Thread

1. 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.

         1. 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.

            1. 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.

         2. 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.

         3. 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.

         1. 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.

         That wasn't the wildest thing that happened in our servers.

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