Activision’s faulty anti-cheat software
blog.mikeswanson.com
blog.mikeswanson.com
After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.
Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.
I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.
Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.
I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.
Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".
After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.
The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.
It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.
I have a growing enthusiasm for companies that consistently care for users, and conversely a callous distain for companies that don't.
In fact, I can't really think of many businesses where I feel appreciated or cared for as a customer, but the few that I can are all small businesses and most of them are local to me.
When people start demanding refunds or even start a class-action suit (especially if getting banned in multiplayer prevents you from playing single player missions), things will change.
You can thank a clever lawyer for thinking of mandatory arbitration clauses that are making class-actions a thing of the past.
Those "lawyers" aren't nearly as clever as they seem to think they are: https://www.cernovich.com/patreon-lawsuit-owen-benjamin/
I wouldn't assume that. Game companies are notorious for pinching pennies. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if these systems were outsourced completely.
It's not a bug that a filter caught names that the merged companies now collectively do not allow in their collectively owned games.
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The only miss here is more of a UX issue: they handled username bans the same way they handled all bans, with a shadowban.
Shadowbans are great for most infractions since you burn some time of the offender before they start again and give them little information to find loopholes with... but for something rectifiable there should be a way to nudge and explain why they're banned.
You’re right, this was a support failure, but it was also a failure of the team(s) that performed the merge.
2. Why do you think that B/A haven't spent a lot of time thinking of scenarios like this?
There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
And the reason for this is because multiplayer games are hard to maintain and without a profit motive it becomes long-term unviable.
I used to play a lot of a game called BZFlag, which was fully open-source etc, but it always struggled to keep up with any amount of advancement in the gaming world because it was entirely built by volunteers with limited time on their hands.
Eventually "players actually getting to do what they want with the software they paid for" somehow became a thing of the past, though I don't really know why. I mean, I can think of reasons, but most of those reasons suck.
- Making servers that are somewhat resilient to getting hacked is difficult enough if you control the servers and the code and no one can see it, but publicly available server binaries? There are more than enough eyeballs from cheaters, griefers and other abusers to discover exploits.
- If you offer server binaries to people and people get hacked by cheaters, griefers and other abusers as a result, they may hold you liable for damages
- Giving away server binaries also means giving away leverage and income. With UT99-2003-2004-3, everyone can simply set up servers and you as a publisher have no way of forcing people to pay up (or to take down central servers so that people are forced to buy the successor game).
- Giving away servers also means you give away a significant amount of brand control. Parents won't care that pedophiles or Nazis can target their children because some random server admin doesn't give a shit about moderating, they will associate it with your brand.
- In a related vein, modding is also in the crossfire. Just remember the GTA San Andreas Hot Coffee mod and the parental outrage over a decade ago - and today the influence of "concerned parents" groups has gotten even worse, not to mention legitimate concerns about people distributing pedophile or hate mods. As a publisher you can't really afford people replacing e.g. every opponent with the image of Black people.
In the end, most of the reasons boil down to people (and, at least for pedophilia and pornographic content, also governments) expecting game publishers to pick up the slack of educating people that it's not OK to distribute or spread such content, or that it's not OK to DDoS server admins because they decided to ban players for spreading hate content.
All of those old games were rated for teenagers or adults. Some of the worst actual threats to young children come from things like Roblox that give parents a false sense that the company is moderating the content effectively.
Unfortunately, most of the industry has chosen to support two bad models: either pure P2P or the uni-corporate-server-farm model. Neither of them really provide the best experience for consumers. While the distributed dedicated server model does have its own problems, it also has many advantages, including that of outsourcing server management to small businesses and hobbyists rather than absorbing all those costs to the software maintainer.
Ah yes, Argumentum ad Pearl Clutchum. It never fails.
This has been very much the norm from the nineties up until fairly recently. I spent my childhood and teens playing games over LAN or the Internet with self-hosted servers (Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life, GTA, Dungeon Siege, Red Alert, Warcraft 2, ...)
There are also many hosting companies that let you create and manage Minecraft servers via a web interface and take care of stuff like rotating backups so even the most incompetent users can self-host.
I think it was the xbox-ification of shooters that changed everything. 2009 or so, if I had to guess. MW2 was the first game that I remember really pushed company owned servers hard. Coincidentally this was also used to sell overpriced, often useless, DLC. At least back then the DLC was maps though.
It might be my age but I find it easier to remember games that DID have dedicated servers, rather than those that don't.
It was actually the norm in the 90s. Other comments have cited examples but it’s worth noting that consoles supported running local servers too.
What changed was subscription based online services and stupid loot (et al) boxes meant companies could extract a continuous stream of money from gamers without having to put out much, if any, additional content. So everything became online first.
Source: I ran several games servers in the 90s and early 00. (Still do in fact but only for Minecraft these days).
In fact I’d go further than that and say: to old timers like me, this practice of locking multiplayer games to the studios servers feels more like a recent trend than what used to be the norm.
There's a tested solution to these issues, and it's not "act as isolated consumers".
While I was initially excited about the release of the iPhone mini, I ended up not buying one because I had bad experiences in the past using apps that were clearly never tested on the smaller screen sizes, and I couldn't trust that it wouldn't happen again.
I appreciate this typo on a spiritual level.
I’m in my mid thirties, and I have career ambitions and hobbies and relationships that I want to nurture. While I would love something I can play and enjoy for 15-30 minutes every other day, I don’t have time for something that takes 5+ hours just to feel the slightest amount of reward. Cheats can take a game that’s designed to be grindy and addictive and instead make it something that can be enjoyed in smaller chunks.
An excellent example of this is Breath of the Wild. BotW requires a ton of slow terrain traversal (at least until you’ve unlocked more fast travel points, and even then the walking/gliding takes quite a while). Playing the game with a mod to enable 5x movement speed makes it a game that I can actually enjoy playing for 15 minutes at a time. Also, it takes something like 45-60 seconds for the game to reload when you die, so temporarily having an invincibility cheat on makes it feasible for me to figure out an enemy’s move set, whereas without I would either have to cheese the enemies or give up on the game entirely: what I’m not going to do is sit down with a hard cap of 15 minutes, die fifteen times, getting a total play time of maybe a minute of actual game play plus 14 minutes or so of loading screen, and then come back the next couple nights to do same thing over again.
