this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Client-side anti-cheat is useless. It's not a necessary evil, it's just evil. The minute the cheater/hacker has direct access to the system, you've already lost.
Much like every form of security measure, the intention is not to completely eliminate the possibility of an attack (which is impossible in most cases). Instead, the intention is to increase the amount of effort that's required to make an attack.
What you're referring to is deterrence, and it doesn't apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn't ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.
And the efficacy being so bad is the reason why client-side anti-cheat keeps getting more and more invasive to the point of being literally, by definition, a type of malware and system rootkit. And yet it's still not enough to defeat cheaters, because the cheaters have full access to the system itself.
And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.
Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong person?
Source?
What do you mean by system in "full access to the system"? Too vague to even say anything about.
The potential guys that can write the cheat software and how quickly it can be developed is the part that matters. Much like when it's easy to use an exploit once it's already discovered. Someone still has to discover the exploit.
You made the comparison: "Much like every security system"
It's out there, my dude. It's a constant complaint in literally every competitive online game. If people are complaining about it, then it's not working well enough. This isn't an esoteric thought either. You ask anyone if cheating is a big issue in online gaming and anyone with knowledge about it will tell you it's a constant problem that's getting worse.
If you own the hardware and have admin/root access to the OS. Then it's yours and you have "full access" to everything. And I do mean everything. You can modify the OS. You can read the values of protected parts of memory. And so on.
If you don't understand what I mean by "full access to the system" in the context of anti-cheat running on your own hardware, then there's nothing I can say in a short comment to get you up to speed.
The cheat and anti-cheat battle is a constant cat and mouse game. The advantage is always with the cheaters because they outnumber the developers 100:1 at the least. Plus they have the will and determination to find ways around anti-cheats. In fact, building security against exploits is by far way harder than finding exploits.
The reality is that client-side anti-cheat is a losing battle.