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Comment by Permit | Hacker News Reader

One thing that may surprise HN readers is the widespread support some of these tactics have among the gaming community. I distinctly remember Shroud (a popular Twitch streamer and former CS:GO professional) asking for this (for PUBG) in 2018. I remember Chocotaco (another popular Twitch streamer) voicing support for South Korean laws[1] that criminalize cheating in video games.

It's harder to quantify support among typical players, but I imagine it's much higher than we might expect. People really hate cheating in videogames.

[1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/console/south-korea-cracks-dow...

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Criminalizing cheating in a game is insanity and I am shocked and appalled that this idea has so many supportive comments here. Here in the civilized world we should only be criminalizing conduct that causes actual harm. Not conduct that causes occasional frustration. What’s next? Shall we send the slippery fingered Monopoly Banker to actual jail, too? We’re talking about a game FFS.

Cheating in professional sports sometimes gets addressed by Congress, and that, too, is cheating in a game.

While I don’t think we should be putting cheaters in jail, I wish bans could stick harder, even across games. VAC does this to a certain extent, but only for some games. A shared database of cheaters that companies could use would be nice, but of course the sticking point is identity.

The current setup is a bit like if getting DUI’s only suspended your driver’s license in the particular town or stretch of highway where you got the DUI, and you were free to continue driving anywhere else.

People get actually killed due to DUI.

And are there going to be any limits to this? If you cheat on a game when you're 13 by downloading some aimbot and get caught should you still be banned from all gaming when you turn 50? And will there be any kind of halfway transparent appeals process or is this going to work like all the other corporate run Kafkaesque bans we see every other day on HN?

I may be wrong, but I believe South Korea has a centralized identity system that game companies use so this kind of thing can be tracked and enforced. I wouldn't be against a similar system being used in the USA.

Yes - all players in SK essentially require identity verification. Using other's is a crime. Cheating is generally not directly prosecuted, but in other part of fraud/gang activity such as illegal match fixing, betting, fraudulent gains (tournaments), etc.

At least in the US I cannot think of any cheats that don't violate the CFAA/DMCA.

I wouldn’t be either, except that IIRC in South Korea you use your social security number, and I don’t imagine Americans (or other Westerners) will be comfortable with handing that over to gaming companies.

PBBans does this.

At the highest level of play, players who cheat to gain and advantage could be causing actual financial harm to others. The professional scenes of these games involve non-trivial amounts of money.

The sad thing is that in the professional scene you have a lot of players who are legitimately very good, but who still use the cheats to gain an edge.

The solutions to these problems are mercurial and at some point unless you get the players in one physical space with controlled/organizer supplied hardware it’s impossible to keep things clean but it is a real problem and it has real consequences for players who compete at that level.

Define actual harm. You don't seem to hold the time of people who play games very highly.

If wasting time is a crime, we should also make long checkout lines and traffic jams illegal while we’re at it.

But imagine if someone built purpose-built software for causing traffic jams, and a large community of regular users make traffic jams 5 times more common than they used to be. I don't say this out of any personal animus, I don't drive very often myself, but I think it would be reasonable to start talking about criminal penalties. At some point you have to be able to defend the commons, no?

>But imagine if someone built purpose-built software for causing traffic jams, and a large community of regular users make traffic jams 5 times more common than they used to be.

What's the difference between that and someone who simply drives bad/slow? Do they get a pass because it doesn't have "purpose-built software"? Or is it because they're not acting as a group? If cheaters are not acting in a coordinated way, do they get a free pass as well?

The difference is intent, and this is a core consideration of our justice system.

So people using excessive amounts of coupons and/or change at checkouts should be sanctioned as well?

Can you not tell the difference between someone intending to save money (or pay their bill) and intending to slow others down?

You could make the argument that cheaters are trying to "have fun"/"win" as well, albeit in a way that negatively affects others.

I haven't seen excessive coupon use banned, but I actually have seen a store make that person wait until the rest of the shoppers cleared the line. Very satisfying.

I’m a gamer. I value my time a lot. I hate cheaters. But I don’t think anyone’s civil liberties should be curtailed because they cheat in a game. And if we’re all going to be so outraged by people wasting gamers’ time then 95% of mobile games would be criminal.

