I don't play video games, but I do play online chess, and in online chess, there is a huge epidemic of cheating. Many cheaters are banned by chess.com. Some of these bans go unnoticed, but in other cases, the cheaters passionately insist that they were not cheating. And I don't believe them.
In a minuscule number of cases, chess.com has been known to reverse a ban. But chess.com does not provide the details of their anti-cheating technology.
So in the arena of chess, I do side with the provider, because as a practical matter, I believe they are almost always (>99.9%) correct. Of course, they still suffer from false negatives, because intermittent cheating is virtually impossible to prove.
I'm not sure what lessons to draw from the article.
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.
But Scenario (2) is rather complex - most strong players who are "smart cheaters" would use the Stockfish suggestions infrequently, perhaps just once per game. The difference to the game result can be significant, but detecting this sort of cheating is a statistical exercise.
As you said, it comes down to thresholds, and setting a tradeoff between false positives and false negatives.
And let's not forget that a false negative, which is the default case and extremely common, also has an effect – it disadvantages all the honest players who lose to a cheater.
Because computer-aided cheating is trivial to do and known to be widespread.
It's apparent that chess.com has tuned the detection threshold to near certainty, which lets many cheaters through, at least for a long time.
What often gets lost in criticism of the corporate entity is that undetected cheating (i.e. false negative by the anti-cheating software), which is very common, also has a cost, and victims.
I don't play online games either (or chess, for that matter), but as I understand it quite a lot of the anti-cheat tools work by trying to detect if cheating software is running. Since it's trivial to modulate the exact hash of a .exe, it works by heuristics, similar to anti-virus software. False positives with this are not uncommon, just as false positives in anti-virus isn't uncommon.
This is different from chess.com, which looks purely at the in-game behaviour. Chess cheating is probably a lot easier to detect reasonably reliably, as it's so much more limited: you just have a 8x8 grid, limited game pieces, clearer win and lose conditions, etc.
So in short, I don't think the situations are really comparable.
The lesson is: fight for what you believe in. The world is unfair and the more you comply, the more you will get shoved around. I bet that guy didn't even play the game anymore after he got unbanned; it does not matter at all.
Imagine if police could charge you with a crime, but refuse to show their evidence or explain how they believe you committed the crime, with the reasoning that "we must not provide details about our process, or evidence to show you committed the crime, to protect the integrity of our policing methods"
Not really, when you consider the context of each situation. Being banned from an online game is a sort of localized "prison" within the context of the game.
> Activision explained that the burden of proof should be on me as “there is no requirement for Activision to prove that I had cheated” and “any burden rests on the Claimant” (me). The Judge agreed with this so I had the task of providing evidence that I didn’t cheat.
This doesn't make sense to me - if I bought a book, paid, and never got it, then sued, would I be expected to prove they never delivered the book? That seems nuts, I'd expect the court would say "show the courier's receipt".
"The burden of proof is on the accuser" - I'd expect the required proof here to be the proof that they were banned (which should be trivial: the emails).
> A combination of the evidence I submitted... and lack of evidence submitted by Activision led to this decision.
So in the end the burden of proof wasn't on @mdswanson?
Stuff like this is an ever-present threat so I'd like to know what was effective in case it ever happens to me.
Here's what I don't get:
- At the start the blog says that Activision's case fell apart because they gave a reason - does this mean that if they said "we banned him for no reason at all" he'd have no case?
- Couldn't Activision have said "well, he got 37 hours of gameplay, we don't owe him any more"? There's no monetary damage - so how was damage actually determined here? Was there a defamation angle or something?
What laws did the Judge cite making this decision?
Yes if they banned him for no reason he would have no case but steam only shows bans for cheating so this problem wouldn't have come up anyways.
The burden of proof in civil cases is on both parties equally. They are decided on the preponderance of evidence basis. So in this case the author only needed to show that it was more likely that he wasn't cheating than he was cheating.
Whilst it was an interesting read, it still doesn't quite state why they believed he was cheating and what methods are taken on deciding that. Without that it is impossible to make conclusions.
This is by design. Anti-cheat solutions are intended to be opaque. This also applies to bans from many online platforms.
