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.
Solution is easy: don’t play LoL 🤷
My main issue with this blog post is that rather than properly addressing concerns, they make fun of them.
It’s not a rootkit, journalists just spread misinformation for clicks
Why is it not a rootkit, then??
Because journalists.
because on windows it’s not considered a rootkit, it’s considered user obscured feature sets.
I guess the difference is in whether or not the victim was complicit with installing spyware in the kernel.
A blog toxic as it’s community? Gasp.
A long while back riot used to be a fun sorta disruptive thing that was pretty healthy overall. It was awkward and fun. That was before it was purchased though. Now riot exists to make money for big china. It isn’t that company anymore. It’s a facade.
You can’t fix it, nor can the employees.
Riot is a skinpuppet that has no autonomy. Unlike the employees though, we have the choice to leave that failing franchise and move on. Rootkits aren’t acceptable and that needs to be the standard. It wasn’t okay when Sony tried it in the name of anti-piracy and it’s still not okay now. No person should be okay with installing a black box with greater admin rights than they have on their own machine. That is not okay. It is security heresy. That blog uses hand waving and bullshit to sell the concept to people that don’t know any better. And honestly? That’s almost just as bad as the rootkit itself.
A rough translation is:
Be a good drone and put the slave collar on. It’s good for you. Don’t ask questions, you don’t need to know why. Just do it. You are the product and you have no rights.
I disagree that they went downhill post-purchase. They were shit from the very start when pendragon decided to burn one community to promote his own in the name of capitalism.
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.
Makes business sense. Why bother developing for 800 users when you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to worry about? The software company I work for has to make this kind of decision all the time.
But it was nice of them to include a viable strategy for cheaters via VMs.
probably because those 800 users can’t fucking open the game. It’s almost like if you manufacture a car that doesn’t kill you the instant you fuck up even the slightest bit, that people will want to buy and own it.
800 feels like a number they cherry picked considering the overall community size.
Speaking personally: their vm detection is hot garbage and they know it. Detecting a VM is easy enough for anyone- detecting cheating via it is far more difficult. They flag a VM as such and wait for a report to roll in then blindly ban it… only to reverse it when pressured. This isn’t the behavior of an org with concrete evidence. It’s a smokescreen.
Honestly, i don’t get why people are bitching about it so much. A company, that makes a game with intention to make money off it, that never supported linux neither promised to support linux some time in the future, clarifies that it sees no purpose in supporting linux because of monetary reasons.
Okay, that may be your favorite game, you might have spend tons of money on in - but idea that it may never be supported on your favorite platform has never crossed your mind? It’s like whining that PS exclusive game is not getting ported to Xbox.
So basically, “it’s too hard, and our engineers are not good at their jobs.”
Imagine this: you have a cheater problem. Your team of developers have only ever worked on gameplay-related stuff - graphics, game engine, etc. You can:
- Make them pull solution out of their butts, somehow gain expertise in topic they have never worked on
- Pour ALOT of money in HR and hire specialists that have experience in anticheat software
- Pay 3rd party for solution that you can use RIGHT NOW and that works (at least somehow)
When money is involved, you make decision by counting them. You give somebody (tech lead, probably) task to evaluate your options - and give you approximate numbers. And i’m not surprised they chose 3rd option.
Stop stealing our CPU cycles for high risk rootkits and start mitigating and detecting cheating on the server. It’s that easy.
I’m currently working on bot detection for web resources - and trust me, it’s extremely hard to distinguish them from people without some client-side analysis. Sure, you can use behavioral analysis, but you need lots of data and, again, expertise in that. Okay, they have the data - thousands of games played daily. Have you ever seen job listing for “game patterns analyst for LoL”? Again, you have to find someone capable - highly payed experts, who will spend some time testing their theories, with no guaranteed success.
“How do you separate good players from cheaters? This low ranked player who just got his second pentakill - is he cheating or smurfing? This weird behaviour - is it because of missing fog of war or are they just communicating over voice chat?”
