As someone who has played a decent of competitive games in the past, it is less about them being extremely serious, and more about how much people cheating ruins the fun for everyone else.
For example, a soccer Sunday league might not be that serious, but you still wouldn't want someone frequently running on the pitch with a golf club and whacking the ball into your goal with no consequences.
GTA Online has this feeling at times. I always find it a refreshing distraction when somebody comes into a public server with obvious hacks and starts spawning bizarre weapons, vehicles, giving out money, changing the weather or day/night cycle abruptly, teleporting everyone to the same location. It's easy to leave to another server when it gets boring or frustrating, but these are the times when I put out the call on Discord for other non-currently-online friends to join me!
Those were easily worked around with unsigned drivers or physical hardware. Now Secure Boot is required to run Valorant games, which should be a harbinger for what will happen to your online banking experience if consumers allow this to continue.
Yeah that's why I stopped playing and hosting those games, ESEA Bitcoin mining scandal made me buy a physically isolated gaming machine with constant monitoring, and VM banning in EFT was the last drop. Valorant is the most paranoid and the biggest offender, but the others are close.
In PVP games, it's hard to have fun when there is any non-negligible amount of cheating, even if you're not playing seriously. This comment is a little like saying people who won't let you cheat in a board game are being "too serious". Maybe the more relevant disconnect is that you just don't like PVP games much...?
If on the other hand you're trying to imply that cheating in popular PVP games can be prevented without measures this extreme, as far as I know that's just wrong. It's an arms race and we've been at it long enough that we're at the hardware level now.
We're talking about a free to play (no cost to being banned) game without dedicated servers (no intimate community to police the servers). Cheaters always existed but the business model used exacerbated the problem.
Because competitive games with a cheater problem are dead games. I understand the desire to prevent cheating, and I think most players of those games are okay with it.
When it became more profitable to sell a 3D model for game's character than it was to sell the actual game.
The only point to these systems is companies wanting a total stranglehold on any way to play the game so that you cannot bypass their skin market.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing any of this, because it costs more to develop a root kit than it costs to just hand out a shitty server exe and let the community figure it out like was common in the past.
Video Game has to be one of the areas enshitification is most visible to me.
Unfinished games being released, no LAN, paywalled features, pay to win, games unusable after support ends, etc.
I think we are due for surge of people just playing classic games and boycotting all the new BS that is coming out. Piracy should be encouraged as a check and balance against shitty UX.
That's a well known risk when buying used hardware. I used to host a bunch of pretty popular servers for survival games many of which used hardware ID checks, and we had about a dozen people banned due to this in 5 years. These were high-profile clan players except for one case, they were absolutely transparent about this and these clans were under constant scrutiny by mods, but obviously we also conducted very thorough and manual investigations and never found any evidence or even a hint of foul play.
Not sure what well-known means, I don't think I'd ever heard of even the idea of hardware bans until now. Feels like banning a student's notebook because they took notes with it to cheat in school, rather than suspending or expelling the student.
It's really the only solution to minimize collateral damage while trying to effectively permanently ban someone from a free-to-play game that doesn't require ID verification.
Often, the only piece of info they collect from you is an e-mail address used to register an account. If you ban an e-mail address, creating a new one is trivial.
Banning an IP address has too much potential for collateral damage. You end up banning an entire household, or potentially an entire building. If you ban an IP that belongs to a VPN, you can easily end up blocking hundreds or even thousands of legitimate players.
Hardware bans are basically the best (or rather, the least bad) option. I challenge you to come with an alternative solution to be able to permanently ban a player without requiring ID verification or potentially affecting innocent players that can't be easily circumvented.
I'm not saying you can't use hardware as a factor in banning. I'm just saying there seem to be better ways of incorporating hardware checks to minimize harm to innocent people.
How about making the hardware ban temporary, like 3 months?
How about making it work when you see a consistent combination of hardware, like mobo and storage?
How about allowing unbanning of the hardware if someone sends you a notarized statement that they bought it from someone else?
> How about making the hardware ban temporary, like 3 months?
Actually not a bad idea...resort to long suspensions rather than outright permanent bans.
As long as detection and action are swift enough, if a cheater knows they'll be banned within an hour, then they'll likely get bored of cheating just to get banned an hour later every 3 months.
