Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "My Biggest Linux Gaming Fear Has Happened" video.

  1. If you want to stop cheating, stop trusting the client system. You cannot trust the client system even if it appears to be running your anti-cheat DRM system. Even pretending that DRM helps is just stupid. Always trust your own servers only and use e.g. AI to detect cheaters remotely from game input. However, do not block detected cheaters, just modify matchmaking to put cheaters against each other. That would create a new metagame for the cheaters (try to beat other cheaters) and the players playing the vanilla game would only play against other non-cheaters. If somebody cheats little enough to stay undetectable remotely, that level of cheating is probably acceptable overall. Most cheaters are lazy and stupid and would be really easy to detect remotely.
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  2. I agree. If the game cannot be run without administrator / system level access, it's not safe to run at all. It doesn't matter if the game runs on Windows, Linux or console.
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  3. I agree. I purchased GTA V for my Linux desktop and returned the game for refund once the DRM system in the game was too much pain to play the game. Make it visible to the vendors that DRM is costing them real money! In addition, the pirated version of the game is more competitive if the paying customers have to fight the DRM system even a little bit and pirated version works without DRM of any kind. If you don't want to give customers extra incentive to pirate the game, do not put DRM measures in!
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  4.  @lussor1  You cannot block cheaters by blocking Linux desktop gamers. The only real way to block cheaters is to NOT TRUST the client system, no matter if it's desktop Windows, gaming console or Linux laptop. Trying to run some kind of DRM system on the client system doesn't work because real DRM is a mathematical impossibility. So the real solution is to run enough of the game logic on the server to avoid cheating. However, that's often computationally expensive and vendors come up with random hacks instead. I think the best compromise would be to just monitor gamer actions and label cheaters and cheaters and then change online gaming matchmaking to put cheaters only against other cheaters and players playing along the official rules to playing against each other.
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  5. The problem isn't that Linux couldn't play the game, the problem is game vendor explicitly blocking Linux desktop for some reason! As long as game vendor wants to block Linux desktop, there's no point trying to make it easier to support Linux desktop. This is no different from my online bank actively blocking LineageOS while allowing OEM Android versions that no longer receive even security updates!
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