A touch of cheats make modern games actually playable to someone who has a busy schedule, but still wants something to decompress with.
That said, I agree that anyone should be able to modify a local (that is, local coop/multiplayer or singleplayer) game's behavior to suit their needs.
You can save anywhere, so you can make sessions as short as you'd like anyway. There aren't even classic Zelda dungeons anymore! Just 5-10min challenges in the form of a shrine.
And the games tend to be structured by acts, so it's easy to play it for half an hour to an hour until an act is completed. Then it can sit for a day or two and then you continue through the next act.
Many roguelikes feel like they have a similar time structure in mind. Sigil of the Magi, Slay the Spire, Peglin and such have an hour run time generally and that's it. Game sizes like Witcher 3 have grown kind of disheartening to me, as much as I want to like it.
In a world where content is locked behind actual repetitive grinds of the same content for numbers to go up, this strikes me as a preposterous example.
I also can’t think of any game that asks for 5+ hours for any payoff for anything tbh.
MMOs are usually an example of this, where there is rarely any true fun to be had in the opening hours (where either gameplay is extremely slow, many people are zipping through power-levelling, etc.). They're hardly an example of a modern game though.
A good example is in comparing the newer Final Fantasy games with the older ones. In the older ones, it was 100% required to occasionally run around the map and just fight random encounters to level up and be able to face the next bit of the story. The newer ones eschew this completely, and some don't even have random encounters for most of the time. Save points were also placed such that you would often have to redo an entire gauntlet of fights if you failed once, which is a thing of the past as well.
Also, your example of BotW is not an example of what is normally called grinding. The exploration, the terrain traversal, is, to most people I've seen praise it, the core appeal of BotW, not some repetitive grind the games makes you go through to enjoy the good bits.
On the other hand, I'm not trying to say "you're playing the game wrong". I fully agree that we all have a right to "cheat" in single-player (or LAN) games to make them fit our preferences, regardless of the designer's intentions or the preferences of other gamers.
Yeah, I know why I don't buy anything from some of the major publishers anymore.
Some companies sell XP boosters and other P2W crap for even SP games nowadays.
People gave up on software ownership when they stopped demanding the source code. The source code is the software, not the binary.
Games stopping to provide self-hosted servers is also what made LAN parties increasingly difficult. Having to rent game servers, provide decent bandwidth and not being able to run third party tools (for recording scores or set modifiers) made it impossible to use modern games in a 50 people LAN party with a low budget.
Generally speaking, if you are a suspected cheater, I can see why you would be barred from online-play.
There's always going to be false-positives though. How often that happens and what means of recourse one has (or should have) is IMO another discussion. And in this particular case, it seems Activision is doing pretty much all the wrong things(tm) though.
> even banned from the single player mode.
The fact that an account (and a server) is required to play a game you've bought in single-player mode is on another level outragious.
That itself should be illegal.
> Sorry, no refunds!
Again. Clearly this needs to be illegal.
If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
Obviously doing it for no valid reason is a breach of contract, but I'm sure the legalese is pretty thick. No one "buys" anything obviously and the license agreement will clearly say you forfeit your license if you cheat. And here I'm pretty sure the legalese would say "Whether or not you actually cheated is up to us to decide so we define it as when our tools say you did".
So basically: you have a license, and that license is valid until their tools say it isn't.
Now, will such a license agreement hold up if tested legally? Maybe not. But it's likely what I clicked "Accept" on.
Some games managed to balance this quite well despite no self-hosted servers, for example BF4 which allows community managed "rented" servers.
But one thing to note though is that nearly all of them will very quickly adopt global blacklists with cheaters. So for a community BF server you'd hook your server to a global anti cheat database, and any bans from the server would end up on the global cheater blacklist. While the choice of using a global blacklist was of course up to the administrators, it wouldn't be very easy to find a server that didn't use this type of system if you happened to be blacklisted. So the community will invent exactly the same kind global bans that the game studio has. I never saw a problem with that (likely because I wasn't a false positive).
I really can't blame them entirely. Perhaps you could blame companies for not using a hybrid model where players can host privately plus maintaining their public servers.
Why? Because in a similar vein to how social media needs to be moderated to prevent the bad apples from spoiling the bunch, games now need to be moderated to maintain reputation among the community. If a player hearing about CSGO for the first time has no idea what they're getting into finds only a public server running 24/7 CS_OFFICE with Warcraft Mods they might get a bad impression of what the game is. Having consistency in user experience is highly important, and public servers being maintained and moderated by the developer is probably the most important part of that. What about all those servers that have massive latency issues? That's a bad look on the game because most players won't recognize community run servers are the reason the game behaves buggy.
Do I dislike it? Yes. I think it has created irreparable harm to the ability for gaming communities to build organically but so long as central hubs like Reddit or Discord continue to pop up I figure they've just offloaded the community aspect to external sources. Is that better? I'm not sure. Partially yes. Losing contact with a friend because they stopped logging into your preferred server isn't really a thing if you're Discord friends or Steam friends.
I suspect it's simply to control monetization and without the extra engineering cost of private server releases.
Because they allow it
And it was great part of their cs 1.6 succesa
I bet devs are scares that too many people would play private servers
And best of all: you can only get yourself banned from individual servers.
[1]: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-1-19-1-pre...
In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect you as a customer, which is very rare in AAA. These companies hate you. No one will listen to you and nothing will change, as it's extremely profitable. No one will regulate it. In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
> In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect
Could always pick up a copy of IDA...
> In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
As a side note if you want some fun you should fire up wireshark when you're playing a game and watch how much "metadata" is sent from your PC to the game company. They know more about you than your doctor in some cases. EasyAntiCheat and Denuvo seem to be the worst offenders.
Even more of a reason to bust out the IDA
And they recently did the same with the Diablo 2 """remaster""", preventing multiplayer-heavy mods running in the regular online mode from operating !! (They are not allowed on battle.net, partially for anti-cheating reasons of course.)
Meanwhile other games still allow normal connection through IP/server name, provide a matchmaking server for players to organize their games, including modded ones, and provide an *optional* ban list for server owners using the official matchmaker to enforce on the worst offenders that in no way affects the singleplayer or the direct connection multiplayer experience !
