Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking backlash from a segment of the player base. Protesters, unhappy with the new system, have resorted to using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt the servers, escalating tensions between the gaming giant and its community.
Couldn’t we avoid all this by giving players the option to host and moderate their own servers?
Ownership of purchased goods?
Are you crazy???
Things like FiveM exist, which is exactly that. I’m not sure if that is at all affected by the anticheat though, I didn’t read the article.
Rockstar has apparently bought FiveM.
I sure hope not cause GTA Online is trash if you want to do anything other than Free Mode. I got so sick and tired of all the loading screens, disconnects, and empty lobbies.
Even when they apparently “fixed” the loading issue, all it did was speed up the connection to Free Mode. Hosting/joining a mission still takes ages and nobody ever joins any of my games anymore so I gave up and went to FiveM full-time. If that gets shut down by anti-cheat then I’m going back to GTA IV. Cops N’ Crooks is more fun than anything GTA Online has to offer, anyway.
I’ve heard rockstar recruited fivem developers
And owns everything now
Most of them got kicked from the project
Tons of the problems of modern day matchmaking could be solved by this, but if players are running their own servers then they can just have their server give them the items they want, which means no more premium currency purchases for R$.
That would lose a ton of profits!
Don’t buy games with invasive user-side anti-cheats that hamper performance, and demand refunds on any game that adds it after purchase.
I don’t understand why this is so hard for people. If everyone gave a shit, we could end this. But instead, people would rather just complain while still forking over the money to these companies.
There are so many good indie games without this kind of bullshit. We have better choices.
They implemented this 10 years after the game’s release. It’s harder to vote with your wallet at that point.
and demand refunds on any game that adds it after purchase.
The way I see it, adding it, even this late, is changing the terms of the agreement and thus justification for a refund. Steam will often see it that way too if you word it as such. And if not, hell, you can still badger the publisher for a refund incessantly so at least it still costs them the equivalent in man hours even if you don’t get the refund. The point is not to be passive, even if we don’t get to win every single battle.
Companies like Rockstar certainly would meet any requests for refunds outside of very recently purchased with “Go kick rocks.”. For sure they changed the rules/ experience after the fact, but you can bet it’s covered in the small print of the EULA. Even if they received (and denied) 100,000 requests, they would care a bit unless they saw a significant slump in their overall sales. Sadly, a lot of their customers will be pissed about this but will be first in line buying other Rockstar games.
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What rights?
You’re buying a license to play a game. Rockstar is not obligated to ensure it’s available to you indefinitely.
“What!? You don’t like the erosion of ownership rights? You’re an asshole!” - you.
They’re trying to argue that an EULA isn’t binding because they can’t sign away their rights, and thats legally incorrect in this case.
Recognizing reality is different than endorsing it.
Depends on your country/jurisdiction. Consumer protection is weak in the USA, but much stronger in some other countries. It’d depend on how much it changes the experience. For example, if you buy a product because it advertises a particular feature, but then the manufacturer removes the feature in the future, that can be a reason to get a refund, at least in Australia and some European countries.
I won’t be buying other Rockstar games if they do this with other Rockstar games, since it means I won’t be able to play them since I use Linux and they don’t want to use the checkmark to enable BattlEye on Linux/Proton.
Sadly, a lot of their customers will be pissed about this but will be first in line buying other Rockstar games.
Then they aren’t pissed enough. But yes, talking the talk is completely meaningless if you don’t also walk the walk, I agree.
Companies like Rockstar certainly would meet any requests for refunds outside of very recently purchased with “Go kick rocks.”
If you let them, sure. The reason we use phrases like “fight for a refund” is because these things are hard and they take effort. Like yes it sucks to have to do that and yes I understand our time is valuable, but as I see it there is value in both having your voice heard and punitively costing an offending company manhours in having to deal with you - even if you ultimately do not win the fight.
Again, the point isn’t about winning or getting your money back, it’s about not being passive and just accepting the things that happen to you as if you do not have autonomy.
Right, I bought that shit in 2014 I think. Haven’t played it in several years.
Probably testing it for gta6.
And that’s the one we can refuse to buy.
But let’s be honest - people won’t. They’ll buy it in record numbers - just not on Linux.
Is “get rid of all anti-cheat” a popular position outside of Lemmy? I don’t really play these sorts of games but was under the impression that most competitive multiplayer would be unplayable without anti-cheat measures.
