You are conflating ideas. I don’t think it will be a productive discussion to go down the road of anticheat systems and DRM. We can all have opinions that are different.
What is productive is calling out hostile behavior and comments that do nothing but hurt the ecosystem. I see these type of strong negative opinions in a lot of areas of the Linux community. “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”
The best possible, most correct, most defensible, most world-improving advice to give for dealing with a user-hostile product or service, is to have the strength of will to reject it and live without it, and live the example to show that it's possible and you won't die.
Or at the very least, it is AT LEAST as defensible a stance as "The more pragmatic/adult approach is to give the bully whatever they want than to go without their product or service".
That philosophy is not remotely automatically more correct or more adult or nuanced or any of the self-serving words anyone typically uses to try to grant their idea more legitimacy than it deserves.
Calling the principled stance "hostile" is itself hostile.
You can phrase it in a way that sounds emotional and shortsighted and jeuvenile, and certainly there are many juveniles who are guilty of that.
Never the less, rejecting a bad deal is still fundamentally a reaction not an action, a defense not an offense.
The publisher promulgating a user-hostile deal is inarguably the offender, the initial hostile actor.
You can decide that the bad deal is tolerable for yourself, but that is entirely your weakness and does not make that policy smarter or more correct than that of those that decline.
I am not here debating DRM or anticheat. Simple pointing out that telling someone the game they play is garbage because it uses anticheat does nothing but hurts the Linux ecosystem.
You can come up with another essay but I don’t think it disproves what I am saying. Telling someone the game they play is garbage is not increasing the Linux user base. I am sure there will be a retort here, “we don’t want those kind of users or related software”.
Who said "we don't want those kind of users"? The game publishers are saying that!
The people you're trying to criticize are themselves only rejecting the software and the publishers that use it, and for a completely explicable and defensible reason, not because it's the wrong tribal colors or religion.
You are consistently neglecting to acknowledge the basic order of operations and ignoring the initial act and offense in order to focus on a reaction that you don't like and to excuse the initial act that you personally don't have a problem with.
I am saying that you only have the right to say that the deal proposed by drm and anticheat systems is acceptable to you, not to go one mm further to say that anyone else is ogbligated to feel the same, and is in any way hostile or harming the ecosystem or anything like that if they don't.
Sorry I am not going down this low brow path. We can agree to disagree. I just don’t think it helps an ecosystem to tell people the software they want to run is garbage.
I do. I think it helps the ecosystem more than any other reaction. I'm not sure we can agree to disagree. I don't think you are allowing it, and certainly I am not.
Actually I think "agree to disagree" was exactly right.
It doesn't mean we accept each others opinion as different yet valid, we still call each other wrong, but the point is it ends there with recognizing and accepting an impasse rather than progressing to pistolas at dawn, right?
Except wait, my whole problem was never that someone was ok with the deal (pay for a product or service that doesn't serve you), it was only with trying to say that everyone else also has to be ok with it.
Except wait again, that might have been your original point too. Not to put words in your mouth but would it be fair to say that you originally had no problem with someone declining to use some software, but only with telling someone else they should do the same?
> What is productive is calling out hostile behavior
Okay; anti-cheat is user-hostile.
> “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”
Okay, the thing I want is to use a game that I paid for, play it on the machine I own, and run it without giving it any special privileges (certainly not modifying my kernel). I trust that you will support that and not be negative about the way I want to use it?
What are you even arguing? I am not here debating if drm/anticheat is good or bad.
I am saying it’s hostile to tell someone who wants to run software but cannot because of a limitation in the OS that it does not matter because it’s garbage anyway.
The players of the game are willing to put up with DRM and anticheat in order to get the game. By taking a hardline stance against these, the Linux community is being user-hostile.
They are not, but both are symptoms of a consumer-disrespecting mindset.
- DRM does not serve the consumer, but the producer.
- Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. And if someone cannot design a game, their anti-cheat is often a disservice to the consumer.
I don't like either DRM or anti-cheat solutions, not because I am not willing to pay the producers, but because I have been burned too many times by dysfunctional solutions.
> Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary.
That silly "speed of light" thing? Just design better.
And some cheats happen on a different device. There is no way anti-cheat software can defeat those (even eye trackers are not perfect).
The design question is about software that abuses the game state, which is sent to the client, but not displayed to the player (e.g. wall-hacks), and software that sends impossible input (e.g. speed hacks). Anything that manipulates mouse input is very hard to counter.
In the end, all the technical solutions have limits and you need other means to solve the issue (e.g. play with friends/live events). However, anti-cheat software tries to counter many cases that can be solved by better implementations (e.g. servers that send very limited information to the client).
> However, anti-cheat software tries to counter many cases that can be solved by better implementations (e.g. servers that send very limited information to the client).
And now you can't provide client-side prediction between packets, so you get movement stutter all over the place instead of occasional updates and you get somebody popping into existence because they were behind a wall occlusion on your last packet and you've now strafed into line-of-sight. And they got theirs before you did, so you're dead.
Winning, winning result.
Consider perhaps that the people making this stuff aren't stupid and would try such obvious things if they were practical.
> However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary.
Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days, but anti-cheat technology definitely raises the bar. It's only "unnecessary" if you're willing to accept a large number of cheaters.
Some anti-cheat stuff definitely goes to far but to dismiss the idea entirely is just naïve.
Back in the day we had admins and communities of people. You'd get to know people more and establish trust. You could have registered brackets and independent tournaments with manual administration and banning for cheaters.
It worked pretty good, but all of that was taken away.
> It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days
On that part, we can agree, and if you think I want to 'dismiss the idea' you completely misunderstood the point. My point is, that the cases anti-cheat software tries to solve, are cases that a well-designed game has solved in the beginning (e.g. sending limited game state to clients, discarding impossible input, etc.).
On the other side of the coin, I have seen players who cheated even with anti-cheat in place (like you said), for some games I was unable to play games via proton because the anti-cheat didn't work and I was unable to play some games because the developers messed up their anti-cheat implementation. So there are drawbacks to a feature that has limited use and for which many cases can be solved by other means.
In the end, there are many cheat cases that anti-cheat software can't solve (e.g. using a secondary device) and which have to be solved by other means (e.g. spectator delays, live events, private servers).
> Nonsense. It's completely impossible to stop cheaters these days
on the user side, it's perfectly possible if you only play online with your friends.
The whole idea that we should be able to play with random people if we all accept to have a kernel rootkit needs to die. Ultimately that's exactly what the NSA and other agencies want you to support.
Sure but most people prefer not to have to spend their lives finding enough friends that some are always available when they have 5 minutes free to play one game of Rocket League.
I suppose you could argue that games could offer an "anti-cheat free" version that can only be used in private matches. But I think you can imagine how many downloads that would get.
