Let me be crystal clear: I hate kernel-level anti-cheat.

I’m not talking about a mild dislike, or a passing irritation. I mean deep, primal, disgust. The kind you feel when you realize the thing you paid for—your game, your entertainment, your free time—comes with a side of invasive rootkit-level surveillance masquerading as “protection.”

You call it BattlEye, Vanguard, Xigncode, whatever the hell you want. I call it corporate spyware with a EULA.

It’s MY Computer, Not Yours

Let’s get this straight: no anti-cheat—none—has any damn business installing itself at the kernel level, the most privileged layer of my operating system. You know who else runs code in the kernel?

Rootkits. Malware. Nation-state surveillance tools.

So, no, I don’t want your “proactive protection system” watching every process I launch, analyzing memory usage, intercepting system calls, and God-knows-what-else while I try to enjoy a couple hours of gaming. That’s not anti-cheat. That’s anti-user.

“But It’s Necessary to Stop Cheaters!”

Don’t feed me that line. You mean to tell me the only way to stop some 14-year-old aimbotting in Call of Duty: Disco Warfare 7 is to give you full access to the innermost sanctum of my machine? Are you serious?

There’s a difference between anti-cheat and carte blanche to run black-box software with system-level privileges. If your defense against wallhacks requires administrator rights on MY computer 24/7, your design is broken.

Cheaters are clever, sure. But so are malware authors. You know what they do? Exploit over-privileged software running in the kernel. You’ve just handed them one more juicy target.

I Didn’t Sign Up to Beta Test Your Surveillance System

Let’s talk about transparency. There isn’t any.

What does your anti-cheat actually do? What telemetry does it collect? What heuristics are used to flag me? Does it store that data? Share it? Sell it? Run in the background when I’m not even playing?

You won’t tell me. You’ve locked it up tighter than Fort Knox and buried it in an NDA-laced support email chain.

And don’t even get me started on false positives. I’ve seen legit players banned for running Discord overlays or having a debugger open from their job. Their appeals? Ignored. Labeled cheaters by automated judgment, with no accountability.

The Irony? You Still Don’t Stop Cheaters

And here’s the kicker. You’re still losing.

Despite all this Big Brother garbage, cheaters still infest games. ESPs, ragebots, HWID spoofers—they’re thriving. Know why?

Because you’re fighting a cat-and-mouse game with people who are smarter, faster, and more motivated than your overfunded security team. You’re just screwing over everyone else in the process.

Enough

I don’t want a rootkit with my copy of Rainbow Six. I don’t want a watchdog in the kernel just to enjoy Escape from Tarkov. I don’t want to sacrifice privacy, performance, or basic control over my system for the privilege of not being called a cheater.

You say your mission is to “keep the game clean.”

I say: start by getting out of my goddamn kernel.