My PC, My Rules? Not According to Modern Anti-Cheats

If you’re like me, you love PC gaming. I mean, really love it. I spend my days as a web developer, building things for the internet, but my nights? My nights are for diving into the gritty streets of Escape from Tarkov, hunting massive beasts in Monster Hunter, or managing a sprawling empire in Stellaris. My Steam library is a testament to the sheer variety and freedom that PC gaming offers: from the co-op chaos of Sea of Thieves and 7 Days to Die to the glorious depth of Dwarf Fortress.

The common thread in all of this is choice. I chose my graphics card, my mouse, my keyboard. I choose what programs run in the background, maybe Discord for chatting with my wife while we play, or a YouTube video on my second monitor. My PC is my space, a powerful, customizable rig that I built to do exactly what I want it to do.

But lately, I’ve felt that freedom slipping away. A new kind of software has been invited onto our machines, and it’s not asking for permission anymore, it’s demanding it. I’m talking about the new wave of aggressive, kernel-level anti-cheats. And frankly, they’re starting to turn our glorious, open-platform PCs into locked-down, basically glorified consoles.

The Promise and the Problem

Let’s get one thing straight: cheating sucks. Nobody likes getting headshot from across the map by someone who isn’t even aiming at them. It ruins the fun and destroys the competitive integrity of a game. So when a company like Riot Games comes out and says they’re going to solve cheating in their game, Valorant, with a super-powerful anti-cheat called Vanguard, we all listen.

They promised us a clean experience. They told us this was the price of admission for fair matches. The price? Giving their software the highest level of privilege on our computers.

So, what does that actually mean? As a developer, let me break it down for you in the simplest way possible. Imagine your computer’s operating system has different security levels, like the floors in a high-security building. Most programs you run, like your game or your web browser, are on the upper floors (we call this “user mode”). They have limited access. But the very core of your system, the part that talks directly to your hardware, is the basement (we call this the “kernel,” or “Ring 0”). This is the god-mode level. Whatever runs here has the keys to the entire kingdom. It can see everything, do everything, and control everything.

Kernel-level anti-cheats like Vanguard install themselves right there, in the basement. They load up before almost anything else when you turn on your computer, and they watch every single process, every file, every bit of data flowing through your system. The logic is that if they are at the deepest level, they can catch any cheat trying to mess with the game.

Sounds good on paper, right? But here’s the question we need to ask: is the trade-off worth it?

The Illusion of a Cheater-Free World

I recently watched a fascinating deep-dive video that broke down how cheaters are bypassing even these “impenetrable” anti-cheats. And let me tell you, it was an eye-opener. The video showed that dedicated cheaters aren’t just downloading some shady .exe file anymore. They’re using incredibly sophisticated methods.

They use things called “DMA (Direct Memory Access) cards,” which is physical hardware they plug into their PC. This card can read the game’s memory directly from the RAM chips, completely bypassing the CPU and the operating system. The anti-cheat, sitting in its kernel-level basement, is completely blind to it. The cheat information is then sent to a second computer, which processes it and sends aiming instructions back to the first PC through a spoofed mouse controller. To your gaming PC and its all-powerful anti-cheat, it just looks like you’re a god-tier player with inhumanly good aim.

And that’s the expensive method. Others are using custom-compiled versions of Windows, clever driver-mapping tricks to hide their cheats, or even “visual cheats” that use AI to analyze the screen output and aim, never once touching the game’s memory.

So, what does this mean? It means that the fundamental promise. A cheat-free environment, is an illusion. The most invasive anti-cheats are not stopping the most dedicated cheaters. They’re just creating a high-stakes, technological arms race. The cheaters who are willing to pay for expensive hardware or sophisticated private cheats are still there. You’re still playing against them. You just don’t realize it because they’re not spin-botting in the middle of the map. You just think, “Wow, that person is just really, really good.”

The Collateral Damage: Punishing the Rest of Us

So, if these systems don’t stop the hardcore cheaters, what do they do? Well, they make life miserable for the rest of us, the 99% of players who just want to play the game.

This is where the “console-ification” of our PCs really begins. Suddenly, our open, multi-purpose machines are being told what they can and cannot run.

