- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
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Come join the community I made recently specifically for battlefield like games made by indie developers such as the superb ww2 battlefield-like Easy Red 2 !
Fuck EA
The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing. Don’t accept their game of “just the tip”
Root kernel access isn’t enough for them? Jesus fuck are they greedy.
It’s ego and they actually think they can win against cheat makers. But like it or not, there will always be cheats, for the same reason there will always be cracked copies of their games.
If it runs, it can be cracked. -An old 0day saying
PS - Just let us have our own dedicated servers again. Then we can just banhammer a bitch, instead of relying on a stupid lobby vote system and a report button.
If you could have your own server, you could keep playing the game after they decide it’s time for you to pay $90 for the next one.
BF4 still very playable!
…because of private servers.
just picked it up for $4 and (after the annoying Punkbuster install) it holds up really well, especially for being 12yo. definitely scratches the Battlefield itch so I don’t feel so tempted to buy BF6
Nice. There are some servers with only the premium maps but if they are cheap it’s worth it, including Firestorm, which they are bringing back for BF6. Peak Battlefield.
CoD WWII is the only one I want to play. :-(
You mean CoD (2003) and United Offensive right? Right?
We still play UO every night. Historians have their Base Assault server going during the afternoons and there is usually a CTF and S&D server populated every night (which one it is varies)
We’d love to have some old players back!
Man… Call of Duty: United Offense was the game my squadron played all the time while we were deployed to Iraq in 2007. Someone had a cracked copy they brought with them and we installed it on all our computers in the squadron (we were an IT squadron).
Once a day, around lunchtime, we’d shut down the whole squadron for about 30 minutes. We’d hang signs on our doors that said we were closed for “simulated warfare training.” Then we’d jump into a massive free-for-all match and shoot everything that moved until there was one person left standing. Someone had dozens of custom maps people had made online, so we always had some new and unique map to play with.
I don’t miss Iraq, but I do miss those days. CoD was my favorite FPS series back in the day. Now it’s complete garbage.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the 2009 original, not the 2022 reboot) was the first time I felt like the franchise wasn’t trying anymore. I mostly played the campaign mode and that was the first campaign that was basically just a carbon copy of the previous game. Same exact plot, same exact ending, just a new villain who took over for the villain in the previous Modern Warfare game.
Black Ops was kind of weird, but not that bad. However, I completely lost interest when trying to play Black Ops 2 and haven’t bought a new game since. I hear they’re up to Black Ops 6 now?
My friends and I started on PS3 with CoD ModernWarfare. Playing 4 player splitscreen was fun! Then later when internet around here got better, we played MW2 and Black Ops. A few played BlackOps 2 and I think only one stayed for MW3. I think I even got the Wii version of black ops lol
Cod 2 is where it’s at. The smoke blew my mind back in the day
Not going to happen because they want shitty skill based matchmaking and lobbies filled with bots!
This
cracked copies of their games
There actually isn’t for any of their newer games due to the always online requirement.
Yet* :P
I’m still waiting lol. MW 2019 still hasn’t been cracked, it’s already been 6 years so I’m not expecting it to ever happen.
Wow, I stand corrected. Took them 6 years but it finally happened.
Yeah, Denuvo is just a pain to crack. It’s not UNcrackable, just a giant pain. Not to mention the methed out psycho that was cracking them has probably gone to rehab or something.
The executables are basically running in an encrypted VM and require multiple keys from Denuvo’s servers to decrypt and run (hence why they want SecureBoot on now). With breaking the VM being the biggest hurdle as they’re each running their own pseudo-machine-code that the VM translates during gameplay. Meaning you can’t just make a universal unpacker/decrypter/patcher type tool that spits raw x86 executables out for you. Nope, it all has to be done “by hand” now. At least from the translation step and on.
This isn’t about greed, it’s about the game being riddled with hackers to the point people are leaving.
Yet no other game requires secure boot and plenty of them don’t require kernel level access either. Many of those games have no such cheating problem.
It’s a cop-out because they aren’t good at their jobs and instead want to gobble up more and more access to your computer instead.
Every Riot game requires Secure Boot for Vanguard to work. So does Tarkov and a lot of other games. It’s not unique to those two.
And what the fuck would they want with your computer anyways? Are you afraid they’re gonna steal the porn you stored on it? Secure Boot is literally a few checks on boot and the anti-cheat simply verifies these checks. There’s nothing nefarious here, this is a lot less invasive than Riot Vanguard.
They are using this to leverage their way into control over your system. They are trying to become the iOS of PC’s, where you can’t install or run anything Microsoft didn’t collect protection money on.
You sound like you follow QAnon…
EA Gets hacked and all the extra info they have been storing on me goes right to the hackers. It’s also a huge back door they could sell to shady 3 letter agencies.
Valid concerns, but Secure Boot does not influence that outcome. The root access is the most egregious thing here, not Secure Boot.
They could easily identify the worst hackers just based on the game play data without needing to actually confirm that they have cheats installed.
Snapping between spread out people to get a half dozen head shots in a quarter second? Hacking.
Locking on to someone behind a wall? Hacking.
