Activision’s faulty anti-cheat software

https://blog.mikeswanson.com/post/702753924034297856/activisions-faulty-anti-cheat-software

by mdswanson • 4 years ago

473 336 4 years ago

blog.mikeswanson.com

mdswanson5• 4 years ago

Trying to spread the word on Activision's faulty anti-cheat software and how they're permanently banning players with no explanation or recourse.

zebracanevra• 4 years ago

This scenario is the same for nearly every multiplayer video game.

Here's a recent example in the Russian game Escape from Tarkov[1]. A player kills a developer and gets banned moments after for cheating. Luckily he manages to catch it on video, and posts it to reddit. He's subsequently unbanned. Why was he banned? "false alarm triggered". When asked for more details, BSG responds "Sorry, can’t tell you cause it’s part of anti cheat system, hope you understand". Which is ridiculous.

BSG is in Russia and therefore untouchable, but I don't have much hope for these other companies like ATVI who are doing the sort of abuse.

[1]. https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapefromTarkov/comments/zawwc5/i_...

Gigachad4• 4 years ago

"Sorry, can’t tell you cause it’s part of anti cheat system, hope you understand". Which is ridiculous.

This is how all fraud detection works. Outside of gaming as well. That doesn't mean the previous action was right, but the fact they can't tell you why means nothing at all. The whole industry is built on secrecy and having a few hidden tricks in the bag.

hsuduebc23• 4 years ago

Not sure if russian custom of abusing power above weaker is same as Activision absolute incompetence to develop functional software.

dubcee349• 4 years ago

Don't spend money on products or services out of russia. We should all be avoiding that at this point.

charcircuit2• 4 years ago

It's not ridiculous. If he said the exact thing which triggered the flag a cheat author could tune their cheat to always stay under what gets flagged.

Hikikomori2• 4 years ago

Could also be a coincidence, actual devs have not commented yet afaik.

The banned guy can contact battleye and try to get unbanned if it was false, has happened before (usually a group of players with something in common are banned, last time it was s specific motherboard or a driver for it).

GaryNumanVevo2• 4 years ago

EFT is also very different in that they rely on a large grey market to drive sales. Real Money Trading is a huge problem, people will buy a cheat, use them to obtain lots of in game money, and then sell this in-game money to people for FIAT.

If EFT bans a cheater, they're effectively getting another sale, because the cheater will come back and make money off the grey market once more. The result is that you have tons of cheaters, and EFT only needs to make broad strokes efforts at curbing them to keep existing players happy.

blibble3• 4 years ago

if it's a recent purchase and you've done nothing wrong: hit them where it hurts and issue a chargeback

at least that way they're not profiting from their scummy behaviour

snoopy_telex2• 4 years ago

This sadly is a bad idea, as it’ll get your entire store account banned (Steam, battle.net, etc). Chargebacks work great until the whole account matters.

blibble3• 4 years ago

steam don't

and honestly who cares these days if their battle.net account is lost

(as long as you get some of your money back)

DaiPlusPlus• 4 years ago

it’ll get your entire store account banned

Surely, taking escalatory retribution like that is illegal, somewhere...I hope...?

-----

Non-escalatory retribution would be banning you from the game you filed a chargeback for - I can't get mad over that.

But an online store doing unilateral revocation of access and licenses for a consumer's entire library (without refunding it 100%) in response to a single chargeback is just begging for countries' consumer protection agencies to come knocking, and even if that's a term in the store's EULA I can't see how they could be upheld by a court as an conscionable (and therefore legally enforcible) contract clause - especially given the dim-view to which online and click-through EULAs/TOS are viewed by most countries courts' today anyway.

Speaking as someone with too much time on my hands (thanks to a cushy job, I'm pleased to say, rather than funemployment) I secretely want to be dicked-over by a megacorp like this so I can get amusement (and a worthwhile life experience) by availing myself of the court system to hold these companies to account. Now I just need to find a similar way to make Microsoft undo the crappy shell in Windows 11.

jwalton• 4 years ago

Steam has a whole FAQ about this: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22...

Matheus28• 4 years ago

In this case, it really looks like Activision's Anti-Cheat is broken and banning people unfairly (if we can trust OP, which I have no reason not to).

A related problem though is that game developers have a really hard time trusting anyone who says they've been banned unfairly. Almost everyone who gets banned for valid reasons will claim they did nothing wrong, etc. This is especially true for delayed bans, as the person doesn't even realize that their account got flagged to be banned weeks before the actual ban took place.

Given that problem, when a developer gets reports of users being banned unfairly, it's very easy to ignore them as salty cheaters. Ideally there is a way for them to know exactly what tripped the anti-cheat, but sometimes it's hard as the client has to covertly tell the server to ban itself.

snoopy_telex2• 4 years ago

The console bans should be investigated cause that’s a strong signal that the software is just wrong.

AmericanChopper4• 4 years ago

Not as strong As you might think. The Cronus is a very strong cheating device for consoles, and it’s ubiquitous enough to be sold in some big-box retail stores.

CyanLite2• 4 years ago

I'm a stock Xbox Series X console player in DMZ mode. I also sometimes get the random crashes and "DEV ERROR" messages after being removed from the game. I also have been removed from games several times with the "Player kicked" message. I can share my userId with any Activision employee here who's looking into the matter where you can see my K/D ratio is far too poor to be a "cheater".

revolvingocelot3• 4 years ago

This is a feature! You and the other cheaters, whether you're actually baby or bathwater, will simply have to buy it again!!

IMO the only winning move is not to play. I loved calladoody back in university, but you've got to move with the times, yeah? OTOH, I'm not the one who really changed; I'm still all about dedicated servers, but they haven't been seen since Modern Warfare 1.

The winning move for the anticheat dev is shortly going to be not to play, either. It's one thing to implement increasingly invasive rootkits to find out who's watching your game's memory, but I've heard tell of devices that sit between the PC and monitor, using specialized ML to click M1 and fire when an enemy is detected in one's crosshairs. How can you check for something like that?

Gigachad4• 4 years ago

How can you check for something like that?

I've heard of work around using machine learning to analyze players and compare them to the actions of cheaters. It's not flawless but it can give some kind of probability of cheating so you can match make cheaters with other suspected cheaters.

0x0000000• 4 years ago

CSGO does this very well to my understanding.

revolvingocelot3• 4 years ago

Then we still end up here: someone who's naturally skilled gets some lucky kills, and the Computer Says No, so now he's out a game license. Appealing modern anticheat decisions is hard enough, but once it's less "the computer noticed your memory-editing" and more "the computer decided you need to be banned", it'll be impossible. TFA seems to suggest that future is Real Soon, if not now.

So go play games with dedicated servers, and local admins who can only locally ban anyone suspect. If players don't like it they can leave for another dedicated server.

xeyownt5• 4 years ago

Wow. So you are a good player, and you are matched against cheaters. What a justice. I don't understand this practice. Playing against cheaters, or being treated like one, what's worse?

counttheforks• 4 years ago

These bans also block the single player mode?! That is absolutely absurd. False bans for multiplayer aren't anything new (unfortunately), but also blocking the singleplayer mode, making the purchased product 100% unusable seems criminal.

meibo• 4 years ago

This is what happens if you "buy" Activision/Blizzard software - they're driving the service model to the max and will exploit it as much and as deeply as possible. They're the worst of the worst and anyone familiar with their games will tell you the same.