It’s just… really NOT that easy.
The “distributions” argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)
There’s your answer - they are not interested. And there is nothing wrong with that! It’s just business! Remember the “a times b times c” scene from fight club? They’ve calculated their x - and it’s not worth pursuing (for them).
Rootkits are bad, m’kay. Wanna avoid them? Don’t install them. Just don’t be surprised when company adds them - it’s their product, they do whatever the fuck they want.
While yes the company can certainly do what they want - that isn’t to say that everything they want to do is correct.
In an isolated bubble their decision looks… fine… ish. The reasons they provide are mostly excuses- but for arguments sake let’s say it is actually making a meaningful difference. (It isn’t and won’t: TPM is flawed and has already seen demonstrations of exploits.) So we now have a platform that has locked out users based on OS version, hardware support (TPM), in addition to os. They are actively culling users that otherwise were viable customers. Smart.
Let’s expand on this outside the bubble: what os is growing rapidly in usage with gaming? Linux. Riot is actively making a shortsighted decision (historically this tracks) which will cause them grief in the long run. Remember: their games worked on these platforms prior to this decision. The support was all free labor done by the community. Let’s say they want to release a game that takes advantage of the handheld platforms that are rising in popularity- they now need two separate anti cheat systems. Oops. They now need to try to claw back the early adopters and free community support they burned. Good luck.. Factoring in the cost of limiting future flexibility and growth… I can only imagine the game experience must have improved 2-3x by the addition of this anti cheat … except it hasn’t. By their own admission: cheat developers move faster. Objectively? It was a terrible decision.
Linux is at 2 percent in the steam hardware survey, also 50 percent linux gamers in steam are steam deck users. That is not a big enough market and riot has more data than us and they are probably right.
Based on the increase since steamos became a thing - I would argue it is gaining momentum in a significant way. Based on hardware manufacturers interest in the steamdeck and similar products - I would suggest my views are not off base.
Handheld gamers doesnt contribute much to league of legends, which is a highly competitive mouse and keyboard focused game. And riot have data about the linux gamers who plays lol before anticheat update. So they are right to offer zero support. Also linux never had much support for popular liver service games like EFT, warzone, siege, fortnite.
The point I was making is riot isn’t just a league of legends company. They are a game company that is applying this anti cheat on their entire software suite. This decision cuts off future growth- which from a business standpoint is awful. That of course completely ignores the primary issue, which remains, the rootkit.
Highly competitive is… no more competitive than any other game… but on that subject their matchmaking was so poor they had to hide the ELO mechanic completely to mask the issues with it. The issues still exist of course… but just like this smokescreen masking the shortcomings in their anticheat… they are just less obvious.
edit: some words
let’s say it is actually making a meaningful difference. (It isn’t and won’t: TPM is flawed and has already seen demonstrations of exploits.)
I dare to say their solution is “good enough” to stop ordinary user from cheating - not to solve cheating problem entirely - it may be impossible - but to raise bar of cheating without getting banned
They are actively culling users that otherwise were viable customers. Smart.
They may lose some users who won’t play anymore because they won’t install rootkit, but keep those who would leave because of cheaters. Maybe their situation is dire enough so they would apply such drastic measures?
Let’s expand on this outside the bubble: what os is growing rapidly in usage with gaming? Linux. Riot is actively making a shortsighted decision (historically this tracks) which will cause them grief in the long run.
I mean, i’m all in for that, but year of linux desktop
201120122013201420152016201720182019202020212022202320242025?Linux is my favorite OS (i use arch btw) and i use it since… 2007, i think? But i sorta gave up on that belief - it’s a nieche OS, and if gaming is ever coming to linux - it’s not coming to linux, it’s coming to ChromeOS or SteamOS.