Luckily i managed to get in touch with an understanding support rep who unbanned me, but not without a "stop modding if you don't wanna get banned again" message, which is absurd. I paid for the game and i should be able to do whatever i want with it within the confines of my own computer.
Most of the time you buy a one time license to use the software, which is tied to your account and platform.
I.e. it is a form of slavery, which I guess you are paying for? Which is a type of scam. The mgmt who work at these AAA shops belong in the dumpster bin of humanity.
You hand over rights to your platform which you, not they, bought and paid for, and provide them with lucrative information, and are now bound to do whatever they say? Some hot nonsense, if I ever heard it.
While I agree you "shouldn't" buy the game, we shouldn't even be giving legitimacy to these practices at all. We generally try to prosecute snake-oil salesmen, shutdown hucksters, put con-men out of business, etc..
There are unfortunately many reasons why people might buy the game - false advertising, lack of proper research, peer pressure from a poorly informed populous. You may be tempted to say "you should do your research", and while I agree you generally should, its also true its impractical to research everything. The same way I shouldn't have to go into a grocery store and have to worry about if the peanut butter is poisoned with salmonella, a consumer be able to purchase a product, and have the reasonable expectation that they can do what they want with the product within the confines of their own home.
Finding out after you have purchased a game that it is arbitrarily locked down, and that you have little recourse to get your money back, is a form of fraud.
I'd had one genuine temp-ban beforehand, and my theory is over the years I got enough reports from opponents that they just built up into saying t'ra to my account and purchases. Yay, right?
I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.
I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.
Oh, even more frustrating about this is, the game has a swearing filter enabled by default. If those players saw swear words from me, they quite literally specifically opted into that by turning off the swearing filter! Meanwhile they were allowed to sabotage the game for me and ruin my night AND get me chat-banned.
I play DotA, which seemingly does nothing (at at least, very little). I eventually decided to just disable text and voice chat entirely rather than put up with salt in every other game. Toxicity is contagious.
When i was small it was the normal word to refer to black people, but USA has decided that's racist so now it's "persona di colore", even though as a child i've always found it funny because every person is of some colour :D
Taking your money for no product delivery, charging you fees for no service is theft even if you are completely foul. Pointing to a "condition of entry" sign at the door of your premises does NOT change the law.
When you buy a snack, you get a tangible good in exchange for money. The implied agreement is the most basic of exchanging goods for cash.
When you purchase an online multiplayer game, there's an agreement you have explicitly agreed to that you will not, for example, call other players the N-word or sabotage the match by repeatedly running into the enemy team (griefing). These are really quite clearly-defined rules you agreed to. You bought the game knowing full well these are the rules, also knowing you _will potentially permanently lose access to the game_ if you violate those rules.
In my prior example (and the one I just wrote here), there is zero comparison to buying a snack in a store and then the store owner snatching it back and keeping the money.
Like I said, I think there should be consumer rights in place to protect the player against losing access to the game they paid for if they were abiding by the rules. I'd say that is a pretty reasonable expectation.
Edit: A more apt analogy would be that you go into a store, buy a snack, eat some of it and then begin pouring hot sauce on other peoples' snacks and yelling in their faces. You don't get to just happily stick around and keep enjoying your snack while you're completely ruining the snacks of others.
The list of "bad words" isn't listed for you, and the matching of bad words is not necessarily well tokenised.
You're not always sure what you've said or done, to be removed. And in some cases, they won't tell you what sin you have committed, either.
Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.
In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard
This would be Felony Contempt of Business Model[0], which would be enforced with every move in the legal playbook.
>Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.
I see the thought here, but it would do so by providing transparency to the license-revocation (banning) process, which greatly benefits customers who are getting screwed as hard as OP is. This in turn should lead to fewer cases of paying customers getting screwed.
>In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard
This is the case because they're moderated better. The companies are raking in cash. They can hire people to fix the problem. They don't because the current model maximizes profits.
[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...
"You want E2E encryption? Why are you sticking up for the terrorists and child porn rings?"
Terrible, terrible argument all around.
is totally different to:
> You're not always sure what you've said or done
Listing the "bad words" ahead of time (or even at all) is self-evidently not workable because people will just use different works to abuse/harass/bully people while evading the banned words list.
That said, it's important to tell the person after the fact "you're banned because you harassed / bullied someone" or "you were caught using anti-cheat software." Maybe some date ranges so the person understands what they did and why they won't be reinstated. BUT you don't need to list out the _exact things_ they did because you're just opening up the toddler argument of "why is that so wrong?" which is just bad actors trying to waste your time and "legalese" their way back into the system.
If the system matches on substrings, then you need to know what to avoid - you can't even self-censor, if everything is ambiguous. You end up with the memes of getting banned from Club Penguin, otherwise.
Except, Club Penguin does as you suggest - it tells you that you used a "rude or inappropriate word". Even if the regex is matching something that it shouldn't.
That's not the only thing you are doing. You are also creating an opportunity for false positives to justifiably challenge their bans.
If you are going to keep the user's money, I think you absolutely have to provide recourse for false positives because otherwise what you are doing is simply theft.
Tough: you have to stay ahead of the bullies if you want to get money for an online service. It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of, so that they can challenge you if you are in fact wrong. The fact that it makes the job harder is not in any way an excuse.
Now, if you were to return their money (or at least part of it based on how much time they actually played or something), then yes, you would have an argument that you have a right to unilaterally rescind the contract. But you can't keep the money and say "you know what you said".
So they can just re-buy the game under a new account and just carry on as before? Try this: go to a football match, shout racist abuse at a player then demand a refund for your season ticket. I know for a fact you won't get it.
> It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of
> "you know what you said"
Note that what I said wasn't "you know what you said" but "you violated these rules within these date ranges." For example:
* "You were detected using a cheat tool on 13th-15th November"
* "You harassed a player throughout March-August 2022"
* "You were repeatedly abusive in private chat in September 2022"
You're not being accused of murder in the Crown Court, you're being banned from interacting in a video game community. If you want access to the exact information, sue for it.
--- Caveat ---
Should you be banned from playing the game locally / single player? Absolutely not. This I would agree with you on.
Fairly soon you'll need to maintain a subscription just to play.
When it becomes the norm, it will replace purchasing a game at the store [this has already started to happen for PC]. We will no longer be able to play games except through platforms like Xbox Live or PS Plus.
