Easy Anti-Cheat is actually still supported for Linux, a statement from Epic Games

And we, of course, believe Epic Games and Sweeney for they never lied before (*sarcasm*).

I'm starting to feel like we will have to actually start paying from our pockets to get proper support in our platform for even third party tools.

All this situation recalls me of the recent events of Vivox, with the difference that for this case we have the comments from two bullies of the industry. Propitious days...

The mistake here (and hopefully lesson learned) was believing Garry in the first place... Epic Games are not saints, of course not (their scummy practices are hurting Linux gaming already), but Garry... this guy behaves like Linux is a nightmare, haunting his dreams, while he maybe didn't realize Linux is powering all his smart devices and the whole god damn internet. What an interesting and sad person.

Oh, for fuck sake, what do you people want? A written statement signed in Tim Sweeney's blood? They're not stopping anything and just being honest about prioritizing Windows over Linux because duh. Being critical of Epic is one thing, but being ridiculous tin foil wearer is just absurd.

Good for you for owning up the mistake Liam. Also thank you for the new info on the matter.

Yeah, I'm actually surprised Liam got even this much from them. The fact they bothered to address it at all (rather than one big shoulder shrug and a "who cares?") I find the most encouraging aspect of all...

" day-to-day prioritization decisions between anti-cheat issues across all of the platforms we support."

How is this different from a pause? As far as I can tell they nowhere in their statement explicitly deny a pause. Like all PR statements, theirs is ambiguously worded.

Oh, for fuck sake, what do you people want? A written statement signed in Tim Sweeney's blood? They're not stopping anything and just being honest about prioritizing Windows over Linux because duh. Being critical of Epic is one thing, but being ridiculous tin foil wearer is just absurd.

I guess it's because of the tremendous amount of bad blood caused by Epic Games in the community lately. The reaction to this is...quite human, I guess? It's hard to trust somebody with a track record of not giving a flying fish about you and openly saying so. Trust has be earned, and their posting is a first step towards reconciliation after breaking more porcelain than the proverbial bull in the china shop, nothing more, nothing less.

I don't see any gum jumping. A major developer cast aspersions on Linux support for a crucial piece of middleware affecting many games. I want that news reported.

If Liam sat on news like this, waiting for official communications, half the controversial stories would break elsewhere, without any community damage control, such as dredgepits like Reddit.

Please keep doing what you're doing, Liam. It's much appreciated.

Some people will only ever want me to cover something when it's 100% confirmed and not have any kind of speculation whatsoever, that's just not how the internet works though. As I tried to explain to others before, part of my reasoning in doing a lot of things early is so I can get ahead of all the utter clickbait out there. Some people don't accept that and as usual a couple people across Reddit are saying all sorts of horrible things - but fuck them.

The problem is, what if they don't reply in a few days, a week, 2 weeks? Everyone else covers it, we're left waiting. Better to get ahead of a problem, while still contacting people to ensure you get confirmation while making sure people know things are not confirmed.

I don't see any gum jumping. A major developer cast aspersions on Linux support for a crucial piece of middleware affecting many games. I want that news reported.

If Liam sat on news like this, waiting for official communications, half the controversial stories would break elsewhere, without any community damage control, such as dredgepits like Reddit.

Please keep doing what you're doing, Liam. It's much appreciated.

Some people will only ever want me to cover something when it's 100% confirmed and not have any kind of speculation whatsoever, that's just not how the internet works though. As I tried to explain to others before, part of my reasoning in doing a lot of things early is so I can get ahead of all the utter clickbait out there. Some people don't accept that and as usual a couple people across Reddit are saying all sorts of horrible things - but fuck them.

The problem is, what if they don't reply in a few days, a week, 2 weeks? Everyone else covers it, we're left waiting. Better to get ahead of a problem, while still contacting people to ensure you get confirmation while making sure people know things are not confirmed.

Don't worry about them Liam. Speculation is a right of men in the free world. Plus using you mind to connect the dots, formulate hypothesis, look for the hidden truth are all legit and valuable skills in journalists. What is cancer is deny, hide or distort the factual truth, but that's not what happened here.

All in all speculation even when it turns out wrong it prompts the involved actors to release official statements to the press to avoid misunderstandings and so is functional to get actual clarity. Which is what journalism is about.

OK, two things, good and bad... well, start with the bad I guess.

Earlier comments by a partner reflect ordinary day-to-day prioritization decisions

Wait, whose decisions? Facepunch's or EAC's? Sounds like EAC's? It doesn't sound like they're denying this but just qualifying it..

...

I don't know, there's a lot of PR talk in this.

Nothing really PR about it (other than the careful wording). The day-to-day prioritization of tasks/issues is very much a normal thing in development. All Dev decisions are weigh against impact, business need, risk, and so many other factors and prioritized based on that.

Nothing really PR about it (other than the careful wording). The day-to-day prioritization of tasks/issues is very much a normal thing in development. All Dev decisions are weigh against impact, business need, risk, and so many other factors and prioritized based on that.

They essentially confirmed that they had paused support by neither saying nor denying it but vaguely qualifying Garry's claim and saying there are no long-term plan changes, which was never the subject. If that's not PR talk...

They could have been transparent and said something like "Yes, Linux support is currently on hold while our teams have their hands full with X and Y, but once that's cleared things will be back to normal."

Nothing really PR about it (other than the careful wording). The day-to-day prioritization of tasks/issues is very much a normal thing in development. All Dev decisions are weigh against impact, business need, risk, and so many other factors and prioritized based on that.

They essentially confirmed that they had paused support by neither saying nor denying it but vaguely qualifying Garry's claim and saying there are no long-term plan changes, which was never the subject. If that's not PR talk...

