Just tracking trended data in general would be sufficient to defeat a LARGE number of common cheats. One of the very few use cases "AI" might actually work for in a positive way. But that puts the burden on the developers and server hosters, and it's much easier to just burden the players directly instead.

Servers often don't send player data that is outside of the immediate area of the player, but they have to for enemies that are nearby. If they walk around the corner and your client didn't know about it, then you'll be waiting for your ping time to even render the enemy. I.e. they walk around the corner and already shot you, then you see them suddenly appear a full players width away from the corner, and you die. Aka peekers advantage amplified.

Same deal with footstep sounds, bullet tracers, a player's shadow, etc. Your client needs to know where all this is coming from and it can't do that if it doesn't know the enemy exists and where. And that is a buffer zone for hackers to derive wall hacks from.

So basically, the overwhelming majority of servers do do all those things, since the late 90's. Hacks tend to work within those bounds. The most common, impactful and hard to detect cheats are based on providing perfect mechanical inputs. Aka aim hacks. Nothing about limiting info from the server can prevent that unless you also want the legitimate player to be unable to see their enemies.

Check the data on the server

I believe this already happens to some degree.

Don’t give any data to the client it doesn’t need, like enemies around the corner

Enemies around the corner still make noise/peek/shoot/etc. You can't just hide data of nearby enemies from the client because their actions still have in-game consequences that need to be reproduced across all active/nearby players.

Now the server doesn’t need to care. There’s input? Validate and use it.

How do you validate data that is within the realm of possibilities? if my head shot would have been 1 pixel too far to the left to hit and my hacked client sends it 1 pixel to the right so it makes a hit, how does the server know this isn't fake?

Server decides if it’s a headshot.

If my fake data doesn't look out of the ordinary i'm still hacking the system and tricking the server-side validation.

Client only sends coordinates of origin and target. Lag? Sucks to be you, with or without cheat.

The math to send the perfect headshot isn't difficult if you know where you are, where the enemy is and you can only send origin & target coords, I'm not sure this solves anything.

That would only create more work for the developers, all for the defacto expulsion of Linux users (Way less players at all times). The best course of action here would be the actual expulsion of Linux users. Also, EA is at most 25% correct. (Not a rational argument, I just very much dislike them)

Agree with you 100%.

Damn, sorry to hear that. It’s always bad to leave something one knows because something’s become unbearable. I wish you best of luck on your journey! (I’m assuming a lot, but why else would you switch despite your choice of use of free time?)

Thanks! I'm a huge open source supporter and only ever installed Windows on my desktop to play games, still using Linux on my laptops. Thanks to Valve, Proton, and Wine, I'll be able to go back to Linux and maybe discover some new games.

On the other hand: I quite like it. It forces them to keep their grubby little hands from my kernel.

I do not like anything anti cheat. But I also don’t really like cheaters, especially in online games, so anti cheat could be tolerated. The only thing is: nothing trumps my systems integrity. Definitely not online player satisfaction.

Kinda agree with you on this. Although I have my desktop as a strict "gaming" machine, I wouldn't mine an EA rootkit on my Desktop Linux system if all I did on it was game. But yes, they can keep their hands off my kernel on my "work" devices.

The server already determines if a shot's valid or not though. Once a client receives information on where the enemy is at, then the client can send message to the server that they are shooting exactly at that location.

It's not that simple. Especially not for real time shooters, latency is a killer.

And when one client sends actuons that are weird and doesn’t line up with it’s internal game state

What if my hacked client sends actions that are not weird, completely plausible, but didn't happen and instead were faked? E.g. I take a headshot and would have missed, but my client sends data that I actually shot them dead center, because I wasn't completely off? How would the server know it wasn't me?

The cheat in this case would send legitimate actions. Like maybe you, the human, would have missed the headshot, but your cheat corrected to the inputs that would have landed one.