> If you ban an e-mail address, creating a new one is trivial.
For many people, getting a new CPU is pretty trivial too. They might as well just offer the option to pay a fee to get unbanned at that point. It would reduce waste.
> I challenge you to come with an alternative solution to be able to permanently ban a player without requiring ID verification or potentially affecting innocent players that can't be easily circumvented.
At least allow hardware+email overrides/allow-list. If someone has a banned cpu and they promise they're not the offender, why not allow them back on _with_ a fixed email address?
If they keep doing it, not like you won't notice by the time they're like "no really, the 4 other guys before me cheated, I bought this cpu from them".
Maybe well-known among people whose business it is to buy and sell hardware. I personally have never heard of this, and I imagine a strong majority of normal people buying hardware don't know either.
I've been building PCs for myself and on occasion, others for 20 years. I have been playing games for as long. I never knew CPU hardware IDs were used in game permabans.
1) The game or service is auto-banning players, not the community.
2) Player fingerprinting isn't CPU-only.
3) The hardware aftermarket contains every flagged component without exception.
The aspect I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the amount of money people will spend to cheat in a game for a limited amount of time. Simple account bans are useless against people who have no problem buying another copy, forever.
From my perspective, the unusual part of this claim is that OP's community hasn't gone invite-only like so many others. Open servers are a labor of love.
Yes, many adjacent communities either went private/invite-only or had many geoIP restrictions where it was possible. We insisted on being neutral, having as little rules as possible, and being semi-manually moderated, with a ton of tricks from our side (down to automating tracking the cheating alts). We even punished cheating blame drama and whining by kicking players out of hardcore servers. As a result we had cutthroat and fair pvp from the most dedicated teams in existence (especially in Ark, but 7dtd and Rust were standing out as well).
About a dozen, not dozens, over several years! These were global bans by the anticheat, not ours. We had EU servers in 5 games, with hundreds of active players per day on each of the two or three per game. It's not as niche as you think.
>that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
Since HN isn't familiar with the lengths cheaters and admins are willing to go in this cat and mouse game, here's some context: we had a healthy community with non-playing mods monitoring the game nearly 24/7 and wrote a lot of custom observability software, in particular to my knowledge we were the first to attempt eliminating duping in DayZ Mod (ArmA II - everything is client-side!), before DayZ Origins. Each player was tracked and recorded server-side, and observed by mods. I can safely say we never had a closet cheater operating on our servers for more than a week, and obvious ones for an hour. The longest time was a month, it was a highly respectable player, he was truly subtle and it was a big scandal after which he was provided with proofs and banished forever. Half of our server was Russians and about a quarter were Germans, in an era of brazen cheating in both communities, and HWID bans being relatively new (think early Rust/DayZ/7DtD/Ark's Great War and later on SCUM). In each case I'm talking about except for one guy, these were highly regarded players (which doesn't mean we trusted them, quite the opposite), and each move and fight between their clans was scrutinized by default, and recorded to be shown later. They came back after global bans and were fully transparent about what happened (they bought used PCs/laptops, not CPUs, and got immediately banned). Since such situations were highly unusual, we had to dig into a few days of activity of them and their clans manually, looking at each action and investigating possible info they weren't supposed to have. With all our experience absolutely nothing stood out, and we had to conclude they're clean and let them return.
When the hardware you bought snitches on you, it is clear that you do not own it. Somewhere we got thing ass-backward. The human tells the computer what it can/can't do, not the other way around.
This is not what is happening. The CPU simply has a hardware identifier, it's not 'snitching' on anyone. This has legitimate uses, can prevent things like the external packaging of the CPU being modified and sold as something else etc.
That some provider / service is limiting access to their platform based off of this is not some libre / freedom issue. It's unfortunate and probably should be tied to something else. The computer isn't doing anything wrong here.
Right, but I should be able to tell software the CPU id is whatever I want it to be. The hardware is going behind my back and talking to the software without my permission.
Na, we had this conversation decades ago now and yes unique identifiers on your cpu is your cpu snitching on you because this is exactly how it was going to be used. The manufacturer has no need to put it on there.
At least that is one game provider and you can still use the computer for normal usage and other game providers. At Nintendo Switch 2 they will completely block the device from accessing the online game center which is the only chance for downloading games when trying to use a cheat card or similar.