They could have been transparent and said something like "Yes, Linux support is currently on hold while our teams have their hands full with X and Y, but once that's cleared things will be back to normal."

Qualifying Garry's claim, maybe, but that "short term pause" may be for a single 2-week sprint (assuming that use that kind of dev process). We do that in development all the time.... we have to do that or very little would ever get done as we'd always get peppered with ad-hoc work.

"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".

It makes...no sense to me.

@liamdawe The mere fact that you apologize for "jumping the gun" is a proof to me that you want to build a transparent and honest community, and I praise you for that. Indeed you now have way more influence than a few years back, so now you need to be careful with that new responsibility ;)

Keep up the good work!

Sadly I'm already seeing people using it to give me grief but oh well, live and learn.

Thanks for the article and also congrats for becoming a public person ;)

Garry Newman should just go back to making music.

What we're talking about here is just gossip. Communications as they are now, we can gossip at the speed of light. I think it is fine to provide information as it is known, and the human race will just need to learn to squelch its gossiping tendencies online.

Nothing really PR about it (other than the careful wording). The day-to-day prioritization of tasks/issues is very much a normal thing in development. All Dev decisions are weigh against impact, business need, risk, and so many other factors and prioritized based on that.

They essentially confirmed that they had paused support by neither saying nor denying it but vaguely qualifying Garry's claim and saying there are no long-term plan changes, which was never the subject. If that's not PR talk...

They could have been transparent and said something like "Yes, Linux support is currently on hold while our teams have their hands full with X and Y, but once that's cleared things will be back to normal."

Qualifying Garry's claim, maybe, but that "short term pause" may be for a single 2-week sprint (assuming that use that kind of dev process). We do that in development all the time.... we have to do that or very little would ever get done as we'd always get peppered with ad-hoc work.

I'm not saying they shouldn't pause, just that there's no reason to dance around the issue and release such a non-statement. That just makes them look shady.

"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".

It makes...no sense to me.

well, no.
No Anticheat will ever be 100% bulletproof. And pausing may mean just no new features/updated cheat-definitions and no fixing of bugs - but it will still work as it does at the time.
I don't know how you can live in the illusion that ANY anticheat can prevent ALL cheats 100% ^^

"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".

It makes...no sense to me.

well, no.
No Anticheat will ever be 100% bulletproof. And pausing may mean just no new features/updated cheat-definitions and no fixing of bugs - but it will still work as it does at the time.
I don't know how you can live in the illusion that ANY anticheat can prevent ALL cheats 100% ^^

That's not what I said nor the point of my post. It's not acceptable NOT to patch your Anti-Cheat software to keep up with the cheaters. You can't "pause" developing it.

Nothing really PR about it (other than the careful wording). The day-to-day prioritization of tasks/issues is very much a normal thing in development. All Dev decisions are weigh against impact, business need, risk, and so many other factors and prioritized based on that.

They essentially confirmed that they had paused support by neither saying nor denying it but vaguely qualifying Garry's claim and saying there are no long-term plan changes, which was never the subject. If that's not PR talk...

They could have been transparent and said something like "Yes, Linux support is currently on hold while our teams have their hands full with X and Y, but once that's cleared things will be back to normal."

Or alternatively they could have said "No, Linux support is not paused. We still have someone working on it." They didn't say either of those things; what they did say isn't actually inconsistent with, well, pretty much any reading of the situation.
My best guess is they did a pause, but only a little one which has little significance--someone whose file it is was asked to do some other urgent thing for a couple of weeks, or something. But that's based on just sort of the general impression their vagueness seems to be intended to give--and often when people get that vague it's precisely because they want to give an impression at odds with reality, without actually lying. So who knows?

"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".

It makes...no sense to me.

well, no.
No Anticheat will ever be 100% bulletproof. And pausing may mean just no new features/updated cheat-definitions and no fixing of bugs - but it will still work as it does at the time.

It will work with old well known cheats but will probably fail to detect new ones during the pause. Which means that they create a big backdoor for any MMO that have multiplatform support and a big problem for the devs and community if the cheaters start abusing of any new security breach. In the end this gives the devs of Facepunch yet another excuse to end with Linux support builds.

Pausing the development of an AC won't be innocuous to our platform.


Last edited by x_wing on 7 May 2019 at 7:05 pm UTC

"Pausing" to work on such a piece of software is a funny concept overall. How do you "pause" supporting Anti Cheat software? This isn't a MMO where you can stop releasing new features for half a year and nothing bad will happen other than users getting bored. Anti-Cheat software is really a binary thing: It either works as intended, or does not. There is no in-between. Clients using this software HAVE to rely on it working correctly at any time. You can't hand them an anti cheat tool that stops the game from working on the platform its supposed to run on, nor can you tell them that it will catch only 50% of the known cheats because development is "paused".

It makes...no sense to me.

well, no.
No Anticheat will ever be 100% bulletproof. And pausing may mean just no new features/updated cheat-definitions and no fixing of bugs - but it will still work as it does at the time.
I don't know how you can live in the illusion that ANY anticheat can prevent ALL cheats 100% ^^

That's not what I said nor the point of my post. It's not acceptable NOT to patch your Anti-Cheat software to keep up with the cheaters. You can't "pause" developing it.

@Kimyrielle @x_wing

You absolutely can. I highly, highly doubt that the detection methods are built directly into the app. More likely that they are similar to malware signatures the AV tools utilize to detect malware. Those aren't included in the code, the code (or app) just knows how to parse the data and match it to anything it finds on the system. In fact, I would venture to guess that, like Malware signatures, Cheat detection probably uses a shared DB/detection method and what sets each AC tool apart are:

* Ease of use with the middleware
* Pricing
* Performance
* And other product-specific benefits/enhancements.


Last edited by EagleDelta on 7 May 2019 at 7:45 pm UTC