The weird thing is that people actually buy and play the games that requires them.

People just want to play videogames. How would they know if the anticheat has kernel-level access without going out of their way to research it?

That's what I find weird, no matter if it's a vacuum cleaner, a game or a pair of jeans of course I'm gonna research the product (and the company producing it) before I buy.

Yeah, but let's be honest: If all your friends are playing the newest Call of Duty, you buy that and play with your friends.

People who know what a kernel is likely don't have friends who play the newest call of duty

Last time me and my friends played Call of Duty it was LAN hosted with punkbuster inactive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty_2)

Also water is wet and the sky is blue

"What the hell is a kernel? Like... popcorn?"

You severely overestimate the layperson.

Sometimes concessions have to be made for cross platform play with friends.

Nah, I don't expect people to research. I just find it weird that they don't. Both the first link in Googles search and the AI overview of Google explains that question as long as you add anticheat into the sentence.

That is not weird at all.

Because it causes problems. It makes you install an extra thing, it sometimes causes crashes or conflicts with other programs, and it often prevents you from playing on Linux (which is becoming more mainstream in the form of the Steam Deck and competitors).

The part that annoys me most is not one, but three people I know blame Linux for not supporting the invasive anti-cheat, and not the developers.

Yeah, they are the weird ones. Not the guy who doesn't understand how someone could care more about playing the game than dying on some hill that has little affect on their lives.

Weird 🙄

Counterpoint: cheating is now so widespread on multiplayer pc games that they are basically unplayable.

It's the main reason I still play console for multiplayer.

But if pc multiplayer games are unplayable due to cheating while using kernel anti-cheat, that tech is totally useless?

True. In fairness I don't play them so I wasn't aware how widespread anti cheat is. I occasionally play Apex legends which forces cross play on console and the pc gamers have kernel level anti cheat but it's very obvious they are cheating. It would be a fun console game if it wasn't for that.

Edit to say that like me you can simply choose not to play those games.

I would generally disagree. It happens, but it's still pretty uncommon. Kernel level anti-cheat doesn't stop cheating, but it is invasive and a massive privacy/security risk.
Maybe particular titles have higher rates of cheating, like cod or battlefield, which I don't play, but I've yet to run into any obvious cheating in Deadlock, SF6 or Guilty Gear Strive.
I put a couple hundred hours into dota 2 without meeting a single obvious cheater.
Team Fortress 2 had a botting problem for a long time that was pretty much resolved without the introduction of kernel level anti-cheat.

The next issue you run into is if you research a game, is the news site is talking about the game, talking about the fact that it has kernel level anti-cheat, and to go one step further. Do you know what kernel level anti-cheat is?

Like, we both know what it is, but we're also on Lemmy, which means we're probably more on the tech-savvy side. Your typical Joe Smoe gamer who's only using their computer to play AAA titles isn't necessarily going to know what kernel level anti-cheat is, aside from the fact that when they install the game, it makes Windows pop up the UAC, saying that it needs more information to install.

They may know that it's running as admin, but they don't know the extent of what that means, or what it has access to. and it won't be until it starts actively inhibiting what they're able to do before they will actually care.

It's hard to research a feature if you don't really know what the feature is and how it associates, especially a feature that is as mainstream as a kernel level AC which is becoming common on competitive games.

The everyday person knows current level anti-cheat as a cheat that is on video games and makes it so it's harder to hack/cheat on it. At face value, that sounds like a good thing. So the general public isn't going to bat an eye. It's only the people who care about privacy or using systems that are blocked by it that really bat an eye at it.