In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect you as a customer, which is very rare in AAA. These companies hate you. No one will listen to you and nothing will change, as it's extremely profitable. No one will regulate it. In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.

TAForObvReasons• 4 years ago

Google is the worst of the worst. At least you can easily choose not to play Activison games. It's much harder to choose not to participate in the Google ecosystem, and actions in one service or account can have deep repercussions to other services and "associated" accounts. Appealing to an actual Google support human being is seemingly impossible

blue0396• 4 years ago

its not just Activision/Blizzard. Single player bans are in a lot of AAAs.

In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect

Could always pick up a copy of IDA...

In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.

As a side note if you want some fun you should fire up wireshark when you're playing a game and watch how much "metadata" is sent from your PC to the game company. They know more about you than your doctor in some cases. EasyAntiCheat and Denuvo seem to be the worst offenders.

BlueTemplar2• 4 years ago

Yeah, but then ActiBlizz has been doing the "online only" thing at least since Starcraft 2 (2010), also removing multiplayer not through Blizzard's servers in the process !

And they recently did the same with the Diablo 2 """remaster""", preventing multiplayer-heavy mods running in the regular online mode from operating !! (They are not allowed on battle.net, partially for anti-cheating reasons of course.)

Meanwhile other games still allow normal connection through IP/server name, provide a matchmaking server for players to organize their games, including modded ones, and provide an *optional* ban list for server owners using the official matchmaker to enforce on the worst offenders that in no way affects the singleplayer or the direct connection multiplayer experience !

jersak• 4 years ago

I've always enjoyed playing and modding D2, so when D2R launched I bought it and again went into modding and what not, all single player. A while after that i got an email saying i had been banned. I tried hopping on a single player game and it worked so i didn't care too much since i don't play online anyways. However, to my surprise, 30 days after the ban when i tried to play i was greeted by a message saying that i had been offline for too long and needed to log back in to "verify ownership" of the game, which i obviously couldnt since i got banned, so i couldn't even play offline/single player.

Luckily i managed to get in touch with an understanding support rep who unbanned me, but not without a "stop modding if you don't wanna get banned again" message, which is absurd. I paid for the game and i should be able to do whatever i want with it within the confines of my own computer.

deafpolygon4• 4 years ago

They want to be in control of the mods (for 'security' reasons). So they can sell you extra service on top of it. We're moving towards GaaS (gaming as a service) really quickly and it's disheartening to see.

emsixteen• 4 years ago

My XBL 2001 account got permabanned with 10~ years of purchased content on there, all my network of friends and leaderboard achievements and the likes, the works. Lost access to literally everything that wasn't on-disc, and appeals didn't help.

I'd had one genuine temp-ban beforehand, and my theory is over the years I got enough reports from opponents that they just built up into saying t'ra to my account and purchases. Yay, right?

SkyPuncher8• 4 years ago

And moderators of popular forums like r/ModernWarfareII refuse to allow posts that try to increase awareness of the issue, again, likely assuming we’re all a bunch of whining cheaters. I don’t think they’re aware of the disservice they’re doing to their community by actively suppressing these reports (or conspiratorially, they’re influenced by Activision itself).

I don't think this is very conspiratorially. It's very clear that the mods are coordinating with Activision on releases and information. I've had several posts taken down over the years because they don't tow-the-line.

bfgoodrich• 4 years ago

Game community subs, especially for FPS games, often ban posts about cheaters, bugs or things like the submission. Not because they're conspiring with the maker, nefariously hiding negative info, but because if they don't the sub turns into a grievance filled "help forum".

People who had never visited the forum before, and likely never will again, drop in because they're mad and want a complaint venue where they can gripe. When a game has hundreds of thousands or millions of players, that sort of thing starts to swamp the sub and soon there is no community or sustained conversation and instead it's all 360 no scope drive by complaint drops.

I absolutely commiserate with the OP, and it 100% legitimately sounds like they got caught up in a flawed anti-cheat (maybe exacerbated by a storage system issue on their end, making it think they were trying to modify the system files). But on the other hand, and they recognize this, all the actual cheaters also do the I didn't do nothing routine. When a game is rife with cheaters (PubG, MW, Squad, etc), pretty soon you have a really skeptical approach to those appeals.

jakogut3• 4 years ago

This has been going on since the release of MW2019. I myself was banned after trying to launch and play the single player campaign on Linux through Wine/Proton. I was unable to even launch the game to play the campaign again on Windows after that, and I no longer use Windows at all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nfeupc/modern...

I emailed Activision support back and forth more than a dozen times explaining the issue, finally resulting in them saying they were escalating to another team. I sent them another four emails over three months, asking if there was any update, before asking if there was even anybody left alive at the company that my emails were reaching, with no response.

I really enjoyed the MW2019 campaign, but I won't be buying another game from Activision.

noasaservice• 4 years ago

You should have charge backed for defective/sabotaged goods.

jakogut3• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, this ban happened close to a year after the original purchase, and my intent and goal was to play the single player campaign of the game I purchased, not get my money back.

Not a good look for Activision, in my opinion.

Thaxll4• 4 years ago

The game is sold for Windows.

amatecha9• 4 years ago

Good timing, I was just today considering playing Diablo III on my Steam Deck (or trying to)... based on your experience, I guess that might be a bad idea to even try.

emkoemko• 4 years ago

no Diablo III and D2R work fine on wine, they don't have anti cheat like their shooters do

jakogut3• 4 years ago

I know Activision now owns Blizzard, but I don't know the extent to which these policies apply across other games. I know World of Warcraft has an active and thriving Linux user base still. I recommend checking https://appdb.winehq.org and https://protondb.org for reports on game compatibility.

hsuduebc23• 4 years ago

Ban frequently comes with ban reason "Caserma rhino" which looks like that they must know what happened given this weird specific string as you can see on picture below.

https://imageup.me/i96

I as a player can say that game frequently crashes, shares a lot of bugs with previous version of call of duty and overall is just a copy od mw1 with worse UI and technical state.

nperez4• 4 years ago

I started the wiki linked in the article (codconsumer.org). Long time HN lurker and was pleasantly surprised to see this here!

I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.

I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.

dylan6042• 4 years ago

if there's a thing called permabanned and they still take the money from the banned person, that should be criminal

amatecha9• 4 years ago

Paying a few bucks doesn't give you a free pass to, say, spam racist epithets over and over in chat, or sabotage every multiplayer game you join by running into the enemy team every single match. That said, yeah, "being blocked from a $70 game for no actual discernible reason" should be prevented by some form of consumer rights that can't be waived by agreeing to a EULA.

acdha• 4 years ago

They should have to specify the cause and provide evidence. If, say, you’re a Nazi and spammed threats in chat that’s very easy to demonstrate and very few courts are going to even blink at the idea that it’s a terms of service violation which doesn’t warrant a refund.

Where that’s harder would be things like “our ML system thinks your input timing wasn’t humanly possible” and it’d be great if this forced companies to be more nuanced about how they handle things like that by doing things like requiring multiple independent checks.

kevingadd2• 4 years ago

Microtransaction games will happily ban players without recourse or explanation after they spend hundreds of dollars. No refunds, they make the rules and regulators don't care

seattle_spring2• 4 years ago

If the person was cheating then tough shit. If anything, ruining entire online economies by cheating should be what is criminal. Fuck cheaters.

bearjaws• 4 years ago

This happened to me for a different reason, but it was the same level of frustrating.

After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.

Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.

I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.

Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.

I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.

Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".

After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.

The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.