This needs to change, because their systems are not 100% accurate. They need to be able to prove that you cheated or broke ToS before they can ban you and effectively steal any money you've paid them.
I completely agree with you. These anti cheat systems, whether it is related to video games or university work or anything in life, need to be fully open and transparent otherwise as you say without understanding and proof of what you did wrong, there shouldn't be any ban or punishment. If they find you in breach of a contract, they should be required by law to prove how you broke the contract.
The amount of people in this thread who think online video games can be equated to imprisonment or being kicked out of university or other actually-important things is rather shocking.
Imprisonment is worse, being kicked out of university is also worse, but a company taking your money for a product and then banning you from use of that product without a reasonable (and inexpensive) appeals process is also evil (and imo should be illegal).
To me, the fact that they didn't state those things makes it trivial to draw the conclusion: b00lin is in the right, and Activision is in the wrong. Any time one party tells their side of the story, and the other doesn't despite being given the chance to, I always side with the party that did.
>Without that it is impossible to make conclusions.
Conclusions about what? Whether he actually cheated or not? If there isn't enough evidence to tell someone is guilty or not, your conclusion should be "not guilty", not "it is impossible to make conclusions".
Without that it is impossible to make conclusions on whether anyone cheated.
I think we actually agree, although I would use not guilty in the court of law standard, whereby it means not enough evidence to convict, not in the not guilty == innocent way some use it.
That's kind of the whole point. Activision wouldn't even explain to a judge in court why they ban people or how (if) they review bans. Therefore there's no way to prove yourself innocent.
2 years? Jeez. All for a crapfest game haha. Kudos to you for going through with that. I guess they have a streaming platform so reputation was on the line, but I would not have put this much effort. Did you use AI to generate legal documents?
Very interesting read.
I don't play video games, but I do play online chess, and in online chess, there is a huge epidemic of cheating. Many cheaters are banned by chess.com. Some of these bans go unnoticed, but in other cases, the cheaters passionately insist that they were not cheating. And I don't believe them.
In a minuscule number of cases, chess.com has been known to reverse a ban. But chess.com does not provide the details of their anti-cheating technology.
So in the arena of chess, I do side with the provider, because as a practical matter, I believe they are almost always (>99.9%) correct. Of course, they still suffer from false negatives, because intermittent cheating is virtually impossible to prove.
I'm not sure what lessons to draw from the article.
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.
Scenario (1) is trivial to detect.
But Scenario (2) is rather complex - most strong players who are "smart cheaters" would use the Stockfish suggestions infrequently, perhaps just once per game. The difference to the game result can be significant, but detecting this sort of cheating is a statistical exercise.
As you said, it comes down to thresholds, and setting a tradeoff between false positives and false negatives.
And let's not forget that a false negative, which is the default case and extremely common, also has an effect – it disadvantages all the honest players who lose to a cheater.
Why do you believe they are almost always right? Without understanding the anti cheating technology, I feel it's impossible to judge.
Because computer-aided cheating is trivial to do and known to be widespread.
It's apparent that chess.com has tuned the detection threshold to near certainty, which lets many cheaters through, at least for a long time.
What often gets lost in criticism of the corporate entity is that undetected cheating (i.e. false negative by the anti-cheating software), which is very common, also has a cost, and victims.
I don't play online games either (or chess, for that matter), but as I understand it quite a lot of the anti-cheat tools work by trying to detect if cheating software is running. Since it's trivial to modulate the exact hash of a .exe, it works by heuristics, similar to anti-virus software. False positives with this are not uncommon, just as false positives in anti-virus isn't uncommon.
This is different from chess.com, which looks purely at the in-game behaviour. Chess cheating is probably a lot easier to detect reasonably reliably, as it's so much more limited: you just have a 8x8 grid, limited game pieces, clearer win and lose conditions, etc.
So in short, I don't think the situations are really comparable.
The lesson is: fight for what you believe in. The world is unfair and the more you comply, the more you will get shoved around. I bet that guy didn't even play the game anymore after he got unbanned; it does not matter at all.
Imagine if police could charge you with a crime, but refuse to show their evidence or explain how they believe you committed the crime, with the reasoning that "we must not provide details about our process, or evidence to show you committed the crime, to protect the integrity of our policing methods"
There is difference between putting you into a prison and denying you access to an online game.
