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".

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