This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn’t take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully… even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope…


Get your anticheat code off my fucking cpu and onto your servers where it belongs.
Garbage games do this, simple as.
Absolutely. You know where all the players are and what they have. Just check if something that the client is reporting is IMPOSSIBLE and kick the player who threw the request. If you have a player who is performing at over a certain level of realistic performance, have someone manually check them to verify they’re legitimately that skilled and if so, flag the account as “actually just that good”. It’s the only reliable solution.
What performance threshold should that be? 10%? So 140,000 manual checks of CS:GO players? 1% is still 14,000. How are you going to check those people - go to their houses? If they don’t let you in just ban them? What about people who install cheats that allow them to perform as well as someone in the top 2% but not top 1%? They have a free ride?
It’s not possible to catch all cheats, but pure server-side cheat detection is basically worthless.
Doesn’t CS do it by using volunteers, showing clips to players waiting for matches or something where they can vote if the player was using cheats? I could be remembering wrong though, my CS knowledge comes entirely from watching klicksphilip :P
CS has VAC which can issue VAC bans - unless something’s changed. They may also get volunteers to assess stuff idk.
I’m not a gaming dev, but a full-stack web dev; is it not common sense that data needs to be validated on the server side, not client? I don’t really get why client-side “anti-cheat” is a thing, but may be missing something.
Not a game dev either but my guess would be the main reason is server performance/compute cost.
Any checks that are done on the client run on the users’ hardware instead of the publisher having to pay for more/better servers and electricity.
I think the disconnect with most other types of developers stems from the respective goal hierarchies. In most fields of computing, correctness isn’t just a high-value goal - it’s a non-negotiable prerequisite. With online multiplayer games, one of your chief concerns is latency and it can make sense to trade some cheating for a decrease in lag. Especially if you have other ways of reducing cheating that don’t cost you any server processing power.
Also, aren’t many of the client side anti-cheat solutions reused in several games? If you’re mainly checking that the player is running exactly the same client that you published, I imagine the development cost for anti-cheat is lower.
TLDR: Money. It’s always money.