This is a bad enough problem that it actually threatens the integrity of the game and the continued support from more casual gamers such as yourself.

As for your particular case (running a Windows VM with PCI-e GPU passthrough), that's... such a niche corner case that you're you just don't factor in.

We can agree that cheating will never be truly eliminated. It's a question of degree and it requires a multi-level solution ie both client-side and server-side.. The server-side detection has to allow for checking by a human with all that entails. It sounds like this is what they're rolling out with CoD Vanguard (Ricochet). It'll be interesting to see how effective this is.

Probably the biggest problem for the likes of Warzone and Fortnite is that the game is free. It means getting banned and having to create a new account is essentially zero cost. What about paid-for and earned cosmetics I hear you ask. Well, those are hacked too so it doesn't really matter.

But with Warzone, it was happening so often, I no longer give anyone the benefit of the doubt. I used to run into more than one blatant cheater per day. And now all my bad beats, I assume half of them are cheating, even if it's not exactly clear. It's ruined the game for me. I genuinely don't even bother to play anymore unless I'm playing with one of my friends.

I should know, because I decided years ago to take the path of "if you can't beat 'em..."

Once I did, it became painfully obvious how many people cheat. With x-ray, "wallhacks," or 3D "radar," with bounding boxes around all players, it became readily apparent who's aiming at and/or chasing players who shouldn't be visible, always choosing the route the opposing team is taking, without fail. And who on the other team always takes the route you take, chasing you through any maze with no problem, even turning around when (and only when) you try to flank them. Also anyone who out-scores you while cheating (particularly if you're "rampaging") is definitely cheating as well, because you're already doing better than is humanly possible. And believe me, you'll get out-scored plenty.

I would be glad to have functional anti-cheats, but it's just not possible in my experience. Cheats are available on day one of any game launch, or day 2 at worst. It's big business (clearly). Even kernel drivers like this have patched kernels to get around them.

For now, cheating makes games fun to play again. Aimbots aren't perfect anyway, and even if they were, nobody can look or shoot everywhere at once. You still have to manage ammo, you still have to reload, and you can still get the drop on people (cheaters) when their attention is focused elsewhere, and you still get killed while cheating. Sure, it sucks for the people who don't have cheats, but I'm not going to be one of those people as long as a large percent of other people are cheating too. Unless and until anti-cheating actually works, it's just evening the playing field as far as I'm concerned.

You know it's possible to choose to -not- play a game, right? There are so many games available that don't have ridiculous cheating problems.

I'm not saying it's not niche (it definitely is), but I just wanted to chime in and say I'm another one who does this.

Here's one patch that supposedly works with battleeye: https://github.com/WCharacter/RDTSC-KVM-Handler

The current situation is that they could probably use server-side heuristics to detect players behaving oddly, review the case, and ban according.

But also I wouldn't be surprised if there were already bots using machine learning to autoaim based on video signal out of the PC with aiming done as a "real" HID mouse.

If we can train a car to drive, we can certainly train a computer to find and click faces in cod.

But we can't really train a car to drive yet, and it seems unlikely that the full problem (i.e. Level 5) will be solved in the next decade or so.

Also I don't think "twitch streams" are a great sample of "normal level gameplay", most people there would be ranked comparatively highly in MMR I would have thought? That or I'm leaving tons of money on the table by not streaming my wood-tier CS:GO :D

But limitations in available players in the queue (especially as skill goes up), "experience optimized" matchmaking (which psychologically manipulates you into playing more by feeding you wins and losses at the right time)...I'm not so sure.

I used to spend a significant amount of time playing a tactical shooter type game, and what I figured out was that the game would purposefully throw you soft games and hard games, especially when first partying up with people on your friend list.

One of the developers of the game publicly disclosed that their matchmaking algorithm took several dozen games to figure out how good you were. I tried creating a new account, and it took a very long time before I stopped being given opponents who could barely move, whereas I'm dodge-rolling, using my character's ult, using grenades, etc. It was so bad, I felt terrible and stopped using the secondary account. So cheaters (who keep creating new accounts) probably enjoy plenty of playtime. There were multiple cases of obvious cheaters running around achieving relatively high account levels, showing that anti-cheat measures took a long time to kick in.

