ones with intrusive anti-cheat, due to Linux not allowing it to run at the kernel level
Which, you know what? Good. Why the hell should I have to install a rootkit in order to play your game? Even if they started publishing this shit as kernel modules I would refuse to install it. If publishers stopped trying to turn every single game into a proto-NFT economy with hats and skins and bullshit the bot accounts would disappear overnight. Cheaters are annoying, but no more annoying than tryhards, smurfs, and bad sports. Find some cool people to play with. Organize a league or join one if you want to be competitive.
Protondb.com can show you the current state of Wine compatibility for any game on Steam.
Literally playing Elden Ring on Gentoo right now. :shrug-outta-hecks: It's getting harder and harder to find games which don't work in Proton these days (with the aforementioned exception of "anti-cheat" malware). It's worth checking before coughing up any money though.
The very funny thing about this is that EAC can't even effectively do the singular job that it nominally claims to do. Lost Ark, as an example, is absolutely INFESTED with bots autoleveling characters at all times, filling chat channels with spam for RMT. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this were the same for other games.
It is at best a technological solution to a social / socioeconomic problem. The root cause is that the publishers have turned accounts and in-game items into commodities by design. They have fostered an environment where harvesting items in Fortnite, Rocket League, and CS:GO is no different from mining Bitcoin.
Online multiplayer games have always had cheaters, but in the past this could be easily mitigated by server admins laying down the banhammer. And hell, a little cheating can be kinda funny when the game isn't turned into such a long commitment as a 45 minute round of Warzone, or a Tarkov run where you can lose a month's worth of grinding instantly, or some elo score dick measuring contest.
It's not even just that it's a technological solution, it's an automated "solution" that doesn't require much work. The only things developers can do to prevent cheating is writing good server code that doesn't allow players to do insane things. Somehow there are still game developers that do server-authoritative logic client-side. And preventing aim-botting just requires collecting game statistics and banning people (like you mentioned) who are inhumanly good, or making the gameplay more interesting than point-and-click stuff that aim-bots can do. FPS games that are mainly about clicking the enemy should be on their way out. Like piracy and everything else, it's an arms race, but game studios are only making pistols while cheat authors are making rocket launchers.
Personally, my favorite system was the one employed in Sauerbraten. You join a server, and if there are no admins, you can appoint yourself as the admin, change the map, ban any player. It was dead simple, and even though the game had absolutely no server-side gameplay heuristic verification, it was effective. By the time a server has enough players in it to attract trolls, somebody has already claimed the power to evict them. The ban list is emptied once all players leave the server.
The other cool thing about the game was it's online multiplayer map editing mode, where everybody would toggle their cheats on just to fuck around shooting projectiles which could only normally be produced by NPCs. This provided a blow-out valve for the nerds and hackers to flex and one-up each other while there was nothing at stake (If you knew a little bit of C, it was pretty trivial to add a console command to simply kill other players Deathnote style lmao).
I absolutely love games that have lobbies where people can hang out and someone can act as the "gamemaker". Playing games like Halo Infinite or Overwatch now where you go to the main menu after every game is such a soulless system. I think it's done to get people into games quicker, with better ping and balance, and also to reduce harassment that companies have to deal with, but it really makes games very alienating. Gamer nerds can't even make friends playing games anymore!
Easy anti-cheat is supported on Linux now, but devs need to set a flag or something in their game and a lot of them are lazy. Shouldn't be a concern in a couple years from now.
I assure you the reason Microsoft hasn't activated EAC on Halo Master Chief Collection on Linux (even though it runs campaign mode and private coop flawlessly) is not due to laziness. The industry is rife with monopolist designs and patronage. This is the reason DirectX was created in the first place even though OpenGL already existed.
God forbid I could use my tiling window manager to add splitscreen back into a game they deliberately removed it from.
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Which, you know what? Good. Why the hell should I have to install a rootkit in order to play your game? Even if they started publishing this shit as kernel modules I would refuse to install it. If publishers stopped trying to turn every single game into a proto-NFT economy with hats and skins and bullshit the bot accounts would disappear overnight. Cheaters are annoying, but no more annoying than tryhards, smurfs, and bad sports. Find some cool people to play with. Organize a league or join one if you want to be competitive.
Literally playing Elden Ring on Gentoo right now. :shrug-outta-hecks: It's getting harder and harder to find games which don't work in Proton these days (with the aforementioned exception of "anti-cheat" malware). It's worth checking before coughing up any money though.
The very funny thing about this is that EAC can't even effectively do the singular job that it nominally claims to do. Lost Ark, as an example, is absolutely INFESTED with bots autoleveling characters at all times, filling chat channels with spam for RMT. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this were the same for other games.
It is at best a technological solution to a social / socioeconomic problem. The root cause is that the publishers have turned accounts and in-game items into commodities by design. They have fostered an environment where harvesting items in Fortnite, Rocket League, and CS:GO is no different from mining Bitcoin.
Online multiplayer games have always had cheaters, but in the past this could be easily mitigated by server admins laying down the banhammer. And hell, a little cheating can be kinda funny when the game isn't turned into such a long commitment as a 45 minute round of Warzone, or a Tarkov run where you can lose a month's worth of grinding instantly, or some elo score dick measuring contest.
It's not even just that it's a technological solution, it's an automated "solution" that doesn't require much work. The only things developers can do to prevent cheating is writing good server code that doesn't allow players to do insane things. Somehow there are still game developers that do server-authoritative logic client-side. And preventing aim-botting just requires collecting game statistics and banning people (like you mentioned) who are inhumanly good, or making the gameplay more interesting than point-and-click stuff that aim-bots can do. FPS games that are mainly about clicking the enemy should be on their way out. Like piracy and everything else, it's an arms race, but game studios are only making pistols while cheat authors are making rocket launchers.
Personally, my favorite system was the one employed in Sauerbraten. You join a server, and if there are no admins, you can appoint yourself as the admin, change the map, ban any player. It was dead simple, and even though the game had absolutely no server-side gameplay heuristic verification, it was effective. By the time a server has enough players in it to attract trolls, somebody has already claimed the power to evict them. The ban list is emptied once all players leave the server.
The other cool thing about the game was it's online multiplayer map editing mode, where everybody would toggle their cheats on just to fuck around shooting projectiles which could only normally be produced by NPCs. This provided a blow-out valve for the nerds and hackers to flex and one-up each other while there was nothing at stake (If you knew a little bit of C, it was pretty trivial to add a console command to simply kill other players Deathnote style lmao).
I absolutely love games that have lobbies where people can hang out and someone can act as the "gamemaker". Playing games like Halo Infinite or Overwatch now where you go to the main menu after every game is such a soulless system. I think it's done to get people into games quicker, with better ping and balance, and also to reduce harassment that companies have to deal with, but it really makes games very alienating. Gamer nerds can't even make friends playing games anymore!
Easy anti-cheat is supported on Linux now, but devs need to set a flag or something in their game and a lot of them are lazy. Shouldn't be a concern in a couple years from now.
I assure you the reason Microsoft hasn't activated EAC on Halo Master Chief Collection on Linux (even though it runs campaign mode and private coop flawlessly) is not due to laziness. The industry is rife with monopolist designs and patronage. This is the reason DirectX was created in the first place even though OpenGL already existed.
God forbid I could use my tiling window manager to add splitscreen back into a game they deliberately removed it from.
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