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Comment by zebracanevra | Hacker News Reader

This scenario is the same for nearly every multiplayer video game.

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_...

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> "Sorry, can’t tell you cause it’s part of anti cheat system, hope you understand". Which is ridiculous.

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 cynic inside me thinks that the reason gaming companies fall back on this excuse is to help keep the costumer facing/dispute resolution staff as thinly manned as possible.

If your local GameStop posted a security guard outside the store to confiscate games from suspected shoplifters, and only had an error rate of 0.01%, I doubt people would be happy for GameStop to tell the 1 in 10,000 people who's newly purchased games have just been stolen that they can't discuss why and to just deal with it or GameStop will send someone else around to their house to steal all their other games.

Not sure if russian custom of abusing power above weaker is same as Activision absolute incompetence to develop functional software.

Could also be a coincidence, actual devs have not commented yet afaik.

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).

EFT is also very different in that they rely on a large grey market to drive sales. Real Money Trading is a huge problem, people will buy a cheat, use them to obtain lots of in game money, and then sell this in-game money to people for FIAT.

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.

It's not ridiculous. If he said the exact thing which triggered the flag a cheat author could tune their cheat to always stay under what gets flagged.

Don't spend money on products or services out of russia. We should all be avoiding that at this point.

The game is 5 years old.

Russia invaded crimea in 2014

You mean which come from russia right?

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