To sum things up - i’m not saying rootkit anticheat is a good thing. It’s a solution to some problem, which people chose by comparing it to alternatives. Contrary to popular belief, CEOs don’t just sit around and think how to make players more miserable - those decisions are not made in one day. I’d drop a game if it forces me to install rootkit - i value my privacy more and i’d advice anyone to do the same. I’m just really annoyed by all the whining and comments “boohooo my favorite game developers suck and don’t value me enough”.
I dare to say their solution is “good enough” to stop ordinary user from cheating - not to solve cheating problem entirely - it may be impossible - but to raise bar of cheating without getting banned
The problem is that it isn’t raising the bar. Sure some low hanging collateral might be caught but in reality a department could easily fudge numbers (banrates) to justify a move to a new solution… and do. frequently. Speaking generally - this isn’t the days of download an exe and become 1337 like the old days. Hackers want to get paid. You sub to services which are monetarily motivated to stay ahead of a business which gains little from fighting on this front more than ‘good enough.’
They may lose some users who won’t play anymore because they won’t install rootkit, but keep those who would leave because of cheaters. Maybe their situation is dire enough so they would apply such drastic measures?
This wasn’t a dire situation. As long as league (or any online game) has existed there have been anti cheat mechanisms in place. And the best mechanism that has always existed was server side tracking with audits. Full stop. Clientside anything is a bandaid and this is no exception. If I were to speculate on the choice? This was the cheapest option available. Dress it up how you like… companies rarely go for correct options… they go for cheap ones.
I mean, i’m all in for that, but year of linux desktop … Linux is my favorite OS (i use arch btw) and i use it since… 2007, i think? But i sorta gave up on that belief - it’s a nieche OS, and if gaming is ever coming to linux - it’s not coming to linux, it’s coming to ChromeOS or SteamOS.
Lots has happened with Linux sure, but recently it is becoming considerably more mainstream and is gaining a critical mass on a relevant front: gaming. Linux is (generally speaking) free vs licensed oses like windows. Want a cheap gaming system? Steam is blazing a helluva path. Devs want bigger audiences - and more eyeballs. It would be foolish to disregard the growth in this sector.
Contrary to popular belief, CEOs don’t just sit around and think how to make players more miserable…
CSuites / Parent companies make money for themselves - because capitalism. Look no further than VMWare torching their userbase and salting the earth. Short term gains over long term longevity. Riot is not special here- they are being shortsighted.
Look no further than VMWare torching their userbase and salting the earth. Short term gains over long term longevity. Riot is not special here- they are being shortsighted.
Hmm, good point. I’d argue that VMWare’s user base was more solvent (is that a right adjective? English is not my native language), but i don’t think this argument would be in my favor.
You sub to services which are monetarily motivated to stay ahead of a business which gains little from fighting on this front more than ‘good enough.’
And subscription costs too raise the bar to start cheating. Not everyone would pay to have upper hand in F2P game. Those who are willing to do it can be hand-picked by reports and manual review. We don’t know their “definition of done” in fighting cheaters - maybe decreasing number of cheaters by 80% is an acceptable result? Maybe those 20% of remaining cheaters can be accounted for as “really good players” - those exist too. That would solve the problem.
This wasn’t a dire situation. As long as league (or any online game) has existed there have been anti cheat mechanisms in place.
We both don’t know that, if we are being honest. If it wasn’t problem at all they probable wouldn’t have done anything at all - or they’d do something far cheaper. This is a speculation - i can be wrong about state of things.
Also,
Short term gains over long term longevity.
I think there is a shitty pattern — if everyone is making same bad decision (good short term, bad long term), it makes this decision not as bad as it would be otherwise. If you are the only one who is forcing players to install possibly-malicious software, you look really bad. But if every (or majority) of competitive multiplayer games requires it, this idea just doesn’t sound that bad. If you already have malware on your PC - what changes if you install another one?
