Microsoft has officially announced its intent to move security measures out of the kernel, following the Crowdstrike disaster a few short months ago. The removal of kernel access for security solutions would likely revolutionise running Windows games on the Steam Deck and other Linux systems.
As a long time cs gamer I approve of this change but I warn ye regardless that there is no alternative or viable solution to actually stop cheaters right now.
And if you've only heard stories and don't really experience cs (vac kind of does nothing)
Ive kept track of players for months/years who have not been banned. I find it strange that they eventually do get banned several months after cheating. It took one account nearly 2 years to get banned.
I hope that a clever solution comes out, a man can dream right ?
well... you see back in my day we had cool bros in "clans" running their servers mostly paying for it themselves with some donations. admins would boot bad faith actors as needed.
then something happened to that model... and here we are now... FPS genre has no been the same IMHO
The competitive scene happened. Can't have meaningful competitive matchmaking against the same 100 players. People don't just want to frag noobs, they want to grind the ladder to be able to say "I'm GE and you're Gold, therefore I know for a fact I'm better than you".
This is a global phenomenon. Even goddamn chess has this, first thing players ask each other nowadays is "what's your chess.com ELO".
I'm not a competitive player myself but I get why people rush after ELO progression. And it's not much of a stretch to say CS, Valo, and especially chess wouldn't have seen such widespread success without competitive ELO-based matchmaking.
I would argue that Valorant or CS are terrible games for casual enjoyment anyways. The skill floor is already pretty damn high for a shooter.
In the FPS genre I've found Battlebit has faithfully replicated the feel of BF3/BF4 for those of us who just want to run towards the objective and shoot, and it had old school community servers.
Self moderation has been way more effective at controlling cheaters than automated systems. Counterstrike did some good with overwatch and phone verification but I've always enjoyed manual server moderation if it's maintained.
Csgo and 2 have a "trust" system to keep track of player behavior and put you in games with others of similar trust value. So if you get reported often or have a history of bad behavior, you're more likely to be put in games with other bad actors, and vice versa. Idk how effective it is though.
Honestly there isn't a great solution, which is kind of why I avoid competitive multiplayer games. Even kernel level anticheats can be circumvented.
The nice thing about vac is that theres pretty much no false positives. And valve will occasionally update it, catching a ton of cheaters off guard and getting them banned.