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Redditor buys used CPU, turns out it was banned on Valorant and they are SoL

80 points · 65 comments · xbmcuser

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2OEH8eoCRo0 · 1790945910 · focus · HN ↗
When did video games get so serious that we need to do these things? Ridiculous.
1. vjsrinivas · 1790946288 · focus · HN ↗
  I wonder if it has anything to do with the rise of e-sports and the monetary aspect of "professional" multi-player games?
  1. 2OEH8eoCRo0 · 1790946568 · focus · HN ↗
    That's one of my theories. Money got involved and here we are. Now games are serious business! Remember when they were just fun?
    xeonmc · 1790949120 · focus · HN ↗
    Esports used to be just fun grassroots competition until Riot Games bulldozed over the nascent self-sustaining scenes and started the rat race of astroturf-bankrolling "professionalized" scenes lacking the foundation of any sort of viable business model, propped up only by VC sponsors. When those ran dry, the Saudi oil funds swooped in to buy up all the tournament rights as part of their sportswashing campaign.
    Riot Games was also the one that introduced the nanny policing of "if you deviate from the squeaky clean advertiser-friendly image we stipulate, we'll make sure you have no future in the pro scene ever again" tribunal, presenting themselves as the bastion of "pre-eliminating all toxicity from online gaming", which is ironically hypocritical considering their scandals after scandals of toxic workplace culture.
    7bit · 1790951053 · focus · HN ↗
    Esports was serious loooong before Riot games existed.
    xeonmc · 1790951524 · focus · HN ↗
    Serious competition as a fulfilling grassroots activity? Sure it existed before Riot.
    Artificially propped-up unsustainable "professionalization" whose eventual conclusion is to enforce spyware on casual participants? That's Riot's gift to the world.
    orbital-decay · 1790955429 · focus · HN ↗
    Kernel spyware is at least 2 decades old, and manual scrutiny of casual participants is as old as networked competitive gaming and cheating themselves (id games had that from the start!). It has nothing to do with money. Moreover, people are paying north of $1k/mo to cheat in video games.
    vel0city · 1790967696 · focus · HN ↗
    I remember watching Counterstrike tournaments in CPL in the early 2000s and Intel Extreme Masters in 2007.
    LoL (Riot's first big "esport" game) didn't really start having large tournaments until 2011. LoL didn't even come out until a few years after ESL started hosting regular professionalized Counter Strike tournaments.
    mmmlinux · 1790956838 · focus · HN ↗
    They were never just fun though. there were always hackers and cheaters.
  2. Eridrus · 1790960763 · focus · HN ↗
    No, people cheat at multiplayer games that have no stakes pretty regularly.
    This is more necessary with the rise of freemium games where the base account is trivially replaced and so banning people's accounts does nothing.
    Not that paid games don't have cheating issues, but there's a limit on how much people are willing to spend getting rebanned regularly.
2. nancyminusone · 1790948441 · focus · HN ↗
  Probably around the time individual games started to have the term "billion dollars" associated with them in some way.
3. bigmadshoe · 1790949868 · focus · HN ↗
  As someone who has played a decent of competitive games in the past, it is less about them being extremely serious, and more about how much people cheating ruins the fun for everyone else.
  For example, a soccer Sunday league might not be that serious, but you still wouldn't want someone frequently running on the pitch with a golf club and whacking the ball into your goal with no consequences.
  1. cronin101 · 1790951548 · focus · HN ↗
    Definitely not frequently, but once or twice a lifetime would provide a measurable uplift.
    ElevenLathe · 1790954009 · focus · HN ↗
    GTA Online has this feeling at times. I always find it a refreshing distraction when somebody comes into a public server with obvious hacks and starts spawning bizarre weapons, vehicles, giving out money, changing the weather or day/night cycle abruptly, teleporting everyone to the same location. It's easy to leave to another server when it gets boring or frustrating, but these are the times when I put out the call on Discord for other non-currently-online friends to join me!
