This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn’t take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully… even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope…
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I mean, Linux player base is only .01%, even if they are all cheaters, they will literally have no impact… You can’t say “Linux user base is too small”, and “if you support Linux you want cheaters” at the same time if you want to make sense.
Yeah, but saying “Our codebase is so terrible Linux keep showing us new bugs we won’t fix” or “We can’t sell your personal data with Proton” is worse PR…
I would bet that the claim of more than half of Linux players cheating is false positives due to shitty anti cheat. Like the anti cheat relying on some windows process or trying to initiate some process and linux is structured differently so it fails.
THE INTEGRITY OF YOUR DEVICE COULD NOT BE VALIDATED
If Valve’s expanding hardware lineup helps increase SteamOS adoption, they’ll change their tune.
Not a chance.
Overhaul your entire game stack || Blame Linux for being too small
Why would they need to overhaul their game stack? Rust would run just fine on Linux if they didn’t block it intentionally.
When I say they’re gamestack, I’m talking about their client and their backend services and their associated middleware.
Moving a game that is mostly client authoritative to server authoritative is a hell of a lot of work and requires serious rewrites to both the client and the server.
It also requires a lot more compute to handle the back end.
When you go from calculating everything on the front end and just sending the data back to the back end to sending actual controls to the back end and doing simulations, you need to rewrite a significant portion of everything.
It’s way cheaper and way faster just to write it in the client, and require the kernel/secured OS to police risky actions to the application.
The last couple of projects I looked at were probably 50% more man hours to make it server authoritative out of the box. Trying to come back and do it after the fact, It’s much, much higher.
I doubt that they will, given the fact that Linux is misrepresented a lot. They use Linux servers, so why not support Linux already?
This guy is from the UK and former military. I think there must be some kind of weird haywire thing where the military experience made him irrationally upset about people who do not follow rigid rules and structure or something.
No doubt he spends most nights stalking cheater forums and dreaming about the day he finally wins his war lol
Stereotypes are so edgy.
But often true
i think its moreso the people most likely to go into military already tend to be more narcissistic people willing to kill others or easily convinced of extreme things like that for ego. Though the service can only really worsen those issues for most people. I also dont think he stays up at night like that lol i think he just hardly really gives a fuck cuz hes convinced he couldnt be going about it wrong despite him openly admitting other groups manage to and he just convinces himself its impossible with his team when every large server has their own moderation staff and can make use of tools if given them. His whole comment is so silly.
Does the anti-cheat break the game on Linux? Not buying the game. I don’t need that kind of crap in my life.
Not sure what to believe here due to I haven’t gamed in years. What’s everyone take on this? Educate me.
I’d imagine people on Linux who want to play Rust would be more than happy to shell out $15 and go through the little effort it is to download DLC so they can play on a Premium server when the other option is to shell out $140 for a Windows 11 license and go through the effort of installing that spyware trash to their PC.
On the other hand, Alistair clearly doesn’t want your money so maybe stop trying to give it to him.
i didnt plan to anyway lol and i dont think people should bother, rust is not a game worth the extra money or even worth the time in general… and its damn well not worth a windows install, and i say that as someone who alrdy has one just in case on my system, i wouldnt even choose to boot up windows to play rust…
I think Helldivers 2 uses EAC and it works on Proton just fine.
Helldivers uses nProtect not EAC but yes, EAC in general is compatible with Proton. The Finals use to run EAC for the longest and Arc Raiders currently uses it and both those games run well.
Does Deep Rock Galactic or maybe Marvel Rivals use EAC? I could’ve sworn I’ve seen pop-ups mention it and those are the three games I’ve played on Linux. But also, memories are bad, constructed memories happen, yadda yadda.
I thought Deep Rock Galactic was PvE anyway
If your cheat detection runs on the client side only, you don’t have cheat protection.
Well, there only so much in gaming that reasonably can be done server side.
Sure, the server could identify that a player shouldn’t be visible and not transit that location to a client, addressing seeing through walls, in theory.
But once a player is hypothetically visible, aimbot can happen. If you are crawling in a ghillie suit in the grass, but the other player has a client that skips rendering grass and replaces the ghillie suit model with a suit made of traffic cones…
Now intrusive anti cheat isn’t worth it, but it is an unavoidable reality that it is up to the client to preserve the integrity.
Closest you get would be streamed gameplay, where the rendering even is server side. Also not worth it. But even then I could see cheating machine vision and faked controls to get an edge unfairly.
i wonder if this guy heard about counter strike…
Glad I never gave this cunt any money.
His argument is valid, wdym?
Fucking trolls, seriously.
You’re getting downvoted because the truth hurts. Most people are here are not devs on competitive games clearly. What sane developer would multiply their anticheat costs for .01% player growth?
It’s a network effect issue. More people need to game on Linux before it’s relevant enough to support for competitive multiplayer games. Same reason why Riot dropped it.
It isn’t. Cheating is a game culture problem, not a technical problem. Just to counter example. Rust is filled with cheaters precisely because they haven’t done everything they can to fix cheating. They are culturally fixated in a single lane thinking. As a result, they’re flooded with cheaters (plenty on Windows) who exploit their inflexible strategies. This is top Flanders “we haven’t done anything and we are all out of ideas”. Linux is not the source of cheating on Rust either, but he’s arguing as if it is. He is lazy. That’s not bad on itself, but he is also disingenuous and is arguing in bad faith.
Make server side anti cheat and suddenly what OS the player is running becomes irrelevant.
