Kernal level anti-cheat means I ain't gonna play it
I don't care where the company is based no game should be requiring kernal level access, that's just opening the door for security concerns
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Kernal level anti-cheat means I ain't gonna play it
I don't care where the company is based no game should be requiring kernal level access, that's just opening the door for security concerns
I'm wondering if there's a way we can even know they're installing it. Windows just gives that generic admin prompt, I imagine? Tells you nothing of what's happening.
Good cheat prevention needs to be part of the game's fundamental design, not some virus as a band-aid.
We totally won't harvest your data.
Ignore the fact that we have political, state, and financial interest to do so, and that you would have no way of verifying or detecting if we did harvest your data, but you can trust us.
Just trust us.
It's not only interests of the chinese government, they HAVE to oblige legally if they are asked to. So even if the company has the best intentions, the government overrules.
And don't make that a chinese bad guy argument, as if western companies aren't doing the same, they just don't do that officially, which one is shadier is yours to decide.
All you can do as a company or anyone is to stop harvesting data and don't plant blackboxes/backdoors in customers systems
If you ask me, it's best to treat any program requiring kernel level access that isn't part of your base operating system or something you created and have full control over as malware. All it takes is one exploit or something of similar nature and some bad actors taking advantage of it before it can be patched for your computer to become fucked.
Well base operating system or hardware driver. There are exceptions, the pps driver for timekeeping makes sense to be kernel level too.
But games developers? No, they have no right to ring 0. I understand they want to protect from cheats, but they're just moving the battleground to a part of the system that results in blue screens/panics when it fails. And cheat developers will follow them there and even move to the hypervisor if needed, trust me on that.
Not to mention MSI releasing a monitor with built-in AI to highlight enemies for you that almost definitely counts as cheating, yet there's nothing they can do except ban the hardware all together.
That's gonna be an uninstall for me, Tencent.
Another game I'll never play 👍🏻
Eh, probably for the best, everything I've heard about LoL is that it turns you into a toxic hateful shell of a human.
Yep, a lot of recent anti-cheat is looking a lot like DRM.
more like intentionally installed malware but yes, 100 % this
Not just looking like DRM, I would say it IS DRM.
I was gonna care until I read league of legends. Clearly people already hate themselves and despise sensible choices and alternatives. Otherwise they wouldn't play lol.
Everything bad about LoL is it being a MOBA. I think you can't prevent toxicity in a MOBA.
In a team with randoms, if you start losing you're stuck in an unfun game where you get crushed by the ennemi for half an hour.
What's not to love?
tl;dr: Was never toxic or angry, and was consciously trying to not blame others but focus on my performance, but eventually gave up on DOTA, because it's too complex to play seriously and captain a team. Switched to Starcraft2, and realized how mentally taxing and depressing it is when you don't have a team to blame, and that you unconsciously blame teammates because it's a powerful mental defense mechanism. I've never felt worse, stressed and anxious, than after a loosing spree in 1v1 Starcraft.
I've spent hundreds of hours playing DOTA in highschool, and eventually I've reached the conclusion that unless you play with (and ideally are a captain) in a premade team, there's not really a point in playing - you will never get better alone, and you will unconsciously always blame other teammates, making it harder to learn your lessons and improve. (I'm deeply flegmatic and forgiving in regards to others, a archetypal support main, so i never was getting angry or toxic, thankfully. So I was usually more focused on my own performance and didn't care that other fuck up - or so I thought)
I've also quickly realised that the knowledge required to be a captain is something that even after thousands of games, and hours of research, I'll never be able to get. There's so many variables you need to know just to pick a team comp and get through the ban and pick phase, and then you add itemization to the mix, knowing what your team should do based on the current minute, hero picks, and items chosen by your and enemy team.. I really respect any pro player due to that, because its isane how many variables they have to work with.
And so I switched to Overwatch, because there, the meta is a little bit easier to follow and there's not that many variables in play, to be able to lead your team.
I wasn't able to get a stable team willing to take the game seriously, and eventually I've also noticed that I still tend to subconsciously focus on what my team did wrong, instead of my own gameplay.
So, I switched to StarCraft 2. And oh boy, those were the worst few months of my gaming life. The meta was eaiser to grasp, I knew what to do, the issue was building the muscle memory to execute it correctly. But there are plenty of resources, from training maps to The Staircase method, so I was making a pretty good progress.