It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.

robswc• 4 years ago

That is insane. Had similar issues but not really banned... just "error-less" issues coming up that would lead you to believe the problem is something else entirely.

ryndshn• 4 years ago

wow, amazing you were able to figure that out... most people would have given up

nomilk• 4 years ago

It usually doesn't take a lot of work for engineers to do some brainstorming around who will be affected and send a direct email letting users know what's up. That would have saved you days of fumbling around and frustration.

I have a growing enthusiasm for companies that consistently care for users, and conversely a callous distain for companies that don't.

incongruity2• 4 years ago

I feel as though the list of companies that consistently care for users is shrinking by the day.

In fact, I can't really think of many businesses where I feel appreciated or cared for as a customer, but the few that I can are all small businesses and most of them are local to me.

chefandy3• 4 years ago

This is fundamentally a support and UX problem, not a dev failure. Big production user management and authentication systems can get pretty complicated and trying to figure out every weird edge case when combining them is not low-effort by any measure. "What if someone's username wasn't caught in their profanity filter but gets caught by ours" seems like a pretty rare edge case in a huge pool of big problems to solve. Their shortcoming was not giving their users proper guidance on how to address the inevitable kinks that pop up.

oneoff7863• 4 years ago

The correct answer is a notification in the game every time you try to play. Not an email saying you’re secretly banned.

duckqlz• 4 years ago

Sounds very annoying. Conversely, many of activision’s users are minors. In the games you mentioned it’s some what rare to encounter adults, especially as a new player. Perhaps not the best place to advertise ones love of erotica. Personally it bothers me when I walk past my 10 year old nephew and the other players in his squad have names that are sexual, racist or inflammatory; so I report them. If the people that I report have to work hard to realize that they are disrupting a community and making people uncomfortable I am ok with that too. +1 for activision in my books.

savolai• 4 years ago

How is getting punished without getting to know the reason useful for anyone? How do they learn anything from such an experience?

SpaghettiCthulu• 4 years ago

It sounds like you were the only one who was uncomfortable. Your nephew probably thought it was funny.

SkyPuncher8• 4 years ago

This author sounds like me minus a ban.

I really enjoy Call of Duty. Got extremely good at it in high school, along with my group of friends. Since then, I've had to move away and CoD has kept us connected multiple times per week. It's been a very enjoyable game for well over a decade.

In the past few years, it's become extremely clear to me that something is seriously wrong with CoD - and perhaps Activision as a whole. I'm willing to explain much of it away as "it's hard to run a big game at scale", but some the bugs are just inexcusable. Activision offers little to no insight or recourse when things break.

I have 700 hours in MW2/WZ1. I can't even stand to play the new game. It's just too broken.

ahmedalsudani• 4 years ago

If you can convince your crew to try something new, there are some great FPS games nowadays. I've enjoyed those, though I haven't been able to put in anywhere near your number of hours.

- Squad

- Escape from Tarkov

- Rising Storm 2: Vietnam

doodlesdev4• 4 years ago

Squad is extremelly buggy and badly optimized though. Still my favorite game. Ever.

lmedinas• 4 years ago

BTW... sometime ago there were people on Forums convinced they got banned on EFT due to WSL and Virtualbox, as there were hacks using VMs. Worth take a look first.

EFT requires a huge amount of free time, it feels like a day job. I would consider that before putting time on that game. Its nothing like COD.

capableweb• 4 years ago

Beauty with CoD is that you can turn it on, play for 10 minutes and then move on to other stuff in your life. None of those games (except maybe Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, I'm not familiar with that one) look like you'll be able to do so. CoD is essentially a arcade FPS, while the ones you listed are more on the "realistic" side of things.

dncornholio4• 4 years ago

- Hell let Loose

Arrath3• 4 years ago

+1 for Tarkov, its what CoD's new DMZ mode is a watered down imitation of.

I highly recommend single player mods/server emulators for EFT like Altered Escape, its a nice break from going up against meta geared super competitive players.

Insanity• 4 years ago

Nit: mw2 is the new game, you meant mw1 (2019) presumably.

Similarly for me cod has kept me connected with friends and family across the world as we travelled and went our own ways. But all of us have actually moved onto mw2 by now and are enjoying it a great deal. (We don’t play Warzone and only play s&d or prison rescue). There are bugs here and there but not too bad overall. We are a mix of PC and Xbox players.

I would still recommend giving the game a try in a few “seasons” as it will likely stabilize further.

amatecha9• 4 years ago

He might mean the actual original MW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_2

I've been SUPER confused as to what this "Modern Warfare 2" is that people are talking about, because I played that in, well, 2009. At least they called it "II" instead of "2" (as if anyone will notice this difference)... >_>

SkyPuncher8• 4 years ago

You're right. I meant MW2019.

Though, MW2 (og) is where I got hooked on cod.

JamesSwift6• 4 years ago

I have a _bunch_ of issues with MW2 in warzone, but by far the most absolutely frustrating is a multiplayer bug. It seems that if I get a UAV and then die in a S&D style map (e.g. S&D, prisoner rescue, Knockout) then about 50% of the time I am soft-locked for the remainder of the _game_. By this I mean my HUD goes away, the game runs at 5FPS, and I _cant use the UAV I got_. I used to be able to unglitch it by killing myself and spectating a teammate before the next round, but that doesnt work any more. I just have to wait for the game to finish. So incredibly frustrating.

duxup• 4 years ago

I remember when gaming "clans" were a thing and clans would play any number of selected games.

It was a neat idea where the clan was the focus and less so the game.

doodlesdev4• 4 years ago

That still exists, it's just not as fashionable anymore.

dncornholio4• 4 years ago

My old Counter-Strike 'clan' Mousesports became a 'team', then it became an 'organisation'. These kids make a lot of money now and travel the whole world to play in their 'clan'.

0x202020• 4 years ago

IMO, the release of Warzone 1, Call of Duty’s Battle Royale mode that released a few months after Modern Warfare 2019, has completely changed the priorities and incentives for the company. The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.

The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.

I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.

bakugo• 4 years ago

The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.

This has nothing to do with cosmetics and everything to do with customer standards. We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 minutes, they will happily enjoy it and praise it anyway because they probably do not have the intellectual capacity to notice or care.

The newest Pokemon game is a prime example of this, it has no cosmetics, no microtransactions, nothing, yet it's so much more of a technical trainwreck than any CoD game, you really have to play it to believe it. It costs $60 and looks and runs worse than many PS2 games, but it sold tens of millions anyway because the people buying it are effectively zombies that only exist to obey corporations and will happily consume whatever is sold to them no questions asked.

JamesSwift6• 4 years ago

Same experience here. I crash/bug-out multiple times per day. Every day I play, the first time I play a map it lags for the first 3-5 minutes, cycling between full speed and 20FPS. I have run into _several_ game breaking bugs in multiplayer, one of which locks me out of playing consistently (detailed in another comment in this thread).

I am big on boycotting and generally have avoided Activision games because of how they have milked things in the past. I'm incredibly frustrated with the state of the game, and disappointed I got talked into buying it by my buddies. Even worse, they just stockholm it saying things like "they just released it, you have to give it time". What? We played Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at launch for a week straight and the only issue I can remember is server instability which was transient. I'm so tired of this public beta workflow, which if you are pushing a game per year you end up getting what, 9 months of _actual_ gameplay, and thats assuming the game doesnt need app-level modifications (vs fixing actual bugs) to smooth out the experience.