This will eventually give companies like Microsoft and Sony complete control over their platform's IP. When it happens, we'll never be able to collect these games as part of nostalgia growing up playing these games.
Wait, you can be banned for being bad at the game?
As many times as I would love to see a ref be able to issue yellow cards for continued blatant offside calls against a player, they cannot be kicked out for breaking said rule.
I am thinking of an amateur tournament - I am quite certain a player who was blatantly acting against their own team would be kicked out by the organizers, even if they weren't explicitly breaking the rules of the game.
Refunding people who deserve to be banned would only encourage them to create new accounts and continue causing problems.
But whatever. Do they confiscate the season tickets you were using with no refund? What if they weren't yours? What if they were stolen? What if you know the coach? Can they not like your "offensive beard", take your season tickets and re-sell them? How about your date's utterly vile "Ross Perot was right!" shirt? Can they terms of service you out of the cash for next week? (Wouldn't surprise me on one hand how bad that could be but I somehow doubt it).
Kick them the hell out for being foul by all means, your house, your rules.
"And you take your damn money with you and not come back because I ain't no thief, even from scum like you, you vermin!"
That's irrelevant to the discussion. It's a thing that happens, people expect it and the only people who complain about being kicked out are... well being kicked out for being a horrible person.
> But whatever. Do they confiscate the season tickets you were using with no refund?
Absolutely, yes, they do.
On the other hand, they'll probably also tell you _why_ they're doing so. They also won't take your money for _future_ season tickets.
I can't simply start a fake theatre, sell tickets for $100 each, then turn away all ticket holders at the door even if legitimate theatres do have the right to (e.g.) turn away drunk patrons without breathalysing them.
Activision/Blizzard aren't courts of law, but they do represent to some degree a "controller of a market", they are absolutely shirking their responsibility here. Maybe after the SBF fiasco Govts outside China will finally start cracking down hard on all these illict online markets with zero rules.
Where that’s harder would be things like “our ML system thinks your input timing wasn’t humanly possible” and it’d be great if this forced companies to be more nuanced about how they handle things like that by doing things like requiring multiple independent checks.
But yes, people who are actually using cheats are manipulating/attacking the service they're using and deserve nothing from the companies who are trying to defend against it.
My Google account was banned years ago, “computer says no” - all of my attempts to appeal failed. I at no point broke their terms. Nobody cares, I lost all of my data.
I hope that a class action prevails against Activision. And I hope that across our industry consumers receive more robust rights. Not being able to reach a human at your company quickly escalates from a being cost optimization, to outright fraud.
A related problem though is that game developers have a really hard time trusting anyone who says they've been banned unfairly. Almost everyone who gets banned for valid reasons will claim they did nothing wrong, etc. This is especially true for delayed bans, as the person doesn't even realize that their account got flagged to be banned weeks before the actual ban took place.
Given that problem, when a developer gets reports of users being banned unfairly, it's very easy to ignore them as salty cheaters. Ideally there is a way for them to know exactly what tripped the anti-cheat, but sometimes it's hard as the client has to covertly tell the server to ban itself.
Cronus certainly makes many things easier, but it does not give you magic. You still have to be decent at the game for a Cronus to be of any help.
“This particular cheat only helps people that are already good at the game” is also an ancient trope as far as rationalizing cheating goes, so hope you’re enjoying your Cronus lol.
Even with a Cronus, you still need to be able to aim and place your shots. It certainly helps you land more shots, but basic tactics easily overcome a Cronus.
I don't disagree that a Cronus is cheating. I'm simply stating there are different levels of cheating. Since Cronus is hardware it's both hard to detect and limited on its impact. Cronus also don't let you magically wall people or auto-headshot.
Software based cheats are significantly more impactful to the game play. Software cheaters can see you through walls, auto-aim, auto-shoot, auto-move. There's simply no way to counter someone who knows exactly where you are and can hit a perfect shot every time.
Activision should address both, but software cheating is a far larger problem.
Hardware based cheats, like recoil control, can be countered with in-game mechanics. For example, enforcing a minimum amount of recoil and using an RNG recoil pattern. My understanding is Cronus rely on grossly predictable recoil patterns.
Software cheating extends well beyond recoil control and requires active detection mechanisms.
And for what? Because you think Cronus is too hard to detect?
No cheat should be tolerated, let alone compromised with to the point of fudging the game. Should racing games counter Cronus by removing difficult corners that rely on predictable turns? Should games avoid entire categories of mechanics just to work around Cronus? Fuck that, Activision should continue investing in protecting the creative integrity of their product, not conceding. Anti-cheat systems have gotten incredibly sophisticated with incredible gains in cheat detection, and it didn't get there by giving up.
Your argument is that games are bad so they should have serious restrictions on them to make them stay bad....
This is nonsense. Games should be, first and foremost, fun. You will build and play better, more interesting games where there are fewer predictable turns (literal or figurative), when there isn't such an unhealthy obsession with protecting terrible mechanics.
For a very few cases where there is e-sport(s) like activity, fine, create your TiVO like experience (in multiplayer, e.g. combat simulators, racing).
"Anti-cheat systems have gotten incredibly sophisticated with incredible gains in cheat detection".
Anti-cheat systems are a large part of why I rarely play any AAA titles - they are slow as all 'F, buggy, and honestly completely trashy games. And if I bought one of these games and was randomly locked out of it, you can bet I would be demanding the blood of the developers be spilled.
I just made the hackusation because it seemed funny to me. Your insistence on further explaining the difference in severity between the different types of cheating just makes it seem even funnier.
That thing exists to solve a very real problem: the game mechanics the Cronus mediates or exploits are being used by game devs to cover up otherwise-boring gameplay.
It isn't software running on the console, which is what anti-cheat generally protects against.
Practically all anti cheat for a long time has primarily worked by monitoring what is running on the computer/device, and ensuring the integrity of the game and its data.
You don’t need anti-cheat with deep system hooks to monitor input. That can be done from the game itself trivially.
I would be surprised if they aren't using heuristics on input.
> Protect sensitive game logic to reduce data mining and detect peripherals that give the cheater an unfair gameplay advantage.
https://irdeto.com/denuvo/console-games-protection/
They also have a common list of cheats on the general information page, none of which are really related to Cronus.
