Quoting: damarrinIs creating a good server-side anticheat solution even possible?

Yes, it is. Rather than just spout that it's the only way or anything else vague, the appropriate solution would be to hire a team to reverse engineer the cheats, tear them down to their basic components and build heuristics on that.... but it costs money and likely a new team dedicated to doing that.... and it's not cheap, so the money is in picking the easiest option that makes it LOOK like the business side cares.

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Quoting: hell0

Quoting: udekmp69

Quoting: KimyrielleMaybe one day the developers of shooters will figure out how to design cheat-resilience into the game itself, instead of trying to take control over their customers systems, which won't ever work.

I think they need to stop focusing on client-side and develop a decent server-side solution.

Now that's something "AI" (aka neural networks) could be useful for, rather than spitting out humongous piles of somewhat believable texts or images.

They don't even need that. Just hire a team who's entire job is to analyze the cheats all the way down to the assembly, if necessary, and build heuristics-based detection on it. It works really well, but it costs money, so they won't do it.

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Quoting: FremenThis is bad news, as more and more companies port their games to "kernel level anticheat" rather than linux compatible EAC or BattlEye, we will just end up having fewer playable games. Until we get kernel level EAC support in Wine, we will start losing games on linux. Very bad news. Prepare for Apex to go the way of kernel level AC too.

You won't get Kernel-level AC in WINE as the Windows Kernel is not available, most Kernel-level AC won't allow virtualized or emulated kernels, and AC devs find MacOS kernel too closed and Linux kernel too open. It's about control and you have to give the AC full control of your system and how you may use it to play said games. Some Kernel-level AC require you to not even have certain Windows features installed or even require development tools to not exist at all. At that point, might as well buy a console.

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Quoting: poiuzWas it already confirmed that the players were not "hacked" by their cheat software?

This much is a known quantity at this point.

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: dpanterSo it's not EAC's fault and it's also not Apex Legends fault? Or... how is this message supposed to be interpreted? Doesn't seem like an admission of fault, more like Respawn saying "we're just gonna fix some stuff don't worry about it oh also some people were hacked or whatever probably random and unrelated dw gyze lol"

Reads like it was a problem in Apex they're patching to me.

They are not going to say what it was until they 100% know what it is. I've worked for InfoSec companies and PirateSoftware is a good follow on this being that he's in both GameDev and Offensive Security. He clarifies that in the cases of hacks like these, it is unprofessional and irresponsible to claim things like "It's an RCE in X" before investigation is complete. He watched the videos and laid out that based on the evidence at the time, it could be an RCE in Apex/EAC OR it could be a Server bug being exploited OR it could be the hacked players having compromised systems OR something unknown.

Even with additional evidence, that evidence still doesn't clarify the cause. In fact, it implies that there could be more than one exploit or vulnerability involved.

In InfoSec, you NEVER claim what the cause was until you can 100% prove it.

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Quoting: Nezchan

Quoting: LacSlyer

Quoting: EhvisI don't really see a lot of the Hollow Knight specific art style in this game. This looks more like a traditional cartoony style. And while some of the mechanics look similar to Hollow Knight, the gameplay as a whole looks quite different. I mean, ladders? :) Crownsworn definitely looks closer.

If you can't see some of the screenshots on their store page that look like a blatant rip off of Hollow Knight then you either have no idea how Hollow Knight looks or you didn't actually look at the images. The art style isn't exactly the same, it's a bit more cartoony, but some of the shots make the environment look like they literally copy pasted from HK.

Keep in mind, the developer posted these shots to sell the game. When a handful of those images they posted can raise questions like this it's enough to be suspicious at the very least.

I think this is what people are missing here. This isn't about how the game actually plays. It's not about iteration on an existing set of ideas. It's about marketing, and using "looks a lot like" as a strategy, even though the game isn't like the thing it looks a lot like.