JamesSwift6• 4 years ago

Its not just the bugs though. Its the glaringly obvious "move fast" mentality as a dev. There is no way anyone looked at the warzone 2 ping system and thought "thats good enough, ship it". In all of the dev-run cycles, or the playtesting, or the beta testing you are telling me it wasnt _glaringly_ obvious that the system was broken?

mrguyorama6• 4 years ago

QA can file all the bugs and tickets they want but when management says you can't work on anything that doesn't stop someone from playing the game they won't be fixed. Video game management doesn't care, and why should they? Bethesda games have been hot garbage from a bugs standpoint since the very very beginning and they only get more successful. Even after Fallout 76, I promise you the new elder scrolls will have quests that are impossible to complete for no reason sometimes, will struggle to function after a 100 hours of playtime for unexplained reasons, will have trivial exploits (though I don't think that's a problem) and just be unreliable and bad, but it will make millions of dollars still.

Ungelled• 4 years ago

I purchased the game and was met with casmera-rhino before even playing a match or seeing a screen to chose what to play I payed $70+ for the game Ive been playing cod for years and years and my stats arent crazy im a casual player and not even a second look at my account after I appealed my ban on activisions website my fate was sealed permanently banned account with over $300+ worth of microtransactions and games and im unable to appeal and Im not sure what to do Im researching class action lawyers and getting advice and how to get my account or my money back from the company if anyone has any advice or is currently talking to a lawyer or some type of representative id really appreciate some info, thank you.

Firmwarrior3• 4 years ago

You can do a chargeback or take them to small claims court, but either way you're going to be blacklisted from them forever

So it's time to find a new game to play, I guess..

GaryNumanVevo2• 4 years ago

Did you recently buy a refurbished piece of hardware like an SSD or something? Activision has hardware based bans, I was reading some reports of people buying a used SSD or even mixed-new-used stock SSD's that people had cheated on and then returned.

EMIRELADERO• 4 years ago

This seems like it could result in actual lawsuits. While the license for the game exists, a court wouldn't look too kindly on this situation. Courts have the power to void contracts if they're against "public policy", so that should be something everyone should keep in mind.

WirelessGigabit• 4 years ago

I'm thinking to create a new account per game.

This allows me to

* issue a chargeback without worries

* sell the account when I'm done with the game

Just the same with Google devices. NEVER buy a Google Pixel on your own account, as issuing a chargeback will cause them to block your whole account.

Thaxll4• 4 years ago

Chargeback should be last resort, compagny pay for it and will basically close everything related to that account / credit card.

lmm• 4 years ago

Chargeback should be a last resort but it should also be something you can reliably fall back on if the company fails to handle your complaint adequately. And the likes of Google seem to do that 100% of the time.

nixgeek2• 4 years ago

This essentially doesn’t work now either, unfortunately.

A lot of the latest AAA games will only allow you to play multiplayer if your account ALSO has a verified phone number attached, and they only let you attach each number to a single account, plus they filter out phones which are not postpaid (so no using services like Twilio).

aussieshibe3• 4 years ago

How do they differentiate prepaid and postpaid phone numbers?

Is there some way they can check with the provider for a given number? Seems less than ideal from a privacy perspective.

xeyownt5• 4 years ago

My god. Any company doing that enters in my do-not-buy-ever list.

maccard3• 4 years ago

A lot of the

No. Overwatch 2 did this and rolled it back pretty much immediately. CS:GO and DOTA2 don't require it but it they gate competitive play behind it. That's not a lot of AAA games.

blibble3• 4 years ago

I can pick up 20 free SIMs from my local phone store...

buildbuildbuild• 4 years ago

This is a consumer rights issue across our industry. Algorithmic customer support “decisions” should always be appealable to a human audience.

My Google account was banned years ago, “computer says no” - all of my attempts to appeal failed. I at no point broke their terms. Nobody cares, I lost all of my data.

I hope that a class action prevails against Activision. And I hope that across our industry consumers receive more robust rights. Not being able to reach a human at your company quickly escalates from a being cost optimization, to outright fraud.

charcircuit2• 4 years ago

He was able to appeal.

LadyCailin• 4 years ago

Yes, and it was denied, with no explanation, no ability to defend against claims, etc. If there is monetary loss, then a proper appeals process should be put in place. If they refunded the money, then that’s one thing, but they kept the money, and so this is theft.

nperez4• 4 years ago

Their stated policy on appeals is that your ban will only be overturned if it was the result of a compromised account

Firmwarrior3• 4 years ago

Yeah.. you can do a chargeback or take them to small claims court, but then you'll be blacklisted as a customer for life. There needs to be a better process

Thaxll4• 4 years ago

Anti cheat is hard, very hard, and you will always those kind of false positive.

What I can say is that a lot of people say they don't cheat but they actually cheat.

hakube• 4 years ago

You can find actual cheaters streaming on Twitch and they can go for months and months without getting banned

xeyownt5• 4 years ago

Nice theory until you are treated as a cheater.

Only acceptable anti-cheat is the one with ZERO false positive.

Thaxll4• 4 years ago

Which is impossible so you prefer to have games with cheaters then?

dogben• 4 years ago

Again, pirates get the better product.

robloxbanned2• 4 years ago

On the topic of unfair bans, Roblox bans kid accounts for having malicious scripts hidden in models in Roblox Studio. They can detect it in the kid’s game, but allow it in their toolbox. Accounts with premium membership are not refunded for the remaining time left.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ROBLOXBans/comments/vqw1sj/my_6_yea...

I created a Tell HN thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861309

aussieshibe3• 4 years ago

On the topic of Roblox, it sounds pretty awful generally. Microtransactions don't (IMHO) have any place in a game for young kids.

In a previous job I dealt with a police request for information after a pre-teenager child sent an email to their school principal saying there was a bomb in the school that would explode and kill everyome unless they were given some number of Robux so they could buy a hat or something for their character.

dncornholio4• 4 years ago

What's unfair about banning malicious scripts exactly?

robloxbanned2• 4 years ago

My 6 year old roblox account got banned 18 days ago because I made a game and a free model in the game had a script hidden from the owner that showed hentai on the screen.

Roblox Studio has a toolbox of free community models. Malicious scripts are hidden in models. Kids import free models in their games and get banned for malicious scripts.

nitwit005• 4 years ago

It's worth keeping in mind that this is a company hit by government lawsuits alleging sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation, plus a staff walkout for similar reasons.

You should expect them to behave poorly, as they have a history of doing so. It's unfortunate, but you just have to give up on buying their games.

ngneer• 4 years ago

SGX is probably not the right answer, but there have been suggestions to that effect,

https://lifeasageek.github.io/papers/seonghyun-blackmirror.p...

https://web.cse.ohio-state.edu/~lin.3021/file/SYSTEX16.pdf

blue0396• 4 years ago

Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers. Back in the day you could get banned from a server and go find somewhere else to play. Now you'll get banned for life, and in some cases, even banned from the single player mode. Sorry, no refunds!

There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.

fastball3• 4 years ago

How would we have "not let them"?

blue0396• 4 years ago

Stop buying the games. It's really that simple. I can't understand the people who say "well, I'll try this game out but I hope they fix it next time". That's not how business works.