Kernel anticheat is just like gaming piracy, where developers are constantly fighting ghosts rather than tackling the social issues that encourage the behaviours they want to avoid.
there are no social issues you can ever fix to be found here. give a 11 year old an auto-win button for counter strike that he can press whenever he loses a single round and feels his pride hurt - he’ll press it.
i think that anti cheats display a disrespect to the customer, because in an ideal world he should then run two computers instead of one. one for online banking, the other one for every company’s favorite rootkit with questionable maintenance.
the only way out, in my view, is going to server side ai cheat detection.
But my point is: What makes that player want to push the “auto win” button? There are lots of games with cheating, but also many more that dont suffer nearly as much from cheating, if at all.
Competitive games, especially ones that lean towards eSports and “real prizes” are going to have some incentive to cheat, but even in this genre there’s games known for cheats and others that have better reputations. The question is what game design decisions can improve the urge of players to seek cheats in the first place.
The issue with this entire statement is that despite the amount of system access they want, and the complexity of the software they’ve made, cheating is as rampant as it was before. The fact that they continue treating Linux as an issue, just as Ubisoft do with Siege, or Bungie with Destiny, just shows that there is a much larger issue at hand
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.
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.
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.
Pfft… that’s easy to solve. Just ask them to identify all the fire hydrants.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The “any backdoors we leave open for it” bit kinda sounds like straight-up complaining that they can’t compromise users’ security without compromising their own control over users’ systems?
Boo fucking hoo, I guess 🤷
That’s a pretty standard position nowadays from a lot of different tech companies. They can’t possibly give the user any freedoms, because it might compromise something. It’s this broad assumption that all users that refuse to surrender control of their device should never be trusted and therefore not have their desires respected.
Like how Google continues to actively punish users that claw back control of their devices through custom roms or rooting, and of course Apple has been doing that forever. Microsoft is threatening more invasive restrictions in windows, too. It’s why shit like integrity checking is continuing to be pushed.
The pattern is very clear: you are required to let them stick their arm up your device’s ass to participate in our “modern” tech space.
It’s the equivalent of a store that forces all customers to strip naked before entering to prevent shoplifting. You of course don’t have to enter that store, but that store has also run virtually all the other stores out of business, and it’s the only one that carries the specific brand of chips you’re looking for.
In my country there was a story about a lady who got viral because it had been customary for shops to make people leave their backpacks and purses on a locker or with an employee. Then a security employee also had to check your receipt against the items in your bag before you left. It’s extremely annoying and cumbersome, it can add up to half an hour of extra time when the shops are full and there aren’t enough employees to do the checks.
So one day she went to buy groceries, before giving her purse to the employee she emptied it and itemized everything there was in there on a piece of paper. Then she bought her groceries and had the clerk double check the price and weight of every item she bought against the price tags and content labels of everything. Including the prepackaged meats. Then, when picking up her purse back, she had the list of items and emptied the bag again in front of the employee.
The manager noticed and went to her mad at what she was doing. She argued with him that they treated her as a thief so she would treat them as thieves themselves and pointed out how she had been charged for an extra plastic bag they didn’t gave her (we get charged the price of the bags) and demanded her plastic bag or money back.
Of course nothing came of it, but it riled social media discourse over here for a while. Some low end (local bodegas) and high end stores stopped the practice as the economic situation stabilized later, but it was still a quirky detail of that dark era. Some employees did steal stuff from customers bags sometimes. Same lady had a field day during the days of stores trying to return change on payments with lollipops and candy. So she tried to pay with a bag of candy and lollipops. That one was wild as well.
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.
WINE
Is
Not
(an)
EmulatorWhat makes you think they are referring to Wine in that particular case, and not the emulation of the kernel level anticheat on userland? It’s also arguably not an entirely correct use of the word there either, but it’s fine.
What makes you think they are referring to Wine in that particular case.
Them talking about Lutris and Wine in that same paragraph and using the phrasing “even allowing” implying it’s what they’re currently doing. But looking again, you’re right. They were referring to VMs.
