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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t expect magic, so I don’t expect Linux to be a Windows competitor in the consumer space for many years to come.

    Surely you can see the material differences between the Steam Deck and someone trying to install a flavour of Linux for themselves on their Windows PC. Valve has done everything. No tinkering with drivers. The hardware works out of the box. No complicated workarounds. No CLI. Every game is clearly labelled for compatibility in the UI. It even has functionality which Windows doesn’t have like sleep and wake for games in progress. They’ve even gone with an immutable OS, so developers know their games will operate if tested on the one distribution.









  • Last time I investigated this, Overwatch used a very poorly-designed client-side solution called Warden. It’s a signature-based detection system, similar to antivirus. It looks for process IDs of known cheats. There is also some server-side heuristic detection which looks for impossible player stats that reveal rage-mode cheating. Again, this is easily defeated to the point that it doesn’t work at all because cheaters know about it and spend the first few minutes of the match firing into walls and floors to dilute their stats. Detecting process IDs is useless when you can just make some minor changes and recompile every few days, which is exactly what the subscription-based hacks do. It is a naive and amateur solution, and because of its flawed architecture it can never be effective.

    The only serious anti-cheat in any game is in Valorant. It’s a kernel module that can detect low-level hacks. Overwatch’s anti-cheat runs in user mode, and all the serious hacks use HID drivers that are recompiled periodically to prevent signature detection.