Presumably something was sacrificed to be able to have the game, usually money which is in turn acquired through sacrifice of one's time/life (a job).
In both cases, the victim is being deprived of time out of their life.
Not really, when you consider the context of each situation. Being banned from an online game is a sort of localized "prison" within the context of the game.
It's called a "thought experiment"
When you consider the contexts, you can also realize they are two different things that should be handled separately and in different ways.
> Activision explained that the burden of proof should be on me as “there is no requirement for Activision to prove that I had cheated” and “any burden rests on the Claimant” (me). The Judge agreed with this so I had the task of providing evidence that I didn’t cheat.
This doesn't make sense to me - if I bought a book, paid, and never got it, then sued, would I be expected to prove they never delivered the book? That seems nuts, I'd expect the court would say "show the courier's receipt".
"The burden of proof is on the accuser" - I'd expect the required proof here to be the proof that they were banned (which should be trivial: the emails).
> A combination of the evidence I submitted... and lack of evidence submitted by Activision led to this decision.
So in the end the burden of proof wasn't on @mdswanson?
Stuff like this is an ever-present threat so I'd like to know what was effective in case it ever happens to me.
Here's what I don't get:
- At the start the blog says that Activision's case fell apart because they gave a reason - does this mean that if they said "we banned him for no reason at all" he'd have no case?
- Couldn't Activision have said "well, he got 37 hours of gameplay, we don't owe him any more"? There's no monetary damage - so how was damage actually determined here? Was there a defamation angle or something?
What laws did the Judge cite making this decision?
Yes if they banned him for no reason he would have no case but steam only shows bans for cheating so this problem wouldn't have come up anyways.
The burden of proof in civil cases is on both parties equally. They are decided on the preponderance of evidence basis. So in this case the author only needed to show that it was more likely that he wasn't cheating than he was cheating.
Could a case have been made for defamation, as their actions had caused Steam to falsely label them as a cheat?
Whilst it was an interesting read, it still doesn't quite state why they believed he was cheating and what methods are taken on deciding that. Without that it is impossible to make conclusions.
This is by design. Anti-cheat solutions are intended to be opaque. This also applies to bans from many online platforms.
This needs to change, because their systems are not 100% accurate. They need to be able to prove that you cheated or broke ToS before they can ban you and effectively steal any money you've paid them.
I completely agree with you. These anti cheat systems, whether it is related to video games or university work or anything in life, need to be fully open and transparent otherwise as you say without understanding and proof of what you did wrong, there shouldn't be any ban or punishment. If they find you in breach of a contract, they should be required by law to prove how you broke the contract.
The amount of people in this thread who think online video games can be equated to imprisonment or being kicked out of university or other actually-important things is rather shocking.
Imprisonment is worse, being kicked out of university is also worse, but a company taking your money for a product and then banning you from use of that product without a reasonable (and inexpensive) appeals process is also evil (and imo should be illegal).
I was wondering if the cheating incident could be investigated by an NDA'd neutral 3rd party?
To me, the fact that they didn't state those things makes it trivial to draw the conclusion: b00lin is in the right, and Activision is in the wrong. Any time one party tells their side of the story, and the other doesn't despite being given the chance to, I always side with the party that did.
>Without that it is impossible to make conclusions.
Conclusions about what? Whether he actually cheated or not? If there isn't enough evidence to tell someone is guilty or not, your conclusion should be "not guilty", not "it is impossible to make conclusions".
Without that it is impossible to make conclusions on whether anyone cheated.
I think we actually agree, although I would use not guilty in the court of law standard, whereby it means not enough evidence to convict, not in the not guilty == innocent way some use it.
That's kind of the whole point. Activision wouldn't even explain to a judge in court why they ban people or how (if) they review bans. Therefore there's no way to prove yourself innocent.
I can't even prevent people from stealing my identity / using my SSN lol OP out here going to court for a video game and beating cases
2 years? Jeez. All for a crapfest game haha. Kudos to you for going through with that. I guess they have a streaming platform so reputation was on the line, but I would not have put this much effort. Did you use AI to generate legal documents?
It also affected his Steam account and games unrelated to CoD, especially games developed by Valve. Valve consideres profile standing in matchmaking.