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. 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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