These sorts of generated inputs could in theory be detected using heuristics to watch for inputs that appear too patterned to be fully human. Whether any company is bothering with this, I have no idea. The only one I'm aware of that even appears to attempt to detect these types of devices at all is Epic and I have no idea what methods they use.
And it seems like it would be pretty simple to detect this in the game itself; this sort of detection doesn't need any anti-cheat with deep system hooks.
Correct, it wouldn't need any deep system hooks, nor are the console manufacturers likely to ever give game developers the ability to hook into the system that deeply, nor do they really need to since modern consoles are secure enough in practice that wallhack/aimbot type system level code cheats haven't been a concern for a while now on the major console platforms.
There are various bits of anti-cheat logic that game developers could be putting into their console version like the aforementioned analysis of input devices to look for helper devices, and things like looking for likely "lag switch" attacks by keeping track of the ongoing latency of packets coming in and out, but these are all passive heuristic checks that would exist within the game itself, not driver or kernel level anti-cheat as is common on PC.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nfeupc/modern...
I emailed Activision support back and forth more than a dozen times explaining the issue, finally resulting in them saying they were escalating to another team. I sent them another four emails over three months, asking if there was any update, before asking if there was even anybody left alive at the company that my emails were reaching, with no response.
I really enjoyed the MW2019 campaign, but I won't be buying another game from Activision.
Not a good look for Activision, in my opinion.
The only "cheats" I ever really saw WoW care about was botting, and that's probably easier to catch server-side than client-side anyways. Why monitor inputs when you can just see who's been fishing for the past 24 hours in a row?
I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.
In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.
I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.
- Squad
- Escape from Tarkov
- Rising Storm 2: Vietnam
EFT requires a huge amount of free time, it feels like a day job. I would consider that before putting time on that game. Its nothing like COD.
Tarkov looks great, but you need to plan. You can't hop on after a long day of work and realize you're too tired to play a good match.
I highly recommend single player mods/server emulators for EFT like Altered Escape, its a nice break from going up against meta geared super competitive players.
Similarly for me cod has kept me connected with friends and family across the world as we travelled and went our own ways. But all of us have actually moved onto mw2 by now and are enjoying it a great deal. (We don’t play Warzone and only play s&d or prison rescue). There are bugs here and there but not too bad overall. We are a mix of PC and Xbox players.
I would still recommend giving the game a try in a few “seasons” as it will likely stabilize further.
I've been SUPER confused as to what this "Modern Warfare 2" is that people are talking about, because I played that in, well, 2009. At least they called it "II" instead of "2" (as if anyone will notice this difference)... >_>
Though, MW2 (og) is where I got hooked on cod.
It was a neat idea where the clan was the focus and less so the game.
The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.
I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.
This has nothing to do with cosmetics and everything to do with customer standards. We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 minutes, they will happily enjoy it and praise it anyway because they probably do not have the intellectual capacity to notice or care.
The newest Pokemon game is a prime example of this, it has no cosmetics, no microtransactions, nothing, yet it's so much more of a technical trainwreck than any CoD game, you really have to play it to believe it. It costs $60 and looks and runs worse than many PS2 games, but it sold tens of millions anyway because the people buying it are effectively zombies that only exist to obey corporations and will happily consume whatever is sold to them no questions asked.
Elder Scrolls titles have been selling very well for a long time. I don't think this is new.
I hated the frame rate issues and various bugs I ran into. I considered requesting a refund (like I did do for similar reasons very quickly after buying Cyberpunk 2077). But before I knew it I was hours into the game. This is actually the first mainline Pokemon game in 15 years that I've played up through the Elite Four on. For me, the fun of the gameplay was enough to outweigh the negatives.
Also, don't forget that even back when games were significantly simpler they were still loaded with issues. The original Pokemon games are a good example here. They had many bugs, some of which were quickly found to be exploitable. To me that's another data point to indicate that issues with the game's coding don't necessarily make the game bad.
I am big on boycotting and generally have avoided Activision games because of how they have milked things in the past. I'm incredibly frustrated with the state of the game, and disappointed I got talked into buying it by my buddies. Even worse, they just stockholm it saying things like "they just released it, you have to give it time". What? We played Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at launch for a week straight and the only issue I can remember is server instability which was transient. I'm so tired of this public beta workflow, which if you are pushing a game per year you end up getting what, 9 months of _actual_ gameplay, and thats assuming the game doesnt need app-level modifications (vs fixing actual bugs) to smooth out the experience.
I don't think this is very conspiratorially. It's very clear that the mods are coordinating with Activision on releases and information. I've had several posts taken down over the years because they don't tow-the-line.
People who had never visited the forum before, and likely never will again, drop in because they're mad and want a complaint venue where they can gripe. When a game has hundreds of thousands or millions of players, that sort of thing starts to swamp the sub and soon there is no community or sustained conversation and instead it's all 360 no scope drive by complaint drops.
I absolutely commiserate with the OP, and it 100% legitimately sounds like they got caught up in a flawed anti-cheat (maybe exacerbated by a storage system issue on their end, making it think they were trying to modify the system files). But on the other hand, and they recognize this, all the actual cheaters also do the I didn't do nothing routine. When a game is rife with cheaters (PubG, MW, Squad, etc), pretty soon you have a really skeptical approach to those appeals.
IMO the only winning move is not to play. I loved calladoody back in university, but you've got to move with the times, yeah? OTOH, I'm not the one who really changed; I'm still all about dedicated servers, but they haven't been seen since Modern Warfare 1.
The winning move for the anticheat dev is shortly going to be not to play, either. It's one thing to implement increasingly invasive rootkits to find out who's watching your game's memory, but I've heard tell of devices that sit between the PC and monitor, using specialized ML to click M1 and fire when an enemy is detected in one's crosshairs. How can you check for something like that?
I've heard of work around using machine learning to analyze players and compare them to the actions of cheaters. It's not flawless but it can give some kind of probability of cheating so you can match make cheaters with other suspected cheaters.
So go play games with dedicated servers, and local admins who can only locally ban anyone suspect. If players don't like it they can leave for another dedicated server.
