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Easy Anti-Cheat is one of the most widely used systems to reduce cheating in games, it's available in some form for actual Linux builds of games but it's something of a sore spot for Wine and Proton. Some time ago, it was confirmed that Valve and the Easy Anti-Cheat team were planning to work together to get the situation sorted, Epic Games later confirmed Easy Anti-Cheat was still supported on Linux for native builds too after it appeared that was stopping. Since then, we've not really heard anything officially on it.
However, over on Reddit, user Guy1524 who happens to work for CodeWeavers (who work on Wine / Proton) gave a personal update on their own clearly unofficial (EAC themselves are not involved) progress to get Easy Anti-Cheat working.
At this point, EAC will load, correctly process an IOCTL in which the loader sends an encrypted "internal dll", which it expects the driver to inject into the game process. EAC will then correctly map this dll when the process loads, and try to initialize it. This is the point where it is failing right now (the internal dll will yield an error), but we seem to be really close to the end of the initialization function, and once blitzcrank finishes devirtualizing it, we should be able to quickly get the function to succeed. In theory, if all goes to plan, the game should then launch, and be able to load the EAC library through the hooks setup by the internal DLL / kernel.
Wine (and so Proton) has always been a game of cat and mouse for Windows games on Linux, a constant game of catch-up as developers do new and different things and break compatibility. Anti-cheat tools add another layer of complexity that can cause more problems. The issue here, is that even if they manage to get it hooked up and working, EAC could end up doing something to block it if they don't like how it's operating. This is actually something that Epic Games Founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, mentioned on Twitter when asked about it:
We'd be fully supportive of these efforts if confident they wouldn't lead to the worst-case scenario, which is a significant increase in cheating that we have no ability to detect.
If they manage to get Easy Anti-Cheat properly working with Wine and Proton, it would open up yet another big world of gaming on Linux. I think we can all agree that would be a great thing until the day our market share rises enough that more game developers support Linux directly.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
For the dual booters it will just be Denuvo (or what ever other anti cheat is currently broken) if EAC is working.
And given the current trend of windows kernel root kits, maybe it is better to avoid these games or run them on a seperate machine only used for gaming.
Statistically speaking, if 10% of Linux users were cheating, then that is 10% of the 1% population, i.e. 0.1% of gamers. Comparatively, if you have 10% Windows users cheating, then that is 10% of the 99% population, i.e. 9.9% of the gamers. Even if every Linux gamer was cheating (*ridiculous*) then that would only amount to a max of 1% of the population.
EAC catches very few cheaters. It just isn't fit for purpose. The main reason for something like EAC is so that Game Publishers can have an automated way of banning cheaters on their own servers, without having to *pay staff* to administrate those servers.
Most of the time, cheaters are banned due to reports from other gamers. If anything, EAC can possibly help to provide suspicious behaviour information on the cheater's gaming logs, but that is about the limit of its usefulness.
I'm pretty sure that most cheaters are following guides online to avoid getting caught, i.e. Managing to completely avoid being detected by EAC. And those cheaters who *are* being detected, well in many cases they are using a stolen Steam account bought for a couple of dollars on the black-market, and if their account is banned, well - no big deal, it wasn't *my* account anyway.
Quoting: g000hI get quite irritated by the fact that the likes of Garry Newman and Tim Sweeney and other game developers suggest that the approx 1% Linux gaming market-share would in any way influence the amount of cheaters on their games.
Statistically speaking, if 10% of Linux users were cheating, then that is 10% of the 1% population, i.e. 0.1% of gamers. Comparatively, if you have 10% Windows users cheating, then that is 10% of the 99% population, i.e. 9.9% of the gamers. Even if every Linux gamer was cheating (*ridiculous*) then that would only amount to a max of 1% of the population.
If I as a Windows user would want to cheat, and it were hard on Windows and easy on Linux, I might just dual boot. I guess that's what they're fearing, not the 0.whatever%.
Quoting: g000hI get quite irritated by the fact that the likes of Garry Newman and Tim Sweeney and other game developers suggest that the approx 1% Linux gaming market-share would in any way influence the amount of cheaters on their games.
Cheaters make and use tools to do so. If Linux would provide an angle to defeat EAC, it would become a tool for the cheaters.
Quoting: EikeThat's also how I understand it.Quoting: g000hI get quite irritated by the fact that the likes of Garry Newman and Tim Sweeney and other game developers suggest that the approx 1% Linux gaming market-share would in any way influence the amount of cheaters on their games.
Statistically speaking, if 10% of Linux users were cheating, then that is 10% of the 1% population, i.e. 0.1% of gamers. Comparatively, if you have 10% Windows users cheating, then that is 10% of the 99% population, i.e. 9.9% of the gamers. Even if every Linux gamer was cheating (*ridiculous*) then that would only amount to a max of 1% of the population.
If I as a Windows user would want to cheat, and it were hard on Windows and easy on Linux, I might just dual boot. I guess that's what they're fearing, not the 0.whatever%.
They don't think Linux users are cheaters, but are afraid easy cheating might lure cheaters to use Linux for their goals.
With which they do have a point.
QuoteYeah this doesn't involve the EAC team at all.Source: Reddit
Sad to hear this, but still amazing news!
Last edited by AsciiWolf on 20 June 2020 at 11:48 am UTC
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