Recently a game called “The Finals” has released and after their beta was over they stopped supporting Linux, and a lot of people are clearly pissed and have sparked a ton of debates within their Discord server but I constantly and constantly see an argument brought up by Windows users in the community saying that they dont want Linux support and argue that enabling Linux support is only going to add more cheaters into the game. (as its a pretty big problem right now even though they’re using EAC.)
I don’t believe it, I haven’t seen any proof of it, but I wanted to ask you guys what your thoughts are on it. And, if you have some sort of source proving whether or not this is the case, please do share.
I grew up as a web developer, and one of the things they hammer home to you is to never trust the client. The end user can tweak and modify their web browser and send data that is invalid or even malicious.
Instead, you’re supposed to validate everything the client sent you when you receive it. To always consider the client hostile, and check that what it wants to do is sensible.
It’s a shame to see the opposite of that mindset from these game studios. They want to ensure that the client is as trustworthy as possible using invasive techniques and trying to restrict people’s ability to use their own computers.
Which sounds fine on paper, but doesn’t really work. Until we live in the world that Microsoft wants where we are only allowed to use software officially signed and approved by Microsoft, people can still run arbitrary code on their devices.
Anticheat binaries can be modified and tanpered with to ignore things. Network traffic can be intercepted. The game could run in a virtual machine with a modified cpu.
It’s annoying to me that these big companies have managed to shift the narrative so effectively to what is effectively the PC equivalent to confiscating water bottles at aorports to give the illusion that they are stopping terrorists.
Google actually tried to push an “anticheat” for Chrome (as far as I know they failed because they didn’t have enough market share to force things). This would allow websites to require you to use Chrome with no extendions.
If that had gone through, I wonder how many people would be mad that they wouldn’t be able to play browser shooters on Firefox or other Chromium based browsers? Would we have these same kinds of posts where people were arguing over whether Firefox “has more cheaters”?
The important question to ask isn’t “would Linux allow more cheaters?”, it’s “why isn’t the modern games industry actually doing anything to stop cheaters?”.
TL;DR - Yes, and companies should fix this by catching cheaters on the server, not the game client. Client-side cheat detection will always have gaps.
Server-side cheat detection is a lot harder than integrating an off-the-shelf cheat detection engine since it needs game-specific logic and likely more moderators to determine the difference between a cheater and a high performing player. It also requires more server resources, which also has ongoing costs.
Client-side anti-cheat is “good enough” for most studios, so they can get away with it. It’s also often cheaper to not support a niche platform if the missed sales are likely less than the cost of ongoing support (or the opportunity cost of other lucrative projects).
I think that’s really important to understand, especially when it comes to larger games like Fortnite supporting Linux, especially since most of those potential Linux users are likely already playing on Windows, console, or mobile. The profit is low, and the risks make it a hard business choice to defend. It’s still stupid, but it likely makes sense from a business perspective.
amazingly well said, thank you
It theoretically could, as the Linux version of these anticheats run in userspace. We really can’t say for sure, only someone with knowledge of the internals of EAC/BattleEye could tell us if the Linux anticheats are less capable.
The Finals is so comically easy to cheat in that there would be no point for someone to switch to Linux just to cheat. Especially true when you take into consideration the facts that there aren’t many (if any) cheats for this game on Linux, and most cheat developers only have experience developing for Windows. These devs have years of knowledge on hiding cheats in Windows, and none for Linux.
Yes and no.
While I take issue with oversimplification on this, the ship has sailed: Generally speaking, many/most PC anti-cheat solutions are “rootkits” in that they require elevated, often kernel level, permissions to detect running processes and the like.
The linux implementation, while it varies, generally has drastically reduced permissions and is more or less restricted to the wine/whatever container as far as the higher level permissions. But many still have user level permissions and that is pretty much sufficient. At a high level: It can basically run
ps -elfand all the fun stuff like that.So yes, a linux version of an anti-cheat can potentially create more cheaters. Imagine that I run my aimbot/maphack process as a privileged user (because random ass hackers are totally who I want to give root on my machine…) and it either finds a way to overlay on my screen (ha, good luck with the mess that is x11 and wayland) or outputs to a device over the network so I can glance at a laptop or tablet. Without sufficiently elevated permissions, this can’t be detected.
But… I am not aware of any indications of this ever happening. And, for funsies, me and a few buddies used a webcam, off the (github) shelf computer vision libraries, and a bit of off the (github) shelf ML to set up predictive aiming that more or less replicates the idea of “pre-firing” and learning how to watch corners with a near real-time overlay (when we can be bothered to run it on a GPU box). Which does absolutely nothing on the player computer so…
Which is why we are seeing an increasing push for server side anti-cheat solutions. It increases the cost of the server (which can be amortized by server farms) but basically lets “anomalies” be detected. So it doesn’t matter if they can detect you are running a Tarkov map hack. All they need to do is detect that you are tracking enemies you should not be able to see. And we already see suspicions of similar tools being used for things like MOBAs.
So to answer the question: Yes. But there is no actionable data saying it has ever occurred. Although, grain of salt, that also wouldn’t be widely shared.
Okay. All the fanboys please stop reading. I am just going to talk about… uhm… Eternalism and Warframe and the implication on taxation in the Origin System. Yeah, you don’t want to hear that. So please leave.
Seriously. Please leave.
Okay, are they gone? Good.
Yeah, it actually very much can. Not because more linux players are cheaters. But because it increases the support burden. I am not aware of the resources behind The Finals, but adding linux support means you add a LOT more SKUs to have to deal with. And even if your policy is “Linux, go fuck yourself” you still have to deal with the negative PR of “I tried to play this on my nvidia wayland machine using open source drivers and the framerate was low. FUCKING LAZY DEVS!! YOU LIVE AT <insert address here> AND I AM GOING TO HUNT YOU DOWN AND <insert horrifying threats here>” and so forth. You know, Gamer shit.
Which means there is now less time and resources to go around to preemptively test and fix potential vulnerabilities. Because if EAC or Battleye or whatever spots a massive vulnerability, it is only a matter of time until a sufficiently different process exploits the same vulnerability.
Which is the story of everything. Linux adds a support burden (and “improved bug reports” only go so far and are also incredibly subjective) and that means a development burden. Wine/proton goes a long way toward not making that a big one. But if you are trying to push The Next Big Thing in multiplayer gaming, even those first few hours after launch matter a lot for your survival. The moment your game is “dead”, it is pretty much guaranteed to die.
And that also ignores stuff like (maybe?) FUD being spread. The best example is probably that Chinese battle royale game that everyone and their mother accused of being a crypto miner or whatever it was. Not sure if anyone ever conclusively decided, but the game basically was radioactive during the mad rush to find the next ApeLegs.
So if a studio decides they don’t think the improved sales to us linux gamers is worth the potential headaches at a vital time? I don’t like it, but I am not going to blame them.
