Comment by strken
7 hours ago
I had the interesting experience of being banned from a Call of Duty 4 server, back when the franchise still had servers.
It happened like this: we were playing the game mode Sabotage, and it went into overtime. When this happens, the game shows the exact location of every player on the map to every other player and prevents respawns until there's nobody left on one team, at which point the other wins. In CoD you can shoot through walls with a damage penalty on your shots depending on how penetrative your weapon is, and I was carrying a heavy semi-auto sniper rifle with a short range scope.
It was down to me and another player. The other player was running up some stairs inside a building, to try to get a more advantageous route to the alley where I was lurking. I popped around the corner with the intent to spam my entire ammo reserve through the wall at him, knowing I could take advantage of a body shot to chase him and probably finish him off. By some combination of map knowledge and sheer luck, my first shot hit him exactly in the head and killed him, while my entire team was spectating me. The game instantly stopped and they couldn't see any evidence I was planning on magdumping through the wall. I was pretty much instantly kicked and banned.
This has given me a lot of empathy for accused cheaters. If you're getting 10,000 kills in a year and the average player can tell whether kills are hacking with 99.9% accuracy, you're going to have 10 "ban-worthy" kills every year. I've got no idea how the numbers shake out for chess, but I would be surprised if there were zero or negligible false positives.
Being banned because of using a normal feature can get even more ridiculous.
Playing some games on GeForce NOW (a game streaming service) can get you banned by just using the service or exhaust the allowed plays per day because it runs in ephemeral VMs and each session is from a different server. This is with the game being explicitly added and supported by the developer/publisher...
Chess is obviously a game without hidden information in the game state, so cheating comes in one of two types on these online services:
1. There is no human player at all, just a bot playing the game (maybe being paid for by a user to boost their rank). This is likely detected by all the usual anti-bot heuristics that many web services have. Another option might be looking for statistical outliers on how highly player's moves correlate to open engines like Stockfish (this was the cause of a big cheating scandal in pro chess last year, if I remember right)
2. There is a human player, but they're just feeding the moves into an engine like stock fish and copying them out. Again, this is probably based on statistical correlations.
Here's the thing with any anti-cheat, the standard for a scientific paper is based on a P value indicating the likelihood of something being chance is about 5%. This is obviously way too high a threshold for anti-cheat, it would make 1 in 20 of your bans false bans. But the logic of an "acceptable" heuristic about lucky shots, or headshot rate, or blink stalker micro saving low hp units, or stockfish-correlated chess moves is part of basically all anti-cheat systems.
I'd guess they tune their thresholds to be something more like 1 in 1000, but after a point the way you reduce false bans for these things is to ban less, which given the high rate of actual cheating, is not desirable to the game companies. So if going from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10000 requires halving the amount of bans you dish out, game companies are just not going to do that.
So then some CS drone has to answer the ticket about why the user was banned. They know that 999 of every 1000 tickets are lying, so they just automatically close it with no recourse. It's not worth the company's resources to make a recourse process. For PR purposes it's better to just pretend that isn't the case, and say there's no false positives. We've seen the PR reaction machine initially respond the same way when the "is something hooking the game process" checks detect all the Teamspeak overlay users and bans them all, until the sheer volume of affected people cause them to relent. So it's hard to believe that when they have statistical modelling based bans affecting much smaller numbers of people, they don't just steamroll them.
Heck, it's not anti-cheat, but I've had a copy of Red Alert 3 basically stolen by EA as they claimed my CD key was pirated (it wasn't, I bought it on Steam directly). Of course CS claimed infallibility, but it's made me be a lot more suspicious of other cases where CS claims infallibility.
But these games have millions of players, so 1 in 1000 is... quite a lot of people actually.
> So then some CS drone has to answer the ticket about what I was banned. They know that 999 of every 1000 tickets are lying, so they just automatically close it with no recourse. It's not worth the company's resources to make a recourse process.
In other words, classic corporate greed. As for that 1 in 1000, they're making the product they paid for unusable, which should be illegal. I'm aware it's not in many jurisdictions as you're buying a license and what not, but it should be. In places with strong consumer protections like Germany or Australia, Activision could likely get fined over this kind of behavior.