Basically the only anti cheat that is somewhat successful. Secure multiplayer matchmaking has its price unfortunately.

But any process your user runs can read memory of other processes of the same user, Windows provides an API for it. So its not just kernel stuff that is scary.

Turning your PC into a $gaming_appliance with a keyboard (in terms of opaque and invasive security posture) isn’t so much of a success.

Vanguard might be nice if you want to dedicate a PC to locked-down gaming, not so much if you just want to do legitimate $anything_else with it.

Can also stick to games that use good old dedicated servers with active admins that ban cheaters. Its the new matchmaking type of games that makes anti cheat software a requirement.

>Basically the only anti cheat that is somewhat successful.

And yet Valorant and every other game with kernel-level anticheat seems to have been hacked anyways

Its not bulletproof, but nothing really can be on the PC platform as it is today. Which is why I said somewhat successful, as no other anti cheat comes close.

it's not really a PC problem, its an attestability problem.

Even with kernel level nonsense a cheat can be made technically undetectable by essentially making a 'player robot' that uses a camera and CV to watch a screen and traditional mouse/keyboard interfaces. It'll only be detectable via player-action/movement heuristics and 'best guesses', and it needs no hooks into software or OS.

This type of 'bot' is going to explode across consoles and the like soon given the focus on AI with general purpose reasoning; you can already easily implement this style of bot against slow paced games like mahjong or poker inferring against big clunky slow image-inferring LLMs; given how easy most coding LLMs can spit out the code for specialty CNNs when knowing the criteria we're going to see this kind of cheating get a lot more accessible.

And I mean this practically. Go talk to Claude or ChatGPT about making a bot in this fashion for just about any slower paced deliberate-action game -- it's shockingly good at doing so with very little user input. Provide it with a few screenshots of the interface and it can even automate finding the bounding boxes or whatever other thing-of-interest you need to coordinate purely by description -- the barrier to entry for game cheating is lower than i've ever seen it , and that's one of the things I did for a living for a portion of my youth.

Its a PC problem because process memory is not protected from other processes or the kernel. Kernel anti cheat completely stops userspace cheats from working at all. It has problems with cheats abusing drivers or DMA based cheats, and of course hardware that only acts on your monitor output and adds input to your mouse. Your argument seems to be that it is not bulletproof therefor we shouldn't use it and allow simple userspace cheats like cheatengine to work again.

I suppose this could be true for some kinds of hacks (e.g. aimbots), but is pretty much useless for things that require information, like wallhacks.

>barrier to entry for game cheating is lower than i've ever seen it

Matchmaking rather than finding opponents/matches on IRC and private servers is also a big factor modern cheating.

People are locked in to the game with you in Valorant or CS, they are penalised for leaving and thus can be held hostage by someone who is blatantly cheating.

In older times, you would just quit and find another match, or if it was a community public server they will get banned.

Community servers will definitely be the answer for this in the long run.

Community servers were already the answer, but game devs and publishers have gone out of their way to make them a non-option for most games

AFAIK it's hard enough to develop the cheats that you need to pay for subscriptions to use them

The same is true of games with non-kernel anticheats

in a windows PC context any game has the capability to run arbitrary code. You don’t need an AC to do any malicious damage.