Everyone here is talking about how games shouldn't have the ability to do this while not understanding that without it, most online games (PVP specifically) turn into a cheaters paradise and ruin it for all paying customers.
Riot Vanguard has all but eliminated cheaters in Valorant (sporadic instances and DMA hardware can still be used), but the vast (99.9+%) of games are clean because of what they did. Customers place serious value in that.
This was not an issue until games chose to omit custom servers "For your protection" of course.
Counterstrike and TF2 have absurd problems with bots and cheats on official servers, but because you can just run it yourself, communities were able to handle those problems how they want, including some of them choosing to utilize rootkit level anti-cheat, but many don't, and don't have a serious problem with cheating.
I remember playing video games where cheating was trivial, and yet they just didn't have a serious problem, because the servers that didn't have someone moderating them and kicking out cheaters were terrible to play on regardless of cheating
Most of their audience don't want community servers. They want matchmaking.
Community servers are available in a lot of these games, for instance Counterstrike. What percentage of the playerbase plays on those?
And sure, let's say we do have community servers. You ban a player. It's free to make a new account. The player just instantly returns. You ban that account. The player returns. You ban that account, the player returns. You ban that account
..guess what happens! You haven't actually solved the problem.
The issue isn't the moderation, a good vote kick system will handle that. The issue is, how do you actually ban a cheater when there is zero cost (or extremely low cost) to create a new identity? You tie the identity to a harder to change, more expensive to chante, identifier.
I remember moderating community servers back in the day (I hosted hundreds) and essentially being helpless to actually stop people from rejoining. Ban their IP, they rejoin a few moments later from another IP. Ban their account ID, they're back with another account. Whack a mole all day long until they get bored.
I think at this point the issue is between the buyer and the reseller. If I bought a CPU and I wasn't able to play a game, I'd ask for a refund and ship back the CPU to them at their expense.
60 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadThis is more necessary with the rise of freemium games where the base account is trivially replaced and so banning people's accounts does nothing.
Not that paid games don't have cheating issues, but there's a limit on how much people are willing to spend getting rebanned regularly.
For example, a soccer Sunday league might not be that serious, but you still wouldn't want someone frequently running on the pitch with a golf club and whacking the ball into your goal with no consequences.
If on the other hand you're trying to imply that cheating in popular PVP games can be prevented without measures this extreme, as far as I know that's just wrong. It's an arms race and we've been at it long enough that we're at the hardware level now.
The only point to these systems is companies wanting a total stranglehold on any way to play the game so that you cannot bypass their skin market.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing any of this, because it costs more to develop a root kit than it costs to just hand out a shitty server exe and let the community figure it out like was common in the past.
Unfinished games being released, no LAN, paywalled features, pay to win, games unusable after support ends, etc.
I think we are due for surge of people just playing classic games and boycotting all the new BS that is coming out. Piracy should be encouraged as a check and balance against shitty UX.
It's really the only solution to minimize collateral damage while trying to effectively permanently ban someone from a free-to-play game that doesn't require ID verification.
Often, the only piece of info they collect from you is an e-mail address used to register an account. If you ban an e-mail address, creating a new one is trivial.
Banning an IP address has too much potential for collateral damage. You end up banning an entire household, or potentially an entire building. If you ban an IP that belongs to a VPN, you can easily end up blocking hundreds or even thousands of legitimate players.
Hardware bans are basically the best (or rather, the least bad) option. I challenge you to come with an alternative solution to be able to permanently ban a player without requiring ID verification or potentially affecting innocent players that can't be easily circumvented.
How about making the hardware ban temporary, like 3 months?
How about making it work when you see a consistent combination of hardware, like mobo and storage?
How about allowing unbanning of the hardware if someone sends you a notarized statement that they bought it from someone else?
Etc.
Actually not a bad idea...resort to long suspensions rather than outright permanent bans.
As long as detection and action are swift enough, if a cheater knows they'll be banned within an hour, then they'll likely get bored of cheating just to get banned an hour later every 3 months.
For many people, getting a new CPU is pretty trivial too. They might as well just offer the option to pay a fee to get unbanned at that point. It would reduce waste.
At least allow hardware+email overrides/allow-list. If someone has a banned cpu and they promise they're not the offender, why not allow them back on _with_ a fixed email address?
