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).

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