[marcus_holmes]

I never got how this worked on Steam. You have a consistent Steam ID, which the game is tied to, and all your achievements/ranks/etc.

Isn't that what you are talking about here?

You can create a new Steam account, sure, but that would start you again from scratch as a total newbie (and losing access to anything you'd bought)

[longsword]

I'm talking about steam accounts. There are many cheaters our there, who just dont care if they lose an account. They will cheat on an alternative Account and when they get banned, they will buy a new one. They dont even care spending some bucks on the Game again. Edit: Take Rust as an example. A year ago, the Developers made some stats public: 12 Million copies sold, 600.000 Banned Accounts. Thats 5% of all sold Accounts. There is even a Twitter Feed, showing all the Bans:https://twitter.com/rusthackreport Most of the Accounts will show a Playtime of under 30 hours in the Game, mostly no Friends or other games, indicating they were only made for cheating.

[marcus_holmes]

Griefers gonna grief. Some people aren't happy unless they're making someone else miserable :(

[vintermann]

I'm amazed at how much money some people have to burn on new accounts. Looking at minecraft servers, there are so ridiculously many people banned.

I've wondered if there's some sort of economy here, i.e. someone with a ton of stolen accounts monetizing them by offering to cheat all day on your competitor's server.

[6yyyyyy]

Oh yes, absolutely. There are a number of "alt shops" selling Minecraft accounts accounts for a few cents each.

Most of these accounts have security questions set, so you can't change the email and truly "take ownership" of the account, but it's good enough for cheating on servers.

Some shops even have an API for generating accounts or tokens, so your hack client can have a feature where you get a new account right from your game. Get banned, reconnect in a few seconds.

[vintermann]

The last point sounds like a security vulnerability of some sort? It shouldn't be hard for Mojang to issue unforgeable tokens.