Players using Proton, CrossOver, or other tools earned "Penalty Issued" screens.
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Marvel Rivals lifts 100-year “cheating” bans on Mac and Steam Deck players
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
uesc_marathon
Ars Scholae Palatinae
An idea might be to have something like, say, independently-operated servers, where you could theoretically find one that was moderated in a manner you liked.
Why do I feel like I've heard this before.
Why do I feel like I've heard this before.
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Extra fun here, Marvel Rivals is listed as "Playable" on Steam, and NetEase even made sure to include Steamdeck controller icons in game. Oops!
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Even non-F2P games have been eschewing dedicated servers. The only mainstream game I can think of that still has dedicated servers is Counter Strike 2, but those are mostly modded servers for the people who want surf/original GunGame/scoutknifez/etc, everyone else just uses the matchmaking queue.
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I wonder how much they make from an average user, and if it's low enough that they could sell a "play on custom servers" add on for say $10. I know the profit in these games is mostly from a few whales but not sure how quickly it drops off from the whales to know if there's there's a price here that adequately replaces revenue but isn't too high for people to actually buy.
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While Proton is a hell of a good thing devs and publishers need to back away from kernel level ACs. Making a lot of games unplayable even with Proton on Linux. And there's literally no need for them to be kernel side.
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I seem to recall a game recently that instead of immediately banning players suspected of cheating it did something more subtle. Maybe it tried to always match the cheaters with each other?
I think developers should double down on these more ‘troll-like’ methods of punishment. Reducing their damage to 1% of normal. Introducing ‘lag’ that makes the cheater think their network is having issues. Of course, you can ban them after enough time, but with the free to play games they will just make new accounts. So if instead you waste their time by making their game only partially work and therefore less fun maybe it will reduce the cheaters?
I think developers should double down on these more ‘troll-like’ methods of punishment. Reducing their damage to 1% of normal. Introducing ‘lag’ that makes the cheater think their network is having issues. Of course, you can ban them after enough time, but with the free to play games they will just make new accounts. So if instead you waste their time by making their game only partially work and therefore less fun maybe it will reduce the cheaters?
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Yet Team Fortress 2 got gacha cosmetics and community servers working together just fine?
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Back in the day, Rockstar was supposedly going to introduce a "cheaters pool" where players suspected of cheating would only be able to matchmake with other cheaters, but from what I recall it ended up with a lot of false positives and Rockstar realized that it was a lot more profitable to just ban suspects because they'd usually re-buy the game with a different account, especially if the users weren't actually cheating.
Troll punishments are definitely cool (like the unkillable scarab in pirate copies of Serious Sam 3), but I can't help but feel like most publishers would rather the time spent messing with cheaters be spent on making content for battlepasses.
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TF2 started with community servers in 2007 and didn't get matchmaking until like 2014-2015ish IIRC, and the gacha stuff wasn't until 2010-2011ish when the game went F2P after retailing for years at $20USD.
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Waaay back in the ‘80s? I played Strategic Conquest on a Mac. If the diskette didn’t read correctly, the game assumed piracy, and the game AI would be given perfect scouting intelligence. Battleships were destroyed in port just before their first sailing.
I’ve tried to play Elite Dangerous Horizons with CrossOver/Whisky.app. About half of the time in the training scenario, the space station rotates at ~3 rpm and always moves from left to right - even after flying to the other side.
The game was heavily discounted, so I haven’t tried too hard to diagnose the behavior. It sure reminds me of that war game.
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That was added later. TF2 didn't have any monetization when it started. You just bought the game. In a sense, it still doesn't have monetization, because AFAIK Valve doesn't sell anything for it. It's all random drops, and then players trade or sell things back and forth to each other. (selling off my Max hat for the Heavy bought me two games!)
edit: oh, maybe they are doing some bullshit with keys. I dropped out of that game a long time ago.
No current F2P game will ever let you run a dedicated server. If TF2 came out now, with its current model, it wouldn't have them.
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I'm not sure how you got that impression.
In order for me to get my "Windows only" games to run on Linux, I had to have the code, or the accounts, to update the installation to "my" game. Steam requires the same kind of access (logging into your account), but the games are all there and they work fine.
In other words, there's little difference in set-up and execution for new games through Steam. It's a bit trickier for other "Windows-only" games to get them to run in WINE or Lutris, but once they run, they're at least as stable as the game build you're running.
The community is also very helpful (both Steam and Linux) in getting things set up as long as you visit the right forums (the ones for YOUR flavor and version of Linux, since even if it's the same branch, there can be differences that undermine your efforts to set up something).