It’s not even popular on Lemmy. People are fine with the anti-cheat. They draw the line at enforced third-party accounts, though, which is commendable.
It is perfectly possible to run anti-cheat that are roughly as good (or as bad, as it often turns out) without full admin privilege and running as kernel-level drivers. Coupled with server-side validation, which seems to be a dying breed, you’d also weed out a ton of cheaters while missing the most motivated of them.
As someone who lurks around in different communities (to some extent; Steam forums, reddit, lemmy, mastodon, and a few game-centered discord servers), the issue is not much against anti-cheat for online play. It’s the nature of these piece of software that is the issue. It would not be the same if the anti-cheat was also forced on solo gameplay, but it is not the case here.
(bonus points for systems that allow playing on non-protected servers, but that’s asking a bit too much from some publishers I suppose)
There are plenty of anti-cheat measure that doesn’t require invasive access to your system or performance hits. The objection is not to fighting cheating, it is with the specific overreaching methodology chosen to do so.
Also I personally rarely play multiplayer so it’s even more frustrating to have bullshit installed on my system for a feature that doesn’t even apply to me.
Anti-cheat measures should be baked into the server side. 99 percent of the multiplayer cheating problem is not adhering to the golden rule of server security: Never Trust the Client
I legitimately avoided rockstar for years because they force you to use their store even when you buy on steam. I still haven’t played rdr2, despite critical acclaim. I finally caved and got GTAV on sale cause I realised none of this shit works. Consumers using purchasing power to enforce standards is a losing battle. The storefronts or legislators need to enforce this shit. I think it should be valve. They have the market position and userbase to actually succeed or at the very least convince publishers to not break shit that was already working fine.
Name one war which was ever fought on a single battlefield.
Yes, we should be pushing for both regulatory changes and changes on platforms like Steam, but we should also being doing our part.
If there is anything I’ve learned over time it is that nobody is coming to save you. Ever. If you are holding out for someone to swoop in and make things better, you will be waiting forever. Either we do it ourselves, or it doesn’t get done.
It didn’t have “invasive user side anti-cheat” on day one you doughnut
That’s why Linux users bought it. This was added YEARS after release
Where did I even remotely imply otherwise?
“Don’t buy games with invasive user-side anti-cheats that hamper performance, and demand refunds on any game…”
1st point: AC Wasn’t there at purchase
2nd point: AC was added decades later so how can one return the game?
and demand refunds on any game that adds it after purchase.
This, which is in my original fucking message, applies here. If you think the effort is futile, fine, whatever, don’t try. But my statement was made with full understanding of the timeline, and I stand by it. Feel free to read the rest of the comments in the thread for further discussion of the timeline, or feel free to fuck off, I guess; I’m not in the mood to indulge a pedant clearly just looking for an argument.
No it doesn’t, at least not everwhere.
If you wanna be an idoitic asshat, and get all pissy because someone points out a flaw in your argument, thats not my problem.
Good.
I’ll just play it on Xbox 360…or PS3…or PS4…or Xbox one…or PS5…or Xbox S/X…or Windows…wait is this Skyrim or GTA?
Bitchy cheaters throwing a hissy that they can’t keep creating an unfair advantage for themselves in an online environment. I hope their mothers take away their internet connection for the month.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattlEye
Interacts with the game at the kernel level.
Fuck cheaters, but also FUCK kernel level shit, it’s possible to make a good AC without fucking around in the kernel.
I don’t even install third party Antivirus’ that hook into the kernel because of all the issues it causes. 80% of all BSODs I’ve traced back have always had a root cause because of some shit piece of software fucking around in the kernel. 15% is shitty drivers.
Kernel AVs and ACs actually act like malware in of itself with the types of hooks and interactions it performs. Anything operating at the kernel level can basically see just about everything you or your computer is doing
Fuck kernel level AC
it’s possible to make a good AC without fucking around in the kernel.
What if the cheat runs in the kernel? I am also against these extremely invasive anti-cheat measures, but it must be clear to everyone that the cheat developers and users have no qualms about this.
A user level AC can do shit all against that if the cheat runs in ring 0.
A) They can actually invest in server-side detection
B) Cheats running at ring0 aren’t invisible, unkillable maybe, but AC just needs to detect to ban/kick user
There’s no excuse for kernel AC, it’s just a cheap, lazy shortcut
Cheats running at ring0 aren’t invisible
Every rootkit ever disagrees with that statement.
