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Comment by jjmarr | Hacker News Reader

Chess essentially has ID verification at a high level because the best players can go to real-life tournaments and get titles for the prestige, which grants them free premium accounts on major platforms. It's easier to analyze the subset of top-tier players that aren't verified.

I'd rather just give Riot Games my driver's licence than full access to my computer. They already know my name and where I live from metadata.

There should be a KYC solution for gaming where a company like Epic, Riot, or Valve verifies your identity and developers can gate competitive video games behind that. If you cheat, you're out for 5-10 years (so dumb teenagers aren't locked out forever). The big issue imo isn't banning cheaters, it's preventing them from creating a new account and cheating again.

Such a system would be free money & low maintenance for whatever company develops it first.

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This is actually how cheating is "solved" to some degree in South Korea. Basically you can't play without logging in with your government provided id.

Though they do also use it for stuff like under 16 year olds not being able to play online games between midnight and 6am.

edit: Some extra details about this from a few months ago https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617

> KR (Korea) requires national identity numbers for gaming, which opens up a convenient opportunity to ban cheaters at the “soul” level. It is remarkably effective at keeping them out of game for longer periods of time—cheaters have to buy whole new identities to keep playing, so the bans really stick.

This makes the stakes for getting caught cheating, much higher. It does nothing to "solve" cheating. If someone is using additional code to gain an un-fair advantage, knowing who they are does nothing to detect this.

But it does lower the amount of cheaters as the consequences are bigger. Also makes manual banning/moderation much more cost effective as the bans actually stick.

At the end of the day the goal isn't 0 cheaters but having few enough that the chance of your match being ruined by one is 1 or 2% instead of 10 or 20%

It's relatively easy to catch cheaters. There's constant banwaves in Valorant, CS2, and Rainbow Six Siege. The challenge is that cheat authors fix their exploits to be undetectable, and the cheaters get a new account in a week or two. This means detecting cheats does not have a lasting impact on cheating's presence in a game. The prevalence of cheating is the problem a game developer is trying to solve.

I don't see why something like ChexSystems IDV wouldn't be viable here.

Acquire my identity in the same way you would if I was seeking approval for a new checking account or loan. I'd be perfectly happy to see the bar raised a few inches off the ground. The current state of competitive video games is really bad.

The other obvious solution is to charge enough for accounts that it covers moderation costs plus some extra. That way with each ban wave either the number of cheaters goes down or the funding for moderation to catch them goes up.

Maybe let people opt-in to photo ID verification if they want a one-time free account.

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