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Comment by daneel_w | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting; their anti-cheat already is a root kit that runs as a ring-0 (or lower?) kernel module in Windows, yet they keep having to ban cheaters every month. But this goes beyond root kits. It's now apparently acceptable to operate arbitrary applications on users' PCs even when not playing the game. Utter spyware.

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The very dedicated cheaters use special PCIe hardware to alter and monitor memory through DMA, there's always a step up.

The only way to prevent cheaters is to control the hardware. With modern Xbox and PlayStation being basically a PC that you control with a controller, I can imagine a future where you buy special online gaming consoles that you control with mouse and keyboard to play competitive games. Even that can be foiled, of course, because hardware can be manipulated as well, but it's the furthest PC gaming will go.

What I wonder about it why people put so much effort into cheating. I don't see how playing more than a few games with an aimbot is any fun. What are these people even getting out of it? Is it just having their name on a board somewhere?

You don’t even need special hardware. The hacker will use a bootkit to load driver to read and write memory. Vanguard is trivial to bypass.

> What are these people even getting out of it? Is it just having their name on a board somewhere?

Based on my observations (during 20k+ hours of playtime in multiplayer games), I don't think a leaderboard is even necessary. It often seems to be more about asserting dominance. Very simple and very primal. No deep thoughts, just imposing your will over others. It's satisfying. [1]

[1] Of course there's a spectrum of reasons one might have to cheat. Some might be temporary cheaters who are just curious about the possibilities, others might be aiming for a specific prize in a contest. With the dominance angle I'm characterizing a certain kind of obsessive regular cheater.

Xbox and PlayStation games can already use keyboard and mouse. Not many developers make use of them. Partially because consoles aren't installed used at a desk, partially because the difference in precision between a controller and a mouse makes it difficult to balance competitive games.

> yet they keep having to ban cheaters every month

It's not perfect but the cheaters generally get banned fairly quickly and it's far better than the alternative. I've played tons of games of Valorant at Radiant (the highest rank) and it's extremely rare to even run into someone that I suspect is cheating. In comparison, I get extremely blatant cheaters in about 25% of my games of CS and far more than that in CoD: Warzone.

> and it's far better than the alternative

There is, of course, a substantial issue re: privacy with this approach. A ring-0 driver can essentially do everything the system can (it's running in kernel mode). It's a two-sided coin.

Basically everything of interest on the average user's computer can be obtained without a ring-0 driver. Riot's incentive for the driver is extremely clear and it's not in their financial interest to abuse it.

Yes and no. In the case of e.g. Windows 10, without a kernel module, access depends on UAC specifics.

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