They can actually invest in server-side detection
I’m not deep enough in the topic to be able to judge this, but i would guess the needed extra hardware is simple not worth it. especially in games with many players or complex physics i would guess that could lead to considerable load on the servers.
Plus, server side is not able to catch things the client manipulates on his side. e.g. graphical data to make walls transparent. The server could at most catch the player abusing this knowledge, but if he is smart about it, the server has no way to ever notice.
Cheats running at ring0 aren’t invisible
Every rootkit ever disagrees with that statement.
Clarification, to the game client, the cheat has to interact with the actual game process at some point. Rootkits try to interact with other processes as little as possible until instructed otherwise
I’m not deep enough in the topic to be able to judge this, but i would guess the needed extra hardware is simple not worth it. especially in games with many players or complex physics i would guess that could lead to considerable load on the servers.
Nope, the servers are already beefed up to just handle the players and physics as-is, adding detection routines to determine “Hey, this player is flying 100s of feet in the air and there’s no flying in this game” would be like a drop in the bucket
Plus, server side is not able to catch things the client manipulates on his side. e.g. graphical data to make walls transparent. The server could at most catch the player abusing this knowledge, but if he is smart about it, the server has no way to ever notice.
Do you realize how much cheating just some server-side checks would cut down? The most egregious ones are the ones people complain about, and hate, the most. The ones who instakill you or fling you far above the map or shoves you underground. The “smart ones” can be taken care of manually based on reports.
There will never ever be a 100% cheat proof game kernel AC or not. Nothing is unhackable.
It’s all about doing it as cheaply as possible and offloading to a third party to handle so they can wash their hands
You would also think that Rockstar would want to stop those kinds of cheats just for greedy reasons. If there is some kind of ultra-powerful flying saucer item available, it’s probably something that they sell to players for money. At the very least, when someone spawns something like that, check to see if their account purchased it.
So much of the rest of the stuff could be handled using heuristics. The average player gets X headshots an hour, this player is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe they’re just very good, but let’s flag that account and see if there’s anything else suspicious about their playing. That’s the thing about an MMO, you have vast amounts of data about players so there’s a lot of stuff you can use to see if something is normal.
I guess if they’re not doing it they’ve done some business calculations and decided that investing $X in techniques to ban cheaters won’t result in at least $X more in revenue from happy players who want to play more now that the cheating has been reduced. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re counting on making money off the cheaters somehow – maybe they periodically do get detected and banned and have to buy a new copy of the game. So, the math now says you don’t want to be too aggressive about the cheaters because they’re a good, reliable source of revenue.
80% of all BSODs I’ve traced back have always had a root cause because of some shit piece of software fucking around in the kernel
CrowdStrike has entered the chat.
They’ve been a boom to the cyber security industry though, even though it wasn’t a virus and didn’t really damage anything simply the fact that it happened has forced management to actually appreciate the importance of cyber security, and cyber integrity.
They are hiring like crazy now.
Now if only the United States could be convinced that remote working isn’t the work of the devil, we might be in for a productive few decades in the technology space. No need for AI
Probably a few Linux/Steam Deck players pissed that Rockstar just nuked their ability to play without warning or reason as well.
Heh, I would say the cheaters are generally much more immature and likely to DDOS. I think there is a lot of overlap over video game cheaters and script kiddies, especially when the cheaters are called hackers
Qnd cheaters have money (the same they use to buy cheats) to pay for botnets
Those are legitimate victims, fuck the cheaters.
The cheaters have already found a way to bypass this stupid shit. It only affects legitimate users and cheaters too stupid to figure out the seemingly trivial workaround.
Yeah that’s shitty. I’d rather the cheaters ruin the game for a subsection of the populace rather than all of them though.
I’m upset they nuked Linux support, my PC is Linux and have a steam deck
I’m still not going to fucking ddos them for it
Linux users playing dirty? Not a good look.
Battleye is supported on steam deck
But honestly FUCK kernel level ACs
Battleye is, but they didn’t enable it for Linux. Literally a switch, and they failed to do so.
Eh, I was playing it on steam deck, GTA online was just not worth it with all the cheating anyway.
What I don’t get is why they went with the most invasive kernel level stuff instead of doing even the most basic server side checks to check for users doing physically impossible stuff.
Server-side checks cost processing power and memory hence they need to spend more on servers.
Client side kernel-level anti-cheat only ever consumes resources and cause problems to the actual gamers, not directly to Rockstart’s bottom line (and if it makes the game comms slightly slower on the client side it might even reduce server resource consumption).