    Eridrus · 1790960649 · focus · HN ↗
    People buying cheats do not stop at once.
4. orbital-decay · 1790954138 · focus · HN ↗
  Anticheats started moving into ring0 and became rootkits in early 2000s with nProtect GameGuard, HWID checks started in mid-2000s with myAC (or even earlier? I think myAC first appeared during CS 1.5).
  1. Sohcahtoa82 · 1790960431 · focus · HN ↗
    First anti-cheat I ever ran into was PunkBuster. I don't remember when I first used it, but apparently it was released in 2000.
  2. tadfisher · 1790960433 · focus · HN ↗
    Those were easily worked around with unsigned drivers or physical hardware. Now Secure Boot is required to run Valorant games, which should be a harbinger for what will happen to your online banking experience if consumers allow this to continue.
    orbital-decay · 1790962269 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah that's why I stopped playing and hosting those games, ESEA Bitcoin mining scandal was the thing that made me think and VM banning in EFT was the last drop. Valorant is the most paranoid and the biggest offender, but the others are close.
5. RicoElectrico · 1790954794 · focus · HN ↗
  When tryhards flocked to ranked games; more broadly in the world with no opportunity for the young people e-sports emerged and they saw it as one.
6. sippingabonedry · 1790959356 · focus · HN ↗
  When people ruined it for everyone by cheating.
7. happytoexplain · 1790960993 · focus · HN ↗
  In PVP games, it's hard to have fun when there is any non-negligible amount of cheating, even if you're not playing seriously. This comment is a little like saying people who won't let you cheat in a board game are being "too serious". Maybe the more relevant disconnect is that you just don't like PVP games much...?
  If on the other hand you're trying to imply that cheating in popular PVP games can be prevented without measures this extreme, as far as I know that's just wrong. It's an arms race and we've been at it long enough that we're at the hardware level now.
8. deltoidmaximus · 1790962437 · focus · HN ↗
  We're talking about a free to play (no cost to being banned) game without dedicated servers (no intimate community to police the servers). Cheaters always existed but the business model used exacerbated the problem.
9. nkrisc · 1790970120 · focus · HN ↗
  Because competitive games with a cheater problem are dead games. I understand the desire to prevent cheating, and I think most players of those games are okay with it.
10. mrguyorama · 1790975356 · focus · HN ↗
  When it became more profitable to sell a 3D model for game's character than it was to sell the actual game.
  The only point to these systems is companies wanting a total stranglehold on any way to play the game so that you cannot bypass their skin market.
  Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing any of this, because it costs more to develop a root kit than it costs to just hand out a shitty server exe and let the community figure it out like was common in the past.
m-p-3 · 1790946909 · focus · HN ↗
We'll eventually need something like CarFax where you can look for hardware bans for multiple softwares and games before you purchase a part..
yusyusyus · 1790948479 · focus · HN ↗
uhh.. i dont think amd or intel has even attempted to make a s/n accessible on their CPUs since the big stink in the 90's.
1. rasz · 1790951441 · focus · HN ↗
  TPM 2.0 Endorsement Key (EK)
crostlybostly · 1790950254 · focus · HN ↗
Video Game has to be one of the areas enshitification is most visible to me.
Unfinished games being released, no LAN, paywalled features, pay to win, games unusable after support ends, etc.
I think we are due for surge of people just playing classic games and boycotting all the new BS that is coming out. Piracy should be encouraged as a check and balance against shitty UX.
1. jollyllama · 1790963708 · focus · HN ↗
  First, they came for the gamers...
2. nkrisc · 1790970311 · focus · HN ↗
  It’s also the least impactful. What’s the worst that happens, you don’t play video games? Oh no.
orbital-decay · 1790950954 · focus · HN ↗
That's a well known risk when buying used hardware, although I doubt a blacklisted CPU could do that alone. I used to host a bunch of pretty popular servers for survival games many of which used hardware ID checks, and we had about a dozen people banned due to this in ~5 years. We had extremely thorough investigations and they were 100% clean.
