this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Good read, what if they just want the games to run and don't care about functional anticheat? Couldn't they send fake info to the anticheats, or do you think that would be technically impossible?
Short answer: Yep, cheat softwares regularly do this too, but it's costly and prone to being immediately patched, and it's potentially illegal.
Anticheat systems are designed around this since a cheat client would try to do exactly that. One way for example is for the anticheat to provide a cryptographic key to the game which it uses to prove to a multiplayer server that the anticheat is functioning and untampered with. Even if you bypass anticheat locally, you still have to prove that the game client is legitimate to the server. This does happen! But kernel anticheats are much harder to access and tamper with, and in our case of using WINE are unlikely to even work from the outset.
So okay, let's hypothetically bypass anticheat locally. We modify the game to tell the server it's legit, and it works! A few days later the game gets patched, and suddenly our bypass is defunct. For cheat sellers this part of the cost of business but for people just trying to game on Linux there's little money in it, and if there is it won't ever be spent on circumventing anticheat (which also falls under some legal grey areas if not outright illegal depending on your country).
Given enough time and resources we could probably find some novel way to crack anticheat on a game as such as it becomes playable on Linux. But it's so much easier to use that effort somewhere else or just use a Windows VM that is guaranteed to work even if slightly slower.