If Rockstar’s management theory is that gamers will endure just about any level of shit and keep on giving them money (a posture which, so far, has proven correct for just about every large game maker doing that kind of shit) then they will logically conclude that their bottom line won’t even suffer indirectly from making life harder for their existing clients whilst it will most definitelly suffer if they have more server costs due to implementing server side checks for cheating.
Man, that sounds familiar. I gave up on Escape from Tarkov for the same reason.
It’s just ridiculous the stuff you see that should be easy to catch with basic server checks (even if you were to run them after the fact). Players conjuring money and vehicles out of thin air, moving impossibly fast, vehicles/players with seemingly unlimited hit points, etc. You could easily catch that shit on the server side and ban the cheaters, but instead they go for the most invasive client side shit.
Sure, if you want to stamp out stuff like aim bots and whatever eventually you’ll need to look at the client side of things, but in a decade they didn’t seem to do anything at all.
That kind of stuff catches legitimate users all the time. In Rust for example it’s common to get kicked for “fly hacking” while jumping on vehicles. The more open-ended the game the more weird edge cases become very relevant. Especially if it has a halfway decent physics sim. Tons of ways to give players weird velocities. Then it has to account for the variance ping introduces…
Some stuff, yeah. Should be easy to check if a player has too much HP. But spoofed communication between the client and server is a tough nut to crack when you can only see what the client wants you to see. Keeping everything server-side would help but that introduces latency to every input, unacceptable for anything even moderately paced.
All thay said, it would be a lot easier to swallow the “necessary evil” argument if it actually fucking worked.
I’m pretty sure there’s not a valid reason for players to be able to spawn giant Ferris wheels in people’s garages, that seems like a fairly easy one to test for
Use a more holistic approach. Combine heuristics like the average speed and aim hit percentage with reports from other players.
Review player reports, if a player makes a false allegation in their reports, mark that player as having less reliable reports. If a player reports someone who turns out to be a definite cheater, mark whoever reported the cheater as having more reliable reports. Etc etc.
Like, if the report just says “player was moving fast outside a vehicle”, maybe they were cheating, or maybe they were just goofing off trying to stand on top of vehicles the whole game. If the report says “player was moving fast the whole game, had the highest kill count, and was also reported by 5 other players in the match for cheating”, it’s a little more clear what’s happening.
None of that helps low-level play or games without meaningful progression. Continuing to use Rust as an example, because I’m most familiar with it among games with controversial anticheat: people get banned all the time. All the time. And they keep coming back with brand new Steam accounts, and continue to cheat until someone notices and an admin happens to be online. Rinse and repeat. Seemingly an infinite pool of cheaters, or finite cheaters with infinite money for new copies of the game. And it only takes a few minutes to ruin someone’s week.
The most effective prevention method is probably strict gatekeeping: require a minimum hours played in wild west servers or a certain value of games owned in an account before a player can be whitelisted. Proof of investment, that kind of thing.
Because it’s cheaper than actually implementing working anti heat instead of just stealing control of your computer and leaving gaping vulnerabilities on it.
After all, why would they care? It’s not their computer.
I’m conflicted here
On one hand, I play GTA Online, and the amount of hackers is getting out of hand. Most are chill, some are extremely annoying and blow up everyone in the lobby with 800 million explosions a second. In this case, I’m annoyed that I can’t play it and glad there’s anti cheat.
On the other hand, I didn’t realize that BattlEye would prevent Linux users from playing entirely. I’m not a Linux user (yet) myself, but that really sucks. Also, rockstar is extremely predatory with the shark cards (it was worse with Red Dead Online!) so they do kinda deserve it as some form of karma for being terrible
Edit: EAC -> BattlEye
On the other hand, I didn’t realize that EAC would prevent Linux users from playing entirely.
For the most part any game that “won’t run on linux” totally would if it wasn’t for the anticheat not working (or being supported) on linux, that’s usually the downfall. For instance Destiny runs fine, but if they see you’re using linux they ban your acct because fuck you that’s why. Tbf, even if the anticheat would work it’s usually kernel level spyware that linux users mostly refuse to run, so eh.
I believe it’s BattlEye, not EAC
Yeah it is, my bad! It’s in the body of the post and I forgot lol
Also battle eye works (same with EAC) on Linux you just need to enable it
I bought Red Dead Redemption for myself and three friends, super excited about the game, the lore. I had never spent that much money on a game.
