Yes, but that exponentially increases ongoing costs for hosting servers for the game to perform those extra checks, and unless you’re one of the Valves of the world, you aren’t going to have enough data for an automated system to work properly.

Counter Strike effectively has had a server-sided anticheat since the latter half of Global Offensive’s lifespan, but there are simply too many gaps in the armor - difficult to determine what counts as a violation with 99% certainty, false positives, automated peripherals used by players that “copy” real human players, and so on.

In a perfect world, the answer to this problem would be community hosted servers ran by independent admins who could audit player activity and exercise human judgements. But that would severely limit the scale of games like the Finals, since both those who could stomach the cost of hosting and the quality of matchmaking would diminish. Even after those measures, it’s not bulletproof. Ask RUST players, TF2 players, DayZ/Arma players, and so forth.

Windows users are far more likely to be technically naive enough to install a cheat that will be detected by the kernel level anticheat, and the existence will also act as a deterrent and price increase on the cheat maker’s side. The subset of Linux users who desire to cheat may not be affected by those changes, but other methods, like reporting, active memory checks, and pattern detection can still keep fair play.

This can’t just be a one stop solution. It has to be hybrid. Otherwise the scale of PVP multi-player games we see today is impossible to maintain.

Honestly been loving the finals - so much fun and I haven’t bothered spending a dime.

Except buying the soundtrack on Bandcamp for a copy. That was 100% worth it.

Project Zomboid Mentioned!

They did say and/or steamdeck, and specifically called out Wine and Proton, so I presume the changes are OS agnostic. It’s just the steamdeck has become synonymous with Linux gaming in the public eye.

Those are valid concerns, but I don’t see any reason to believe that a hybrid approach for handling the two ecosystem couldn’t be possible. As mentioned by their discord posts, their patches to the game are directly parsed by CodeWeavers, and options for server-sided anticheat or a Valve-style “Trust Factor” are both on the table.

I could also see this being beneficial regardless of the eventualities because of the barrier of entry - novice or less tech savvy users who wish to remain on the Windows platform and desire to cheat could be more deterred (or caught) by the kernel level anticheat. On the other side of the aisle, linux users could be targeted with a Trust Factor or higher level of User-space scrutiny, given a lower likelihood for running an excessive amount of background processes (compared to Windows).

Wow. Integrity. Nice to see!

I’ve seen website-based examples (similar to CandyBox2, back when that existed), but not a standalone game.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing, though. It’s not like it’s required, and gamification may help the average user’s knowledge.