Agent766• 4 years ago

It's pretty ridiculous for companies ban the alleged cheaters in single player modes too which shouldn't require any server dependencies.

phone8675309• 4 years ago

Blizzard's PC games, since Diablo III, all require an online connection to play even single player specifically to prevent privacy.

incongruity2• 4 years ago

And, tbh, wtf does it matter if I wanted to "cheat" in single player mode? Oh no - it would be unfair to some AI NPCs? At one point "cheating" in single player mode was called modding -- and it drove communities and made software publishers money by keeping games fresher longer.

makotech221• 4 years ago

Lol we were lucky we had the ability to host our own servers back in the day. The IP owners have always had to full right and power to do whatever they want to extract as much profit as possible. We have never had any power over what they do.

brendank310• 4 years ago

Keep in mind that there wasn't flexible infrastructure on demand in those days. User run servers was sort of a low cost market based demand scaler for IP owners. If the game is really a dud, they didn't buy N servers and M bandwidth. If it's a hit, they can add an official hosted distinction if it makes sense.

eikenberry• 4 years ago

Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers.

People gave up on software ownership when they stopped demanding the source code. The source code is the software, not the binary.

keraf• 4 years ago

Having community hosted servers with their own moderation was just so much better. Sure, the moderation level would vary from server to server, sometimes with immature admins giving out bans for no reasons, but you would ultimately find your way to servers that match you the best. And often, people would become regulars, finding the same players on the same servers, that was the best aspect of online gaming, finding a community.

Games stopping to provide self-hosted servers is also what made LAN parties increasingly difficult. Having to rent game servers, provide decent bandwidth and not being able to run third party tools (for recording scores or set modifiers) made it impossible to use modern games in a 50 people LAN party with a low budget.

josteink• 4 years ago

Now you'll get banned for life

Generally speaking, if you are a suspected cheater, I can see why you would be barred from online-play.

There's always going to be false-positives though. How often that happens and what means of recourse one has (or should have) is IMO another discussion. And in this particular case, it seems Activision is doing pretty much all the wrong things(tm) though.

even banned from the single player mode.

The fact that an account (and a server) is required to play a game you've bought in single-player mode is on another level outragious.

That itself should be illegal.

Sorry, no refunds!

Again. Clearly this needs to be illegal.

If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.

alkonaut2• 4 years ago

If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.

Obviously doing it for no valid reason is a breach of contract, but I'm sure the legalese is pretty thick. No one "buys" anything obviously and the license agreement will clearly say you forfeit your license if you cheat. And here I'm pretty sure the legalese would say "Whether or not you actually cheated is up to us to decide so we define it as when our tools say you did".

So basically: you have a license, and that license is valid until their tools say it isn't.

Now, will such a license agreement hold up if tested legally? Maybe not. But it's likely what I clicked "Accept" on.

alkonaut2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers.

Some games managed to balance this quite well despite no self-hosted servers, for example BF4 which allows community managed "rented" servers.

But one thing to note though is that nearly all of them will very quickly adopt global blacklists with cheaters. So for a community BF server you'd hook your server to a global anti cheat database, and any bans from the server would end up on the global cheater blacklist. While the choice of using a global blacklist was of course up to the administrators, it wouldn't be very easy to find a server that didn't use this type of system if you happened to be blacklisted. So the community will invent exactly the same kind global bans that the game studio has. I never saw a problem with that (likely because I wasn't a false positive).

TheCapn2• 4 years ago

Regarding the "ownership" of servers:

I really can't blame them entirely. Perhaps you could blame companies for not using a hybrid model where players can host privately plus maintaining their public servers.

Why? Because in a similar vein to how social media needs to be moderated to prevent the bad apples from spoiling the bunch, games now need to be moderated to maintain reputation among the community. If a player hearing about CSGO for the first time has no idea what they're getting into finds only a public server running 24/7 CS_OFFICE with Warcraft Mods they might get a bad impression of what the game is. Having consistency in user experience is highly important, and public servers being maintained and moderated by the developer is probably the most important part of that. What about all those servers that have massive latency issues? That's a bad look on the game because most players won't recognize community run servers are the reason the game behaves buggy.

Do I dislike it? Yes. I think it has created irreparable harm to the ability for gaming communities to build organically but so long as central hubs like Reddit or Discord continue to pop up I figure they've just offloaded the community aspect to external sources. Is that better? I'm not sure. Partially yes. Losing contact with a friend because they stopped logging into your preferred server isn't really a thing if you're Discord friends or Steam friends.

pradn• 4 years ago

As long as there's a clear UI separation, there's no harm in providing both first and third party servers for brand perception & user experience. A similar issue is content provenance. In StarCraft II, for example, official maps and custom maps live in separate tabs. No one expects a Dragon Ball-themed map to be made with the same standard as an official Blizzard map.

I suspect it's simply to control monetization and without the extra engineering cost of private server releases.

hardware2win• 4 years ago

Your csgo example is weird

Because they allow it

And it was great part of their cs 1.6 succesa

I bet devs are scares that too many people would play private servers

seanw4444• 4 years ago

This is one of the main reasons Minecraft is still one of the most popular games to this day, after over a decade. Open-source third-party servers and their development contribute to development of new fun plugins, which allows more and more independent server creators to build cool unique servers.

And best of all: you can only get yourself banned from individual servers.

Goz3rr2• 4 years ago

This isn't the case anymore since version 1.19.1 [1], where "reported players can now be banned from online play and Realms after moderator review": https://i.redd.it/hoyh22jsh9791.png

[1] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-1-19-1-pre...

notyourwork• 4 years ago

Anyone who’s played (at least the PC version of) Modern Warfare II is fully aware of the instability and bugginess of the release

I’ve casually played this game quite a few times since release and not had any issue. Perhaps I’m too casual but I login, hope into a random quick match, shoot, die, repeat and turn off the console when I’m satisfied.

JamesSwift6• 4 years ago

I think console vs PC is definitely one part of the problem. My buddy on console (xbox) definitely experiences much fewer game breaking bugs and crashes than the rest of us in the squad who are on PC.

Always42• 4 years ago

TLDR:

Activision has been criticized for its faulty anti-cheat software, which has resulted in permanent and unappealable account bans for players of its game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Affected players are unable to access the single-player game, even though they paid $70 or more for it. The bans come with no explanation or ability to communicate with Activision. The issue has been met with "shut up and go away, cheater" responses on social media, and attempts to raise awareness are being suppressed on forums. Players are organizing to file reports with the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.

carlisle_2• 4 years ago

I don’t think they’re aware of the disservice they’re doing to their community by actively suppressing these reports (or conspiratorially, they’re influenced by Activision itself).

I think you underestimate the deluge of posts that are made by cheaters pleading their case in a public forum. It's so common that it's basically a meme. I don't blame the moderation policies that prohibit these posts. These posts are typically provocative and often try to riles users up against the developer. Nobody wants to read these posts, you can never be sure they're real and there's nothing a regular user can do except upvote it and subsequently ignore it. There's no good conversation or comments to be found, it's all bad stuff.

This is not to say the issue at hand isn't a very real problem. Anecdotally it feels like these kinds of situations are increasing with frequency as developers tire of the inevitable losing fight against cheating and are desperate to show their customers they're taking the problem seriously.

voxic11• 4 years ago

I think you still do a disservice to players by dismissing all these reports as low quality and impossible to verify. Here is a good counterexample https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapefromTarkov/comments/zawwc5/i_...

carlisle_2• 4 years ago

It’s amusing you picked this as an example because the EFT subreddit is notoriously moderated. This one works because it has overwhelming evidence. The author of this post only has a few screenshots and assurances. I imagine these players would have the same experience as the author otherwise.

aeturnum• 4 years ago

Activation is a feted hulk and I hope they collapse under the weight of their misdeeds.