1. dataflow · 1790959629 · focus · HN ↗
  Not sure what well-known means, I don't think I'd ever heard of even the idea of hardware bans until now. Feels like banning a student's notebook because they took notes with it to cheat in school, rather than suspending or expelling the student.
  1. Sohcahtoa82 · 1790960817 · focus · HN ↗
    Hardware bans have existed for years.
    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.
    dataflow · 1790965404 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not saying you can't use hardware as a factor in banning. I'm just saying there seem to be better ways of incorporating hardware checks to minimize harm to innocent people.
    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.
    Sohcahtoa82 · 1790985460 · focus · HN ↗
    > How about making the hardware ban temporary, like 3 months?
    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.
    protimewaster · 1790972011 · focus · HN ↗
    > If you ban an e-mail address, creating a new one is trivial.
    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.
    kadoban · 1790992244 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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".
2. happytoexplain · 1790960060 · focus · HN ↗
  Maybe well-known among people whose business it is to buy and sell hardware. I personally have never heard of this, and I imagine a strong majority of normal people buying hardware don't know either.
3. Eridrus · 1790960519 · focus · HN ↗
  Definitely not well known to most people lol.
4. unethical_ban · 1790962183 · focus · HN ↗
  I've been building PCs for myself and on occasion, others for 20 years. I have been playing games for as long. I never knew CPU hardware IDs were used in game permabans.
5. serf · 1790965559 · focus · HN ↗
  Keep in mind that Intel was shipping 50-75 million CPUs a quarter and there are like 280m PCs sold a year.:
  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.
  1. gopher_space · 1790968250 · focus · HN ↗
    1) The game or service is auto-banning players, not the community. 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.
    orbital-decay · 1790975808 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, many adjacent communities either went private/invite-only or had many geoIP restrictions where it was possible. We insisted on being neutral, having as little rules as possible, and being semi-manually moderated, with a ton of tricks from our side (down to automating tracking the cheating alts). We even punished cheating blame drama and whining by kicking players out of hardcore servers. As a result we had cutthroat and fair pvp from the most dedicated teams in existence (especially in Ark, but 7dtd and Rust were standing out as well).
  2. orbital-decay · 1790972483 · focus · HN ↗
    About a dozen, not dozens, over several years! These were global bans by the anticheat, not ours. We had EU servers in 5 games, with hundreds of active players per day on each of the two or three per game. It's not as niche as you think.
    >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.
tamimio · 1790951141 · focus · HN ↗
Same happens on smartphones btw with some apps that take the hardware fingerprint
niels8472 · 1790959623 · focus · HN ↗
Big game needs you to install a rootkit to play. But hey you can trust people selling crack^wloot boxes to kids right.
wxw · 1790961103 · focus · HN ↗
TIL you can ban CPUs
1. pixl97 · 1790964569 · focus · HN ↗
  You can ban anything that gives up a unique identifier
xnx · 1790961295 · focus · HN ↗
When the hardware you bought snitches on you, it is clear that you do not own it. Somewhere we got things ass-backward. The human tells the computer what it can/can't do, not the other way around.
1. eksu · 1790963623 · focus · HN ↗
  This is not what is happening. The CPU simply has a hardware identifier, it's not 'snitching' on anyone. This has legitimate uses, can prevent things like the external packaging of the CPU being modified and sold as something else etc.
  That some provider / service is limiting access to their platform based off of this is not some libre / freedom issue. It's unfortunate and probably should be tied to something else. The computer isn't doing anything wrong here.
  It is an unfortunate situation.
  1. xnx · 1790964410 · focus · HN ↗
    Right, but I should be able to tell software the CPU id is whatever I want it to be. The hardware is going behind my back and talking to the software without my permission.
    2bewithu · 1790969935 · focus · HN ↗
    ctfu
  2. pixl97 · 1790964529 · focus · HN ↗
    Na, we had this conversation decades ago now and yes unique identifiers on your cpu is your cpu snitching on you because this is exactly how it was going to be used. The manufacturer has no need to put it on there.
