Even under the best circumstances where the ring0 anti-cheat developer is not malicious - which I'm absolutely not convinced is always true, mind you - they can be exploited by bad actors to take control of your system via privilege escalation. This isn't even just a hypothetical, it's already happened with basically all that are commonly in use - EAC, GameGuard, BattlEye, XignCode3 all come to mind. It's just bad opsec to run games that use them. You could be doing everything else right with securing your machines and network, and it won't matter. It's leaving the back door open.

I'm curious if an open-source anti-cheat consortium would be successful, or if this is one of the few cases where security through obfuscation might be the only way to protect anti-cheat software.

I don't think it would be possible tbh. You are correct in that security through obscurity is the only way these client-side solutions work. There are some amateurish open source anti-cheat frameworks but with the source available everything is easily disabled or bypassed. The only true solution to cheating that isn't invasive is implementing robust server side checking and active human (or hell, even AI could be used for this...) monitoring of anomalous player activity.

Valve just needs to bring back unranked 5v5 like they had towards the end of csgo. The matches were generally clean because who'd risk the time and an account just to troll in a unranked mode, was good fun.

The most effective form of anticheat is generally community run servers moderated by the people who actually want to play the game properly. But yeah the majority of people don't care about invasive anticheat if it works, valorant is testament to this.

stop ranking competitive games and there won't be any reason to cheat beyond trolling individual matches, and therefore no need for anticheat

Anti-cheat is about optics first and raising the bar in what successful cheating looks like second. Even if you can technically still cheat in Valorant, if it's something like a Direct Memory Access controller to feed a second computer that actually has the cheat software, you've raised the bar high enough that the people that do it are either trying to make a point that they can cheat or a really small minority of people that buy it from those that know how to do it.

I mean, do you really think the GTAV script kiddies could pull off anything from the second half of this video?

The solution to cheating is leagues, not surveillance tech.

The cheating will continue until it stops provoking the response of prepubescent boys voices cracking as they attempt to scream curse words and slurs over the mic.

I never understood the need for anti-cheat in games, just play offline if you don't want other people ruining your time.

G*mers would rather install proprietary software with kernel level access than just give up gaming and Windows lol

They might not even know about this type of shit

No.

I could care less but I'm not into competitive gaming, and I also went through a very long phase of online gaming where I found figuring out packet editing/memory editing to be really fun and rewarding in its own way. Never really used what I learned to do anything other than goof off, which is a much different from people just paying for some kind of cheat software, but whenever Ive encountered explicit cheaters I either shrug and move on or, in the best case scenario, kind of laugh at whatever they're doing if it's more interesting than just ruining someone's match or whatever

I found YouTube links in your post. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

Link 1:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video

Link 2:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video