Perhaps I’m naive about the programming of video games, but why isn’t anti-cheat for live service games handled on the server side? We already send mouse movement and keystrokes to the server to display in multi-player environments, why not just do anomaly detection on top of that data stream?
It feels like anti-cheat isn’t my problem to solve, or to accommodate for.
If the game state of every player at any time can be simulated entirely on server then yes, to some degree. This isn’t the case for many games that have some degree of client authoritativeness, like Apex Legends. As the other poster mentioned, this doesn’t eliminate seeing through walls still, or other cheats that expose game state that players can’t normally see but are required for the game to work.
If all games were streamed over the network, like in GeForce Now, then we would perhaps require far less client anticheat.
I don’t understand this bird or animal that are cheats or kernel level anti cheat. But my guess why it’s not handled server side is it’s too late to detect anything. At that point all the cheats will be well disguised as user input.
When the anti-cheat runs on the client workstation, it just tries to make sure the client isn’t doing something nefarious. It’s cost effective for the game company and doesn’t cost the end user much except compatibility
To do it on the server, you end up needing to run a full simulation of the game which is really expensive at scale. You can, to some extent, just look for input values and thresholds, but over the years of trying to do this, people always find ways to cheat input threshold monitoring.
An interesting take is making the end user run the client on a rented server, then they can both have the client remote and not pay for anticheat at all.
Perhaps I’m naive about the programming of video games, but why isn’t anti-cheat for live service games handled on the server side? We already send mouse movement and keystrokes to the server to display in multi-player environments, why not just do anomaly detection on top of that data stream?
It feels like anti-cheat isn’t my problem to solve, or to accommodate for.
If the game state of every player at any time can be simulated entirely on server then yes, to some degree. This isn’t the case for many games that have some degree of client authoritativeness, like Apex Legends. As the other poster mentioned, this doesn’t eliminate seeing through walls still, or other cheats that expose game state that players can’t normally see but are required for the game to work.
If all games were streamed over the network, like in GeForce Now, then we would perhaps require far less client anticheat.
This is the real truth and why people clowned Apex into the ground ruining their franchise.
I don’t understand this bird or animal that are cheats or kernel level anti cheat. But my guess why it’s not handled server side is it’s too late to detect anything. At that point all the cheats will be well disguised as user input.
When the anti-cheat runs on the client workstation, it just tries to make sure the client isn’t doing something nefarious. It’s cost effective for the game company and doesn’t cost the end user much except compatibility
To do it on the server, you end up needing to run a full simulation of the game which is really expensive at scale. You can, to some extent, just look for input values and thresholds, but over the years of trying to do this, people always find ways to cheat input threshold monitoring.
An interesting take is making the end user run the client on a rented server, then they can both have the client remote and not pay for anticheat at all.