We all played through the single player tutorial, and finally into the open world. We meet up and begin exploring and trying to complete quests when suddenly one of us just … drops dead.
Then another is hit by a meteor and caught on fire?
I am thrown up into the sky.
An alien ship?! Appears and messes with us for a while. I try begging in pub chat for the hacker to please leave us so we can play, which seems to goad them further. This continued for an hour.
A quick look around the internet told us that this was par for the course for RDR and GTA and Rockstar couldn’t/wouldn’t do anything about it.
We ended up refunding all the games through steam. Sad times.
You could have made a private lobby. Although RDR Online isnt too exciting anyway.
Odd, I don’t recall private lobbies being a thing, and a quick google shows lots of people asking for them and a few “workarounds”. Perhaps they are a recent addition or a console thing?
I haven’t played in a few years but this is how I remember the system working: RDO matches people into separate lobbies based on what version of the game they’re running and this check is done by hashing one or more files in the install directory. By adding junk data to one of those files you more or less guarantee that you’ll only ever encounter other people who have the same junk data added. It’s basically the dark souls password system with extra steps.
Maybe I used a mod or something, I dont know, wasnt very memorable aha (well all I remember is excessive amounts of fog), quickly gave up on it.
Before private lobbies in GTA, I remember blocking ports for GTA in my firewall except to my friends’ IP addresses, which worked for a while.
Firstly, yeah… RDRO is utterly plauged with all sorts of cheaters using trainers and all kinds of cheats is full of crap, at least for PC.
The standard strategy you basically have to employ is that whenever you see something nonsense like that happen is you have to jump to another instance/lobby. Depending on your luck, you may have to do this every 15 to 60 minutes aaaand some cheats allow the cheater to follow you to your new lobby.
Secondly…
A few years back I was in RDRO and was attacked by a cheater.
I had a broke ass level 15ish character with the just a few of the least expensive guns.
They had infinite ammo. Teleport hopping. Spawned 10 additional NPCs versions of themselves, then of my character, then zombies, then legendary animals (basically fucking monsters).
All the while they’re scrambling their name in the scoreboard every minute and create spoofs to make it harder to actually do a report or have the grievance system actually work correctly.
I killed them all. I died over and over again, but I kept killing them. Whittled down the fake names and spoofs and kept doing the grievance thing until it was actually landing on one consistent name.
Then the cheater began spawning gigantic props like boats attached to their character, which rotated and hit with physics force when they rotated, which they could shoot out of but I could not shoot into.
But uh, I managed to juke my way through cracks in the collision mesh, then shoot him.
He got tired of this at some point… and just turned himself invisible.
But, by this point I’d been killed enough times that I’d managed to get him showing up on my radar.
I’d by then long since run out of ammo… and began stalking him, via radar, with just a knife and lasso, sometimes the running tackle with the lasso that leads into a hogtie, other times actually managing to sneak up behind him, executing an invisible foe.
After an hour and a half of this, he started slipping up, and I could see him attempting to flee me, teleport half a klik away and just stand there for 30 seconds, then move a bit, then pause again, presumably fiddling around in his menus.
I killed him a few more times in this state, and he quit, he left.
… I would have just jumped to another instance if he had not killed my horse.
Do not fuck with a man’s horse lol.
… anyway, yeah. hung up my hat after that. fucking nonsense.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
You really made an account just to post this singular comment?
No? I’ve had an account for a long time?
Oh, this is the first time you’ve left either hexbear or ml then.
Never been to either. Sorry that you’re feeling so defensive about a simple joke response to your hilarious video game/internet tough guy/I am very badass rant.
Not sure how that makes me someone from either of those instances but it is genuinely funny to see someone go straight to some dumb tankie or communist or what-the-fuck-ever they are name calling shit over something so silly 😂
As if laughing at your totallyhappened story makes someone a Russian plant or a Chinese Holocaust denier or whatever dumb thing ignorant people are going on about now.
Tl:Dr
Stay mad. Touch grass.
Iam out of the loop. What kind of cheats are available in gta online? Edit: or what was available.
They didn’t enable linux support on the anticheat, so the game no longer runs on Linux/steam deck
Hackers like to glitch other users. Randomly turn into a toilet, have all of your ammunition disappear, suddenly fly into the air and die on impact. It made public servers unplayable. Friends only sessions were necessary
The most common cheat is probably gaining money or experience, but there have always been pretty extensive mod menus for GTA Online with tools from invincibility to making your vehicles rainbow, to randomly causing other players to explode or setting hundreds of muggers on them.