Craftopia didn't iterate on Breath of the Wild. Palworld doesn't really do much with Pokémon mechanics aside from capturing in the same way. And this seems to use none of the innovations Hollow Knight brought to the Metroidvania genre. But boy do they want people who know those games to look at screenshots and go "hey, that looks familiar!"

Which is something they have likely needed in the past. If you read the translated interview on the dev's site, you'll see that nearly every publisher he approached passed on the game because it didn't play it safe with a popular, trendy game format and genre. It doesn't have MTX, isn't a battle royale/FPS/Action RPG, so publishers passed. So, instead, they created their own marketing by using the art style to get ppl interested and in the door, then use the gameplay to try and get them hooked.

Even with the boatloads of money they've earned on Palworld, they are still nowhere near the resources that a AAA studio/publisher has available to spend on Engineers or Marketing (two of the most expensive parts of Tech/Gaming companies)

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Quoting: M@GOidI can enjoy a modern game that pays homage for ancient games from 20, 30 years ago. You feel nostalgic and stuff. Hollow Knight was released too recently for someone to be "paying homage" too it. This is a blatantly ripoff and one of the motives I abandoned AAA gaming in the first place. I came to indies for their courage to innovate. I'm not gonna give money to devs that behave like big studios that are too scared to create something new, and decide to copy someone's home work.

While I understand this sentiment, the gameplay for the Palworld dev's new Metroidvania is little to nothing like Hollow Knight aside from the Metroidvania aspects. Artstyles are NOT Copyrightable for a reason.

Additionally, the Palworld dev has specifically noted that he does NOT try to make original games. He takes ideas he likes and makes something new out of it. People like to whine about Palworld being Pokemon with guns, but it's more like a Survivalcraft game with Factorio, monster catching, and guns.

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I get really annoyed by this idea that LLMs are "stealing" data. It's literally the automation of what people manually do..... what we have always done in tech. My job is built around automating monotonous tasks to improve stability and reliability.

LLMs aren't going around storing articles, code, pictures, art, etc in its model. It is simply learning from those.... and all the benefits AND drawbacks that come with that. That means bad data is also getting into many of the LLMs too. I've been using CoPilot to write code for a while now. It is absolutely useful, but it also gets things wrong on a regular basis too.

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Quoting: eldakingSure we probably should use a more accurate term for each category, for clarity, but letting our categories be decided solely based on the terminology being used is not a step in the right direction. The meaning of "indie" has evolved, and going back to dictionary definitions to make it linguistically consistent comes at a cost of being a good category for games.

Then maybe "indie" isn't a good category name for games. The minute we start shifting the definition of a word like "independent" we create confusion in the language and semantics do matter a lot. Yes, language changes over time, but that only works when the definition changes holistically, not when it changes definition for just one sub-area of concern. It also creates issues where now "indie" means different things depending on if you're talking about movies, shows, music, books, games, board games, etc. That is too much to expect people to keep track of.

All that said, a studio making a low budget game for their publicly traded company is obviously NOT "indie". By the same token, I don't think Larian, ConcernedApe, EgoSoft, etc can be anything BUT "indie".... being successful doesn't mean someone loses their "indie" or "independent" status. That implies that only failed studios that make something people like can be "indie".

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I, personally, like to stick to the meaning of the word "indie" or "Independent". As such, studios like Larian and EgoSoft are fully independent studios, desire to stay that way, and even have some level of requirements when working on IP not owned by them that give them more control on the direction they take it.

I'm not sure I'd classify Baldur's Gate III as an Indie game itself, but it was developed by an indie studio. That said, the Divinity series, the X Series, etc are all indie games despite looking mostly like AA or AAA games. Larian hasn't been published by a 3rd party for Divinity since Divinity II and even then they eventually re-published those games under themselves.

Trying to define "indie" as games that either aren't "profitable" (Which is dumb as that implies you want the studio to go under) or that are made by a less well known studio make no sense or aren't successful. If they are truly independent, then it is still "indie".

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