Do you want to fine people for cheating? Whatever. But branding someone a criminal (for life!) over a game is ridiculous.

If wasting people's time is a crime, pretty much every advertiser and marketer in existence is commiting a crime.... Actually I might be able to get behind this idea.

In the federal US courts it's usually defined like this:

(A) General Rule.—Subject to the exclusions in subdivision (D), loss is the greater of actual loss or intended loss. (i) Actual Loss.—“Actual loss” means the reasonably foreseeable pecuniary harm that resulted from the offense. (ii) Intended Loss.—“Intended loss” (I) means the pecuniary harm that the defendant purposely sought to inflict; and (II) includes intended pecuniary harm that would have been impossible or unlikely to occur (e.g., as in a government sting operation, or an insurance fraud in which the claim exceeded the insured value).

I was thinking about this too, given recent events like Titanfall being pulled from sale due to the rampant cheating (which also led to many players abandoning the game before, leading to very low sales).

People cheating (and especially people making and selling cheats) cause actual harm to the publisher of the game for starters, by making the game worse for all legitimate players.

That's a very narrow interpretation.

World of warcraft at some point reached a required level of farming where it was assumed that you needed a bot to just participate in endgame content (lot of material to gather and side quests), or devote your entire life (16 hours) to repetitive actions.

How you manage that?

What about cheating in single player in games that do have also a multiplayer components?

How about monster hunter, many people cheated in that game because the end game farming is unsustainable, however once the equipment is cheated, it's possible to play and really enjoy the endgame content.

It would be so detrimental to ban cheating.

There are games that are made with cheating presumed (e. g. Ultima online)

I'm not advocating criminalizing it, but it is essentially fraud in some contexts, especially where there's direct or indirect compensation for the players.

Would that then not be covered by extant laws?

Yeah, and it is sometimes prosecuted under existing laws in that case. For example several people were successfully prosecuted in 2013 for a match-fixing scandal in English football: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_English_football_match-fi...

I don't know. I think disturbing the peace laws are generally reasonable, which essentially boils down to the same thing. You don't have a right to annoy others for your own entertainment.

Criminalizing (i.e. permanent record, can't ever take certain jobs) is probably to far i 99.99% of the cases.

Fining people who keeps on annoying others in a public context for no good reason (e.g. only for their own amusement) should be fine either they cheat in games, keep people awake at night by playing loud music in streets where this isn't common, harass kids playing on the playground etc etc.

Edits: yes. Mostly clarification.

Cheating in a video game does cause actual harm. And there are plenty of analogous actions that would be criminal in real life. For example if some dude came and interfered with your tennis game every week, that would be harassment and probably trespassing, even if the only thing that person did was to interfere with your tennis game.

You only cheat because you suck and that's the only way you enjoy the game. It takes time to get into the gaming flow, and enjoy the pastime, and cheating ruins this investment.

When I pay $100 for a game, and cheaters make me stop playing, I have been harmed with a wasted $100 plus hours of frustration. If you're too shallow and emotionally unintelligent to pick this arithmetic up, it's on you I guess.

With gaming NFTs going they way they are, cheating in games may become actual financial crimes in the near future.

I think most people don't fully understand the implications of things like this - it's not obvious in normal usage, so how would they? Cheating in online games is salient, but if you told the average person they had a program running on their computer, I imagine their answer would be "so?"

But if it was clearly pointed out in the OS, and the OS said something along the lines of:

"Riot anti-cheat is running in the background. This program may monitor all of your activity on this computer and track your physical location while you use your computer."

...more people might have some second thoughts.

> This program may monitor all of your activity on this computer and track your physical location while you use your computer.

This is just disingenuous.

If you are talking about what could technically be done, then sure, they could do that. But if they wanted to own your machine then they technically could do it the moment you installed any software that they provided regardless of what it says in the EULA.

So then you must be talking about what they are legally allowed to do. And guess what, they also have a privacy policy that limits what information they are allowed to collect and for what purpose they may collect it. Them carving out the legal ability to run programs on your machine for anti-cheat purposes doesn't change any of that.

Now I'm not saying you might not have other reasons for not wanting to run their crap on your machine (I certainly don't want it either) but this here is just FUD and not a good argument.

>If you are talking about what could technically be done, then sure, they could do that. But if they wanted to own your machine then they technically could do it the moment you installed any software that they provided regardless of what it says in the EULA.