Certainly everyone who owns the game has bought the right to play offline. That said, the question of what "owners" are allowed to do in a multi-user product seems genuinely hard. Cheaters (and people who seek 'parasitic' experiences of all kinds) disrupt how the game is intended to be played. Consumer protections were developed for products that don't have that kind of entangled quality.

ddtaylor• 4 years ago

Activision did a similar thing with the completely botched release of Warcraft 3 both the modern Battle.net re-release and the Reforged remake. The TLDR is that if you tried to play most any custom map - even privately - you would reconnect shortly later and find your account permanently banned. In some cases even if you ever actually got to start the custom map, just simply from trying to host a lobby. In my case it was a private lobby with two other friends for the old-school map "Enfos".

I filed an appeal/ticket with Blizzard and they gave me an almost identical canned response as from the article and I simply gave up and vowed to never buy another Blizzard game. About 6 months later on a whim I tried to play the game again and it worked, but the entire experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that I have no motivation to participate in this exercise in frustration.

The problem is that the mapping community had created some very inventive use of out-of-bounds memory access as a way to use the internal game APIs to accomplish things the game engine supports but isn't exposed to mappers. If you take a close look at almost every "big" map eventually you'll find some level of use of these techniques. The community created a "safe list" of known patterns of OOB memory access so that maps could be "verified" as not doing anything naughty while still also having access to these extra modding features.

The worst part? Blizzard was so aware of this situation that they actually re-implemented the OOB memory access in a safe way using known memory offsets. So, they fixed the actual OOB memory access so it shouldn't be possible to use an OOB memory access to crash your game or steal your "cdkey" or similar, but they have whitelisted many useful memory offsets so it's still possible to interact with the game engine in more complex ways.

That's the strangest part for me is that they put in a LOT of effort to remain that level of backwards compatibility and then banned players automatically when they tried to use it. Of course absolutely none of this was communicated to regular players in game and of course the forums are a complete shit show.

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Sophistifunk• 4 years ago

STOP GIVING THEM MONEY

olliej2• 4 years ago

It seems like a "you cheated and can no longer play the game" should be mandatorily accompanied by a full refund of the game and any in game purchases - in cash, not coupons, in game currency (because duh), etc.

It would sure as heck deal with the "you can't play the game you paid for" nonsense, and if they start putting all "cheaters" in a single set of servers any over-aggressive "you're a cheater" rules will cause people to stop playing the online modes that encourage in game transactions.

doodlesdev4• 4 years ago

The problem with that is it allows the cheater to buy the game again and rinse and repeat. Unfortunatelly monetary loss is the best way to deal with cheaters. Generally the cheaper a game is the more cheaters it has simply because the barrier to entry gets reduced.

olliej2• 4 years ago

The problem is theft of a product that has been purchased. For example, say Tesla were to say we’ll just take back the car without permission if someone complains about it online, that’s a crime: theft. The reason for the crime is irrelevant, if someone has paid for a product you don’t get to retroactively say “nah we’re taking back the thing you paid for, and we aren’t going to return your money”. If you’re offering a contractual service you can halt, but generally have to return at least the prorated amount you have received for services you are no longer offering.

A game company can always just block the credit card details (not just the number) from buying the game again, there’s a limit to the number of CCs that a person is going to be able to use.

Of course the reality is, cheaters are paying to buy the game again when they get caught, so there’s no actual incentive for activision to actually stop cheaters, just to make them pay again. Which is why they ban the single player mode as well - it’s in their interests to encourage repurchasing.

Sparkyte3• 4 years ago

Best anti-cheat is to separate your cheaters from your general gamers, if some behavior is detected that indicates they are a cheater temporarily remove them from the same queue as normal players and treat all players they party or queue with the same. In this queue they only get paired against other questionable players. When they themselves or other in this cheater queue report a person enough times temporary ban the user from playing for one week, two weeks, four weeks. Depending on the strikes, but never perma ban.

throwaway20373• 4 years ago

I like this idea. Another way: The game company adds all the cheats themselves, as features. Then you can buy the "cheat pack" (more revenue). Each feature that you enable, appears next to your character name. Cheaters with same features enabled, are allowed to match each other online. Of course, then cheaters will try to write software to hide this status... but that is a different issue. :)

After you owned a game for along time, sometimes it is fun to cheat. That is another revenue source for game companies.

Sparkyte3• 4 years ago

Well people will do things they are not supposed to do, providing them an avenue to do so while not awknowledging this keeps games fair. If you ban outright then you know who's cheating.

xeyownt5• 4 years ago

Best anti-cheat is the one that has never any false positive.

Sparkyte3• 4 years ago

You also don't want players knowing they are detected. Keeps things from getting complicated.

nextlevelwizard2• 4 years ago

Isn’t this industry norm? I remember getting banned from Overwatch during Season 1 with no explanation given and when I sent support ticket I just got back “we can’t tell you the reason”

wsc981• 4 years ago

I had a similar question in relation to Twitter bans recently [0].

One person thought in case of Twitter perhaps Twitter Support doesn't want to tell, to make it more difficult to script bots that can prevent getting banned.

Perhaps for games it's kind of the same. Perhaps knowing why you got banned can aid bot devs to prevent their bots getting banned.

---

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33738470

nextlevelwizard2• 4 years ago

I am more cynical and I think it was because I wasn’t playing the META and other players reported me enough

weberer• 4 years ago

No, its the same company.

AustinDev3• 4 years ago

Good luck bro... I cheated at games especially MMO's from 2000 to 2005. Since then, with all new emails and account ID's I've seen more false positive bans than I saw positive bans in that previous period. I once left wire shark open and got battle eye and VAC banned. I was not attaching either to active network traffic or processes at the time. Just last week I got banned for having Charles proxy running by accident on my 5th DayZ account. I guess I should segregate my dev and play boxes... the problem is I make games.

gmjosack• 4 years ago

I use CheatEngine and other memory debugging tools as part of reversing/modding single player games for fun. Recently I had a browser tab open to a CheatEngine doc page, not even the executable open, and Fortnite wouldn't let me launch, said I had cheating tools open.

AustinDev3• 4 years ago

There was a battleye ban for this that got a bunch of uproar once. I think it was for the domain 'unknowncheat.me'if you had visited that you got banned from whatever game you were playing the BattleEye iirc.

Goz3rr2• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure I've played VAC secured games with Wireshark open in the background many times without issue. In my experience VAC is pretty lenient on what you do outside of the game to begin with.

I did get shadowbanned from Modern Warfare (2019) for two weeks though. At first I couldn't figure out why my game suddenly would keep crashing on the main menu every time I started it. After a reboot of my PC it stopped crashing, but now the game was taking forever to find a match and when it finally did I got put in a lobby with high ping players from across the world, half of which were obviously cheating.

I managed to figure out that I had HxD (a hex editor) open in the background before I rebooted because I was messing around with the save files of another game. Simply having a process running called "hxd.exe" will cause the game to "crash" and shadowban you for a while. I verified this by renaming notepad to hxd.exe and observing the same thing.

AustinDev3• 4 years ago

Correction, it was a Battle Eye ban that got replicated to a VAC ban.

danielscrubs• 4 years ago

Is there any games where they bucket customers into probability of cheating and let them play with each other? Have it been tried?