In 2015ish, I used to cheat, other than getting rich, all I was interested in doing was making an indestructible chrome bus with smoke trails that I’d drive around picking up players in, to teleport us all to North Yankton and back like a tour guide.
Aren’t there like cheat servers and non-cheat servers? Or is that a “gentleman’s agreement” that not everyone is playing fair with if you can’t fully block it because of mods etc?
None, now.
According to Mutahar:
-
The Anti Cheat has already been bypassed by a free cheat menu on Windows.
-
He’s fairly sure he has figured out some kind of way to temporarily bypass (as in, it’ll probably get caught in a few weeks) the linux block by some kind of custom virtualization method (requiring only one GPU) that he says he may explain in detail at some point.
In general, he’s done with playing GTO.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSagozpKPs&pp=ygUSbXV0YWhhciBndGEgb25saW5l
But yeah, obligatory reminder for BattleEye and EasyAntiCheat games that refuse to allow linux play:
All these game devs have to do is flip a switch, click a few options in their developer portals, to allow BattleEye or EAC to work on linux, through Proton.
And its been that way for 3 years, since 2021.
There is literally no reason for games that use these services to not work on linux, the devs just don’t fucking care.
Dont blame developers. It’s never developers that make decisions. It’s the management, the shareholders, the project manager, the product owner, the whatever-mba-dipshit on top. But never the developers. They just execute and comply and if they refuse, they’re let go. A developer is a fleshy code printer. A resource. They don’t have real power. They’re a factory worker. Remember that. Don’t blame the worker, blame the boss.
Source: i’m a professional software developer.
This.
I follow code of ethics and raise concerns where applicable. But even if you refuse, they’ll just pick another development team out of their hats to implement anyway.
So many are afraid to lose their jobs now they will keep their heads down and do it anyway.
Some devs sure do fear linux users.
It feels like it’s part and parcel with an overall, growing trend in software to be openly hostile to any system wherein the user has proper admin rights.
Because the potential for someone to use those rights to fuck with the software merits refusing to support systems where they can.
Further entrenching the notion that, to participate in a “modern” consumer software environment, the user must agree to be handcuffed on their own hardware.
The potential?
People are hacking the shit out of any online game without proper anticheats
Normal users do that on Windows, why would anyone install Linux for that
*with or without
FTFY
I’ve heard devs say that Linux users come up with something like 90% of the bug reports. They’re often bugs that only affect Linux,so you’ve got, say 10% to the player base reporting 90% of the issues, and about 85% of those issues only affect the 10% of the player base.
Simply from an economics standpoint it doesn’t make sense to spend that much resources on such a small percentage of the player population. Additionally about half of those Linux users do have Windows computers, that they are prepared to buy your game on, if that’s the only option. So again it makes no financial sense to actually support Linux.
As far as the studios see it they are taking a 5% cut in profits, in order to reduce workload by 85% - seems like a good deal.
I can’t even really argue with that, because they make a good point. Indie devs have it even more difficult because they often have much smaller teams, and really can’t handle the workloads that Linux users would give them.
Who was that developer? Where are those numbers from? Any sources?
I remember ~9 years ago the Blizzard CEO said this: “[…] I would assume most of those people also have access to a Windows or Mac device capable of playing Blizzard games.” https://www.change.org/p/blizzard-entertainment-support-please-release-native-linux-clients/u/9982826
Which is pretty disrespectful, but just one part of these arguments.
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Thats was a. From years before proton, b. from a dev renowned for being linux hostile, c. ignores the fact that linux users are far more likely to be technical and likely to submit a proper bug report rather than shrugging and moving on.
I’m not sure who you’re referring to but I got this off a developer forum about 3 years ago. I don’t know which dev came from just a number of developers chimed in to say they agree
Quite a bit has changed with regards to Linux gaming, even within the past 3 years.
I presumed you were refering to this which was quite high profile at the time.
I don’t want to discount what you saw, but I don’t think Linux gamers are even asking for official support. If they don’t want bug reports from Linux gamers because the reports would be “tainted” by an unsupported operating system, then they could have a banner on the submission page. I would argue, however, that they would be missing out on a lot of free bug testing where all of these companies are far too cheap to pay for proper bug testing these days.
