"I'm currently the #5 player in the cheater zone of Apex."
Heck, embrace it: don't call it the cheater rankings, call it the tool-assisted rankings, by analogy with "tool-assisted speedruns". Tag people at the end of the game with which particular cheats you detected. Pop up a polite notice that "We have noticed that you seem to be using external tools to help you play better; we will now be matching you up with other cyborg players to keep things fair. Good luck, and may the best man-machine win!"
I added a simple "report" button. After a user had been reported a few times they were silently sandboxed with other penis flashers so they could flash their penii at each other.
I love this way of dealing with bad actors - but I think that its a bad idea to let them know whats happening, as then they can try to circumvent. Keep them in the dark, just let them cheat against other cheaters and wonder why they suddenly suck - dont glamorize entering the cheater zone.
But could avoid that if a game embraced it holistically, where the default is tool-assisted and anything goes.
If the competition is all using assists, then the sneaky aimbot that simulates slower human reflexes will lose to the bot that positions the sights directly on the opponent in <0.1ms. I like this idea, I don't see why it would make it any easier to develop the types of cheating systems that affect human players, and it might be fun for the types of players that enjoy things like tool-assisted speed running; where the ultimate aim is more about studying the underlying game mechanics to determine the algorithmically-optimal way to play. If the default is tool-assisted, then all the human players will be excluded by default.
In that sense, encouraging people to come forward with hacking tools means that you'll have a stronger awareness of how they're used. Then if you were to leave the less destructive methods of hacking alone, you could design your detection methods to explicitly examine those avenues of exploitation and maintain a clean separation of people who use outside tools and those who do not.
It's an attempt to combat the constant arms race of hacking by deflating it a bit.
As someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this was called HvH. Great stuff.
Note: Please do not cheat in video games unless everyone involved is okay with it (such as dedicated HvH servers)
They also have a neural network setup that constantly scans match logs for cheaters. If I remember correctly it is responsible for > 50% of all cheater reports (the rest comes from players). Final conviction comes from a crowd sources system called Overwatch, where experienced players rewatch anonymous demos and convict cheaters. Conviction itself may require even 40 or more individual player convictions, and is Bayes-based.
For those wondering what this is referring to, it's a system called VACNet[0] presented at GDC last year.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnRgW54EWwA
It also doesn't seem to have any affect on casual game modes, which is really irritating.
I wonder if anyone has actually put any real thought into effectiveness of such concepts? Creating a parallel universe to stick your undesirables; 4chan and reddit do something similar (though the user self-influcts it) with their containment boards, so the history definitely exists
I recently started playing DoTA again after stopping for about 2 years and I have run into a handful of toxic players, but it doesn't seem to be as frequent or as bad as it used to be. For example, when I stopped playing two years ago it was basically a 50/50 chance you would be in a game where someone would say really terrible things about Brazilian or Chinese players for the entire match.
There was a video recently by Dota Alchemy about how the system applies to high a penalty if you have an accidental abandon or just raged way too hard for a few consecutive games, but you can grind up the behavior score quickly through 10 turbo games.
Anecdotally: I am a nice guy and a good teammate, I don't abandon, I don't team-kill, etc.. I saw quite a few cheaters when I first started playing the game, but now they are quite a lot more rare and especially more subtle, to the point where I am usually not certain even when I suspect someone.
There's some pretty damning stats about how many people cheat in CSGO as well, so it's seemingly quite strong in my opinion. Of course, other's summaries will beg to differ as they see a lot of cheating and hold themselves in equally high esteem, so ymmv
What are the containment boards? I assume you aren't talking about /r/thedonald.
This isn't a new strategy for them btw. There were similar strategies in place for Titanfall 1. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-27-respawn-locks-...
Also this problem is exasperated in Apex Legends because it is a free game that is also popular in Asia.
When you move them to a cheater queue, they don't know. They keep playing, none the wiser. It's infinitely better for everyone. The cheater still gets to play, and the non-cheaters aren't affected as much because the cheater doesn't just keep coming back.
The complexity in your app is that you need to have multiple matchmaking queues, which you probably already support due to skill tiers. So is it really that difficult to add more matchmaking queues for the cheaters?
Friends were able to join my game, but not I theirs, and the "available games" list was way smaller.
https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2017/01/ask-riot-ban...
https://stripe.com/guides/strong-customer-authentication#wha...
(Although only two of the three will be required.)
Adding two secondary accounts (both an SMS and an email) could warrant the name
Now, it's likely that you do the right thing given the chance, but I know for a fact that my dad keeps the keys to his safe in his filing cabinet, and the keys to his filing cabinet in another filing cabinet. It's not really an extra layer of security.
1. They don't know they've been quarantined, so cheat makers will get less feedback about which cheats have been detected. 2. Cheaters are more likely to try new cheats, so it gives a sandbox of users that can be used to find other cheats as they arise.
I hope obligatory two-factor authentication is not becoming a trend.
This will not stop the subtle cheaters though, in a game like Apex you could even drop the aimbot and only use the information advantage of a wallhack. Good times to sell cheats
They came with a shadowban technique later though : https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/24/15686428/pokemon-go-niant...
But on this I am very critical of how Niantic is handling both Pokemon GO and wizard Unite
Basically suddenly you'll feel like people that murder you are cheaters and for the first time you'll most likely be right.
You need some kind of dynamic ranking of "toxicity" (in this case cheating) match user with other of similar toxicity.
When 99.9% of the people you get matched with are cheaters (many of which might be quite obvious), it's not that hard to figure out that your account was probably shadow banned. Some cheaters might not care, but it's certainly not hard to figure out.
In comparison in PoGO if you finish one category of scarce items you still have many part of the game you can play in (e.g. with no pokéball you can still fight in gym and raids)
Coming from Pokemon GO, where the anti-cheat policy is "we will do nothing to actually disincentive toxic user (as they spend good money) but still we will impose arbitrary and artificial limitations to make it worse for everyone" some grinding look like a good solution.
Out of 10 games, how many of them are already ruined because 1 or 2 people left, or players are just insulting one another with the most awful thing they can think of. I'd consider quitting to be fair in both cases.