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[return to "Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm"]
1. jchw+UO2[view] [source] 2025-12-03 17:27:25
>>evolve+(OP)
> and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in the future.

Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.

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2. ZiiS+TR2[view] [source] 2025-12-03 17:41:08
>>jchw+UO2
It works in the sense it allows you to run the game; but it does not prevent cheating. Obviously, Window's kernel anti-cheet is also only partially effective anyway, but the point of open-source is to give you control which includes cheating if you want to. Linux's profiling is just too good; full well documented sources for all libraries and kernel, even the graphics are running through easier to understand translation layers rather than signed blobs.
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3. jchw+R13[view] [source] 2025-12-03 18:29:57
>>ZiiS+TR2
Anti-cheat is a misnomer; it's much more about detecting cheats more than it is preventing them. For people who are familiar with how modern anti-cheat systems work, actually cheating is really the easy part; trying to remain undetected is the challenge.

Because of that, usermode anti-cheat is definitely far from useless in Wine; it can still function insofar as it tries to monitor the process space of the game itself. It can't really do a ton to ensure the integrity of Wine directly, but usermode anti-cheat running on Windows can't do much to ensure the integrity of Windows directly either, without going the route of requiring attestation. In fact, for the latest anti-cheat software I've ever attempted to mess with, which to be fair was circa 2016, it is still possible to work around anti-cheat mechanisms by detouring the Windows API calls themselves, to the extent that you can. (If you be somewhat clever it can be pretty useful, and has the bonus of being much harder to detect obviously.)

The limitation is obviously that inside Wine you can't see most Linux resources directly using the same APIs, so you can't go and try to find cheat software directly. But let's be honest, that approach isn't really terribly relevant anymore since it is a horribly fragile and limited way to detect cheats.

For more invasive anti-cheat software, well. We'll see. But just because Windows is closed source hasn't stopped people from patching Windows itself or writing their own kernel drivers. If that really was a significant barrier, Secure Boot and TPM-based attestation wouldn't be on the radar for anti-cheat vendors. Valve however doesn't seem keen to support this approach at all on its hardware, and if that forces anti-cheat vendors to go another way it is probably all the better. I think the secure boot approach has a limited shelf life anyways.

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4. Xss3+1a3[view] [source] 2025-12-03 19:10:17
>>jchw+R13
Anticheat devs could REALLY benefit by having some data scientists involved.

Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.

Is it ever? No.

Given good enough data a good team of data scientists would be able to make a great set of rules using statistical analysis that effectively ban anyone playing at a level beyond human.

In the chess of fps that is cs, even a pro will make the wrong read based on their teams limited info of the game state. A random wallhacker making perfect reads with limited info over several matches IS flaggable...if you can capture and process the data and compare it to (mostly) legitimate player data.

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5. strbea+FJ3[view] [source] 2025-12-03 22:01:43
>>Xss3+1a3
> Any player responding to ingame events (enemy appeared) with sub 80ms reaction times consistently should be an automatic ban.

It's really much more nuanced than that. Counter-Strike 2 has already implemented this type of feature, and it immediately got some clear false positives. There are many situations where high level players play in a predictive, rather than reactive, manner. Pre-firing is a common strategy that will always look indistinguishable from an inhuman reaction time. So is tap-firing at an angle that you anticipate a an opponent may peek you from.

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6. ThatPl+m44[view] [source] 2025-12-04 00:07:45
>>strbea+FJ3
There's well analyzed video of a pro player streaming who got temporarily banned for something like this. It might not even have been pre-fire, but post-fire at a different enemy retreating at the same position

https://youtu.be/SFyVRdRcilQ

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7. Xss3+j35[view] [source] 2025-12-04 10:12:37
>>ThatPl+m44
Valve need to tweak the model so that it requires a higher confidence level before a ban, and to reduce false positives in their data capture methods. This is a mistake but doesnt kill the idea.
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