At this point, Linux gamers would just appreciate the bare minimum being put forth with developers not breaking the games for them.
rockstar is such a small indie company, how could they even afford to fix bugs…
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I’m not confused what they said. That’s what they said, now what they said may be wrong, but I’m not confused about what they said.
However what I have been told is that actually that’s not necessarily the case. Because the reporting issues that only affect Linux operating systems so most of the user base are not actually benefiting from the reports.
Wisdom is that they would submit better quality tickets and they do but since most of them are disproportionately Linux limited is not really as much of an advantage as you would think.
Wrong on every point, especially the personal opinion.
Go look at the other user which quoted accurately without misrepresentation.
I’m not aware that I provided a personal opinion for me to be wrong about
Because Linux users file bug reports.
The devs from ΔV: Rings of Saturn give a completely different story. Yeah, most bug reports come from Linux - but platform specific ones a vanishingly rare: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_having_just_58_sales_over_38_of_bug/
Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!
Not to mention the quality of the reports from the Linux users was vastly more details and useful to them.
Cool game, btw, if anyone hasn’t heard of it.
I had been wondering why everybody was so angry at them for implementing anti-cheat software. I didn’t realize that they were locking out Linux users. That’s a bunch of bullshit.
Especially a big problem for people who play on Steam Deck. Which most game companies don’t consider it a Console, which is stupid.
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Imagine being such a butthurt little pussy that you DDoS a video game because you’re not allowed to cheat it or play it.
Outside of the political spectrum, I cannot imagine a more pathetic type of person.
Just to explain the completely warranted deluge of downvotes to you: Using Linux doesn’t mean that you’re cheating and the anti-cheat solution they’re using has Linux support, they simply opted to not enable it. I’m not in the loop when it comes to GTAV but usually cheating software isn’t even available for Linux.
The onus isn’t on them to cater to everyone. If it can’t be used using Linux, deal with it like a grown up and find something else to do.
But you’re not going to justify DDoS attacking a company because you don’t like that you’re excluded from their product.
These people need to grow the fuck up. The real world doesn’t give a shit about what they think they’re owed- which is nothing by the way.
This shit just makes me hate the arrogance of Linux users that much more.
Oh, and that you all think that downvotes are relevant to a discussion shows your immaturity on the topic. My opinion isn’t popular because it’s nuanced. And everyone within and outside of lemmy know damn well that this platform hates anything that doesn’t paint in the colors of black or white. So… it’s expected to be downvoted. If I posted this anywhere else- it’s be a mature discussion.
The onus isn’t on them to cater to everyone.
Gazillions of people have been playing on Linux, in particular on the Steam Deck, for ages. Those are paying customers. They pulled the plug on that without warning and without need, technical or otherwise, people are pissed. Depending on jurisdiction, Rockstar might be in for at least refunds.
I don’t condone ddos’ing either and what I also don’t condone is you saying “oh the only reason people are pissed is because they can’t cheat”. Now that is, if I’m charitable, ignorant, and allthewhile you have the gall to accuse others of arrogance. Nuanced my ass to be that you’d first have to acknowledge basic contextual facts about the matter. Getting downvoted is also not “the ignorant sheeple not understanding your brilliance”. Get your head out of your arse and look in the mirror.
I don’t give a fuck what their reason is. Whether it’s cheating or the plug was pulled on them.
There’s no reason to act like fucking spoiled little entitled children. No one involved in this childish shit is a victim.
Stop excusing this bullshit.
Is there, in your mind, any situation in which any consumer can ever legitimately complain about the practices of any business, or is it all whining?
See? There is a huge failure of comprehension here as you have mistaken a DDoS attack with a “legitimate complaint.”
They are NOT the same thing. And I won’t entertain a discussion where I have to suspend belief to assume they are.
The onus isn’t on them to cater to everyone. If it can’t be used using Linux, deal with it like a grown up and find something else to do.
You went far beyond “ddos’ers are silly boogers”, which I agreed with, but delegitimised critique of Rockstar in general: You told Linux gamers to stop playing: “Find something else to do”. Don’t motte and bailey now.
Your words, they get interpreted. In specific contexts. Failing to acknowledge that those contexts can differ from whatever the context is in the privacy of your own mind is a failure of both theory of mind and communication on your part and, going out on half a limb here, probably the reason why everyone around you seems so hostile. Read the room. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you are right because what you say is met with hostility, rather, work towards having what you think is right accepted with gratitude. For starters, don’t go on tirades – which starting an argument with “butthurt little pussy” definitely is no matter how correct your assessment of the situation may or may not be. Develop tact.