Lastly: the anti-cheat software available for this relatively small game was incredibly sophisticated. Sure, you could set the hitbox detection and zero fuzz and go for all headshots, but that would make you jump off the page stats-wise, you're right. As long as you weren't super greedy, you could probably "on paper" look like just a fairly skilled player.

The other problem? The game had verystrong controller assist. So much so that many pro players abandoned the game fairly early on. It was very difficult to tell the difference between someone cheating and someone who was just good at controller play, because controller aim assist is intended to help casual players compete against MNK players. It's not intended to help very skilled controller users, who will absolutely decimate MNK players in a lot of types of gunfights (particularly close range stuff.)

There's also another issue where some people play with devices like Cronus which are borderline cheats and essentially hardware scripts (better/no recoil control, scripted bunny hopping, that sort of thing).

I wish I were making up that last one.

Although I concede that basically what I'm asking for here is for the default to be _my_ usecase...

And why do you care if a lobby exists that you are never going to go to? Why does it bother you if cheaters want to use cheats against each other? As long as you don’t interact with them, I don’t understand why you would care.

Have you tried running CS:GO on Linux through Steam on Linux? It's officially supported and for me it runs as well as I expect on low-end hardware. Are there any performance reasons to want to run in a Windows VM instead?

I do worry that this push to ever-more-intrusive forms of anti-cheat will mean that games are less likely to run on Linux. If the source to your anti-cheat kernel module needs to be released under the GPL it's probably not going to be that effective for very long..

This is how it works in ARMA for instance (not sure if opt-in or opt-out though), the players can decide whether to install/uninstall the game's anti-cheat solution on their machine, and the people running the servers can decide whether they require the anti-cheat-solution to be installed. Since I almost never venture into multiplayer anyway, the decision for me was simple (uninstall the anti-cheat software).

> - Implement server-side anticheat detection,

This only works for "real" client/server games, not peer-to-peer games which usually only use centralized servers for matchmaking and some other non-gamplay-services.

That's somewhat similar to how FACEIT did it when I tried it for TF2. The serverside detection decided if you needed the client side detection.

My buddies started to play Valorant and they asked me to give it a try. I downloaded and installed it.

First major issue: Must start on boot and has to be running at all times. If you close it, you have to reboot the entire machine to play Valorant.

Second issue: (This has been fixed) All my VMs stopped working. I couldn't start any of them in my VMware Workstation.

Uninstalled Vanguard and Valorant shortly after. There should no reason an anti-cheats needs to run on boot.

The only point at which a company cares about cheaters is when the community starts to really get riled up about them and revenue drops.

COD Warzone has a full stats API and cheaters leap off the page. We're talking people with K/D ratios of, say, 10-20:1 or more. All they'd have to do is zap or flag those accounts automatically. But they don't care.

Just about any sort of public online game involving shooting has long stopped being fun for me because cheating is so rampant and blatant, and companies care more about policing talk on their discords and subreddits about problems with cheaters, than they do about addressing the cheaters.

The issue with any kind of wave of ban style action like you are suggesting is that the users can just create new accounts for free and continue to cheat. It greatly reduces the integrity of the overall matchmaking and game experience for everyone else.

If you think there is a better solution to ban repeat bots and cheats please provide it or at least offer a creative response to what COD is trying.

full disclosure, I don't like this solution, but having seen anti-cheat measures in a number of games, this seems to be the only one with real teeth for shooters

> The only point at which a company cares about cheaters is when the community starts to really get riled up about them and revenue drops.

My point is not contraindicated by Activision releasing new anti-cheat software a year and a half after a game came out.

Activision likely saw falling player signups/playtime/cosmetics spending, did some surveys, and decided improving their anti-cheat was the way to go.

> If you think there is a better solution to ban repeat bots and cheats please provide it or at least offer a creative response to what COD is trying.

In another comment I pointed out that the games are full of cheaters so blatant their K/D ratios are better than the top pros in the game, sometimes by a factor of ten. It would be trivial for Activision to automatically ban them simply on that alone, or at least auto-flag them for a manual review. A K/D ratio of 1.0 is considered "good" for an average player. 2-3 would be world-class. The top player on one of the CoD:WZ trackers has a K/D ratio of twenty six.

You're right of course, if there's no $$$ to be made from people who won't buy the game if it has client-side anticheat, then why would they develop a whole second system just for people like me who don't want to run this crap, but want to play the game enough that they'll run it anyway?