There is more data than just win/lose here. Using ML you can analyze exactly how the player moves, etc and get some kind of probability
This allows me to
* issue a chargeback without worries
* sell the account when I'm done with the game
Just the same with Google devices. NEVER buy a Google Pixel on your own account, as issuing a chargeback will cause them to block your whole account.
A lot of the latest AAA games will only allow you to play multiplayer if your account ALSO has a verified phone number attached, and they only let you attach each number to a single account, plus they filter out phones which are not postpaid (so no using services like Twilio).
Is there some way they can check with the provider for a given number? Seems less than ideal from a privacy perspective.
Some people found themselves that they could no longer play the Overwatch franchise after having bought the $40 original game because of this. This was later rolled back and they allowed prepaid phones. So they can definitely distinguish them.
No. Overwatch 2 did this and rolled it back pretty much immediately. CS:GO and DOTA2 don't require it but it they gate competitive play behind it. That's not a lot of AAA games.
So it's time to find a new game to play, I guess..
Here's a recent example in the Russian game Escape from Tarkov[1]. A player kills a developer and gets banned moments after for cheating. Luckily he manages to catch it on video, and posts it to reddit. He's subsequently unbanned. Why was he banned? "false alarm triggered". When asked for more details, BSG responds "Sorry, can’t tell you cause it’s part of anti cheat system, hope you understand". Which is ridiculous.
BSG is in Russia and therefore untouchable, but I don't have much hope for these other companies like ATVI who are doing the sort of abuse.
[1]. https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapefromTarkov/comments/zawwc5/i_...
This is how all fraud detection works. Outside of gaming as well. That doesn't mean the previous action was right, but the fact they can't tell you why means nothing at all. The whole industry is built on secrecy and having a few hidden tricks in the bag.
The banned guy can contact battleye and try to get unbanned if it was false, has happened before (usually a group of players with something in common are banned, last time it was s specific motherboard or a driver for it).
If EFT bans a cheater, they're effectively getting another sale, because the cheater will come back and make money off the grey market once more. The result is that you have tons of cheaters, and EFT only needs to make broad strokes efforts at curbing them to keep existing players happy.
How anyone can believe that their DRM is infallible and not be prepared to deal with the issues it will inevitably cause, is beyond me.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be aware, that they need to have a way to accept reports of false positives and investigate those. Even if "screw the customers" is company policy - you still need those reports to analyze and fix the flaws in your software.
Not doing that is basically like making it impossible to report bugs and suppress any talk about bugs anywhere - and then claiming your software is bug free, because there haven't been any bug reports. Highly dysfunctional.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ROBLOXBans/comments/vqw1sj/my_6_yea...
I created a Tell HN thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861309
In a previous job I dealt with a police request for information after a pre-teenager child sent an email to their school principal saying there was a bomb in the school that would explode and kill everyome unless they were given some number of Robux so they could buy a hat or something for their character.
Roblox Studio has a toolbox of free community models. Malicious scripts are hidden in models. Kids import free models in their games and get banned for malicious scripts.
This is the only time I got perma banned in any game in my life. The only possible reason I can think of is that I always use some AutoHotkey scripts I wrote myself as shortcuts for Windows control, and has nothing to do with Destiny. I don't really care much about not able to play Destiny again, but because Destiny 2 had moved to Steam, even today there is still a VAC ban record in my Steam profile, which I do care about.
I as a player can say that game frequently crashes, shares a lot of bugs with previous version of call of duty and overall is just a copy od mw1 with worse UI and technical state.
I don't really care that much about my crappy in-game cosmetics, but to have access to the game ripped away from you with no actual explanation to what you did is a pretty big gut punch. The result I took from the experience is that EA/Respawn are untrustworthy and will never receive another penny of my money. Their steadfast "you cheated, no appeals, now shut up" attitude seems like poor long term planning if regular players are going to be randomly harmed by whatever happened.
I've pondered over the issue too, and ultimately I think the entire circus could be avoided if they were willing to discuss the specifics of banning. The notion that they don't need to tell you how you were detected as though it is some sort of protection for their anti-cheat methods is a disservice in customer relations. For me, I tried appealing a case against something I had no evidence for, so to ask a question about how I can make things right in an appeal (what logs do you need? what proof can I provide that this was a bug) ended up just flagging my account so I could no longer open tickets. I had found other users on Reddit who received the same ban (and consequentially, received unban at teh same time too, so it was a system bug). We were all treated the same. How to fix this? Have confidence in your anti-cheat to the point where you can say "we caught you doing X" so I can provide evidence to the contrary.
I suspect it is because they'd need to hire more staff to work customer service. They'd also need to give those staff the necessary tools to respond to customers which I can tell they do not have at the basic CSR level.
In the end, they lose a customer permanently. They also gain a vocal proponent against their services as I write similar rants every time I see a topic of it discussed. They don't really care much about me though. That's important to remember. They are willing to bulldoze the individual in hopes the larger reputation they maintain about being hard on cheaters doesn't backfire.
I did get shadowbanned from Modern Warfare (2019) for two weeks though. At first I couldn't figure out why my game suddenly would keep crashing on the main menu every time I started it. After a reboot of my PC it stopped crashing, but now the game was taking forever to find a match and when it finally did I got put in a lobby with high ping players from across the world, half of which were obviously cheating.
I managed to figure out that I had HxD (a hex editor) open in the background before I rebooted because I was messing around with the save files of another game. Simply having a process running called "hxd.exe" will cause the game to "crash" and shadowban you for a while. I verified this by renaming notepad to hxd.exe and observing the same thing.
It would sure as heck deal with the "you can't play the game you paid for" nonsense, and if they start putting all "cheaters" in a single set of servers any over-aggressive "you're a cheater" rules will cause people to stop playing the online modes that encourage in game transactions.
A game company can always just block the credit card details (not just the number) from buying the game again, there’s a limit to the number of CCs that a person is going to be able to use.
Of course the reality is, cheaters are paying to buy the game again when they get caught, so there’s no actual incentive for activision to actually stop cheaters, just to make them pay again. Which is why they ban the single player mode as well - it’s in their interests to encourage repurchasing.
> Of course the reality is, cheaters are paying to buy the game again when they get caught, so there’s no actual incentive for activision to actually stop cheaters, just to make them pay again. Which is why they ban the single player mode as well - it’s in their interests to encourage repurchasing
You've gone off the deep end into conspiracy theory land here i think.