Yes, I am talking about what could technically be done, not what could legally be done. That's the only thing the OS is in a position to know about.

Yes, they technically could do all of this the moment you install any software, on current desktop OSes. Don't you think that's a problem? Is that the best we can do for OS security?

You said earlier: > I think most people don't fully understand the implications of things like this

The "things like this" of which you speak were presumably to do with the topic at hand, which is a legal text.

You didn't provide any reason to suspect that your complaint was generally about OS security. But sure. It would be great if desktop OSes were capability based.

It just doesn't seem relevant to the issue at hand.

It's relevant insofar as granting a program that level of access in a capability based OS would be the exception, not the norm.

Today's OSes aren't in a position to make such a statement at all as they don't keep such tight control over a program's authority. But in a capability based OS, it would be - so a program that's in a position to monitor all your activity on your computer can be easily called out as such.

In other words, the notifications I mentioned that I'd like to see are only really practical in a capability-style system.

Caveat emptor allows me to assume the worst. Plus nobody is actually reading the EULAs every month to find the legalese clause that allows them to collect and sell even more of your data.

Yeah, although wrongly. The "may" there is a bit of a weasel word. Literally, it only indicates possibility, but lay-people read "may" as indicating probability. To a nerd, whether something is technically possible is interesting, but what ordinary folks want to know is whether Riot is likely to be acting against their interests (i.e. selling location or activity information to third parties, vs. simply conducting whatever monitoring they deem necessary to ensure cheats are not being deployed).

Fair - replace "may" with "is able to," and my statement still stands.

That type of language is up front and center every time you get a UAC prompt in Windows. Doesn't seem to do much. You'd really need to put the message forward, far more so than is warranted by any probability of actual harm, to get 99% of users to feel anything about it one way or another.

> This program may monitor all of your activity on this computer and track your physical location while you use your computer.

What incentive would they have to do that? They currently are making ridiculous amounts of money and you think they're going to risk all of that to know trivial details about you? Most people aren't that interesting and the information that could be obtained is worth far, far less than the money they make by keeping their player base happy.

A remote exploit in Vanguard is a much more reasonable concern.

"They currently are making ridiculous amounts of money and you think they're going to risk all of that to know trivial details about you?"

I hear this argument for the unlikelihood of corporate malfeasance all the time.

But look all throughout history and you'll see countless examples of very rich and powerful people and corporations taking extreme risks, including doing massively illegal things or risking consumer outrage and loss of good will.

It doesn't help that the real-world consequences of such acts are often just slaps on the wrist, no matter how illegal/immoral/reputation-trashing the acts might be. Very rarely do the rich and powerful suffer severe personal consequences... usually they can buy their way out or exit with a big bonus and just get hired somewhere else that's happy to turn a blind eye to their past (or might even prefer to work with sleazy/corrupt types)... and the public's memory is short.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting Riot would do anything underhanded.

Ironically, the idea that only Riot will ever be able to leverage the capabilities of this software service is probably why many don’t mind running it.

Unfortunately, that idea is flawed for the much the same reason the idea of backdooring encryption algorithms is flawed.

> Ironically, the idea that only Riot will ever be able to leverage the capabilities of this software service is probably why many don’t mind running it.

Just wait until someone finds a vulnerability in Riot's anti-cheat software and abuses it for more sinister purposes. No software is ever completely bug-free.

Some of the most profitable companies in the world today are in the business of collecting seemingly menial metadata about you, creating a profile, and leveraging/selling it.

I actually have no problem with criminalizing cheating to some extent, I’m not actually sure you need new laws for that since it should fall under existing computer misuse legislation and arguably you can also make a case for harassment and public nuisance.

Even without it being a full on felony in jurisdictions that have that distinction it should expose you to civil suits because you are degrading a service and costing the company money.

If you break into a paintball arena for example and start running around shooting everyone with your own gun you probably will get the cops called on you and they’ll drag you out and charge you with something. And heck even without breaking in if you simply disregard the rules and don’t leave when asked the cops will be called.

That said you can support all of this without supporting being forced to install root kits and handing over the control of your devices to the game developer or publisher. The same goes for DRM, I honestly don’t see a problem if someone goes to jail for piracy I do care when companies use terrible DRM to protect their products.

