It's really the only solution to minimize collateral damage while trying to effectively permanently ban someone from a free-to-play game that doesn't require ID verification.
Often, the only piece of info they collect from you is an e-mail address used to register an account. If you ban an e-mail address, creating a new one is trivial.
Banning an IP address has too much potential for collateral damage. You end up banning an entire household, or potentially an entire building. If you ban an IP that belongs to a VPN, you can easily end up blocking hundreds or even thousands of legitimate players.
Hardware bans are basically the best (or rather, the least bad) option. I challenge you to come with an alternative solution to be able to permanently ban a player without requiring ID verification or potentially affecting innocent players that can't be easily circumvented.
At least allow hardware+email overrides/allow-list. If someone has a banned cpu and they promise they're not the offender, why not allow them back on _with_ a fixed email address?
If they keep doing it, not like you won't notice by the time they're like "no really, the 4 other guys before me cheated, I bought this cpu from them".
How about making the hardware ban temporary, like 3 months?
How about making it work when you see a consistent combination of hardware, like mobo and storage?
How about allowing unbanning of the hardware if someone sends you a notarized statement that they bought it from someone else?
Etc.
Actually not a bad idea...resort to long suspensions rather than outright permanent bans.
As long as detection and action are swift enough, if a cheater knows they'll be banned within an hour, then they'll likely get bored of cheating just to get banned an hour later every 3 months.
For many people, getting a new CPU is pretty trivial too. They might as well just offer the option to pay a fee to get unbanned at that point. It would reduce waste.
I find a lot about this story exceedingly hard to believe.
1) a community of niche players has banned dozens of people due to HWID conflicts between their existing playerbase and their banned players.
2) that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
3) the hardware aftermarket is so small that the same players from within that niche community are swapping components unknowingly.
it' be more plausible for me personally to think that a CPU vendor fucked up on the HWID generation scheme.
2) Player fingerprinting isn't CPU-only.
3) The hardware aftermarket contains every flagged component without exception.
The aspect I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the amount of money people will spend to cheat in a game for a limited amount of time. Simple account bans are useless against people who have no problem buying another copy, forever.
From my perspective, the unusual part of this claim is that OP's community hasn't gone invite-only like so many others. Open servers are a labor of love.
>that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
Since HN isn't familiar with the lengths cheaters and admins are willing to go in this cat and mouse game, here's some context: we had a healthy community with non-playing mods monitoring the game nearly 24/7 and wrote a lot of custom observability software, in particular to my knowledge we were the first to attempt eliminating duping in DayZ Mod (ArmA II - everything is client-side!), before DayZ Origins. Each player was tracked and recorded server-side, and observed by mods. I can safely say we never had a closet cheater operating on our servers for more than a week, and obvious ones for an hour. The longest time was a month, it was a highly respectable player, he was truly subtle and it was a big scandal after which he was provided with proofs and banished forever. Half of our server was Russians and about a quarter were Germans, in an era of brazen cheating in both communities, and HWID bans being relatively new (think early Rust/DayZ/7DtD/Ark's Great War and later on SCUM). Yes, there absolutely was time in Russia when it was possible to buy a banned PC on Avito (eBay equivalent). In each case I'm talking about except for one guy, these were highly regarded players (which doesn't mean we trusted them, quite the opposite), and each move and fight between their clans was scrutinized by default, and recorded to be shown later. They came back after global bans and were fully transparent about what happened (they bought used PCs/laptops, not CPUs, and got immediately banned). Since such situations were highly unusual and we had a policy of punishing entire teams, we had to dig into a few days of activity of them and their clans manually, looking at each action and investigating possible info they weren't supposed to have. With all our experience absolutely nothing stood out, and we had to conclude they're clean and let the willing ones return.
That wasn't the wildest thing that happened in our servers.