RubberShoes• 4 years ago

Have not hit this issue...yet. However, on my Xbox someone else's ActivisionID has inadvertently been tied to mine. Got in touch with the owner and when they go to unlink their account from my Xbox Live Activision's website just reloads. No errors, no codes or any confirmation or denial. Phone support is nonexistent, followed all other possible channels and cannot find or do anything.

I spent $70 for a game I can't play on my own account. I can't play with my friends, I can't level my own stuff, and there is nothing I can do. It's completely broken and I can't get a refund in any way. Anyone had success in disputing these purchases with their credit card companies?

throwaway20373• 4 years ago

I think it is worth a try to do credit card chargeback. Call your credit card company and explain _high level_: "I bought a video game. I cannot register online. It is required to play. There is not support line to help me. I am stuck. This game does not work for me. I want to do a charge back."

I assume you bought from an online store. Also, try to find a support line. Provide this information (high level!) to your credit card company.

mrguyorama6• 4 years ago

I once had my EA account hacked. I tried to find a way to contact support and get things sorted out. The EA website had a page to start the support process, but it just..... didn't work. The button that said "put me in the queue" caused and error and loaded a broken page. This was the case for MONTHS.

God, imagine if your business could ignore customers for months and still be stupidly successful.

CrendKing• 4 years ago

This kind of absurdity could happen to anybody. I was a Destiny player since Destiny 1, had absolutely no problem campaign or multiplayer. Around the time of Destiny 2 Forsaken DLC, I got bored of it and stopped playing for about a year. One day, I decided to pick it up and replay the Forsaken single player campaign "Last Call". 10 minutes in, while I was enjoying it, suddenly the game froze, and I was kicked back to the menu screen. When tried to login, it told me my account is perma banned. Shocked, my first instinct was that this is some kind of mistake on Bungie side. However, after going through the fruitless appealing process, which Bungie denied without disclosing any specificity, I believe I'm one of those falsely banned.

This is the only time I got perma banned in any game in my life. The only possible reason I can think of is that I always use some AutoHotkey scripts I wrote myself as shortcuts for Windows control, and has nothing to do with Destiny. I don't really care much about not able to play Destiny again, but because Destiny 2 had moved to Steam, even today there is still a VAC ban record in my Steam profile, which I do care about.

can16358p• 4 years ago

If this is true you should all gather and file a class action lawsuit immediately against Activision.

This is extremely user-hostile... even more than Apple-level-user-hostility.

hooby• 4 years ago

For roughly 25 years now - as long as modern DRM methods exist - there's constantly been reports of false positives, bugs, crashes, performance issues and security holes caused by DRM.

How anyone can believe that their DRM is infallible and not be prepared to deal with the issues it will inevitably cause, is beyond me.

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be aware, that they need to have a way to accept reports of false positives and investigate those. Even if "screw the customers" is company policy - you still need those reports to analyze and fix the flaws in your software.

Not doing that is basically like making it impossible to report bugs and suppress any talk about bugs anywhere - and then claiming your software is bug free, because there haven't been any bug reports. Highly dysfunctional.

riversflow4• 4 years ago

Probably going to be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but I am involved in a couple of medium sized (100-200 active members) gaming communities which have to deal with cheaters sometimes, one of which is fairly expert—many members are Global Elite (top Competitive rank) in CSGO, with many of the top players being ex minor league esports people(they all LAN fairly regularly so I can say confidently they aren’t cheaters), and I have never heard (as in someone knows someone) of anyone in over a decade in both communities getting unfairly banned from a AAA title or any title for that matter. And if they did it would definitely be the talk of the Discord/forums, getting called a cheater is pretty much the norm for these folks, so getting a ban would be something between hilarious and a slap in the face. So this is likely exceedingly rare, and many of these people are cheating, and consider their cheats benign and are just in denial that their macros are actually getting detected and earning them bans. Perhaps not OP, and perhaps not the sibling comments, but in my experience cheaters are typically pathological about not cheating.

Cheating of that type is so easy and common in many multiplayer games, and it really sucks the fun out of multiplayer when someone isn’t following the rules.

formerly_proven• 4 years ago

False bans do happen. Even VAC, which isn't known for banning willy-nilly, will sometimes remove bans because they do make mistakes. Many other anti-cheats have had more or less prominent issues with false bans, for example GTA Online as well as other games had multiple incidents where they banned people using software like Afterburner/RTSS (and subsequently unbanned them). GTA even had exploits which allowed other cheaters to ban other players.

The sentiment of your comment remains popular in gaming circles. But as software people on hacker news, doesn't it seem rather obvious that complex software like anti-cheats embedded in hugely complex software like games will have bugs? Add many people overclocking their computers to the brink of instability and silent corruption into the mix and you will have issues. (VAC must've kicked me dozens of times for failing game integrity checks because of this - now imagine if that's a ban, like Activision does. A checksum failure on a gaming PC hardly proves cheating beyond even a passing doubt)

riversflow4• 4 years ago

doesn't it seem rather obvious that complex software like anti-cheats embedded in hugely complex software like games will have bugs?

No doubt, and it does suck that some people get caught up in it. It’s also lame that they prevent you from playing single player, but I’d guess this is to make engine exploit development more expensive and time consuming. I do think that they should have a manual review appeal, not sure how that would work without undermining the anti-cheat or being extremely invasive.

I honestly hate that I’m defending Acti-bliz, they rake in hoards of cash and become more predatory every year. Recently they downgraded and deleted my favorite game, giving it one of the worst monetization schemes in PC. But cheating is a serious issue, I have abandon a number of games because cheating at my skill level became too common.

wallmountedtv• 4 years ago

A counter argument would be that, those who are allowed by the anti-cheat to play freely for a decade, are those who were filtered down by the anti-cheat to who it sees as a "good player" to itself. But when the anti-cheat finds someone that they do not like, for example a developer who has tooling such as CheatEngine, WireShark, AHK, or WSL installed, will get discriminated against in preemptive bans, unable to get more than be a casual in said games.

It also does not help that "good players" by the anti-cheat's eye will often enable this bias by doubling down whatever the anti-cheat says is bad. A black box that no human fully understands the behavior of, even its own developers, yet is ultimately trusted without review of anyone hit by a ban. A system ripe for enabling bias to absolutely excessive proportions, and need to be held in better check.

riversflow4• 4 years ago

when the anti-cheat finds someone that they do not like, for example a developer who has tooling such as CheatEngine, WireShark, AHK, or WSL installed.

A lot of these folks are software developers! I’d have to do a poll to get wider info, but I know several people have AHK, WireShark and WSL installed, and have for years. But especially with online multiplayer games, the sentiment has always been that you necessarily give up some freedom to participate. For example, I don’t actually know a single person who dislikes ring 0 kernel anti-cheat, dubbed “spyware” by many.

absolutely excessive proportions.

Citation badly needed, there are a lot of cheaters! The fact that I can buy a Cronus from a local gamestop, today, speaks volumes. I’d like to get cheaters in check first, how about we criminalize assisting in cheating, not actually enforce it through state-sponsored law enforcement, but make it so that gaming companies have an easy path to shut it down and bankrupt cheat-device manufacturers/retailers/importers. Something like DMCA. In the same bill we can hold game/anti cheat vendors accountable for bans.

walrus01• 4 years ago

filing reports with the Better Business Bureau (BBB)

good luck with that, the BBB is basically Yelp for Boomers.

buzer2• 4 years ago

One thing that I have been wondering about about anti cheat systems is that wouldn't people be able to do GDPR data request on their account? I would imagine that a lot the data they use for the ban decision would count as personal data and thus they would need to include it as part of the response. And if there are mistakes they would have option to rectify it.

vodkapump• 4 years ago

I did this with EA actually, I was banned for no reason from Apex Legends, EA support told me it was an EasyAntiCheat ban, but I wasn't banned from other EAC games which made me suspect that wasn't true. When I googled around I found screenshots showing that the ban message ingame would have the text "Banned" after the default "client banned" message.