> I actually have no problem with criminalizing cheating to some extent

If it is criminal to cheat it is not a game anymore.

On the other hand I would welcome hazard game regulations for all games with lottery ticket like products for sale, like "loot boxes".

> On the other hand I would welcome hazard game regulations for all games with lottery ticket like products for sale, like "loot boxes".

...especially with all the YouTube advertising. I see advertisements for these (what is essentially) gambling games quite frequently on YouTube. "One free spin if you use code XXXXX, guys! Go download it now!" type of stuff. They obviously get a kickback from these ads.

The audience for these types of channels are mostly going to be young / teenage boys. They know exactly what they're doing, and personally I find it despicable and harrowing that YouTube entertain this.

Try Googling "gachapon" to get an idea of how bad the epidemic is globally. These games have existed for a good while in Japan and China, and their sole purpose is to extract value out of people with obvious impulse problems (in both the real-life and digital incarnations). It's really just the abuse of capitalism driven to it's extremes; game companies will go "whale hunting" to try and create situations where limited-time assets can only be acquired through insane spending, and repeat it until their users either quit or run out of money. Seeing all this talk of incorporating Web3 into everything only makes me afraid of our gacha-ized future.

>If it is criminal to cheat it is not a game anymore.

It never has been a game in the sense you're implying here, that's to say as an informal arrangement, you're literally signing a TOS for a piece of software you're going to use abiding by some rules, it just happens to be a 'videogame'.

And I don't just mean it it in a pedantic sense, but a lot of these games involve money, either by paying for the game or by paying for content, not just gambling, and if someone ruins a product you paid for that's pretty bad.

But it is in no way worse to cheat in eg. Fortnite than in a board game like Monopoly.

Also, the TOS is not legally binding in a contract sense, especially since minors are "literally signing" it, which they have no power to do.

I'm not sure concerning the details in regards to minors, but terms of service are legally binding contracts, although enforcement depends on the details of any given contract. Terms of service lawsuits absolutely do exist, both by companies as well as by customers. You may remember the George Hotz / Sony lawsuit over jailbreaking the playstation.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/safeselling/...

> But it is in no way worse to cheat in eg. Fortnite than in a board game like Monopoly.

If you cheat in Monopoly, I can simply not play with you anymore. This is not true of Fortnite. You also have the potential to impact a much higher number of people cheating in Fortnite.

I’m pretty sure it’s already criminal to use “hacks” to cheat. Abuse of game mechanics shouldn’t fall under that, tho I have no issue with banning people who do it knowingly and repeatedly after it’s been made clear it’s not an intended mechanic.

We do (try) prevent cheating in sports and other games and ban players and in fact whole countries for cheating. Try cheating in a casino for example, card counting may get you thrown out, hacking a slot machine would land you in jail.

Loot boxes are another issue they should be regulated as gambling I have no issue with thst.

>I’m pretty sure it’s already criminal to use “hacks” to cheat

Server-side yes...client-side NO. You can do with you computer and the software running on it ~whatever you want...and you can throw TOS is the bin...TOS are not laws, more like unsigned contracts.

I'm okay with criminal laws that punish people for cheating in games that have cash prizes but I really don't want to see that applied to everyday games.

Let's so for old times sake I organize a lanparty with my friends from HS and during this event someone decides to turn on no clip to surprise their friends. Should this be criminal?

It depends on the harm done. Obviously if you’re playing with your friends there is likely no harm done.

If you’re wasting 50+ other people’s time (e.g. FPS battle arenas) then you might want a harsher punishment.

Of course there are degrees; I don’t think people should be thrown in jail for cheating in casual matches/pubs.

But then if you cheat in a tournament where there are hundreds of thousands of $$$ at stake, jail time might be appropriate.

> But then if you cheat in a tournament where there are hundreds of thousands of $$$ at stake, jail time might be appropriate.

Please no. I mean athletes are not thrown in jail for doping in most places. If cheating are to be illegal, it needs gambling regulation and supervision, even if just for pros. And I don't think that would end well.

https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/2015_Match-Fixing_Scandal#...

If you paid to attend an event and someone was disrupting it are you happy with the venue calling the police to come and deal with them so the event can resume?

