a decently funded team dedicated to find and ban cheaters, rather than attempting to prevent them all with a rootkit.
I’m sorry but I just don’t buy that.
First of all, you can’t solve a problem you’re not willing to work on.
Second, no one is expecting a solution that bans 100% of cheaters and has zero false positives. We all know that’s unrealistic. So saying no one has solved it yet is kind of misleading. There are existing solutions that work well enough for most people.
Third, there are solutions that can run entirely on the server side that would work for every system. Riot just isn’t willing to use them.
My comment stands. Bad engineers that can’t solve a problem other people have already come up with solutions for.
The rootkit isn’t a solution. It’s a bandaid - and a bad one at that. Moba and FPS hacks have already moved outside the hardware of the PC or into the virtual space. It’s a beware of dog sign on the fence meant to scare users… while ultimately doing very little (besides providing a vector real hackers and tools can exploit to gain access to your system.)
Seriously anyone willing to install a rootkit on their system that that company is behind deserves whatever comes their way next.
I fully agree with that. It’s why I quoted “solution” in the first place.
