[gambiting]

>>The actual cheater is still getting a signal that they've been detected, because they get banned.

So....yes. But there are mitigating tactics around this, I really recommend looking into it because it's a fascinating topic. As the simplest thing - you don't ban cheaters the moment they are detected to not give off how you detected them. That's why Activision bans people in waves and all at once, even though they know some people are cheating and still active. Unfortunately a lot of people are paying for cheats nowadays, and the cheat makers usually have some kind of refund policy where if you get detected you get your money back - games companies want to inconvenience those buyers as much as possible, so you can't claim your refund straight away because hey, the game worked for a good while even while you were cheating, must have been something else :P

>>Meanwhile the normal user is both confused and significantly more inconvenienced

Yes, which is why the aim is to have 0 legitimate players getting caught by this, obviously.

[arminiusreturns]

>> Yes, which is why the aim is to have 0 legitimate players getting caught by this, obviously.

One thing this is missing is that forcing addicted players to buy again helps bring in the cash flow, so what a few legit people got wrapped up, enough buy back the equation for the shadier game companies (usually the big ones) will go ahead and never rescind a ban.

[gambiting]

Literally no one does this in the industry, even if it sounds like a great idea on paper. Every big publisher knows that cheaters always bring negative cashflow to your company because they put off other players from playing. A single cheater in a 20 player game can put half of them off playing again, tarnishing your reputation at the same time. There is no universe in which "we'll just make cheaters buy our game again" makes any financial or any other sense - the goal is to get them to stop playing, permanently, and be enough of a pain in the ass that they never buy your game again.

>> so what a few legit people got wrapped up, enough buy back the equation

I've never seen any data that would support this. It just doesn't happen - if you accidentally ban a legit player they just get really pissed off and there's about 0% chance they will give you money again. Which is why you try extremely hard to not do that.

[bobthebuilders]

I used to work at a game company fresh out of college, and this is simply untrue. The company made roughly 40% of sales from cheater whales (one can imagine how much the chest makers made), and there were guidelines on repeated bans where we recognized similarities to make sure we wouldn't ban them again too early.

I left the industry because of thah and the other things like loot boxes and matchmaking for profit and to push micro transactions. It's a terrible place.

[gambiting]

I guess you worked somewhere where that was considered a good business strategy then. I worked at a large publisher for over 10 years on couple big competitive titles and the idea always was to get cheaters off our service asap and permanently, no matter their spend(in fact we couldn't see that and it never made any impact on our engineering decisions around the problem).

>>It's a terrible place.

Some companies sure.

And yes sorry I realize I said "no one does this" - let me correct myself to say that in my experience at a couple big publishers this isn't a strategy anyone pursues because it's not worth the losses to your legit playerbase and reputation. But there might be companies that do this, I concede.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Yes, which is why the aim is to have 0 legitimate players getting caught by this, obviously.

You can't just say that though, you have to actually do that, which is apparently not what's happening.

[gambiting]

The problem is obviously the same as in many other industries - how do you distinguish honest legitimate players who swear they haven't cheated from people who will say anything to get you to unban them. I don't work in that department personally, but I've seen reports shared internally where the player literally went to local news station to say how unfairly they are treated and how we banned him without any info or any reason and how it's affecting his mental health and his family and he basically made a huge stink around it, and then we pull up the ban report for his account and we clearly see a screenshot from his machine where he's running cheat engine with cheats for our game enabled. Some people will just lie through their teeth to get their way. So you have to rely on what you know with absolute certainty - you detected something that is absolutely indicative of cheating? You ban them. Anything else is a no no. At least where I used to work no one used any kind of algorithm for automatic bans, those were only used for manually reviewed cases where someone would actually watch a replay of your game before issuing a ban.

Does that mean the system is foolproof? No, of course not. But banning honest paying users is a huge risk to any business - so obviously no one wants to do that, every system like this errs on the side of caution by default for that reason alone.

And obvious disclaimer - I can only comment on my own experiences, I have no idea what every company out there is doing.

[AnthonyMouse]

> how do you distinguish honest legitimate players who swear they haven't cheated from people who will say anything to get you to unban them.

It's mostly not about the appeals process. You want to avoid the false positive accusations to begin with.

> and then we pull up the ban report for his account and we clearly see a screenshot from his machine where he's running cheat engine with cheats for our game enabled.

Hypothetically things like this can happen where someone is reusing passwords that end up in a data breach and then some script kiddie gets their hands on it and wants to dip their toes into some cheating without risking their own account. Then you have the original account holder screaming at you because they know they didn't cheat.

Or they could just be cheaters who doth protest too much.

But there are ways you can at least try to distinguish these things, e.g. did the cheating happen on the same PC or IP address the account normally uses?

> Does that mean the system is foolproof? No, of course not. But banning honest paying users is a huge risk to any business - so obviously no one wants to do that, every system like this errs on the side of caution by default for that reason alone.

It's apparently failing enough that this thread has multiple people saying they've experienced false positives, and it doesn't seem like they're interested in getting their accounts back.

[arkh]

I would not be surprised to learn some gaming company is selling cheats for their own games.

[michaelt]

Yes, but I think the companies prefer the term "in-app purchase"

[Asmod4n]

there is no money back from the cheat makers, its paypal, visa et al which does that.

[gambiting]

Well I don't know if it's universally true for every single cheat, but cheat makers do in fact offer refunds/compensation if your account gets banned. As ths simplest example:

https://battlelog.co/forums/topic/12037-sorry-frost-you-can-...

(Frost is one of the owners of the site that sells cheats - he offers refunds and compensation whenever anyone has issues with their cheats)