Have you ever launched a game only to have it refuse to start because of some “incompatible software” or “You need secure boot active in your BIOS”? I have. Maybe it was my RGB lighting software that syncs all my peripherals. Maybe it was a performance monitoring overlay I use to check my frame rates. Or, in a particularly frustrating case for me, it was AutoHotkey. I use AHK for some simple automation scripts for my development work. It saves me a ton of time. But because some cheaters have used it to make simple trigger bots, I now have to remember to kill the process every single time I want to play certain games, or risk my account getting flagged.

Think about the broader implications. What about gamers with disabilities who rely on specialized third-party software to play? These tools often need to hook into a system at a deep level to function, the exact kind of behavior an aggressive anti-cheat is designed to block.

We’re giving up our freedom and control for a security that is, at best, partial. We’re letting game companies put a rootkit on our system that, in many cases, runs 24/7 from the moment we boot up, just on the off-chance we might launch their game for a few hours. This is a massive overreach. We are trading our privacy and the utility of our PCs for a false sense of security.

The PC Is Not a Console, and That’s the Whole Point

I have nothing against consoles. They’re fantastic, streamlined machines for plug-and-play gaming. But they are, by design, walled gardens. You play what Sony or Microsoft allows you to play. You use the hardware they approve. You can’t run a Discord overlay, you can’t mod your games (usually), and you certainly can’t run a script to automate your work in the background.

I didn’t buy a PC to have that experience. I bought a PC precisely because it is not a walled garden. The beauty of PC gaming is the chaos, the customization, the freedom. It’s about being able to alt-tab to a wiki for Path of Exile, run a custom ReShade filter to make Dead By Daylight to look scarier, and use community-made tools that enhance the experience.

When a game’s anti-cheat dictates what I can and cannot have running on my own machine, it violates the very spirit of PC gaming. It treats my powerful, versatile computer like a dumb terminal whose only purpose is to run their software. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of why many of us choose this platform in the first place.

There Has to Be a Better Way

Look, I’m not saying we should just let cheaters run wild. But the current approach of “more invasive is always better” is a dead end. It’s a lazy solution that prioritizes the developer’s peace of mind over the user’s freedom and privacy.

So what are the alternatives? There are plenty.

1. Smarter, Server-Side Detection: Instead of putting a spy on every player’s computer, invest more in server-side analytics. Let powerful servers analyze player behavior, statistics, and input patterns to flag anomalies. If a player suddenly has a 95% headshot rate, the server should be able to notice that without needing to scan my family photos.
2. Community-Powered Moderation: Systems like CS:GO’s old “Overwatch” were brilliant. Let trusted, high-ranking players review gameplay footage of suspected cheaters. The human eye can often spot unnatural movement and blatant cheating far better than an algorithm can.
3. Raise the Cost of Cheating: The video I mentioned pointed out that services like Faceit have less cheating partly because they require phone and payment verification. When a cheater gets banned, they can’t just create a new free-to-play account in two minutes. Making it more difficult and costly to get back in the game is a huge deterrent.
4. Focus on What Matters: Stop trying to catch every single person using a slightly-too-fast jump-throw macro. Focus the heavy-duty detection on the blatant, game-ruining cheats, the spin-bots, the wallhacks, the rage-hackers. That’s what truly drives players away.
5. Use AI for what it’s worth: Valve is working on an anti cheat that will use AI to determine the likely hood of a cheater, by looking at the inputs and what information the player has available. Nothing about reading permission levels and what not. In essence this anti cheat would catch anyone cheating be it by scripting, expensive harware hacks or anything we haven’t thought of yet. Basically acting like “human eyes” and letting us know when something seems off.

My PC, My Rules

At the end of the day, it comes down to a simple philosophy. We, the players, are the customers. We are not the enemy. We shouldn’t have to install a kernel-level rootkit that watches our every move just to prove our innocence every time we want to play a game.

The fight against cheating is important, but we can’t let it be the excuse for turning the most open and free gaming platform into a collection of locked-down, single-purpose appliances. We built our PCs for freedom, for power, and for choice. If we wanted a company to tell me what software we’re allowed to run, we would’ve just bought a console.

Game developers need to remember that. They need to trust their players more and find smarter, less invasive ways to protect their games. Because if they don’t, they risk destroying the very thing that makes PC gaming so special in the first place.