I was wondering what the feeling is with Anti-Cheat and Windows VMs. Seems like there are a few anti-cheats that don’t have any issues (like Easy Anti-Cheat) but others will insta ban you. Does anyone have a good list? What’s the feeling in the industry? Is it more likely that anti-cheats will ban you if running in a VM or are they starting to be more open about it?
I ask since I would love to do a Threadripper Unraid build, with Windows, Linux, and MacOS (maybe) VMs. I don’t want to build the system and then find out I can’t play some games and worse get perma banned.
I wish it was better but theres little information and it becomes out of date quickly, as well as being very complicated to begin with (at least to me). The only solid info is this reddit post from last year where they spoof RDTSC by having to recompile the kernel, people in the comments couldnt even get it to work on AMD, and even if it did the spoofing was rudimentary.
So yeah… it sucks and it does seem like most anti cheats will ban you.
Doesn’t work with every game as there’s other ways to detect VMs (device identifiers mainly).
This depends not only on the anti-cheat but also on the game developer and the specific game.
Those anticheat systems are just a framework after all, devs can choose which detection mechanisms they want to use.
You can be fine in one game but get kicked on another using the same system.
Also side note, on most games you will only get kicked from the server, they don’t usually ban right away.
That being said, both Easy Anti Cheat and BattlEye are coming with native Linux support (well, wine/proton technically) so you might not have a need for a VM soon. Still comes down to developers though.
I’ve heard of BattlEye and Escape from Tarkov can get you banned if you run via a VM. Not sure if its instant. You could ask the dev on their forum if it isn’t covered already.
I’m against the banning because of using VM’s, it should always be based on if you were cheating or not. People have always been able to change their ip and buy the game again, most companies don’t ban machine ID’s. VM’s going to be more popular as time goes on; I hear even Win11 is doing VM stuff now…
EFT is one of my favorite games, which I cannot play cause of the VM. The official response from the devs was that using VM technology you can inject into guest memory, while undetected, therefore easier to cheat. They never said however how many cheaters are using similar methods, since setting up a VM and a cheat in Linux is for sure not the easiest task…
Therefore, they cannot prove you are cheating, and for that they kick you out if they see you are using Virtualization. Ban comes only if you try to hide it.
There are several people that were able to play, using nested virtualization, by enabling Hyper-V under Windows, but if done under AMD CPU, it cripples performance. Microsoft is well know for their boycott against AMD, and although they said it will be fixed by W10.21H1, they didn’t. I just tried it few days ago. With W11 it is even worse, as it crashes on boot with Hyper-V enabled.
IP & HWID bans are easily bypassed. Some expensive cheats they can mask you HWIDs for you. The cost is to buy the game again, which for some popular free games, is zero…
Our best hope is EAC and BE, hopefully others too, will eventually make their anti-cheats work with Linux, so we can play natively and not using VMs etc. Valve has done a lot to that direction but there is still more. Also there are companies that try to implement Kernel Level anti-cheat, that will never work with Linux. For these companies, I just don’t care, cause I simply ignore their games.
Thanks everyone for your replies! Seems like maybe not as bad as I thought, but I think I’m just going to play it safe and just do a dedicated Windows system. I will, however, also be building a Linux desktop since I really want to start to move over to Linux as my daily driver.
Check SomeOrdinaryGamers youtube. He’s got some videos on how he has KVM setup on his ArchLinux install where he plays Apex, Valorant, CoD and other’s without being banned it seems.
