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.
They’re kinda proving rockstar’s point, I am fairly sure the venn diagram of “protesters” (ddosers) and cheaters is more or less a circle
Without hard data it’s difficult to tell to what extent this is accurate, but there seems to be a substantial portion of Linux gamers (including Steam Deck users) who are pissed off that due to the anti-cheat they can’t play the game on their platform of choice anymore. Some of them may have joined the DDoS campaign, so there is a genuine venn diagram.
I think people misunderstood my comment, I meant I think the ddosers and the cheaters are more or less the same group. Don’t imagine the majority of people in the Linux community would think that’s a good way to get rockstar to listen
I don’t play multiplayer games, so I can’t tell what kind of people the cheaters are. But speaking for myself, I did change my ratings from 5 stars to 1 and was very vocal whenever an upgrade to a game I purchased broke that game on my system, and there wasn’t a way to roll back. Given that those were single player games, DDoS wouldn’t hurt them, so I just kept spamming their support e-mails.
The actual cheaters completely bypassed the new anti-cheat in about 6 hours. They had to update their cheats a bit, but are otherwise essentially unaffected. Linux users, Steam Deck users, and people who don’t want to give a single game full hardware access, are all affected. None of those can play GTA:Online anymore, unless they mod the game to bypass the anti-cheat, which can be seen as cheating in itself, and could result in a ban.
The ddos attacks are likely being orchestrated by a small group of people or even an individual, it probably does not represent the vast majority of affected users.
If you were to treat cheaters as you may treat pirates, a service problem, then the overlap of Linux users and cheaters is a circle of unsatisfied users.
Cheating is absolutely not the same issue as piracy though, one is people wanting an unearned power trip over others and one is the service issue piracy is
You’re not gonna convince cheaters to stop cheating by offering them a better experience
As a player I agree but as a software user and maker I don’t. Users should be in control of their own computing, therefore client-side anti-cheat is the unjust power over the user (edit, because it is proprietary).
Has anyone tried? As far as I know the most that has been done is to shadowban cheaters to their own servers for matchmaking. No one has tried having built-in multiplayer cheats to compete with 3rd party cheats.
I don’t think clientside anticheat is a good solution by any means.
Built in multiplayer cheats? Isn’t that just pay to win?
I didn’t mean to imply charging additionally for the cheats. Is the state of the games industry so bad that was a reasonable assumption :(
I was thinking of dedicated servers aimed at attracting cheaters, and a server that encourages players to fight handicapped players (various levels of cheat users).
What’s the overlap of cheaters and people who perform DDoS attacks?
That’s what I mean, I imagine most of the people ddosing are cheaters, hence the quotations around protesters