The exact same thing happened to me with League of Legends. I was inexplicably banned for cheating, despite never having done any such thing (and despite regularly playing on three accounts (this is fully permitted), the other two of which were not banned!) Their support people repeatedly said "we reviewed your case and the ban is correct", etc. all the while giving zero information about what I did so I could correct it. I have a couple of the rarest skins in the game, and have played thousands of hours since 2009. I only play ARAM, so the suggestion I was risking my account of great sentimental value by cheating at the most casual mode in the game is beyond ridiculous. Anyway, nothing in gaming has ever stressed me out more. I got unbanned solely because of a contact in the industry who had it looked into, and the ban was inexplicably lifted. I still play, but I think about the false ban almost every time, and League will probably be the last competitive multiplayer game I ever put any time towards. Part of me doesn't want to play it anymore because I dread that happening again. :(
I feel that. I'm not against playing video games, but I'm uneasy about getting too attached to virtual property, considering it's controlled by a gaming company who has no obligation to you and no inclination to keep games alive beyond their shelf life.
To be fair though, real life property is only slightly less ephemeral.
Yeah for real, my Steam account could just be erased and I instantly lose like $1000 of games I "bought" (by some vague definition of the word). As soon as online-only services started becoming more prevalent, it became quickly apparent how ephemeral they are, and how unilaterally they can be taken away from me with zero recourse. "Don't get too attached", as they say >_>
Maybe take it as a signal from universe that intense gaming is waste of life and a net loss for you? I know its harsh and double that in gaming thread, but I don't see any other way. We don't talk 3-5h a week, and it seems neither are you.
You will almost certainly badly regret when on that proverbial death bed and most probably well before that, life goes darn fast and the feeling of losing out in the most important aspect of our existence - how well we live our lives is soul crushing. Its not that gaming hard is bad per se (apart from addictions and abysmal effect on health), but you are losing on much better aspects of life which are just out there for the grab.
Or don't take my word, just check what old people regret in their lives. Sure gaming is not there yet, but it will find its place firmly among too much work and not spending enough time on family and relationships, which are consistently on top.
I play games very little, a few hours a week. I am very social and not lacking in that area -- don't worry about me lol :) I don't engage in "intense gaming", notice how I said I've played since 2009, that's 16 years ago :P
I got a false permanent ban as well. Despite the fact that cheating is damn near impossible on consoles, and the fact that I worked way too long to get to an absolutely mediocre rank (gold 1) on ranked play, and the fact that I had never even had a warning or complaint for any behavior whatsoever, they permanently banned me with no explanation.
Unlike the blogpost, I just decided I would just never spend any money on an Activision product ever again. It's what everybody should do.
>>Despite the fact that cheating is damn near impossible on consoles
Unfortunately, aim assist devices for consoles are very widespread now and a big problem for competitive gaming.
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>>I had never even had a warning or complaint for any behavior whatsoever
That's the gold standard in the industry though, you don't warn(suspected) cheaters to not give them opportunity to adjust their tactics. Sorry you got caught by this unfairly.
> That's the gold standard in the industry though, you don't warn(suspected) cheaters to not give them opportunity to adjust their tactics.
Is this supposed to do any good? The actual cheater is still getting a signal that they've been detected, because they get banned. Then they figure out how, make a new account and go back to cheating.
Meanwhile the normal user is both confused and significantly more inconvenienced, because their rank etc. on the account you falsely banned was earned legitimately through hard work instead of low-effort cheating.
>>The actual cheater is still getting a signal that they've been detected, because they get banned.
So....yes. But there are mitigating tactics around this, I really recommend looking into it because it's a fascinating topic. As the simplest thing - you don't ban cheaters the moment they are detected to not give off how you detected them. That's why Activision bans people in waves and all at once, even though they know some people are cheating and still active. Unfortunately a lot of people are paying for cheats nowadays, and the cheat makers usually have some kind of refund policy where if you get detected you get your money back - games companies want to inconvenience those buyers as much as possible, so you can't claim your refund straight away because hey, the game worked for a good while even while you were cheating, must have been something else :P
>>Meanwhile the normal user is both confused and significantly more inconvenienced
Yes, which is why the aim is to have 0 legitimate players getting caught by this, obviously.
