Embark | Dusty @NAMA
Hey guys! There are no plans to drop support for SteamOS/Proton/ Wine and/or Steam Deck, despite us not officially supporting the platform. We will do our utmost best to maintain your ability to play!
Embark | tvandijk
Just to add to what Dusty just said, we're working pretty closely with CodeWeavers to QA every release we put out there since about Season 5, and I don't see a reason to stop that. It's not exactly a collaboration, but we do catch issues with SteamDeck early because at the very least they do a pass on the game before we release a patch. Do we miss some things once in a while, absolutely. It's not our primary platform after all, but we understand there is a pretty passionate and growing playerbase on SteamDeck. Please keep reporting issues here, to our support, or report them to the Proton devs directly, and we will investigate what we can do to fix things...
I think the real answer is going to be an evolving server side anti-cheat. If you do it client side, they will always find a way round it.
But that idea puts their servers at risk if the code is bad.
Somehow ... not an issue for client-side ...
Yes. But this is precisely the reason I won't play games that need kernel level anti-cheat. I barely trust game devs to run usermode code on my machine. I sure don't want to let them near kernel mode.
Yes, but that exponentially increases ongoing costs for hosting servers for the game to perform those extra checks, and unless you're one of the Valves of the world, you aren't going to have enough data for an automated system to work properly.
Counter Strike effectively has had a server-sided anticheat since the latter half of Global Offensive's lifespan, but there are simply too many gaps in the armor - difficult to determine what counts as a violation with 99% certainty, false positives, automated peripherals used by players that "copy" real human players, and so on.
In a perfect world, the answer to this problem would be community hosted servers ran by independent admins who could audit player activity and exercise human judgements. But that would severely limit the scale of games like the Finals, since both those who could stomach the cost of hosting and the quality of matchmaking would diminish. Even after those measures, it's not bulletproof. Ask RUST players, TF2 players, DayZ/Arma players, and so forth.
Windows users are far more likely to be technically naive enough to install a cheat that will be detected by the kernel level anticheat, and the existence will also act as a deterrent and price increase on the cheat maker's side. The subset of Linux users who desire to cheat may not be affected by those changes, but other methods, like reporting, active memory checks, and pattern detection can still keep fair play.
This can't just be a one stop solution. It has to be hybrid. Otherwise the scale of PVP multi-player games we see today is impossible to maintain.