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Comment by Yasuraka | Hacker News Reader

Why ban IPs or emails if you've got a perfectly valid user ID tied to a >60 bucks license.

No. For the vast majority of games, they're either free to play, or less than 20 bucks.

In addition: people pay over $100 per month for these cheats, plus the initial hardware investment. The 60 bucks license doesn't matter. You just hop to another server.

    The 60 bucks license doesn't matter. You just hop to another server.

That's the entire point and why community moderation servers work. Why would a hacker keep coming back to a well moderate private server where they only get 5-10 minutes of play time before their account/license get banned when they can instead go to another unmoderated server and not worry about it?

The problem with "you don't need to outrun the bear, only to outrun your friend" is that either you or your friend are going to get eaten. All other things being equal, it would be preferable to have a strategy where no one gets eaten.

Both me and my friend are playing on the community server where the cheaters are banned, neither of us are getting eaten.

I mean no... there is always a large portion of players that I would never want to play with in any meaningful way, aka racists, screechers, try hards, toxic, etc.

I'm perfectly content of feed those people to the bear so me and my friends can continue to have a fun and mostly hacker free experience.

Because the unmoderated servers are full of other cheaters.

Some companies have tried a strategy of quietly shunting cheaters off to cheater ghettoes but the cheaters figure it out pretty quickly. With some limited exceptions, the cheating we're talking about is motivated by a desire to gain an advantage over legitimate, non-cheating players.

For many cheaters, $60 is nothing. Either because they have money to burn, or because they're not getting it legitimately in the first place.

The question was why ban IPs or emails instead of those - both are orders of magnitudes easier and cheaper to circumvent.

No, the question is "why do we even need invasive anti-cheating mechanisms" with the proposed alternative being to simply ban people (of course, bans are still used even with anti-cheat).

Yes, banning a license key (assuming you have an unforgeable proof of license key ownership) is more potent than banning an IP address or email address. There are cross-game mechanisms like Steam VAC bans and Xbox Live account bans which are pretty potent too.

But they can still be evaded. Besides many cheaters simply having the money to buy new things, they can also get them from sites that trade in stolen license keys and accounts.

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