<story><title>Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat</title><url>https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/riots-approach-anti-cheat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Teknoman117</author><text>I have mixed feelings about anti-cheat, especially in the last few years.  A lot of them are getting rather intrusive.  Take Player Unknown&amp;#x27;s Battlegrounds for instance, which uses BattlEye.  It actually injects a kernel mode driver into Windows that spies on whatever else your system is doing and exfiltrates unknown data in the name of &amp;quot;guaranteeing a fair game experience.&amp;quot;  I didn&amp;#x27;t even realize that this is what it was doing until my system crashed one day and the cause was some .sys file in PUBG.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;ll also randomly kick you from games for having various programs installed or running.  Programs such as VMware.  You have to disable all VMware services or PUBG will kick you randomly for using &amp;quot;unauthorized applications.&amp;quot;  God forbid you have any VMs running, that might amount to a ban (seriously).&lt;p&gt;Worse still is that when you take your complaints to their social media, or in anyway speak ill of it, you get hordes of fanboys saying that you shouldn&amp;#x27;t install anything other than games on your PC or you&amp;#x27;re a dirty cheater.  &amp;quot;Oh you want to do things _other_ than gaming on your PC?  You should buy another PC then.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t even get me started about trying to run games in a virtual machine w&amp;#x2F; GPU passthrough.  The communities will tear you a new one telling you to do things &amp;quot;normally&amp;quot; and by attempting to use anything other than the &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; setup makes you a cheater.  Just google anything like &amp;quot;steam vac kvm&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;battleye kvm&amp;quot; and you&amp;#x27;ll get hordes of people claiming they heard some guy say virtualization is the future of game cheating therefore VMs are cheating tools and should be banned.&lt;p&gt;Seriously, if I could get a refund for every game that uses BattlEye, I would try.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x2F;rant</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dspillett</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; You have to disable all VMware services or PUBG will kick you randomly for using &amp;quot;unauthorized applications.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If any game dis this to me, I would be having a refund, through credit-card charge-back if necessary.&lt;p&gt;Unless of course it is made obvious up-front that the game will not work with certain common legitimate software, in which case I&amp;#x27;d have not paid for it in the first place and would play something else instead.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; which uses BattlEye. It actually injects a kernel mode driver&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sounds like something I need to avoid. A game is a user-land program and has no business touching kernel-space (with the possible exception of direct communication with the graphics hardware for performance reasons, but in this decade that to me would be a &lt;i&gt;huge&lt;/i&gt; code smell...)&lt;p&gt;Having said that: I&amp;#x27;ve not bought much by way of games aside from a few small ones in Steam of HumbleBundle sales, other parts of life are just too busy for me to have the time ATM, and I&amp;#x27;ve never really bothered with PvP&amp;#x2F;online gaming (when I play games I do so to &lt;i&gt;escape&lt;/i&gt; the unwashed masses, not invite them into my living room!), so I might be so far from the target audience that my thoughts on the subject count for nothing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat</title><url>https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/riots-approach-anti-cheat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Teknoman117</author><text>I have mixed feelings about anti-cheat, especially in the last few years.  A lot of them are getting rather intrusive.  Take Player Unknown&amp;#x27;s Battlegrounds for instance, which uses BattlEye.  It actually injects a kernel mode driver into Windows that spies on whatever else your system is doing and exfiltrates unknown data in the name of &amp;quot;guaranteeing a fair game experience.&amp;quot;  I didn&amp;#x27;t even realize that this is what it was doing until my system crashed one day and the cause was some .sys file in PUBG.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;ll also randomly kick you from games for having various programs installed or running.  Programs such as VMware.  You have to disable all VMware services or PUBG will kick you randomly for using &amp;quot;unauthorized applications.&amp;quot;  God forbid you have any VMs running, that might amount to a ban (seriously).&lt;p&gt;Worse still is that when you take your complaints to their social media, or in anyway speak ill of it, you get hordes of fanboys saying that you shouldn&amp;#x27;t install anything other than games on your PC or you&amp;#x27;re a dirty cheater.  &amp;quot;Oh you want to do things _other_ than gaming on your PC?  You should buy another PC then.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t even get me started about trying to run games in a virtual machine w&amp;#x2F; GPU passthrough.  The communities will tear you a new one telling you to do things &amp;quot;normally&amp;quot; and by attempting to use anything other than the &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; setup makes you a cheater.  Just google anything like &amp;quot;steam vac kvm&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;battleye kvm&amp;quot; and you&amp;#x27;ll get hordes of people claiming they heard some guy say virtualization is the future of game cheating therefore VMs are cheating tools and should be banned.&lt;p&gt;Seriously, if I could get a refund for every game that uses BattlEye, I would try.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x2F;rant</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>I agree with everything you say. It&amp;#x27;s ironic because game companies themselves use virtual machines with obfuscated instruction sets in their games as a copy protection mechanism. It&amp;#x27;s pretty hard to feel any sympathy for them once hackers get around their pathetic countermeasures.&lt;p&gt;To add to your post, here&amp;#x27;s an example of why game developers can&amp;#x27;t be trusted to run code in kernel mode:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&amp;#x2F;TheWack0lian&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;779397840762245124&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&amp;#x2F;TheWack0lian&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;7793978407622...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>