Linux is ridiculously powerful & versatile as I'm sure we all know...and having that much opportunity to mess with all the net/visual/input subsystems in a way the game can't even see (since it's trapped in WINE) is a major issue cheat wise.
Not ideal but I can totally see why a company might from a practical/commercial point of view just block it outright. Especially given player numbers of WINE players vs upsetting your entire user base due to cheaters.
Windows has no lack of power. All this anti-cheating stuff is mostly a scam to stop the dumbest of the dumb cheaters and probably collect information from your computer that's useful to advertisers/investors/law enforcement agencies.
If I wanted to aimbot in an FPS, I would just analyze the HDMI output from my computer (via an FPGA) and have it directly create the necessary USB transactions to move my mouse to the target's head. I would introduce randomness, "input lag", jitter, and even some misses, so that people looking at the kill cam wouldn't immediately think "aimbot" as they are apt to do whenever they die. (You also don't want to make your mouse movements statistically different from anyone else's, or it's the server that will pick up on your cheating... or at least a well-crafted MapReduce. Do game companies have MapReduce? I hope so.)
Executed well, the developer of the game could do nothing about it; maybe I'm really good, or maybe I'm aimbotting. My computer is completely normal, down to the device descriptors on my mouse and monitor. There's no wine, no virtualization, no additional software running.
In the end, trusting the client is crazy. If you want to decide win/loss based on things computers can do easily, your game is probably bad. And aiming is something computers can do in their sleep.
I think you're missing a major component of these deals restrictions: they also want to prevent running 30 headless VMs on a single computer all botting into games to grind whatever free content is available.
This is actually a major component of bot use for f2p games. A lot of companies try really hard to prevent anything that looks like playing in virtual envs. Having these bots fill up your games and play terribly is a bad look for any game that depends on multi-player interactions to keep people involved.
I believe you can get pretty affordable Windows VMs these days, however. I'm not sure that blocking wine really accomplishes a lot. (There are also companies that sell access to consumer Windows PCs on consumer ISPs these days. If you don't play Hearthstone, you probably don't mind $10/month in free money for letting someone bot Hearthstone on your computer. And it's not like Blizzard is going to say "look, enough Comcast, shut these people down or else we lock all Comcast customers out of battle.net". It's pretty tough to run a gaming client these days, I would imagine. So so much stuff is totally out of your control. I do not envy their engineers at all!)
It actually was a major issue for Valve with TF2. It used to be you could run the game headless and have it join a server to idle farm items for you. In college my roommate and I each bought about 3 copies of the game then ran them headless in VMs to try and farm hats. Never got anything super great sadly.
Analyzing the HDMI is definetely not an up-to-date hacking technique by any means.
Besides having to rely on real-time computer vision which is more expensive/resource consuming and harder, the results wouldn't be as good as with other techniques (although this might fit your argument of having some misses and jitter/lag/etc... to act as cover).
Already available in the form of the Tobii 4C for approximately 150 USD. Only accurate for most people to about a circle with diameter of about an inch on the screen though, and it feels strange to use it for an FPS.
What does MapReduce have to do with the rest of your post? MapReduce is used in distributed computing - I thought shooters were basically always single servers to keep the lag reasonable.
(I see two flagged posts asking the same question)
Can you please not snark or post unsubstantive comments here? We're trying for a bit better than that. If you know more, it would be great to share some of what you know so we all can learn something. Alternatively, it's always ok not to post.
I can tell you're a member of the gaming community because you have basically dismissed my comment in a condescending manner without providing any actual information.
Windows is the land of the reverse engineering. Linux, despite its powerful tools still lacks far behind in this area (reverse engineering and cracking apps).
It definitely it. Read up on anti cheating stuff...the windows stuff is down-right rootkit grade....to the point where there are privacy concerns from every the privacy tone-death crowd.
Very very different ballgame from "runs in a WINE container with no visibility beyond that".
Yeah, I know that it's a rootkit-type service. But I'm saying that still doesn't prevent you from going deeper than the checks. Especially if you're using custom code and not a known cheating tool. (Those will get picked up by signatures) Unless they require a fully certified system, you can always play with device drivers which are going to be lower level than anti-cheat.
It's an arms race, but whatever they can check, you can patch. Worst case, you can still virtualise everything.
Linux is ridiculously powerful & versatile as I'm sure we all know...and having that much opportunity to mess with all the net/visual/input subsystems in a way the game can't even see (since it's trapped in WINE) is a major issue cheat wise.
Not ideal but I can totally see why a company might from a practical/commercial point of view just block it outright. Especially given player numbers of WINE players vs upsetting your entire user base due to cheaters.