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…
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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.
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.
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.
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.
So many games that work flawlessly on Linux, so I just skip those that don’t:]
This is the way.
And let people run their own dedicated servers again.
How many of them competitive multiplayer?
many. Marvel rivals, a bunch of the battlefield games, arma 3, dayz, dead by daylight, halo, hunt showdown, team fortress, war thunder, csgo, deadlock, vail vr most of these games manage to have less rampant cheating than rust while supporting linux at the same time, meanwhile rust claims that only 0.01 percent of players, only 14 people, were linux players and somehow thats causing a serious cheating problem that they cant resolve? anyone can tell how dumb that sounds…
I would bet that the claim of more than half of Linux players cheating is false positives due to shitty anti cheat. Like the anti cheat relying on some windows process or trying to initiate some process and linux is structured differently so it fails.
THE INTEGRITY OF YOUR DEVICE COULD NOT BE VERIFIED
If your cheat detection runs on the client side only, you don’t have cheat protection.
Well, there only so much in gaming that reasonably can be done server side.
Sure, the server could identify that a player shouldn’t be visible and not transit that location to a client, addressing seeing through walls, in theory.
But once a player is hypothetically visible, aimbot can happen. If you are crawling in a ghillie suit in the grass, but the other player has a client that skips rendering grass and replaces the ghillie suit model with a suit made of traffic cones…
Now intrusive anti cheat isn’t worth it, but it is an unavoidable reality that it is up to the client to preserve the integrity.
Closest you get would be streamed gameplay, where the rendering even is server side. Also not worth it. But even then I could see cheating machine vision and faked controls to get an edge unfairly.
If Valve’s expanding hardware lineup helps increase SteamOS adoption, they’ll change their tune.
I doubt that they will, given the fact that Linux is misrepresented a lot. They use Linux servers, so why not support Linux already?
Not a chance.
Overhaul your entire game stack || Blame Linux for being too small
Why would they need to overhaul their game stack? Rust would run just fine on Linux if they didn’t block it intentionally.
When I say they’re gamestack, I’m talking about their client and their backend services and their associated middleware.
Moving a game that is mostly client authoritative to server authoritative is a hell of a lot of work and requires serious rewrites to both the client and the server.
It also requires a lot more compute to handle the back end.
When you go from calculating everything on the front end and just sending the data back to the back end to sending actual controls to the back end and doing simulations, you need to rewrite a significant portion of everything.
It’s way cheaper and way faster just to write it in the client, and require the kernel/secured OS to police risky actions to the application.
The last couple of projects I looked at were probably 50% more man hours to make it server authoritative out of the box. Trying to come back and do it after the fact, It’s much, much higher.
Minecraft is actually a good example.
Server owners pay very little to nothing for anticheat, and cheaters have dozens of extremely elaborate clients to choose from, all interfacing with the very open and moddable game. And still, servers that do give a fuck have basically zero rage cheating. ESP? Sure, but that can be solved as well. But beyond that, everything can and is detected. And that in a game as sandboxy and freedomy as MC. It was designed to have a lot of slack in movement and actions, yet ACs are extremely good.
literally when i thought about it for even a few seconds i was like this is some bullshit minecraft has better cheat moderation than rust… the biggest servers all manage to do so completely adequately and theyre just community servers…
I think the main tool is private self hostable servers. The big public ones have to think about anti cheat (more out of preservation of there own economy) but if you just whant to build with your mates. Have at it.
Copius maximus
They dropped Linux before proton was invented. Go on any cheat website and the requirements will always say to have windows. Maybe proton is exploited by some cheaters, news to me. You should just ban windows, no more cheaters.
It’s not proton that is exploited. It’s the kernel itself that cannot be monitored by anti-cheats, meaning cheaters could install a modified kernel to mess with the anti-cheat
as if the cheaters can’t already evade anti-cheats even on windows.
They probably gave up on preventing cheat entirely, and are just trying to reduce the amount of cheaters by making cheating as annoying as possible.