The trend toward dismissing anything one disagrees with as a "conspiracy theory" is going to rob the term of any meaning.
This is the equivalent of "I'm just saying"
> The trend toward dismissing anything one disagrees with as a "conspiracy theory" is going to rob the term of any meaning.
No, I'm not dismissing anything I disagree with. I'm dismissing the idea that activision ban cheaters from their single player games to encourage cheaters to repurchase as a conspiracy theory.
Something can be incorrect without being a conspiracy theory. Criticize the assertion about why activison bans cheaters all you like, but don't do it by calling it something it isn't just to smear the idea.
Gift cards exist. Companies can't block people from buying a game effectively, otherwise cheating wouldn't be a problem anymore as most cheaters are repeat offenders.
> The problem is theft of a product that has been purchased.
While it may be true that taking back a physical product without permission is considered theft, companies have the right to enforce their terms and conditions. In the case of a game company, if a player is found to be cheating, they have violated the terms and conditions and the company has the right to revoke their access to the game. This is not theft because the player has not fulfilled their end of the contract by following the rules of the game. The player has never "bought a game", they bought a software which allowed them to accept terms and conditions to play online.
Also just to be clear, I fucking hate Activision and haven't given them money for years already. I'm talking more generally about the practice of game bans.
After you owned a game for along time, sometimes it is fun to cheat. That is another revenue source for game companies.
Certainly everyone who owns the game has bought the right to play offline. That said, the question of what "owners" are allowed to do in a multi-user product seems genuinely hard. Cheaters (and people who seek 'parasitic' experiences of all kinds) disrupt how the game is intended to be played. Consumer protections were developed for products that don't have that kind of entangled quality.
at least that way they're not profiting from their scummy behaviour
and honestly who cares these days if their battle.net account is lost
(as long as you get some of your money back)
Surely, taking escalatory retribution like that is illegal, somewhere...I hope...?
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Non-escalatory retribution would be banning you from the game you filed a chargeback for - I can't get mad over that.
But an online store doing unilateral revocation of access and licenses for a consumer's entire library (without refunding it 100%) in response to a single chargeback is just begging for countries' consumer protection agencies to come knocking, and even if that's a term in the store's EULA I can't see how they could be upheld by a court as an conscionable (and therefore legally enforcible) contract clause - especially given the dim-view to which online and click-through EULAs/TOS are viewed by most countries courts' today anyway.
Speaking as someone with too much time on my hands (thanks to a cushy job, I'm pleased to say, rather than funemployment) I secretely want to be dicked-over by a megacorp like this so I can get amusement (and a worthwhile life experience) by availing myself of the court system to hold these companies to account. Now I just need to find a similar way to make Microsoft undo the crappy shell in Windows 11.
Of course the reality of these other places being the marketplace and the service provider and the game publisher is a classic anti-trust issue.
Not saying "don't chargeback ever", and obviously in your scenario the SaaS is at fault, really.
Wait, does this mean that if someone hacks your Steam account, and uses your saved payment info to order a Steam Deck shipped to someone other than you, that you have to choose between losing your Steam account forever or losing the money?
One person thought in case of Twitter perhaps Twitter Support doesn't want to tell, to make it more difficult to script bots that can prevent getting banned.
Perhaps for games it's kind of the same. Perhaps knowing why you got banned can aid bot devs to prevent their bots getting banned.
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A teammate told everyone to report me for feeding.
Fuck overwatch, they get what they deserve.
Cheating of that type is so easy and common in many multiplayer games, and it really sucks the fun out of multiplayer when someone isn’t following the rules.
The sentiment of your comment remains popular in gaming circles. But as software people on hacker news, doesn't it seem rather obvious that complex software like anti-cheats embedded in hugely complex software like games will have bugs? Add many people overclocking their computers to the brink of instability and silent corruption into the mix and you will have issues. (VAC must've kicked me dozens of times for failing game integrity checks because of this - now imagine if that's a ban, like Activision does. A checksum failure on a gaming PC hardly proves cheating beyond even a passing doubt)
No doubt, and it does suck that some people get caught up in it. It’s also lame that they prevent you from playing single player, but I’d guess this is to make engine exploit development more expensive and time consuming. I do think that they should have a manual review appeal, not sure how that would work without undermining the anti-cheat or being extremely invasive.
I honestly hate that I’m defending Acti-bliz, they rake in hoards of cash and become more predatory every year. Recently they downgraded and deleted my favorite game, giving it one of the worst monetization schemes in PC. But cheating is a serious issue, I have abandon a number of games because cheating at my skill level became too common.
It also does not help that "good players" by the anti-cheat's eye will often enable this bias by doubling down whatever the anti-cheat says is bad. A black box that no human fully understands the behavior of, even its own developers, yet is ultimately trusted without review of anyone hit by a ban. A system ripe for enabling bias to absolutely excessive proportions, and need to be held in better check.
A lot of these folks are software developers! I’d have to do a poll to get wider info, but I know several people have AHK, WireShark and WSL installed, and have for years. But especially with online multiplayer games, the sentiment has always been that you necessarily give up some freedom to participate. For example, I don’t actually know a single person who dislikes ring 0 kernel anti-cheat, dubbed “spyware” by many.
> absolutely excessive proportions.
Citation badly needed, there are a lot of cheaters! The fact that I can buy a Cronus from a local gamestop, today, speaks volumes. I’d like to get cheaters in check first, how about we criminalize assisting in cheating, not actually enforce it through state-sponsored law enforcement, but make it so that gaming companies have an easy path to shut it down and bankrupt cheat-device manufacturers/retailers/importers. Something like DMCA. In the same bill we can hold game/anti cheat vendors accountable for bans.
This is extremely user-hostile... even more than Apple-level-user-hostility.
I'm "UNDER REVIEW" right now. That means I'm shadow banned. I'm only able to match with other people that are shadow banned.
This is actually the second time I'm "UNDER REVIEW". I guess you can be under review multiple times? I had a 3 day period where I wasn't under review and everything went back to normal. As of today actually, I am now banned again.
It's pretty miserable. It's actually funny, most of the regular multiplayer lobbies are decentish. Nobody seems to be obviously cheating or hacking. Maybe once or twice I felt like someone might be cheating. It takes a very long time to find a match. And when you do find a match, you'd be lucky to have a sub 60ms ping.
