Valve warns Counter-Strike 2 players: use AMD's Anti-Lag feature, get banned
Valve warns Counter-Strike 2 players: use AMD's Anti-Lag feature, get banned
AMD users should think twice before installing driver update 23.10.1.
AMD users should think twice before installing driver update 23.10.1.
people really enjoy the boot of anti-cheat on their necks.
maybe these companies could move their cheat detection to the server where they control the code. maybe don't just send all player positions so wall-hacks become impossible. maybe use some machine learning to look at input patterns and detect when a player is sending things that don't look human.
the list of things companies could do to actually fix cheating in pvp games is long and all they want to do is pay for ridiculous anti-cheat that impacts normal users.
ridiculous.
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Yes.. honestly, imho, any game that's competitive should either embrace "cheating" and design its gameplay to be as transparent as chess (ie.. make it ok to be tool-assisted) or be designed around controlled environments that forbid using tools like that.
Anyone who doesn't want to surrender to a controlled environment (whether it's in the form of some kernel-level control or VPN / Stadia-like platform) should just look for coop games.
It's sad that FPS have evolved towards the competitive landscape... to me, the best experience in the original classic Doom was coop mode. Yet Doom Eternal, at most, only supports some wacky asymmetric team deathmatch.
I wrote a snarky response because of the final insulting comment in yours but then thought better of it, going to try to address a couple of your points legitimately even after the unnecessary personal attack.
It's a lot cheaper to make your server dumb. It costs you less in programmers with deep multiplayer programming experience, it costs you less in ongoing hosting because of reduced CPU usage, and it makes the problem less "yours" as a developer.
I'm saying that's shitty that the developers will try to save money that way rather than investing in actual effective, privacy-respecting cheat prevention.
Your argument seems to be that a quake-style predictive algorithm is the only solution possible for online games. I doubt that is the case, but even if it were, using some raycasts on the server for some basic sanity checks on what data to send to players is an example of where lots of developers just can't be bothered.
If you want to dismiss machine learning as heuristics, I'm sorta ok with that, as I think they are just glorified heuristics, but even the most basic analysis isn't done by most developers. Instead, they rely on the sales pitches of various anti-cheat software and don't implement anything beyond it, even when there might be some low hanging fruit.
I am not saying developers are lazy, there's tons of stuff to work on. I am mad that this problem gets repeatedly pushed onto the users rather than the developers, though, and I think it's reasonable for me to offer some pushback when both my CPU cycles and my privacy are being abused.
Erroneous bans, they intend to reverse them once AMD implements a fix:
AMD's latest driver has made their "Anti-Lag/+" feature available for CS2, which is implemented by detouring engine dll functions.
If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+; any tampering with CS code will result in a VAC ban.
Once AMD ships an update we can do the work of identifying affected users and reversing their ban. @AMDSo lag is officially part of counter strike?
If you inject code, they ban you. Seems pretty straight forward.
They said they'll unban when they can identify them correctly, but it's not their fault.
The Anti-Lag software from AMD seems to get flagged as some sort of cheating from the Anti Cheat software by Valve, as it tempers the Counter Strike code. In other words, its not compatible. AMD should have tested and worked together with Valve, before shipping the update. It's not to blame Valve, because the Anti Cheat software works as intended, but AMD, because they did not work with Valve before launching their software.
Anti-lag has been in the amd drivers for a long time. This seems more to be caused by Valve rushing CS2 out the door so the drivers couldn't be thoroughly tested.
I thought it was pretty well understood that if you modify game DLLs you get banned, why did they attempt to add this feature?