Cheating to hear spies is painfully easy.
www.teamfortress.tv

Some months back, I made a joke statement on a tf.tv post

Just another reason why F/OSS games are superior to closed-source proprietary games.

Some users then argued with me that making anticheat systems FOSS would cause more problems. I conditionally disagreed with them at the time.

Today, I visited that posted again and I laughed at the past chaos; but now I am curious: Should anticheat systems be F/OSS?

    • triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml
      3·
      3 years ago

      I think open source could work for client side too - it’s an arms race between devs and cheaters already, and at least if the code was open there would be a lot of techie players who don’t like cheating who would be motivated (and able) to find and fix loopholes.

      I’d also personally accept much more invasive client-side anti cheat tech if the code was auditable - signed kernel module (Linux) / signed driver (Windows / Mac), or whatever.

  • jokeyrhyme
    81·
    3 years ago

    The anti-cheat problem is kinda’ like the content moderation problem

    I’d like companies to think harder about why some players cheat in the first place

    And I think federation, self-moderation by communities, and allowing users to develop their own block lists is the best way forward: let me decide who to trust, and let me decide who I don’t want to play with

  • Thann
    4·
    3 years ago

    No.

    Anticheat software is only needed for private-servers. With FOSS games, the servers are typically community run, and the community can vote-ban users who they suspect of cheating. (like old-school CS)

  • adrianmalacoda
    3·
    3 years ago

    The point of Libre software is that the user has control over it. Anti-cheat software is explicitly designed to control the user (i.e. to prevent them from cheating) and thus can’t realistically be Libre. You can argue that preventing cheaters is a desirable outcome for the game’s population but it stands that anti-cheat must be proprietary in order to work.

    A compromise could be if the game is mostly Libre but has a proprietary anti-cheat module that is necessary to play with other anti-cheat-enabled players/servers. If you don’t care about anti-cheat you can just remove the module.

  • MrGamingHimself
    22·
    3 years ago

    Definitely not. A lot of pro-FOSS people constantly argue that anticheat should be open source, but the only reason AC is effective is because hackers and cheaters don’t know how it works. If it were open source, people would find ways around it, and with the new implementation of first-person aimbot hacks, this problem would increase way more because it’s already hard to tell the difference.

    There are new waves of hackers that use AI and machine learning to lock onto enemies and send mouse inputs to do that. They cheat doesn’t even need to run on the same system you’re playing on so it’s nigh impossible to detect, if AC were open-source they would see how they detect hackers and play around it, and it’d be a constant battle of cat and mouse where players suffer.

    And a lot of people go “DAE anti-cheat malware lately?” but if you’ve seen the crap people do, you’d understand why anticheat is getting more and more restrictive.

    I’d like to be proven wrong but I’m pretty sure nobody will ever even try FOSS anticheat because it probably will never work.