>> Yes, which is why the aim is to have 0 legitimate players getting caught by this, obviously.
One thing this is missing is that forcing addicted players to buy again helps bring in the cash flow, so what a few legit people got wrapped up, enough buy back the equation for the shadier game companies (usually the big ones) will go ahead and never rescind a ban.
Literally no one does this in the industry, even if it sounds like a great idea on paper. Every big publisher knows that cheaters always bring negative cashflow to your company because they put off other players from playing. A single cheater in a 20 player game can put half of them off playing again, tarnishing your reputation at the same time. There is no universe in which "we'll just make cheaters buy our game again" makes any financial or any other sense - the goal is to get them to stop playing, permanently, and be enough of a pain in the ass that they never buy your game again.
>> so what a few legit people got wrapped up, enough buy back the equation
I've never seen any data that would support this. It just doesn't happen - if you accidentally ban a legit player they just get really pissed off and there's about 0% chance they will give you money again. Which is why you try extremely hard to not do that.
I used to work at a game company fresh out of college, and this is simply untrue. The company made roughly 40% of sales from cheater whales (one can imagine how much the chest makers made), and there were guidelines on repeated bans where we recognized similarities to make sure we wouldn't ban them again too early.
I left the industry because of thah and the other things like loot boxes and matchmaking for profit and to push micro transactions. It's a terrible place.
I guess you worked somewhere where that was considered a good business strategy then. I worked at a large publisher for over 10 years on couple big competitive titles and the idea always was to get cheaters off our service asap and permanently, no matter their spend(in fact we couldn't see that and it never made any impact on our engineering decisions around the problem).
>>It's a terrible place.
Some companies sure.
And yes sorry I realize I said "no one does this" - let me correct myself to say that in my experience at a couple big publishers this isn't a strategy anyone pursues because it's not worth the losses to your legit playerbase and reputation. But there might be companies that do this, I concede.
The problem is obviously the same as in many other industries - how do you distinguish honest legitimate players who swear they haven't cheated from people who will say anything to get you to unban them. I don't work in that department personally, but I've seen reports shared internally where the player literally went to local news station to say how unfairly they are treated and how we banned him without any info or any reason and how it's affecting his mental health and his family and he basically made a huge stink around it, and then we pull up the ban report for his account and we clearly see a screenshot from his machine where he's running cheat engine with cheats for our game enabled. Some people will just lie through their teeth to get their way. So you have to rely on what you know with absolute certainty - you detected something that is absolutely indicative of cheating? You ban them. Anything else is a no no. At least where I used to work no one used any kind of algorithm for automatic bans, those were only used for manually reviewed cases where someone would actually watch a replay of your game before issuing a ban.
Does that mean the system is foolproof? No, of course not. But banning honest paying users is a huge risk to any business - so obviously no one wants to do that, every system like this errs on the side of caution by default for that reason alone.
And obvious disclaimer - I can only comment on my own experiences, I have no idea what every company out there is doing.
> how do you distinguish honest legitimate players who swear they haven't cheated from people who will say anything to get you to unban them.
It's mostly not about the appeals process. You want to avoid the false positive accusations to begin with.
> and then we pull up the ban report for his account and we clearly see a screenshot from his machine where he's running cheat engine with cheats for our game enabled.
Hypothetically things like this can happen where someone is reusing passwords that end up in a data breach and then some script kiddie gets their hands on it and wants to dip their toes into some cheating without risking their own account. Then you have the original account holder screaming at you because they know they didn't cheat.
Or they could just be cheaters who doth protest too much.
But there are ways you can at least try to distinguish these things, e.g. did the cheating happen on the same PC or IP address the account normally uses?
> Does that mean the system is foolproof? No, of course not. But banning honest paying users is a huge risk to any business - so obviously no one wants to do that, every system like this errs on the side of caution by default for that reason alone.
It's apparently failing enough that this thread has multiple people saying they've experienced false positives, and it doesn't seem like they're interested in getting their accounts back.
