The latest plea for official Proton support started on Reddit, where Scout339v2 shared their screenshot of Rust running “on a server with EAC disabled to show that the game already works perfectly on Linux.” Disabling Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) is the key factor here, and part of a broader conversation where Facepunch and its Linux/Proton userbase don’t see eye-to-eye.
While it’s true Rust runs on Proton, you can’t join official servers, and most unofficial servers, with EAC disabled. Facepunch considered changing its stance in 2022 when the Steam Deck launched, but didn’t end up introducing official Proton support. COO Alistair McFarlane said at the time that Linux is “safer for cheat developers,” and that trying to support EAC on another platform could reduce the team’s ability to support Windows.
Actually, games that force kernel level spyware on users to combat cheating when the company literally controls the servers the game runs on and can afford to pay for moderators are not serious about catching cheaters.
It’s interesting how gamers are supposed to have a problem with people cheating in a video game, but not with their computer being compromised by bad actors.
Rust developer opens mouth. Inserts foot.
What a stupid excuse. It is possible to detect cheaters without even touching memory or cpu. You could do the magic on the servers, if you are really serious about anti-cheat.
And I actually liked facepunch, especially what Garry was doing.
Edit: Checked who Alistair McFarlane is. Just a producer. Has no idea about technical stuff. So why the fuck do they let them speak about technical topics if he clearly has no clue about them?!
Then I have ‘no plans’ on ever giving them money for their shitty designed game
Oh, this is about that shitty survival game‽ I thought it was talking about the rust language. I was so very confused.
Honestly, that initial confusion probably boosts this topic’s popularity on the fediverse.
Games that have no plans for Linux are not serious about gamers.
If ring-0 access is the only way you can stop cheaters, your game must be poorly programmed.
Nah, cheating is just absurdly hard to stop. Even ring 0 anti cheat doesn’t stop it entirely. At some point, I feel like the answer is similar to piracy, in that you must accept that there’s going to be some amount of it, and then find a way to mitigate the damage. Because there are solutions to both of them that both go too far.
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Doesn’t Counter-Strike still have this? It serves a different use case than a proper ranked mode, usually, though I’ll admit I’m long out of the loop on Counter-Strike.
Counter strike does have this, and even has third party matchmaking services that rely on it (FaceIt, ESEA, Renown)
I think the way that CS does it is really the best one. Prevent the simple cheats, record games and let people handle the edge cases based on reports and suspicious activity.
While I agree that this is usually enough, you end up with the issue that with volume the process becomes bogged down to the point of inefficiency. The best bet is to implement this system with a much more robust server side cheat detection, and ideally not send occult information or recieve bad information from the clients to minimize the damage that can be done with a cheat.
I didn’t know CS did this, but yeah, at a high level, that’s how I’d address it, too. It’s probably not a solution that scales super well due to the manual review required, and I know that game has a reputation of people still being annoyed by cheaters, but it might be the best we can do without being very invasive, like the ring 0 stuff.
they do also have an AI system now called VACNet which doesn’t ban players but can prioritise which cases to review first, and can match suspected players against each other instead of the general pool via a system called trust factor
You can use analytics to detect cheating effectively. Companies don’t do this because it hurts their bottom line (stopping cheaters). Companies pay lip service to cheating and play stupid games of cat and mouse.
Cheaters should not be banned, they should be forced to play against other cheaters. If you are so inhuman that you are the living embodiment of “got gud” then you get to play with cheaters.
Everyone is happy except for the cheaters and that one got gud guy. Waiting for the first brave company to implement this.
You could argue this would hurt competitive gameplay but it is obvious it is already hurt and the other answers (giving complete control of your OS) are a non-starter for me.
oh noooo, what am I gonna do if I cant play the game that typically involves me being chased by heavily armed end game players, screaming racial slurs at me for no good goddamn reason other than sociopathy?
I guess I’ll just have to console myself with the thousand other games that run perfectly fine because their devs arent self absorbed fuckwads.
If you’re willing to spend some money on cheating there’s no way to prevent people from just aimbotting based on video output and feeding it as USB mouse commands. These anti-cheat systems are just shit solutions compared to server-side culling, superhuman reflex detection and report/review systems with premium servers and bans. Just give people in-game currency for correctly agreeing with the consensus and some people will go nuts on it for less than $1 per hour of in-game items.
Anti-cheat systems basically fuck with the kernel so if a game has it there’s a case for not playing it.
Rust isn’t serious about anti cheat though…
beat me to it
I love having rootkits on my pc to play a poorly coded and Un-optimized game!
Game Developers who don’t want to support Linux are not serious about developing games but getting more dollars for each dollar spent so an imaginary Stock Exchange line can go up.
I remember previous outbursts from facepunch. This has nothing to do with anti-cheat, they have been staunchly anti linux for some time now. They have floated the idea of removing linux support for garrys mod for years.
Oh no, where will I go now to have 12 year olds tell me to kill myself while shouting racial slurs at my base.
Thank you for your insight, Nude Bullying Simulator dev. Obviously you know about serious subjects.
More games should allow your character to go fully nude. Not to bully other people, but simply because it’s fun.