However, the Ranked. Here, I've realized how much blaming others in team games is a necessary defense mechanism, because in this game, you have only yourself to blame for every loss. Hitting that play button in Ranked was terrifying, I was regularly depressed and felt terrible after every loss. It was so taxing to my mental well-being, because most of the games you play, just end with: "You suck. That was a beginners mistake. You'll never be good at this game, and you have only yourself to blame. Just give up.".
There's no blaming teammates, theres no " I've made a few mistakes, but my team also...", which as it turns out, being able to do that is a tremendous help in regards to your mental health.
I still had fun, it was a great challenge and I enjoyed learning the game and slowly getting better, but the losses, and especially loss streaks, were so stessfull and taxing, to the point where I was literally anxious to the point of almost having panic attacks every time I wanted to hit that fucking Find Ranked Match button.
But the wins, oh boy I've never felt better in my life. But, you know - as an average player playing at your rank, you should hover around 50% win rate. And that's a lot of losses.
I'd recommend this experience to everyone who keeps playing competitive games with random players. It was eye opening in regards to how you handle losses, and a great introspection into how I subconsciously handle losses in team games, even though I never got angry.)
Another reason not to play LoL.
Nope. Take your rootkit and go fuck yourself with it.
There's absolutely 0 reason a game should ever have kernel access. Ie unrestricted access to every piece of data on the system.
This won’t change much for me considering i already have a dozen reasons not to play this shit ass game
If you uninstall is there any guarantee that the kernel level anticheat gets removed, too, or are they in there forever?
And today we read from the Book of Sony, Chapter 2005, verses 10-11: Sony BMG quickly released software to remove the rootkit component of XCP from affected Microsoft Windows computers, but after Russinovich analyzed the utility, he reported in his blog that it only exacerbated the security problems and raised further concerns about privacy. Russinovich noted that the removal program merely unmasked the hidden files installed by the rootkit but did not actually remove the rootkit. He also reported that it installed additional software that could not be uninstalled. In order to download the uninstaller, he found that it was necessary to provide an e-mail address (which the Sony BMG Privacy Policy implied was added to various bulk e-mail lists) and to install an ActiveX control containing backdoor methods (marked as "safe for scripting" and thus prone to exploits). Microsoft later issued a killbit for the ActiveX control.
On November 18, 2005, Sony BMG provided a "new and improved" removal tool to remove the rootkit component of XCP from affected Microsoft Windows computers.
courtesy wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal#XCP_rootkit
This really saddens me. LoL is a game that will forever connect me to some of my best friends, I played hundreds if not thousands of hours, even through I have not played nearly as much over recent years. We even did go to public viewing of the world's finals.
If they force this on us, then it will mean that my last game of lol was played months ago.
It really confuses me why people would want to play a competitive video game that is balanced around profit. Riot openly admits to buffing and nerfing based on skin sales and champion releases.
Addiction, I suppose.
Cool, I uninstalled League years ago. Now I'm definitely not gonna reinstall
I've been playing League casually from time to time on Linux, and it's just a shame that they're adding Vanguard to the game since that kills any compatibility it had under wine. Though, knowing League community, a lot of players on Linux are so addicted to the game, they'll switch their operating systems for it or buy a second computer just to play.
I guess the shame and expense Sony learned the hard way in 2005 has faded and now kernel invasion has become acceptable.
The Chinese government wants to install a root kit on your PC
If you meet someone playing these games then they are the dumbest people you have run into
After studying operative systems this semester, it's crazy that developers are really out there giving level 0 privileges to an application program.
Get that shit far, far away from my machines
Edward Snowden showed that the US is spying on their citicens but nobody seems to care. But when China is doing it, everybody seems to lose their mind.
If the group doing the spying is ideologically in the same "tribe", people don't seem concerned. It's both a survival mechanism and our Achilles heel.
Can you run games like this in a virtual machine? Would that eliminate kernel level general invasiveness concerns because it's a...virtual kernel I guess? Does that virtualization require too much overhead to run demanding games?
Yes you can, but at the cost of performance and the risk of permanent ban. I believe there is a sizeable community of Valorant Players on Linux, which means all of them are using virtualization to bypass the anti-cheat.
They can fuck all the way off.