DMZ just released. I really want to play it but I unfortunately cannot, I never find a match.
Also I just gotta throw this out there since I'm trashing on the game right now. This game crashes A LOT.
Activision has been criticized for its faulty anti-cheat software, which has resulted in permanent and unappealable account bans for players of its game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Affected players are unable to access the single-player game, even though they paid $70 or more for it. The bans come with no explanation or ability to communicate with Activision. The issue has been met with "shut up and go away, cheater" responses on social media, and attempts to raise awareness are being suppressed on forums. Players are organizing to file reports with the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.
I’ve casually played this game quite a few times since release and not had any issue. Perhaps I’m too casual but I login, hope into a random quick match, shoot, die, repeat and turn off the console when I’m satisfied.
I spent $70 for a game I can't play on my own account. I can't play with my friends, I can't level my own stuff, and there is nothing I can do. It's completely broken and I can't get a refund in any way. Anyone had success in disputing these purchases with their credit card companies?
I assume you bought from an online store. Also, try to find a support line. Provide this information (high level!) to your credit card company.
God, imagine if your business could ignore customers for months and still be stupidly successful.
I filed an appeal/ticket with Blizzard and they gave me an almost identical canned response as from the article and I simply gave up and vowed to never buy another Blizzard game. About 6 months later on a whim I tried to play the game again and it worked, but the entire experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that I have no motivation to participate in this exercise in frustration.
The problem is that the mapping community had created some very inventive use of out-of-bounds memory access as a way to use the internal game APIs to accomplish things the game engine supports but isn't exposed to mappers. If you take a close look at almost every "big" map eventually you'll find some level of use of these techniques. The community created a "safe list" of known patterns of OOB memory access so that maps could be "verified" as not doing anything naughty while still also having access to these extra modding features.
The worst part? Blizzard was so aware of this situation that they actually re-implemented the OOB memory access in a safe way using known memory offsets. So, they fixed the actual OOB memory access so it shouldn't be possible to use an OOB memory access to crash your game or steal your "cdkey" or similar, but they have whitelisted many useful memory offsets so it's still possible to interact with the game engine in more complex ways.
That's the strangest part for me is that they put in a LOT of effort to remain that level of backwards compatibility and then banned players automatically when they tried to use it. Of course absolutely none of this was communicated to regular players in game and of course the forums are a complete shit show.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
https://lifeasageek.github.io/papers/seonghyun-blackmirror.p...
You should expect them to behave poorly, as they have a history of doing so. It's unfortunate, but you just have to give up on buying their games.
I guess intel SGX chaos didn't help either.
I contacted EAC who confirmed I was not EAC banned, I informed EA of this and just got the default "We cannot discuss bans blah blah" reply. I then ran a GDPR data request, and after 3 weeks I got a massive dump of all my info, which included the ban reason. The ban reason was N/A, not blanked out or censored, just N/A from the data dump. I raised this with EA and they just kept telling me they can't discuss bans etc. I managed to get it escalated eventually via a complaint which lead to my account being unbanned and I got it confirmed that it was an erroneous ban.
https://edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2022-01/edpb_guidelines_...
> Example 3: GAMER X is registered as a user on the gaming platform of PLATFORM Y. One day, GAMER X is notified that his online account has been restricted. As he is unable to log in anymore, GAMER X asks the controller for access to all personal data relating to him. In addition, GAMER X requires access to the reasons for the account restriction. PLATFORM Y, the controller of the online gaming platform with which the request has been lodged, informs the users in its general terms and conditions available on its website, that any kind of cheating (mainly by the use of third party software) will entail a periodical or permanent ban from its platform. PLATFORM Y also informs the users in its privacy policy about the processing of personal data for the purpose of detecting gaming cheats, in accordance with the requirements set out in Art. 13 GDPR.
> Upon receipt of GAMER X’s request for access, PLATFORM Y should provide GAMER X with a copy of the personal data processed about GAMER X. Regarding the reason for the account restriction, PLATFORM Y should confirm GAMER X that it decided to restrict GAMER X’s access to online games due to the use of one or repeated gaming cheats which are in violation with the general terms of use. In addition to the information provided about the processing for the purpose of gaming cheat detection, PLATFORM Y should grant GAMER X access to the information it has stored about GAMER X’s gaming cheats which led to the restriction. In particular, PLATFORM Y should provide GAMER X with the information that led to the restriction of the account (e.g. log overview, date and time of cheating, detection of third party software,...) in order for the data subject to verify that the data processing has been accurate.
> However, according to Art. 15(4) and Recital 63 GDPR, PLATFORM Y is not bound to reveal any part of the technical operating of the anti-cheat software even if this information is relating to GAMER X as long as this is can be regarded as trade secrets. The necessary balancing of interests under Art. 15(4) will have the result that the trade secrets of PLATFORM Y preclude the disclosure of this personal data because knowledge of the technical operating of the anti-cheat software could also allow the user to circumvent future cheat or fraud detection
> The extent of the information provided to individuals will be heavily context dependent, taking into account the nature of the data controller and the nature of the breach of the terms of service. In some cases, it may only be possible for the data controller to provide basic information in response to an access request to which Art. 15(4) applies
So at least some information should be provided while some things could fall under the trade secret exception. I would imagine at least some cases need to go to DPA in order to get some clarification on what information must be provided and which things they could avoid disclosing, but that is going to take quite a while to get any resolution on.
good luck with that, the BBB is basically Yelp for Boomers.
What I can say is that a lot of people say they don't cheat but they actually cheat.
Only acceptable anti-cheat is the one with ZERO false positive.
I think you underestimate the deluge of posts that are made by cheaters pleading their case in a public forum. It's so common that it's basically a meme. I don't blame the moderation policies that prohibit these posts. These posts are typically provocative and often try to riles users up against the developer. Nobody wants to read these posts, you can never be sure they're real and there's nothing a regular user can do except upvote it and subsequently ignore it. There's no good conversation or comments to be found, it's all bad stuff.
This is not to say the issue at hand isn't a very real problem. Anecdotally it feels like these kinds of situations are increasing with frequency as developers tire of the inevitable losing fight against cheating and are desperate to show their customers they're taking the problem seriously.