Edit: another contradiction in their argument. Linux was less than 0.1% of the Rust user base. But, Linux was also the biggest source of cheating? How? It is just a disingenuous and dumb argument made to spite Linux out of hatred. It has no basis in reality.
He’s saying that cheaters who probably play on Windows, used hooks dedicated for Linux/Proton to bypass anti-cheat code.
That is not at all what is said. The guy you’re replying to is also wrong. Alistair only claimed most of Linux users were cheaters, that would be 0.005%, not that most of total cheaters were on Linux. But that means during their all time steam player count peak (which was after the Linux ban) if 260k players, a total of about 13 people were cheating on Linux.
Which contradicts his position that cheating is a massive huge front to wage an endless war on. 13 people is a ban list, not a cry for rootkits on all clients. It stands to reason that if Linux was 0.01% and even if they were all cheating, it is not a massive problem. Is it tiny or is it massive? It can’t be both at the same time.
Every extra cheater is a bad thing.
Do you think a player would care they only make up x% of the playerbase when they get insta killed through walls and lose all their resources by someone in god mode?
Of course any one cheater is bad. But this is a massively successful game studio complaining about cheating when they admit to not putting any resources towards creating a team to combat cheating.
To adress your edit first. That’s not what he said. He said the majority of Linux users are cheaters, not that the majority of cheaters are on Linux.
If you want to be upset about things people say, at least understand what they’re saying…
I don’t think you’re a programmer. I don’t think you’ve worked on the backend of software. It’s seldom as easy as “just fix it”. All software are built in blocks, added over time. Sometimes, it’s not until much later you realise one of the blocks are unstable. But it’s not as easy as just replacing the block. You’ll have to dismantle everything built above it, reconstruct the entire block, and then build everything back up. Sometimes from scratch, because while you’re at it, might as well fix some other issues too.
It’s a massive undertaking, can take a very long time. And while you’re doing all of that. You don’t have time for anything else.
What he is saying, is that they’re currently fighting enough cheaters on Windows as it is, they don’t have time to do it on Linux either, all while maintaining two codebases instead of one.
Now. I don’t play rust. Just not my cup of tea. But it’s silly, how many comments here either don’t even understand the argument he’s making (including yourself) and/or have no understanding what so ever of what software development on projects decades old actually entail.
It’s so funny how you say they don’t care about their creative work at all, because in my experience. You’d have to care a lot about the project to justify the headache of maintaining decade old codebases. It’s seldom fun. We’re talking months of headache for a single day of gratification. And then it starts all over.
Rust’s top player count was ~263,000, so .01% of players is 26. Good job stopping between 14 and 26 cheaters by not supporting Linux.
Rust’s all time peak, is 263’000. As in, the maximum number of players all logged in at the same time. It does in no way reflect the total number of players
The number of registered users, as of 2022, was estimated to 15 million. Of that, 0.01% would be 150 thousand. Which mean they’ve seemingly stopped between 75’000 and 150’000 cheaters by not supporting Linux.
Source of those numbers are https://activeplayer.io/rust/
Good job estimating the number of cheaters on Linux. You were only off by a factor of ~5000
No it isn’t, I can’t even be bothered to read it.
I tried Rust, but quit quickly due to the extreme levels of racism and open Nazis. Maybe they should address some core issues of the game before blaming Linux for their problems?
Also, how was their playerbase only 0.01% Linux? Was their game terrible on Linux? Why did it have hundreds of time less players than other platforms
well they dont see that part as a problem because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree
one that would be poorly maintained by both us and EAC due to the low user base.
I’m sure I’ve been playing a lot of games with EAC, because it’s actually one of the few ones that support Linux.
If I’m not mistaken (judging entirely by the RAC popup/loading), from the games I’m playing, Hell Let Loose, Fellowship, Helldivers 2, I think even The Finals used it.
Hell Let Loose wasn’t working at first, because you have to check a checkbox and enable Linux support when building, which did take them a while.
So, unless I’m misremembering/confusing it with another anticheat, this is bullshit.
Also “unless you have an in-house anti-cheat team”
You made millions out of your player base. You can afford it. You’re just lazy.
yea thats one of the funniest parts like oh so your game that makes tons of money and has rampant cheating doesnt have any team dedicated to the issue? that explains a lot!
Skill issue.
I will be so happy when the era of client-side anticheat is over. I think it will happen eventually, especially now that Valve is releasing the new Steam Machine and has been so successful with Proton-based gaming lately.
Plus, Windows getting so much worse and the zero days and exploits of these kernel-level anticheats will put pressure on the devs to move away from them imo.
yea i think its a matter of time linux is very quickly becoming the operating system of enthusiasts not in spite of gaming but for gaming too. Some older games dont even run properly on windows
But for people with older pcs priced out of the market who are still very heavy gamers they will naturally trend toward debloated windows variants and linux, and with the speed linux has grown in even just the last year its pretty likely itll be more close in market share to macos sooner rather than later. and more of the people who leave windows go to linux vs mac based on stats available so its in some good standing right now.
i talk to many regular people about linux and many seem completely open to switch tbf these are more educated people in school though and one does programming but i think majority of people would be open to running something like a debian or ubuntu and even something more complex with the right applications to support daily usage
on the enthusiast note for example, if you want the best vr performance on your index or vive or other wired headsets your best performance will be running monado on linux using openvr translation, thats just reality, steamvr is pretty ass. And many alternative softwares for gaming like wivrn are completely free and available to everyone instead of charging for similar windows software, gamers use linux and they make sure its a relatively good experience
