This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn’t take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully… even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope…
Developer of game ‘Rust’ talks about
anticheatrootkits on LinuxThis whole anticheat thing is so stupid. Remember when Sony got sued bigtime for including rootkits on their audio CDs? Why are game developers getting away with it no problem? Society is regressing and it’s frustrating to watch.
mentioning EA games like Apex Legends removing support is laughable. Sure Alistair, ALL those EA games ALL decided around fall of 2024 to ditch support for Linux/Proton. All at the Same time. Not because EA has a deal with Microsoft/Game Pass and NOT because a few months later Microsoft announced their own Handheld with Asus. Just like Riot.
So Alistair how long until Rust is announced for Gamepass with all DLC included?
TBF, you’d have to pay me to play most of these “anti-cheat” games anyhow.
Rust is a shit game with a terrible community and rampant cheating.
I’d imagine people on Linux who want to play Rust would be more than happy to shell out $15 and go through the little effort it is to download DLC so they can play on a Premium server when the other option is to shell out $140 for a Windows 11 license and go through the effort of installing that spyware trash to their PC.
On the other hand, Alistair clearly doesn’t want your money so maybe stop trying to give it to him.
i didnt plan to anyway lol and i dont think people should bother, rust is not a game worth the extra money or even worth the time in general… and its damn well not worth a windows install, and i say that as someone who alrdy has one just in case on my system, i wouldnt even choose to boot up windows to play rust…
don’t play this shit
Glad I never gave this cunt any money.
His argument is valid, wdym?
It isn’t. Cheating is a game culture problem, not a technical problem. Just to counter example. Rust is filled with cheaters precisely because they haven’t done everything they can to fix cheating. They are culturally fixated in a single lane thinking. As a result, they’re flooded with cheaters (plenty on Windows) who exploit their inflexible strategies. This is top Flanders “we haven’t done anything and we are all out of ideas”. Linux is not the source of cheating on Rust either, but he’s arguing as if it is. He is lazy. That’s not bad on itself, but he is also disingenuous and is arguing in bad faith.
Make server side anti cheat and suddenly what OS the player is running becomes irrelevant.
Edit: another contradiction in their argument. Linux was less than 0.1% of the Rust user base. But, Linux was also the biggest source of cheating? How? It is just a disingenuous and dumb argument made to spite Linux out of hatred. It has no basis in reality.
He’s saying that cheaters who probably play on Windows, used hooks dedicated for Linux/Proton to bypass anti-cheat code.
That is not at all what is said. The guy you’re replying to is also wrong. Alistair only claimed most of Linux users were cheaters, that would be 0.005%, not that most of total cheaters were on Linux. But that means during their all time steam player count peak (which was after the Linux ban) if 260k players, a total of about 13 people were cheating on Linux.
Which contradicts his position that cheating is a massive huge front to wage an endless war on. 13 people is a ban list, not a cry for rootkits on all clients. It stands to reason that if Linux was 0.01% and even if they were all cheating, it is not a massive problem. Is it tiny or is it massive? It can’t be both at the same time.
You’re getting downvoted because the truth hurts. Most people are here are not devs on competitive games clearly. What sane developer would multiply their anticheat costs for .01% player growth?
It’s a network effect issue. More people need to game on Linux before it’s relevant enough to support for competitive multiplayer games. Same reason why Riot dropped it.
No it isn’t, I can’t even be bothered to read it.
I will be so happy when the era of client-side anticheat is over. I think it will happen eventually, especially now that Valve is releasing the new Steam Machine and has been so successful with Proton-based gaming lately.
Plus, Windows getting so much worse and the zero days and exploits of these kernel-level anticheats will put pressure on the devs to move away from them imo.
yea i think its a matter of time linux is very quickly becoming the operating system of enthusiasts not in spite of gaming but for gaming too. Some older games dont even run properly on windows
But for people with older pcs priced out of the market who are still very heavy gamers they will naturally trend toward debloated windows variants and linux, and with the speed linux has grown in even just the last year its pretty likely itll be more close in market share to macos sooner rather than later. and more of the people who leave windows go to linux vs mac based on stats available so its in some good standing right now.
i talk to many regular people about linux and many seem completely open to switch tbf these are more educated people in school though and one does programming but i think majority of people would be open to running something like a debian or ubuntu and even something more complex with the right applications to support daily usage
on the enthusiast note for example, if you want the best vr performance on your index or vive or other wired headsets your best performance will be running monado on linux using openvr translation, thats just reality, steamvr is pretty ass. And many alternative softwares for gaming like wivrn are completely free and available to everyone instead of charging for similar windows software, gamers use linux and they make sure its a relatively good experience
This is what happens when your game is exclusively a commercial product and not a creative work. This exact logic is why accessibility features are being implemented sparsly and slowly.
If all he cares about is money, let’s just not give it to him. There’s thousands of better games, more worth our time and money.
Minecraft is actually a good example.
Server owners pay very little to nothing for anticheat, and cheaters have dozens of extremely elaborate clients to choose from, all interfacing with the very open and moddable game. And still, servers that do give a fuck have basically zero rage cheating. ESP? Sure, but that can be solved as well. But beyond that, everything can and is detected. And that in a game as sandboxy and freedomy as MC. It was designed to have a lot of slack in movement and actions, yet ACs are extremely good.
Can’t you cheat in MC by just removing a pixel in a block to make it transparent?
But I only ever played it coop, so it doesn’t really matter.
Basically, yes. There are many ways. But:
An anti-xray plugin is nowadays as common for servers as lithium or essentials. It either removes all important blocks from view, inserts fake blocks (eg. ores) or just makes everything appear as only stone. The middle option can even serve as evidence of a player using xray. For preventing ESP, you can do effectively the same but with players: Hide them and their particles until they’re in view, and randomize their sounds’ position, so that a client mod does not provide any more advantage than having decent headphones.
Server-side culling essentially.
literally when i thought about it for even a few seconds i was like this is some bullshit minecraft has better cheat moderation than rust… the biggest servers all manage to do so completely adequately and theyre just community servers…
one that would be poorly maintained by both us and EAC due to the low user base.
I’m sure I’ve been playing a lot of games with EAC, because it’s actually one of the few ones that support Linux.
If I’m not mistaken (judging entirely by the RAC popup/loading), from the games I’m playing, Hell Let Loose, Fellowship, Helldivers 2, I think even The Finals used it.
Hell Let Loose wasn’t working at first, because you have to check a checkbox and enable Linux support when building, which did take them a while.
So, unless I’m misremembering/confusing it with another anticheat, this is bullshit.
Also “unless you have an in-house anti-cheat team”
You made millions out of your player base. You can afford it. You’re just lazy.
yea thats one of the funniest parts like oh so your game that makes tons of money and has rampant cheating doesnt have any team dedicated to the issue? that explains a lot!
Not sure what to believe here due to I haven’t gamed in years. What’s everyone take on this? Educate me.
Fair point. Means I’m not going to play the game, but that’s fine too.
Curious to see though if the Valve Frame/Gabe Cube changes things.
Who could have imagined that the people who create toxic PvP games are as toxic as the people who play them?
So many games that work flawlessly on Linux, so I just skip those that don’t:]
This is the way.
And let people run their own dedicated servers again.