I get that some folks will try to cheat using Linux, but since Steam is native to Linux now (I didn't have to install it with my Linux flavor, it came built in), I'd expect that the vast majority of Linux users aren't actually cheating. If there are indications they are, it's more likely that the "bad behavior" alarms aren't coping well with the various flavors of Linux and are generating false cheating flags when no cheating is going on.
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As compared to all the users who genuinely use Windows to cheat with?
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Many moons ago, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, in 2009, had a pretty clever anti-piracy punishment. In the game's second level, there are some pretty annoying candelabra enemies throughout the Sedgewick Hotel. If the game detected that it was a pirated copy, it made the candelabras invulnerable. So, of course, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the official forums, with people outing themselves as pirates by complaining about the invincible candelabras.
Batman: Arkham Asylum had a similarly clever tool, as well; early in the game, in the lower levels of the asylum, there was a jump that was impossible to glide over and complete if the game was pirated or hacked.
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No, it's called false positives in the kernel-level anticheat they're using. They are paying exactly $0 to go after Linux and Mac gamers specifically, the anticheat is either not detecting kernel calls it expects and assuming cheating or the player had to disable the anticheat somehow to get the game to run, also leading to the assumption of cheating. Neither means the player was actually cheating and the fact they overturned the bans confirms this is the case. If they had actual evidence of cheating they would have left the bans in place.
You seem to have an axe to grind about Linux gamers, but no clue how anticheat works, so you're making stuff up to defend your viewpoint.
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Hey, give them a break. Their nick confirms their brain isn't running at full speed due to "mental gear reduction".Nintendo, is that you?
or maybe it’s Sony.
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Several folks in my group play Elite on Linux. If you ever want to try again, DM me and I'll see if they have a recommendation for a Howto guide. Need to do that myself this summer, since I can't upgrade to Win11 on my game box.
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Final fantasy still has servers, as of last year at least.
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not really. There was a big bot epidemic before. People literally have to do social media shit (e.g #FixTF2) just to force Valve to fix the bot issue.
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Hmm, they unbanned a ton of people. Sure seems like they must have not had any solid evidence of actual cheating or they wouldn't have done that, using your own logic, right?
I don't game on Linux. While I have a Steam Deck, I rarely use it since I built a new Windows 11 desktop last January. I also cannot play the games that use this type of anti-cheat, due to 3D sickness. They literally make me vomit after a few minutes of play. You're still making assumptions and ignoring the Law of Holes. You come across worse with every comment you make.
Your claim to game on Linux is rather difficult to believe, since you don't know basic things about how gaming on Linux actually works. I don't game on Linux, and don't play live-service games, but I know that false positive bans are very common in those types of games for Linux gamers.
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Games using a (Windows) kernel anticheat simply do not run on Linux (even through Proton), so I'm not too sure what you're trying to say here?
The article literally says "While Rivals was quick to ban, it was also quick to fix this issue." meaning that they were wrongly interpreting people running the game on Linux as cheating, and reversed the bans when they realized that was the case.
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Since we know that no technology is 100% accurate, what happens to the false positives? They cannot play the game they probably paid for, and they cannot return it for a refund, and if there's not a large enough number to make a lot of noise on social media, there's no recourse.
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I dislike assholes as much as the next person, but they're as entitled to full control of the hardware they own same as everyone else. Linux (or macOS, for that matter) is not the problem, and I wish people would stop saying otherwise.
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Well, for what it's worth, I can tell them this much: at this point, I won't buy any game that isn't Linux/Steam Deck-compatible.Sam Purdy said:
I won't consider lack of official support a critical consideration for purchases, but even incidentally blocking it--as through anti-cheat--will be. I will weight heavily in favor of official support, though, even if it's only through Proton.
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People use Windows to cheat as well. A few people even run entire secondary systems for the task, or buy controllers specifically to run macros and such. Hell, people buy monitors with their own reticles, which is cheating for e.g. noscoping in Counter-Strike.
All it shows is that developers need to stop going for the simple, brute-force approach and work on anti-cheats that don't depend on kernel/memory/etc access.
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I've run Linux for years, and it's going to be a long time before it's the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
Most recently I've gone to Linux as my primary (again) because of MS' antics with Windows 11 and Recall, but I did all of my WoW raiding--more hours over more years than I care to consider--in Linux.
I love the OS (obviously), and I think most of the objections are overblown, but it's flatly still not a good OS for e.g. my parents.
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