Just give me a fucking normal monitor without spyware
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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It's not like they've stopped selling those. This is interesting on a philosophical level though.
This would be clearly illegal as a software. But what if the hardware includes it? How do you even detect that?
You don't detect it (at least not very well), and cheat hardware isn't new.
Where my game genie lovers at.
This pushes games further toward kernel level software that has complete control over your computer so it can scan your hardware to make sure you aren't using a cheating tool like this monitor.
The funniest part is league of legends literally added kernel level anticheat today with the new season.
Yeah, I really want to be wrong here...
change game making philosophy obviously. but this is not going to be widespread enough to be a concern probably.
Literally me 😂😂
MSI says that this game tracking won't just be limited to League of Legends, as it'll be releasing an application that'll allow you to train these features to recognise and react to enemies and other on-screen elements in any game you like.
The whole unfair advantage thing aside, this is a really cool feature that might have a bigger range of application than just gaming.
Yeah like reading MRIs and X-rays, it's already been proven that those reading medical images tend to have blinders on looking only for what they regularly see and never see the gorilla. With AI they might see the more weird things.
Ok that's bullshit. You should get banned if your monitor is alerting you of incoming enemies
Well to be unnecessarily pedantic about it, that's how games do work normally.
If that's how LoL wanted their game to work, that's how they would make it work
Yeah I'm with you, just making a bad joke
Oh, ok. Carry on.
But it's your hardware doing this? Are 3D-headphones illegal then, because of the massive benefit to aurally locating your enemy? Are hall-effect analogue keyboards illegal, due to the configurable much much shorter actuation distance? Etc, etc. Once it's in hardware, it is a really interesting discussion where you place the cut-off.
You can't even go "Once it has to actually know which game you're playing, as profiles already work similar in gaming drivers, plus importantly most 3D audio is per-game optimized.
(edit)
And come to think of it, DLSS or FSR are also AI-powered frame-per-frame image analysis to add output to the existing image.
Why would it matter if the cheat is from hardware or software?
I think the difference is that hardware, like a 144 hz monitor, isn't really making you better at the game, it's just that what you had before was making you worse. If you get a 144 hz monitor and your aiming gets better, that's not because the monitor made you better but because the 60 hz monitor, you had before, was holding you down.
There really isn't a complicated discussion to be had unless you needlessly complicate things. There's a big difference between having, say, better monitor or headphones in terms of resolution or sound quality vs having a monitor or headphones that add extra features.
It's like saying that AR glasses that visualize a ball's trajectory should be allowed in tennis or football because players can already invest in better rackets or shoes.
The detection problem is not unsolvable. First, you can forbid people that are using that monitor from matchmaking. You can find your monitor's model number using software so that would be trivial. For a more nuanced approach, you can examine players' reaction times and ban people that got too good too fast.
There are plenty of EDID blockers and emulators already on the market. Unfortunately, no, “find[ing] […] the monitor’s model number” is not as trivial as you may think, if somebody really wants to evade. It is quite trivial nowadays to spoof the EDID in hardware, without the software able to do anything.
Analog kbs are causing quite a lot of debate in some games rn with what should and shouldn't be allowed
I'm curious what the trackmania rulings are gonna be.
I think the course of action is clear. Ban it from tournaments/official events. Since I'm not in the LoL scene I don't know if that might already be the case. Now, regular players will know that playing with this enhanced hardware will disqualify them from tournament play anyway. So now you simply create two modes of gameplay: tournament-legal, and casual. People who aren't aspiring to play in a tournament will play the casual game and it'll be acceptable there to use enhanced hardware. People who wish to play with people using tournament-legal hardware will play in the tournament-legal mode. There is little to no incentive to cheat in the tournament-legal game because you won't be able to cheat your way into an actual tournament that way.
So people who want to just play a game casually will get their asses handed to them by people who are artificially enhanced. Cool.
I mean, they get their arses handed to them by people better than them anyway. I understand the ranking system is something of a dark magic fudge, but it should roughly put you with/against people who have a similar chance of winning as you, right? If people play with cheats, they get to pretend they're better than they are (ooh, look at me up here in silver, ooh), but then they fit in with others who, with or without cheats, match a similar level.
The ultimate pay to win.
AFAIK competitive gaming events always happen on hardware that is provided by the organizers so everyone has the same. In some games players are allowed to bring their own mouse and/or keyboard/controller but imo that's already a pretty big "vector of attack" for hacks
You can't just give everyone the same mouse and kb if you want it to actually be fair tbh, different people have different kbs and mice for preference and ergonomic reasons. Different switches, maybe tolerable. Different kb size, very awkward and will lead to misclicks. Different mouse size? Even different sensor position? You will lose some precision until you're used to it.
Though organizers could provide a specified model, and ban peripherials with features that are deemed unfair.
Yeah that's why most games' competitive events allow players to bring their own, but given the fuckton of dependencies some of the "gamer" peripherals install I'm kinda surprised I haven't seen anyone exploiting a vulnerability to use some cheats yet.
For example I have a gaming mouse with onboard memory, and I don't really trust Razer to secure that shit correctly (given the fact that their driver updating software doesn't even bother not downloading the previous versions when not necessary nor cleaning up downloads after installation. Fun fact : I recently discovered I had 10+ GB of download cache after barely a year of usage, for a mouse)
Except cheaters would flock to the tournament-legal game mode because there's less cheaters. Why would they bother to try and win against other cheaters if there's a better chance to win against easier opponents?
Cheaters cheat so they win easier. They don't care about fairness.
Sticking to single player/ co-op, player vs player is looking less compelling year after year
This is only using on-screen information, but making it more visible? Why is this a cheat, exactly? Was that one guy cheating in the shooter game where his cat would paw at the screen when it noticed invisible people moving with a Predator-like shimmer effect?
I think products like this are inevitable, although I'm surprised that MSI is trying to be at the forefront of it. It's weird that a company that sells esports equipment is also going to sell equipment for cheating.
Hard pass