I do actually believe them when they say that cheating on Linux can be made significantly easier and more comfortable than on Windows. I think it’s a real fundamental issue for Linux, multiplayer games with toxic playerbases can be unplayable due to users being able to do what they want. They would have to make systems to allow for playing in smaller human-moderated servers, or rely purely server-side solutions
And that it self is measurable. Never understood the attempt to have total control on byod setups. Its never going to happen lol
Who could have imagined that the people who create toxic PvP games are as toxic as the people who play them?
I mean, Linux player base is only .01%, even if they are all cheaters, they will literally have no impact… You can’t say “Linux user base is too small”, and “if you support Linux you want cheaters” at the same time if you want to make sense.
Yeah, but saying “Our codebase is so terrible Linux keep showing us new bugs we won’t fix” or “We can’t sell your personal data with Proton” is worse PR…
This is actually one of the absolute worst trade-offs they could have made, if you think about it for like 2 minutes :
They said 0.1% of players were on Linux.
Even if they were ALL cheaters, that’s still a tiny amount of cheaters you just “banned”
Almost 100% of whom will just cheat on Windows instead ; whereas all the legitimate Linux players will loudly complain forever.
They decided to sacrifice all the free PR from one of the most vocal groups of players out there, in order to get a ~ 0% reduction in the number of cheaters.
In more simple terms, they just shot themselves in the foot for no benefit whatsoever (though I do grant it’s a relatively small “gun”)
Not only that, but the steam deck exists, the gabecube is coming, Linux gaming has been on the rise. The shit you did “several years ago” is irrelevant. If they allowed Proton, windows players with steam decks can now also play on the go. Instead they repeatedly have to poorly explain why they won’t… to stop basically 0 cheaters. I’d be willing to bet that the only people who actually stopped cheating in rust when Linux support was dropped did so because they lost interest anyway.
I searched just to see, there’s a python script right on github that claims to have an aimbot, esp, wallhack, no recoil and several other features, along with “safety settings” so you don’t get caught. Does it work? I don’t know, but the codes right there to look at and there are dozens of other results in the search.
they actually said 0.01 which is literally only 14 players compared to the average player base… they shot themselves in the foot to fuck with 14 ppl lmfao even though it’s unlikely the number is that small its likely just them exaggerating to make it seem like less people are affected
I also highly doubt their statement that more users were cheating under Linux than not. I’d like to see how they came to this conclusion. And if it’s so easy to identify who was cheating, why not just ban them if it’s .01 players? That’s like 7 or 8 bans. An insignificant amount of effort would go a long way here.
Remember when Apex banned Linux during a cheating low, and then cheaters started trending upward AFTER the ban? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
That .01% number is out of line with the overall share of Steam users in 2018 by literally an order of magnitude. I can understand some deviation within a particular game, but that figure is so far off that I kind of suspect he just made it up on the spot.
mentioning EA games like Apex Legends removing support is laughable. Sure Alistair, ALL those EA games ALL decided around fall of 2024 to ditch support for Linux/Proton. All at the Same time. Not because EA has a deal with Microsoft/Game Pass and NOT because a few months later Microsoft announced their own Handheld with Asus. Just like Riot.
So Alistair how long until Rust is announced for Gamepass with all DLC included?
That’s a bit tinfoil-hatty. EA is a big company and these types of decisions typically come from the top, and if it was decided that they don’t want to bother with Linux, because, let’s be fair, they don’t really have that much of an incentive, the profits they get from Linux is probably worth less than the headache of supporting another platform, then they most probably decided to apply that to the whole company, not just a single game.
Skill issue.
If Linux gamers are not worth his time as we are so few then maybe this singular person’s comments are not worth our time over and over.
I hope for more than merely support for a freer OS. I want the whole video games industry to move away from a proprietary model to software freedom - where demand for support is not dependant on the original dev.
well yea idc i wasnt gonna play rust anyway i just posted since i saw it was being talked about and thought it might have some fun reactions about how stupid it is
I’m gonna make my own Rust, blackjack and h-… A better blackjack.
On Windows the cheating program it’s a simple exe that will get kernel access with a simple uac request.
Everyone, especially 12 years olds, are able to run it. (And maybe get malware/ransomware disguised as a cheating program)
None of the losers that need a cheating program to feel validated in online multiplayer games will have the skills to recompile the kernel in Linux to add support for that