I often cheat, modify and use other people's save game file in single player games. Technically this is already against the ToS.

Of course videogames aren't just a game anymore, they are a billion dollar entertainment industry.

> If it is criminal to cheat it is not a game anymore.

So Poker, Blackjack, etc aren't games now? There are plenty of circumstances where it'd be illegal to cheat in games.

>If you break into a paintball arena for example and start running around shooting everyone with your own gun you probably will get the cops called on you and they’ll drag you out and charge you with something.

"your own gun" meaning a gun that fires bullets, or a paintball gun that's more powerful than that's allowed by regulations? If it's the former the police would be dragging you away because you're literally putting holes in people, but the latter case I'm skeptical they'll do anything. Are they going to arrest a competition bicyclist when they find out that they had a hidden motor in their bike?

One could warn them to stop using their own equipment and then tell them to leave. If they don't, then you might start thinking about calling it Trespassing.

Right, but even in that circumstance I doubt the police (or any part of the justice system) is going to punish you for it. At worst you'll be asked to leave and the police will only show up if you refuse to do so. You're not allowed to bring your own snacks/beverages at a movie theater either, but the police isn't going to arrest you for it unless you refuse to leave.

Do you know how many unintended consequences that criminalizing cheating in video games are going to have? Many, many things can be defined as though it is a "game" or even a "video game".

This is such a terrible policy decision, that I very much hope that no old fart in the US house or Senate ever has this idea. I worry every time that AOC plays league because she may run into the xearth scripter who causes here to have this very same "insight".

Again I stated that I don’t think new legislation is required computer misuse acts and civil litigation is more than adequate currently, ban cheaters find a way to issue a restraining order to prevent them from using your service and if they disobey it they are facing contempt which is a criminal offense.

For the people that make money off selling cheats and or are disrupting the service at scale current laws that cover computer misuse should be sufficient.

I am perfectly happy to have the book thrown at someone who hacks say a Minecraft server to fuck with someone just as I’m happy to see someone who breaks into someones property and ransacks it.

Computer misuse, trespassing, public nuisance and property damage are already criminal offenses.

Cheating in an online video game can easily fall into one or more of those categories.

I'm a game developer; the demand from players for these measures is loud and persistent.

The thing is that they're reasonably effective tools, and the harm, pain and misery caused by griefers and cheaters is real and widespread.

And there's not really much of a technical alternative; the only other response to something like an aimbot is to design such that good aim isn't an advantage, and now you have a totally different game.

Another thing that may surprise HN readers is people are willing to pay for a stronger os level anti-cheat. When I used to play CS:GO a lot of higher level players would play on ESEA [1] or FACEIT [2] specifically because they had better cheat detection. Essentially an anti cheat, ladder, and matchmaking service provided by a 3rd party for a subscription.

Players want cheater free games.

[1] https://play.esea.net/ [2] https://www.faceit.com/

"I distinctly remember Shroud (a popular Twitch streamer and former CS:GO professional) asking for this (for PUBG) in 2018. I remember Chocotaco (another popular Twitch streamer) voicing support for South Korean laws[1] that criminalize cheating in video games."

And what are the 99.9999% other players' opinion on this approach? Surely their collective voices weigh heavier than those of a handful celebrities.

It's hard to overemphasize how weird the gamer threat model is compared to the average HN user's threat model. Another example: Peer to peer chat is considered less secure than something mediated by a server regardless of other features, because the threat model is "my opponent finds my IP and DDOSes me" rather than "the chat provider does something like publish my messages".

If you visit the subreddits for these games, most people support it as well. No one wants to have cheaters in their game.

Too many people have a thought process that is along the lines of "[Bad thing] happens? They should make a law against that." That's the end of it, to them. They're not necessarily thinking about the Nth order effects that that their approach would have on society.

It's really the middle school teacher approach to cheating. It's also fascinating to see the sentiment difference between online gaming and remote education. Not that proctor malware isn't worse, it is, but that the arguments in this thread would have been aggressively downvoted in those other threads.

True, no one wants that. It's an entirely unsurprising sentiment, really. But it's in no way whatsoever mutually exclusive with disliking this specific approach.