2. x1watt · 1790964858 · focus · HN ↗
  At least that is one game provider and you can still use the computer for normal usage and other game providers. At Nintendo Switch 2 they will completely block the device from accessing the online game center which is the only chance for downloading games when trying to use a cheat card or similar.
3. type0 · 1790973716 · focus · HN ↗
  When your OS snitches on you, you should uninstall it
rjh29 · 1790963068 · focus · HN ↗
The Denuvo hack uses Windows Hypervisor to intercept cpuid, maybe that would work?
richwater · 1790964605 · focus · HN ↗
Everyone here is talking about how games shouldn't have the ability to do this while not understanding that without it, most online games (PVP specifically) turn into a cheaters paradise and ruin it for all paying customers.
Riot Vanguard has all but eliminated cheaters in Valorant (sporadic instances and DMA hardware can still be used), but the vast (99.9+%) of games are clean because of what they did. Customers place serious value in that.
1. kasabali · 1790967222 · focus · HN ↗
  I understand that and I still say games shouldn't have the ability to do this.
  1. richwater · 1790969172 · focus · HN ↗
    Then don't download the game. Or run linux and skip the ability to run any online games. I don't know what to tell you.
  2. nkrisc · 1790970237 · focus · HN ↗
    There are many games that don’t do things like this. In fact I play many games that the developers encourage you to modify and cheat.
2. mrguyorama · 1790975618 · focus · HN ↗
  This was not an issue until games chose to omit custom servers "For your protection" of course.
  Counterstrike and TF2 have absurd problems with bots and cheats on official servers, but because you can just run it yourself, communities were able to handle those problems how they want, including some of them choosing to utilize rootkit level anti-cheat, but many don't, and don't have a serious problem with cheating.
  I remember playing video games where cheating was trivial, and yet they just didn't have a serious problem, because the servers that didn't have someone moderating them and kicking out cheaters were terrible to play on regardless of cheating
  1. vel0city · 1791140443 · focus · HN ↗
    > chose to omit custom servers
    Most of their audience don't want community servers. They want matchmaking.
    Community servers are available in a lot of these games, for instance Counterstrike. What percentage of the playerbase plays on those?
    And sure, let's say we do have community servers. You ban a player. It's free to make a new account. The player just instantly returns. You ban that account. The player returns. You ban that account, the player returns. You ban that account ..guess what happens! You haven't actually solved the problem.
    The issue isn't the moderation, a good vote kick system will handle that. The issue is, how do you actually ban a cheater when there is zero cost (or extremely low cost) to create a new identity? You tie the identity to a harder to change, more expensive to chante, identifier.
    I remember moderating community servers back in the day (I hosted hundreds) and essentially being helpless to actually stop people from rejoining. Ban their IP, they rejoin a few moments later from another IP. Ban their account ID, they're back with another account. Whack a mole all day long until they get bored.
oliwarner · 1790965867 · focus · HN ↗
So this is bullshit, right? We're all going along like it really happened but it doesn't smell right.
If they only bought a CPU and CPUs don't have serial IDs (since P3s and some kooky server CPUs), how could Valorant fingerprint it?
1. vel0city · 1790967871 · focus · HN ↗
  Modern TPMs are fTPMs and are essentially in the CPU package.
  Each TPM 2.0 has a unique Endorsement Key (EK).
  Thus, every CPU has a unique identifier, which assuming the fTPM is correct (big if), cannot be changed.
  <a href="https://andrewmoore.ca/blog/post/anticheat-secure-boot-tpm/" rel="nofollow">https://andrewmoore.ca/blog/post/anticheat-secure-boot-tpm/
m-p-3 · 1790972142 · focus · HN ↗
I think at this point the issue is between the buyer and the reseller. If I bought a CPU and I wasn't able to play a game, I'd ask for a refund and ship back the CPU to them at their expense.
Fire-Dragon-DoL · 1790975623 · focus · HN ↗
And this should be illegal. This is blocking resale and creating waste for no reason.

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