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...
Wow. Integrity. Nice to see!
Here is the thing. They cite users running kernel level cheats, and the need to detect them. Well, if they allow user mode anti-cheat to function under linux I see two eventualities that will likely force them to change their mind.
1: Cheats find a way to spoof running under wine/linux while in windows and continue to use only the user mode cheat while running their windows kernel cheats. 2: They develop kernel mode cheats for Linux and move cheating to Linux.
Either of these could end up either forcing them to either stop linux clients entirely, or somehow segregate them.
One thing I've seen with serious cheating communities... They will go a long way, a long long way just to cheat. Almost as far as spending time to get good at the game. Almost, but not quite.
I hope it doesn't go this way. I don't play games with kernel anti-cheat as a matter of principle. But it would be annoying if it happened to a game I already played.
Those are valid concerns, but I don't see any reason to believe that a hybrid approach for handling the two ecosystem couldn't be possible. As mentioned by their discord posts, their patches to the game are directly parsed by CodeWeavers, and options for server-sided anticheat or a Valve-style "Trust Factor" are both on the table.
I could also see this being beneficial regardless of the eventualities because of the barrier of entry - novice or less tech savvy users who wish to remain on the Windows platform and desire to cheat could be more deterred (or caught) by the kernel level anticheat. On the other side of the aisle, linux users could be targeted with a Trust Factor or higher level of User-space scrutiny, given a lower likelihood for running an excessive amount of background processes (compared to Windows).
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.