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comment by ahw
ahw  ·  3413 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An investigation into the million-dollar business of video game cheating

I'd quite like to see a shadowban style system for dealing with cheaters where possible. If they just get banned or a particular piece of software gets blocked, then those users will soon be back with new accounts and new cheats. If you could match them with other cheaters, or start subtly altering their experience then it wouldn't be so easy to detect when you had been detected. More importantly you could keep them away from honest players.

For match-making games you could have a kind of "honesty ELO", that tries to match you with players of similar honesty ranking. Use wall-hacks and you'll play with other people using wall-hacks, then it's not even cheating anymore; you just get the game you deserve. Aim-bot and you'll get matched with other aim-boters etc.

As described in this article the only way to survive as a cheater in such an environment is to change your behaviour to just using 'information advantage' type cheats, at which point it becomes even harder to detect you've been 'shadowbanned' since the other cheating players you would be matched with are almost indistinguishable from just skilled opponents.

What do people think. I know there are systems like this for matching toxic players with each other, are there any for cheaters.





VAZzy  ·  3413 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Shadowbans just don't work. If you're hit with one for a good reason, then you'll always have a way to check for it. Sometimes by just logging off, other times from a friend or by fetching data through a machine in a diferent location, but you'll always know it. And if you're mistakenly banned, then you will keep trying your hardest for whatever amount of time, only to randomly find out that you might've as well played offline because nobody sees you, and you have no idea why or for how long. It has happened already in multiple games, always with those results.

Honesty ELO on the other hand is a brilliant idea and I wonder why nobody did it yet.