Hacks that nullify recoil? They should be able to tell by unrealistically precise counter movements.
Sure, games can occasionally have network issues that result in these kinds of things but if someone does it regularly then it isn’t a networking thing.
Secure Boot isn’t going to do shit about console players running what’s functionally aim assist with cronus zens or xims. They could catch the hardware hackers in the same way you mentioned, but they just don’t do shit.
The problem with this detection method is that you occasionally run into honest players catching bans for being legitimately too good at the game. While rare, there are some players who are accurate enough with their tracking that even professional players would assume they’re cheating, and end up getting banned because the developers decided nobody should ever be that good at the game.
This ends up putting a skill ceiling on a game, which is uhhealthy for a competitive game.
Plenty of people have been banned for false positives for the current anticheat methods due to corrupted files and whatnot, so I’d rather that a few ‘too good for reality’ players were banned instead.
Moderators that actually go trough reports helps quite a lot you know.
I mean I haven’t played one of their games in a few generations now, but like, this defo isn’t helping the chances
Their AC doesn’t work on Linux, so my odds of plying it went to 0 when I found that out. Fuck them anyway. They haven’t made a game worth playing in probably decades. There are better cheaper games not ran by greedy corpos.
Yeah the Beta wouldnt even open on Linux. Easy uninstall, thanks goodbye.
Game is just watered down af anyway to appeal to the call of duty crowd as much as possible. BF lost its identity, so you aren’t missing anything.
So, not required on Linux then I guess.
No need to require something for an OS they don’t plan to support at all anyways, I suppose. :(
Or they’ll just copy Respawn
I don’t know what that is but you lost me at “Windows”.
Fuck cheaters. I support this. I have no issues with the potential vulnerability concerns to reduce cheating. I can’t even remember the last time kernel level anti-cheats resulted in data exploitation.
How do you like your boot seasoned?
As a Bf3 and Bf4 player, I can count the number of cheaters I encountered on one hand. I won’t buy Bf6 because they implement this shit instead of giving us self hostable community servers.
Well shit, I was looking forward to bf6
I mean, this is fine. Secure Boot is on everything motherboard from the last 12 years, there are very few reasons not to have it enabled and those reasons are usually edge case scenarios.
Would absolutely take this over a kernel level driver.
Motherboard TPM has been pwnd so many times. I don’t want to enable attack surface and I have other means of verifying my boot
I don’t see how secure boot is relevant to a video game.
Secure boot requires OS kernel to be digitally signed so that’s just another way to prevent tampering. It’s not like those or any other games will be doing anything other than checking if it’s on because there’s not that much else it can be used for. Secure boot is annoying as hell if you use anything other than Windows though.
You can load your own keys and sign whatever you want. It’s not going to prevent anyone but the most unsophisticated of cheaters. What it does is prevent malicious code from being injected early in the boot, it doesn’t prevent users from loading whatever code they want early in boot.
Can you really sign your own modified Windows kernel or drivers? I don’t think that’s how cryptography works.
I’m not sure about Windows specifically, I just know you can load your own keys onto the mobo. In general, a cryptographic signature is just metadata tacked onto a file, so presumably yes, you could sign the kernel yourself and load your key so Secure Boot works.
The way Linux distros generally work (e.g. Debian) is to use a shim binary and chain load into their own kernel binary. An exerpt:
Starting with Debian version 10 (“Buster”), Debian supports UEFI Secure Boot by employing a small UEFI loader called shim which is signed by Microsoft and embeds Debian’s signing keys. This allows Debian to sign its own binaries without requiring further signatures from Microsoft.
So even if signing the Windows kernel doesn’t work (I don’t see why it wouldn’t), you could use a loader shim like Debian does to not require loading your own keys.
To be fair, I haven’t read the details of Secure Boot specifically to know how it’s done, I’m just going based on my understanding of PGP (about how signing works), early kernel boot, and high level details about Secure Boot. I’m sure someone sophisticated enough to design kernel-level game cheats could figure out how to make Secure Boot happy without a ton of effort from users.
Secure Boot isn’t designed to prevent users from doing things, it merely prevents malicious code from being loaded at boot (i.e. code that doesn’t have access to the keys loaded onto the Secure Boot module).
I’m not sure about Windows specifically
That’s quite an important omission because we’re talking about Windows. Windows won’t run kernel or driver that’s not using expected certificates, what would be the point otherwise?
Again, I don’t know the specifics about Windows, so I can’t say exactly what a cheater could or could not do. I do know that kernel chaining does work w/ Windows, otherwise the GRUB bootloader would be DOA.
Whatever Windows does is a completely separate thing from Secure Boot, since Secure Boot only impacts early boot (i.e. the handoff from UEFI to the kernel). So getting into what Windows does and does not allow isn’t particularly relevant to the discussion about Secure Boot.
You mean this certificate? The one which will expire next year and leave many old machines with Secure Boot enabled, unbootable?
Unbootable w/o changes, yes, assuming hardware vendors actually respect the expiration date.
But that’s completely separate from my point. Regardless of the solution they pick for that particular problem, users can still add their own keys to Secure Boot and do whatever they want.
You can, but it probably needs a key related to Microsoft certificates
