Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking backlash from a segment of the player base. Protesters, unhappy with the new system, have resorted to using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt the servers, escalating tensions between the gaming giant and its community.
Probably a few Linux/Steam Deck players pissed that Rockstar just nuked their ability to play without warning or reason as well.
Eh, I was playing it on steam deck, GTA online was just not worth it with all the cheating anyway.
What I don’t get is why they went with the most invasive kernel level stuff instead of doing even the most basic server side checks to check for users doing physically impossible stuff.
Server-side checks cost processing power and memory hence they need to spend more on servers.
Client side kernel-level anti-cheat only ever consumes resources and cause problems to the actual gamers, not directly to Rockstart’s bottom line (and if it makes the game comms slightly slower on the client side it might even reduce server resource consumption).
If Rockstar’s management theory is that gamers will endure just about any level of shit and keep on giving them money (a posture which, so far, has proven correct for just about every large game maker doing that kind of shit) then they will logically conclude that their bottom line won’t even suffer indirectly from making life harder for their existing clients whilst it will most definitelly suffer if they have more server costs due to implementing server side checks for cheating.
Man, that sounds familiar. I gave up on Escape from Tarkov for the same reason.
It’s just ridiculous the stuff you see that should be easy to catch with basic server checks (even if you were to run them after the fact). Players conjuring money and vehicles out of thin air, moving impossibly fast, vehicles/players with seemingly unlimited hit points, etc. You could easily catch that shit on the server side and ban the cheaters, but instead they go for the most invasive client side shit.
Sure, if you want to stamp out stuff like aim bots and whatever eventually you’ll need to look at the client side of things, but in a decade they didn’t seem to do anything at all.
Heh, I would say the cheaters are generally much more immature and likely to DDOS. I think there is a lot of overlap over video game cheaters and script kiddies, especially when the cheaters are called hackers
