EA expanding EA Anti-Cheat - bad news for Steam Deck / Linux
www.gamingonlinux.com
EA (Electronic Arts) are continuing to expand their home-grown EA Anti-Cheat, with an announcement that Battlefield 2042 is also moving over to it.

EA anticheat is a kernel level anticheat, which are generally bad for consumers due to them giving malware new targets to get full control of an infected system. Genshin Impact’s kernel anticheat is famously targeted by ransomware as an easier way to gain control of user’s PCs for example. They also don’t work on Linux, which is an obvious problem for Steam Deck users.

  • NeryK@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    9 months ago

    It’s not just EA unfortunately. Plenty of multiplayer titles that could run on SD are prevented to do so because of anticheat.

    Hell even Roblox used to work until they broke it with anticheat a few months ago. My kid was not happy with that.

    • thisisawayoflife@lemmy.world
      61·
      9 months ago

      I don’t understand how this hasn’t been solved yet. The new Texas Chain Saw Massacre game has had massive cheating problems. How is it 2023 but people haven’t figured out anticheat yet? Also, how are game companies just not banning these users permanently when they are caught?

      I’ve heard all kinds of rumors about how the server side doesn’t do any client traffic validation, et al. I’m a dev by trade so I’m not new to code, but game dev is all a black box to me.

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
        1·
        9 months ago

        I guess if you want to accurately want to do the checks on the server side you’d have to run the complete game on the server. You can cheat just by making a texture transparent so that you can see enemies behind it. To prevent that the server has to render the frames itself and to ensure that really only approved things are seen by the players the easiest would be to just send over the rendered frame instead of letting the players render it themselves. By that point you have basically invented game streaming again.

        Still, I wonder what Blizzard games are doing. They work fine on Linux and I haven’t heard much about cheating on there.

        • hedgehog@ttrpg.network
          2·
          9 months ago

          You don’t have to send over the frame to fix it a bit, just less information. Minimize the info needed. One thing you can do is occlude to determine which entities should be rendered. Even applied, they could still get an advantage - being able to see an entire character instead of just the exposed part of their foot - but it would at least limit it more.