Well I don't know if it's universally true for every single cheat, but cheat makers do in fact offer refunds/compensation if your account gets banned. As ths simplest example:
The intent is usually to gather data then ban in waves. If a new tool comes out and you ban a couple of players the tool authors might figure out why and update it. Let it sit a while and you can get hundreds/thousands of players who get a message to rethink their choice to cheat.
An additional benefit is that this can include multiple cheat programs and versions in one ban wave, so it may be harder to narrow down exactly what the flaw was. That's the why for no warnings (or explanations) - false positives and recourse if mistakenly flagged is another matter entirely.
> An additional benefit is that this can include multiple cheat programs and versions in one ban wave, so it may be harder to narrow down exactly what the flaw was.
That seems like it could go the other way. There are five cheat programs that each have a dozen versions and now you know that everybody using program A and D got banned, the people using program C and E didn't, and the people using program B got banned but only if they were using version 1.2 or lower and not exclusively version 1.3 where they added a new anti-detection method that A and D don't use and C and E do. Now they know what to do.
Whereas if you ban them as soon as you can detect them, the people using program B get banned before version 1.3 is even out, they have to issue all of those refunds immediately and stop getting sales because their cheat stops working now instead of months from now, and then version 1.3 may not ever get released. Now all they know is that C and E are doing something the others weren't, but that could have been any of a dozen things so A and D don't know what to change.
Doing it that way also has another major problem: Suppose you do the ban wave. Do the people using the existing known detectable cheats now get to make new accounts and keep cheating? If you ban them again right away then the cheat makers get to keep making variants until that stops happening, but if you don't then the game is back to being full of cheaters the next day and the cheat makers are still making money selling the old detectable cheats to fund the development of undetectable ones.
Yeah that makes sense, if they collaborate and share information. But more-so it avoids the case where a patch drops then people suddenly get banned - it's easier to match the exact version and what changed or is different compared to others on the market that avoided it, which I think they want to avoid most.
I think ultimately it's to avoid devoting too many resources to the arms race by breaking it up into sprints. Mass ban waves also make community impact and news, and in some cases for the regular players it refreshes the scene just for a bit by clearing the muck. They can time it to coincide with in-game events or updates too then (which often break cheats), giving a window for non-cheaters to enjoy.
I mean "then they figure out how" and "make a new account" are each doing quite a bit of the heavy lifting here.
Using Activision as the example, when they do a mass ban after you've been cheating for 4 months straight how exactly are you going to figure out how it happened?
Isn't the whole point of the ban that it's not as simple as just "make a new account?" Isn't it tied to the PS+ / XBox Gold membership, or even the physical hardware?
> Using Activision as the example, when they do a mass ban after you've been cheating for 4 months straight how exactly are you going to figure out how it happened?
How are you going to figure out how it happened if it happens after one day? There are different methods of cheating and the cheaters start favoring the ones that didn't get banned over the ones that did. The cheat makers who got banned snoop the telemetry the game is sending to detect cheating to determine if there is any detectable difference between what the game sends when their cheat is installed and when it isn't etc.
> Isn't the whole point of the ban that it's not as simple as just "make a new account?" Isn't it tied to the PS+ / XBox Gold membership, or even the physical hardware?
Tying it to a membership means they just create a new membership, which isn't a deterrent to anyone who is either only playing your game (so can cancel the old one) or likes cheating enough to pay for a separate membership in order to cheat. It might deter the people who can't afford to do that and are also using their subscription for other games, but banning them immediately instead of in waves would do the same thing.
Tying it to the physical hardware seems kind of pointless. They'd just buy a new device using the money they got from selling the old one to someone who probably won't realize it's banned from that game until after the return period expires. Also, then you've banned the innocent second hand purchaser of the device instead of the actual cheater.
> This ban also ruined other games for me. If I ever did well in a game, someone would look at my profile to see how many hours I have and instantly see the red marker that shows “I am a cheater”.
I wonder if that label can be considered to be libel. Probably harder in the US, but from what I understand in UK (or just England?) the defendant must prove that it's true.
For context, (I assume) this is referencing the Horizon IT Scandal in which faulty accounting software used by post offices in the UK indicated there were financial discrepencies suggesting embezzlement, and over 900 innocent people were convicted of crimes that never happened.