Articles a joke since it doesn’t mention that the people pissed off are the linux players. Not the cheaters but the linux users.
There’s a patch for proton for Battleye. My understanding is that it’s really easy for developers to support Linux with it, but I think they’re using their own engine, so things may be harder. Regardless, that’s bullshit if they added something without considering Linux users.
time for refunds.
Steam has refunded games that added anti-cheat that broke linux playability in the past iirc
They have also denied refunds if a game is running in the background and you have 100 hours while editing a spreadsheet, so tread lightly
Didnt hear about that one, but I do recall some stories of people playing hundreds of hours, dev making a major catastrophic change, and steam still giving the refund.
I’ve been denied a refund for a game I played for 2 minutes and realized was trash. When I quit it went back to a popped-under splash screen instead of quitting to desktop. I turned off the monitor for the night and the next day when I requested the refund, Steam said I played it for too long and denied my refund.
It was a game under $10 so I didn’t lose much but it was still bullshit.
Not related to the refund at all, but: Why would you turn off the monitor and not the computer? Even when idling it eats way more power than a monitor in standby.
I’d always leave my computer on but turn off the monitor. Usually it would go to sleep or hibernate, but certain programs would keep it awake. Keep in mind this was during the Win 7 era so it wasn’t foolproof and it would just stay on.
After having talked to some on the GTA V SCUD, so many think we are in support of the cheaters and are framing our frustration around us just wanting the cheaters back.
That’s why one never pisses off a Linux user.
So what your saying is the cheaters are pissed off
That is what they are suggesting but its the linux users who are pissed.
Unpopular opinion…
Man, I wrote a whole WoT about this. Deleted it. Fuck the cheaters. I don’t know why it’s so hard to stop them. The kind of people that will DDoS a company for blocking them are the same ones that will cheat. No gold star for any honest players that DDoS, either. If there’s a server problem or a bad patch that prevents me from playing my first thought isn’t to DDoS the company and fuck up everyone else’s game in a fit of petty revenge too. That said, it’s sad that honest players are the only ones harmed after the cheat coders found their workaround so quickly.
That’s not what this is about, the article is simply garbage. They are enforcing a kernel level anti-cheating system that is incompatible with Linux (where no third party gets kernel access, and rightly so). This locks out all Linux players, including Steam Deck.
At one point I had been playing GTA V online pretty consistently when I had a cheater start targeting me. It was pretty frustrating and after 30 minutes of that I gave up and closed down for the day. I shifted my attention to other games after that. I definitely get that they want to stop cheaters - cheaters ruin the fun for others. It’s a shame that the new anti cheat has made it so that Steam Deck players are stuck unable to play online.
The very annoying this is that BattleEye supports Linux, rockstar has just apparently decided not to ask for that from BattleEye
Not that I particularly want to play it, but the Fortnite requirement has stopped me from installing Mint across some computers for kids for this reason as well.
I don’t play these games or really any game that needs anti cheat. What’s the controversy? I assume the anti cheat is awful?
What’s happened is GTA Online suddenly switched to using BattlEye for it’s anti-cheating. And this broke Steam Deck compatibility suddenly. Now, this is bad enough but reports state that BattlEye will work with the Steam Deck, and all Rockstar needs to do is just send a message to BattlEye and it’ll just work. But Rockstar doesn’t seem to be interested in sending that email.
While I haven’t looked into this particular anti-cheat; they frequently prevent Linux users from playing altogether, ban users due to false positives, and sometimes even gain/require access to data entirely unrelated to gaming, such as your personal documents or even browser data (cookies, history, passwords/tokens, etc) as many of them contain Rootkits
On top of that they dont really seem to actually stop cheating. Im sure they reduce it but games with anti cheat still deal with a ton of cheaters
Seriously, personal documents? What in the ever loving fuck. Jeez, no I don’t want to play your game so bad I need to prove it with a passport.
To be fair, they aren’t specifically targeting this data.
Rootkits give the software unrestricted access to all the data on the computer. You then trust that they don’t use that access for anything nefarious… Aswell as trusting there’s no bugs/vulnerabilities in that software that give a third party access to that data.
Ah, my misunderstanding - kernel level anti-cheat is also a bit bizarre tbh, like people really really don’t understand the level of control they’re handing over to random games companies.
