How would you ever know you got banned because of something like that?
Put in new cpu upgrade, fire up favorite game, game hardware bans you, put 2:2 together?
It would take a very unique type of person to unknowingly upgrade their CPU without knowing it
I’m convinced that client-side anticheat is all about security theater. They want the users to know it’s there so the next time they get their asses kicked they’re less likely to cry hacks. And if anyone complains about cheaters in their games, they can point to the anticheat and go “look, it’s not possible, we block cheats at the source.” In that regard, the more obtrusive and noisy it is, the better.
I’m not convinced that it’s any better than doing detection server-side, either purely statistically or through some machine learning model. If a cheater isn’t any better than an average player, I honestly don’t give a shit that they’re cheating. At that point, it’s effectively an accessibility tool.
why not both server side and client side?
I’m not convinced it’s entirely theater. But it’s a large portion for sure. Just look at how much branding they gave it, they want you to know about it.
The thing I’m curious about is whether or not they feel stuck with it. Like they spent all the money making it and would look TERRIBLE to turn around and remove it or even just not use it on new stuff. How much pushback would it take to get it removed? I don’t think it’ll happen anytime soon but I would love to hear some of the all too revealing details like with 2xko.
In a lot of ways, it’s the lazy way out because they can just shell out to a vendor like BattleEye. Even with in-house solutions like Riot and EA use, they can be developed by separate teams who don’t really need to have any knowledge of how the game actually works.
It’s largely all the same syscalls and access patterns they’re looking for. Process injections work the same no matter what the game is.
Kernel-level access is also in some ways the lazier way to implement it because instead of having an arms race with the cheat developers trying new ways to detect and avoid each other respectively, they just force their anti-cheat module as low in the stack as possible. It’s just also, you know, indistinguishable from a Trojan at that point.