Holy ….. what a fight you had to do. So glad i hardly play any mulitiplayer shooter games. I’d hate to have my insane Steam library stripped away from me.
Maybe he was banned because as a developer, he had development tools installed on his machine, which increased the odds of him being labeled as a potential cheater.
Sometimes I even wonder if other hackers could not hack the machine or other players, to install a software that triggers anti-cheat system: it becomes then difficult to lift the ban.
>Sometimes I even wonder if other hackers could not hack the machine or other players, to install a software that triggers anti-cheat system: it becomes then difficult to lift the ban.
Also I wish more "good" hackers were in games, like the guy in GTA Online I ran into once who was shooting me with a money machine gun because Rockstar are greedy assholes.
> Also I wish more "good" hackers were in games, like the guy in GTA Online I ran into once who was shooting me with a money machine gun because Rockstar are greedy assholes.
Eh? Rockstar doesn't force you to buy Shark Cards, and everyone has gotten 11 years worth of DLCs for free. Making in-game money IS an essential part of the game. You also don't have to purchase every single vehicle or other item the game offers.
During my years of playing, I've met only a few cheaters who weren't complete douchebags (though some of them did act that way towards other players). I consider the "good" cheater to be a myth.
The "eh?" should be directed back at your comment, how you casually omit that microtransactions and the incentives to purchase them have become a central part of modern game design. In the end, how much of an issue you rank this to be entirely depends on your weekly play hours. Maybe you just play so much as to have no issues to unlock best in class content from DLCs (most notably cars in GTAV).
Unfortunately, a quick search didn't yield anybody doing math like for the Star Wars: Battlefront (new) debacle.[1][2]
PS: The non-microtransactional design goal in multiplayer games will optimize for more play time.[3] How convenient to offer purchasable shortcuts.
Interesting stuff! Though I don’t get why b00lin would have to prove that they weren’t cheating. This is not a criminal case, but still. Activision was denying access to a service that was paid for.
Honestly I'd prefer it if games could permaban based on just heuristics and the EULA simply stated "tough luck, buy the game again". I'd happily pay for that, knowing my money is at least not going to some 2 year legal fight.
I get that I might be the one accused of cheating next time. But if that risk is tiny and the cost when it happens is $50 or $100 it sounds a lot more attractive than the alternative.
Also (obviously) I don't care about the account itself. I wouldn't play a game where I aggregate long term stats/items/status/whatever.
In a perfect world you just have private servers where you can have 90% effective anticheat and have humans sort out the rest.
I think stat based bans are the ultimate solution for all the client side bullshit.
If you use statistics, you will sometimes get it wrong, but in the other cases the cheaters are completely out of luck. You could offer the source code to your game willingly and it wouldn't help them very much.
If the cost of a false positive is $50 for the gamer and the chance of it happening is rare, I think many would quickly understand the value proposition from a game experience perspective.
Assuming your false negative rate is low (I.e., you have high classification margins), you can make it extremely undesirable for players to engage in unfair play. Even soft cheating like aiding teammates with streaming and discord side channels could get picked up by these techniques.
I feel like pretty much all cheaters can be detected by just looking at mouse movements vs enemy positions. If you can easily spot cheaters through a killcam or spectator view, they can be detected through a serverside watchdog, no?
Unfortunately the cheats are way ahead of this. Most modern aimbots in shooters like Counter-Strike are (intentionally) not-obvious. They give minor advantages and do tiny corrections for an already-immensely-skilled player to gain a small edge. In a game where the difference between a great player and an elite player is small, they can be the invisible difference maker.
>I think many would quickly understand the value proposition
I think thousands of innocent teenagers without credit cards will be furious. Not to mention anyone that takes a game semi-seriously and cares about their reputation after getting banned. Also, with real-dollar values tied to skins, you’re not just nuking someone’s $50 account — accounts and their associated items can be worth a lot of money.
Anti-cheats should need to be certain. They should also, however, ban the hardware ID, which lots of games companies choose not to do (because they’d lose money).
Nah, that won't do it. Even if you had a rare false positive rate, it would be significantly higher for players with a profile similar to ones that trigger bans.
It would be even worse than the bans some developers hand out now because their inherit randomness would be essentially just that. Not acceptable for any form of service.