If they keep doing it, not like you won't notice by the time they're like "no really, the 4 other guys before me cheated, I bought this cpu from them".
I find a lot about this story exceedingly hard to believe.
1) a community of niche players has banned dozens of people due to HWID conflicts between their existing playerbase and their banned players.
2) that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
3) the hardware aftermarket is so small that the same players from within that niche community are swapping components unknowingly.
it' be more plausible for me personally to think that a CPU vendor fucked up on the HWID generation scheme.
2) Player fingerprinting isn't CPU-only.
3) The hardware aftermarket contains every flagged component without exception.
The aspect I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the amount of money people will spend to cheat in a game for a limited amount of time. Simple account bans are useless against people who have no problem buying another copy, forever.
From my perspective, the unusual part of this claim is that OP's community hasn't gone invite-only like so many others. Open servers are a labor of love.
>that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
Since HN isn't familiar with the lengths cheaters and admins are willing to go in this cat and mouse game, here's some context: we had a healthy community with non-playing mods monitoring the game nearly 24/7 and wrote a lot of custom observability software, in particular to my knowledge we were the first to attempt eliminating duping in DayZ Mod (ArmA II - everything is client-side!), before DayZ Origins. Each player was tracked and recorded server-side, and observed by mods. I can safely say we never had a closet cheater operating on our servers for more than a week, and obvious ones for an hour. The longest time was a month, it was a highly respectable player, he was truly subtle and it was a big scandal after which he was provided with proofs and banished forever. Half of our server was Russians and about a quarter were Germans, in an era of brazen cheating in both communities, and HWID bans being relatively new (think early Rust/DayZ/7DtD/Ark's Great War and later on SCUM). In each case I'm talking about except for one guy, these were highly regarded players (which doesn't mean we trusted them, quite the opposite), and each move and fight between their clans was scrutinized by default, and recorded to be shown later. They came back after global bans and were fully transparent about what happened (they bought used PCs/laptops, not CPUs, and got immediately banned). Since such situations were highly unusual, we had to dig into a few days of activity of them and their clans manually, looking at each action and investigating possible info they weren't supposed to have. With all our experience absolutely nothing stood out, and we had to conclude they're clean and let them return.
That some provider / service is limiting access to their platform based off of this is not some libre / freedom issue. It's unfortunate and probably should be tied to something else. The computer isn't doing anything wrong here.
It is an unfortunate situation.
Riot Vanguard has all but eliminated cheaters in Valorant (sporadic instances and DMA hardware can still be used), but the vast (99.9+%) of games are clean because of what they did. Customers place serious value in that.
Counterstrike and TF2 have absurd problems with bots and cheats on official servers, but because you can just run it yourself, communities were able to handle those problems how they want, including some of them choosing to utilize rootkit level anti-cheat, but many don't, and don't have a serious problem with cheating.
I remember playing video games where cheating was trivial, and yet they just didn't have a serious problem, because the servers that didn't have someone moderating them and kicking out cheaters were terrible to play on regardless of cheating
Most of their audience don't want community servers. They want matchmaking.
Community servers are available in a lot of these games, for instance Counterstrike. What percentage of the playerbase plays on those?
And sure, let's say we do have community servers. You ban a player. It's free to make a new account. The player just instantly returns. You ban that account. The player returns. You ban that account, the player returns. You ban that account ..guess what happens! You haven't actually solved the problem.
The issue isn't the moderation, a good vote kick system will handle that. The issue is, how do you actually ban a cheater when there is zero cost (or extremely low cost) to create a new identity? You tie the identity to a harder to change, more expensive to chante, identifier.
I remember moderating community servers back in the day (I hosted hundreds) and essentially being helpless to actually stop people from rejoining. Ban their IP, they rejoin a few moments later from another IP. Ban their account ID, they're back with another account. Whack a mole all day long until they get bored.
If they only bought a CPU and CPUs don't have serial IDs (since P3s and some kooky server CPUs), how could Valorant fingerprint it?
Each TPM 2.0 has a unique Endorsement Key (EK).
Thus, every CPU has a unique identifier, which assuming the fTPM is correct (big if), cannot be changed.
https://andrewmoore.ca/blog/post/anticheat-secure-boot-tpm/