'Anyone mad is a cheater:' Players are divided as Rust beefs up anti-cheat with more effective—and invasive—upgrades

Unfortunately, you can't tell the story of Rust without including its "cheat community," which Facepunch COO Alistair McFarlane once said routinely harasses and threatens the game's developers when it's not, you know, cheating. The latest measure the studio is taking to keep up with cheat makers is one you'll find familiar if you've tried to play a game like Highguard or Battlefield 6 recently: Secure Boot and Trusted Platform Module (TPM) requirements.

The news came in a statement on X where McFarlane stated, "From March, server owners will be able to opt in and only allow connections to players who have Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 enabled … we’ll be reviewing the metrics and expect to move towards making this mandatory across all servers."

He added that these requirements are "increasingly standard" in the competitive multiplayer space, which is true. Black Ops 7 went for it, and invasive anti-cheat strategies that get all up in your operating system's kernel-level business are as apparently effective as they are sometimes reviled, despite the occasional terrible mishap (like one case where Genshin Impact's kernel-level anti-cheat was leveraged to disable antivirus processes). The blowing winds of shifting anti-cheat standards were also cited by McFarlane as the reason Rust isn't coming to Linux or Proton.

This decision has both fans and detractors. One comment from Shot-Buy6013 on a Reddit thread reads, "Anyone who sunk a decent chunk of time into video games or improving them will be 100% for reducing the amount of cheating." A retort from user psychoPiper states, "Fuck the people that love to game but can't afford to upgrade I guess."

User f30jayden on the same thread simply commented, "Anyone mad is a cheater." Perhaps to lament the preconditions that begat the change rather than the change itself, user llamafacetx commented "Rust becoming competitive was a mistake."

It's possible the opt-in nature of this change will satisfy all parties for the time being, but as McFarlane said in his post, it seems likely that the requirements will eventually become mandatory.