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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
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If you are not a gamer - you probably look at this as a privacy nightmare.
If you are regular (and especially a good at FPS genre) gamer who constantly plays popular FPS shooters, you might appreciate this anti-cheat. It is very important that cheaters get a real punishment, where changing IP and account is not enough.
I’ve heard stories that cheaters in Apex Legends are buying new disks each time they are banned, because easy anti cheat blocklists their hardware by their (serial) IDs.
Also, this post is a bit cringe. Anti-cheat software is needed. And that’s exactly what anti-cheat does - analyzes user’s PC and user’s activity in order to detect cheat software…
This software will not solve the problem - and is probably not even meant to. The company is likely harvesting data to abuse users or sell it.
No extent of privacy invasion will solve cheating. I have made - as a fun university project - demo cheats that do not even need to run on the same computer as the game. They give significant competitive advantage, and detection systems give too many false-positives to even begin to counter these.
You are yet another one who don’t play any competitive multiplayer games and fail to see the benefit on anti-cheat software.
You are 100% wrong.
I have played in online and offline CS and Overwatch tournaments. My team won prizes. We had a wonderful anti-cheat measure: reputation and respect.
LAN parties with people you know is a different thing.
Yeah, unfortunately both reputation and respect is dead in (most) online multiplayer games. LAN and Esports is a completely different thing.
So here we are. Being OK with a company stealing our informations, and certainly selling them by the way, because we somehow think that’s acceptable since you won’t die against a dude that can see through walls in a videogame. Something, Something about priorities…
The policy doesn’t say if the save the CONTENT of your system files, just enumerated them.
So, how exactly does this company expect to make money with the information that I like to keep discord and Adobe acrobat running in background?
I am not certainly sure what point you are trying to make? Yes, this is acceptable as there is no better way to avoid cheaters on PC platform. 🤷
You also realize that anti cheat software comes with a game? If you don’t install games - there would be no anti-cheat software on your PC.
I’m not sure about this one. For sure it’s the most cost-effective method to avoid cheaters, but not the “best” way.
Using statistics on the server side could be less intrusive. Checking file integrity on every run could be an option. Honeypots that are visible only for cheaters already happened with success to detect them.
There are possible strategies.
Server side monitoring of inputs and better code that didn’t tell the client computer where everyone was behind walls would be a start.
Let’s not pretend that anticheat isn’t a poorly made, anti-consumer bandaid for a game company’s lack of investment in security and quality net code.
Gonna be real, this sounds like you just don’t know much about networked game programming. As if in the 20 years of the entire industry trying to solve the cat-and-mouse of cheat developer versus game integrity, no one thought of “uuh, lets jusy not tell the client where they are until they r on screen” and realized it was unfeasible.
And they all do that anyway. Information generally isn’t revealed to the client unless it needs to be.
Yup… There are definitely some games that have netcode that’s just too easily exploitable (e.g. the old god mode cheats where you could just cover the whole map in smoke, fly, etc).
The bigger issue is and has always been the more nuanced cheaters. The ones that have cheat clients that act more like a guiding hand, just caressing the crosshair (or the packets) for the perfect headshot for a 75% increase in accuracy.
That’s not something that can really be detected well over the network… It just looks like a player doing normal things.
It’s necessary for the client computer to know where other players are, though. Like, if someone is walking in the other side of a wall to me, or shooting their gun around a corner from me, it’s important for me to get audio cues, for instance.
As for server-side input monitoring, that can only take you so far. It’s easy enough to add a random element to a script so things don’t happen at fixed intervals, for example. Most of these games do use server-side input monitoring on top of client-side anti-cheat.
Audio cues can be intentionally non specific enough for the client to be able to determine the exact location of the source and for a cheat to overlay the position, tho.
Seriously, you guys see all the overwork, burnout, and abuse of developers for basic fucking features on launch but somehow manage to have nationstate level architecture to prevent cheaters, but oh they just can’t manage to beat the cheaters by not having 3rd party malware and spyware on every connected machine? Some people really here need to grow up and remember the conditions under which these games are made. Games have basically 0 security considerations, proven by their willingness to outsource the entire concept to a 3rd party who can take all the legal liability and at the same time giving us the sorriest excuse for “anti-cheat” while still not solving the problem.