The latest plea for official Proton support started on Reddit, where Scout339v2 shared their screenshot of Rust running “on a server with EAC disabled to show that the game already works perfectly on Linux.” Disabling Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) is the key factor here, and part of a broader conversation where Facepunch and its Linux/Proton userbase don’t see eye-to-eye.
While it’s true Rust runs on Proton, you can’t join official servers, and most unofficial servers, with EAC disabled. Facepunch considered changing its stance in 2022 when the Steam Deck launched, but didn’t end up introducing official Proton support. COO Alistair McFarlane said at the time that Linux is “safer for cheat developers,” and that trying to support EAC on another platform could reduce the team’s ability to support Windows.
If ring-0 access is the only way you can stop cheaters, your game must be poorly programmed.
Nah, cheating is just absurdly hard to stop. Even ring 0 anti cheat doesn’t stop it entirely. At some point, I feel like the answer is similar to piracy, in that you must accept that there’s going to be some amount of it, and then find a way to mitigate the damage. Because there are solutions to both of them that both go too far.
You can use analytics to detect cheating effectively. Companies don’t do this because it hurts their bottom line (stopping cheaters). Companies pay lip service to cheating and play stupid games of cat and mouse.
Cheaters should not be banned, they should be forced to play against other cheaters. If you are so inhuman that you are the living embodiment of “got gud” then you get to play with cheaters.
Everyone is happy except for the cheaters and that one got gud guy. Waiting for the first brave company to implement this.
You could argue this would hurt competitive gameplay but it is obvious it is already hurt and the other answers (giving complete control of your OS) are a non-starter for me.
Curiously, we had a better system and it was taken away for profit.
Community servers.
Where usually there was at least a mod or admin available who was able to get rid of the cheater in minutes.
Now we report and have to wait until some arbitrary ban wave and hope they hit them.
Doesn’t Counter-Strike still have this? It serves a different use case than a proper ranked mode, usually, though I’ll admit I’m long out of the loop on Counter-Strike.
Counter strike does have this, and even has third party matchmaking services that rely on it (FaceIt, ESEA, Renown)
No idea, I don’t and never have played CS.
I know TF2 and L4D still have them, but I meant recent games, it’s rare for a non-indie game to provide the server files to host your own.
I think the way that CS does it is really the best one. Prevent the simple cheats, record games and let people handle the edge cases based on reports and suspicious activity.
While I agree that this is usually enough, you end up with the issue that with volume the process becomes bogged down to the point of inefficiency. The best bet is to implement this system with a much more robust server side cheat detection, and ideally not send occult information or recieve bad information from the clients to minimize the damage that can be done with a cheat.
I didn’t know CS did this, but yeah, at a high level, that’s how I’d address it, too. It’s probably not a solution that scales super well due to the manual review required, and I know that game has a reputation of people still being annoyed by cheaters, but it might be the best we can do without being very invasive, like the ring 0 stuff.
they do also have an AI system now called VACNet which doesn’t ban players but can prioritise which cases to review first, and can match suspected players against each other instead of the general pool via a system called trust factor
Reminds me that DRM used to run Kernel Side until software side drm was the safest/less sketchy option.