I contacted EAC who confirmed I was not EAC banned, I informed EA of this and just got the default "We cannot discuss bans blah blah" reply. I then ran a GDPR data request, and after 3 weeks I got a massive dump of all my info, which included the ban reason. The ban reason was N/A, not blanked out or censored, just N/A from the data dump. I raised this with EA and they just kept telling me they can't discuss bans etc. I managed to get it escalated eventually via a complaint which lead to my account being unbanned and I got it confirmed that it was an erroneous ban.

mdswanson5• 4 years ago

Some falsely banned players have requested their GDPR data, but it expressly doesn't include any of their anti-cheat data. I'm still waiting for them to respond to my GDPR request.

buzer2• 4 years ago

Surprisingly, there is actually some official guidelines about anti-cheat and bans:

https://edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2022-01/edpb_guidelines_...

Example 3: GAMER X is registered as a user on the gaming platform of PLATFORM Y. One day, GAMER X is notified that his online account has been restricted. As he is unable to log in anymore, GAMER X asks the controller for access to all personal data relating to him. In addition, GAMER X requires access to the reasons for the account restriction. PLATFORM Y, the controller of the online gaming platform with which the request has been lodged, informs the users in its general terms and conditions available on its website, that any kind of cheating (mainly by the use of third party software) will entail a periodical or permanent ban from its platform. PLATFORM Y also informs the users in its privacy policy about the processing of personal data for the purpose of detecting gaming cheats, in accordance with the requirements set out in Art. 13 GDPR.
Upon receipt of GAMER X’s request for access, PLATFORM Y should provide GAMER X with a copy of the personal data processed about GAMER X. Regarding the reason for the account restriction, PLATFORM Y should confirm GAMER X that it decided to restrict GAMER X’s access to online games due to the use of one or repeated gaming cheats which are in violation with the general terms of use. In addition to the information provided about the processing for the purpose of gaming cheat detection, PLATFORM Y should grant GAMER X access to the information it has stored about GAMER X’s gaming cheats which led to the restriction. In particular, PLATFORM Y should provide GAMER X with the information that led to the restriction of the account (e.g. log overview, date and time of cheating, detection of third party software,...) in order for the data subject to verify that the data processing has been accurate.
However, according to Art. 15(4) and Recital 63 GDPR, PLATFORM Y is not bound to reveal any part of the technical operating of the anti-cheat software even if this information is relating to GAMER X as long as this is can be regarded as trade secrets. The necessary balancing of interests under Art. 15(4) will have the result that the trade secrets of PLATFORM Y preclude the disclosure of this personal data because knowledge of the technical operating of the anti-cheat software could also allow the user to circumvent future cheat or fraud detection
The extent of the information provided to individuals will be heavily context dependent, taking into account the nature of the data controller and the nature of the breach of the terms of service. In some cases, it may only be possible for the data controller to provide basic information in response to an access request to which Art. 15(4) applies

So at least some information should be provided while some things could fall under the trade secret exception. I would imagine at least some cases need to go to DPA in order to get some clarification on what information must be provided and which things they could avoid disclosing, but that is going to take quite a while to get any resolution on.

xpuente• 4 years ago

I wonder why they don't start to use secure enclaves to fix this cheating debacle? This might solve the problem for good. Between the cheaters and the companies trying to stem the tide, is destroying FPS online gaming.

I guess intel SGX chaos didn't help either.

everdrive• 4 years ago

I’m so thankful that articles such as this get written. At a minimum it his helps other customers avoid predatory businesses. At best, it helps apply pressure to companies to adopt better practices.

mdswanson5• 4 years ago

Thank you!

TheCapn2• 4 years ago

250+ comments already so I fear my rant will disappear to the void, but I experienced this exact same thing with Apex Legends. I was fortunate to get my account back eventually, but the experience is the same.

I don't really care that much about my crappy in-game cosmetics, but to have access to the game ripped away from you with no actual explanation to what you did is a pretty big gut punch. The result I took from the experience is that EA/Respawn are untrustworthy and will never receive another penny of my money. Their steadfast "you cheated, no appeals, now shut up" attitude seems like poor long term planning if regular players are going to be randomly harmed by whatever happened.

I've pondered over the issue too, and ultimately I think the entire circus could be avoided if they were willing to discuss the specifics of banning. The notion that they don't need to tell you how you were detected as though it is some sort of protection for their anti-cheat methods is a disservice in customer relations. For me, I tried appealing a case against something I had no evidence for, so to ask a question about how I can make things right in an appeal (what logs do you need? what proof can I provide that this was a bug) ended up just flagging my account so I could no longer open tickets. I had found other users on Reddit who received the same ban (and consequentially, received unban at teh same time too, so it was a system bug). We were all treated the same. How to fix this? Have confidence in your anti-cheat to the point where you can say "we caught you doing X" so I can provide evidence to the contrary.

I suspect it is because they'd need to hire more staff to work customer service. They'd also need to give those staff the necessary tools to respond to customers which I can tell they do not have at the basic CSR level.

In the end, they lose a customer permanently. They also gain a vocal proponent against their services as I write similar rants every time I see a topic of it discussed. They don't really care much about me though. That's important to remember. They are willing to bulldoze the individual in hopes the larger reputation they maintain about being hard on cheaters doesn't backfire.

mdswanson5• 4 years ago

Didn't disappear. Thanks for sharing!

whalesalad• 4 years ago

Knock on wood my experience with Activision/MW/MW2 has been pretty flawless. The new game has some bugs, but in general it has been the best way for me and my buddies who live 3,000 miles away to remain in touch and hang out on the weekends.

JamesSwift6• 4 years ago

Thats honestly incredible to me. I've had like 5 _different_ game breaking bugs in multiplayer and countless crashes/quality-of-life bugs in warzone 2. Thats not even considering the broken looting that will come up almost once per game. I really enjoy the multiplayer overall (except Border Crossing) but Warzone is a buggy mess that isn't fun at the end of the day because it ends up being a looting simulator a lot of times. I much preferred the tempo of Warzone 1.

BurningPenguin• 4 years ago

It's nice to know, that Valve isn't the only company that sucks at doing anti-cheat right. Or at all, that is...

swagmoney1606• 4 years ago

I'll throw my two cents in.

I'm "UNDER REVIEW" right now. That means I'm shadow banned. I'm only able to match with other people that are shadow banned.

This is actually the second time I'm "UNDER REVIEW". I guess you can be under review multiple times? I had a 3 day period where I wasn't under review and everything went back to normal. As of today actually, I am now banned again.

It's pretty miserable. It's actually funny, most of the regular multiplayer lobbies are decentish. Nobody seems to be obviously cheating or hacking. Maybe once or twice I felt like someone might be cheating. It takes a very long time to find a match. And when you do find a match, you'd be lucky to have a sub 60ms ping.

DMZ just released. I really want to play it but I unfortunately cannot, I never find a match.

Also I just gotta throw this out there since I'm trashing on the game right now. This game crashes A LOT.

Activision’s faulty anti-cheat software

Related Stories