Most people in the gaming communnity don't think about the implications of software like this. They just see it as more effective anti-cheat and don't consider the security and privacy concerns that come with something like this

They think about the implications, and have accurately judged the risk to be worth it. Riot games isn't going to steal your banking info, your nudes, or your super-secret startup idea. It's not going to post pictures of MAGA hats on your facebook, and it's not going to take over your web browser. It's not going to drone strike your location, or kidnap you into a concentration camp because you're ______. It doesn't have the power of pit and gallows over you.

If you're being repressed, what you have is a political problem, not a technological one. If you're being robbed, you should probably only install binary blobs that come from legitimate enterprises.

You're kind of proving my point.

The implication of this software isn't that Riot is going to steal your banking info. What would they possibly do with it? They're a legit business. They can't just starting selling bank credentials or billing people randomly. There's potentially lots of less sensitive information that most people would consider "not Riot's business" that they can get at with this software. Will they? probably not. It's how much do you trust Riot.

And none of that even begins to address the security concerns of having software running with elevated privileges.

I'm not saying it isn't worth it to some people or that it's unreasonable to decide that it is worth it. I'm saying most people don't understand or consider the implications.

> And none of that even begins to address the security concerns of having software running with elevated privileges.

Laymen are even more paranoid about it than techies. Most people incorrectly assume that a malicious program can do just as much damage to your system as a rootkit. They are already willing to accept the maximum possible risk, just from installing a binary blob.

But unlike techies, they spend less time wargaming all the ways in which vendors of these programs seek to wrong them.

This doesn't make them ignorant - at least, it doesn't make them ignorant in the way that you imply.

That sound suspiciously close to how we got the PATRIOT act after 9/11.

I was intrigued by this, because I always wonder if people who are calling for death or life imprisonments in the heat of the moment will think better when they are considering an issue in a relative state of calm.

I did a quick survey of Reddit threads that had to do with cheating criminalization itself, rather than people commenting on instances of people being caught cheating. Fortunately the vast majority of upvoted comments (besides jokey commentary) are anti criminalization. Representative highly upvoted comments: "Cheating is shit and shows no integrity but making it a crime in online gaming?... Idk man..." Or: "This is asinine, I have NEVER been in a game with a hacker and thought that they deserved to be in the same place as a rapist or murderer." I think you'll find a lot of in-the-moment raging over hackers, but when people are considering it as an issue they are more cautious.

But it could also be that different populations are interacting with different types of topics.

Caution: extremely unscientific five minute study above :)

The point is that the celebrities' opinions are to an extent representative of the communities within which they are famous.

> The point is that the celebrities' opinions are to an extent representative of the communities within which they are famous.

I think there's no particular reason to assume that the loudest and best-known voices in a community reflect the view of the broader community. (That's not to say anything about whether it's true here, just that I think it's far from a given, and, if true, is an additional data point rather than a consequence.)

If you are a professional gamer then of course you’re going to hate cheats. It’s no different to professional athletes hating peers who take performance enhancing drugs.

If your money and reputation comes from you being good at something, you’re going to dislike people who cheat.

Edit (for clarity): the more senior you are in a sport, the more likely you are to support invasive countermeasures compared to hobbyists.

Everyone who has at least two brain cells to rub together hates cheaters, in video games and otherwise.

My point is: the more serious you are into a sport, the more severe measures you’re likely to support to counter cheats.

Hence why pros will support anti-cheat software while those who just play causally are more likely to find it abusive.

You say that like amateur athletes think more highly of cheaters. I'd say almost anyone would be unhappy about competing against opponents who don't play fairly

I say that because the GP seemed confused why pros were in favour of anti-cheat software.

I mean, players' standard advice for modding and such is: download this executable mentioned in a forum post off some janky site or a filesharing service, disable the antivirus, run the thing with administrator privileges. Older people tend to see those who grew up in 2000-10s as proficient in computing, but I'm now sure that gamers' understanding of security is on the level of the famed “where's the ‘any’ key” secretary.

Checksums for the linked files on our site dedicated to mod sharing? Dunno what you're talking about.

Cheating is a denial of service attack, affecting users and providers. It's like spam.

I would definitely support criminalizing cheating in video games. I also do not view Riot's running programs at times other than when I am playing in a negative light. What is the threat model? I've already let them own my computer via their rootkit, and their incentives are largely aligned with mine. Why should it matter when exactly their programs run?

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