This is really shitty, and also an accessibility nightmare. Every time I play a multiplayer game with assistive tech, I worry about getting caught by some sort of system like this. I'm not good at...
This is really shitty, and also an accessibility nightmare. Every time I play a multiplayer game with assistive tech, I worry about getting caught by some sort of system like this. I'm not good at things like Destiny 2, and using voice commands and pedals makes my reaction times even slower than they'd be with a keyboard and mouse, but there's always the vague threat of being caught "automating" something just because I'm not physically pressing a key.
My guess is the crashes he experienced were caused by corrupt game files, and that there's a known piece of cheating software that functions by editing those same files, resulting in a false...
My guess is the crashes he experienced were caused by corrupt game files, and that there's a known piece of cheating software that functions by editing those same files, resulting in a false positive.
I imagine that writing good anti-cheat software must be immensely difficult, and that there will always be false positives, which of course is a terrible user experience, especially if the appeal process is basically talking to a brick wall. But I'm a bit worried about the class action lawsuit. Worst case, it might set an impossibly high standard for proof of cheating, effectively outlawing anti-cheat policies in video games altogether.
I have a friend who works on the anti-cheat team at Activision. From what I remember from conversations with him, cheating has been an enormously difficult problem for them. It was especially...
I have a friend who works on the anti-cheat team at Activision. From what I remember from conversations with him, cheating has been an enormously difficult problem for them. It was especially tough with COD: Warzone since that game is FTP, so cheaters could create new accounts without the barrier of entry of paying for the game. Warzone at its peak had something like 125 million active players in a 30 day period, and the cheating problem was bad enough that they were starting to get some major backlash before they released Ricochet in that game. I think my friend told me that at one point the majority of new players encountered an obvious cheater within their first 3 matches. That's not going to be good for player retention, for sure.
It's harder to find numbers for MW2 but I've seen estimates that it has sold something like 10-12 million copies. That's a lot of players, and I can't imagine that it's easy to make sure that automatic anti-cheat isn't occasionally getting false positives. I don't think it's really acceptable for paying players who aren't cheating to be banned, but I at least appreciate that it's a difficult issue for the folks at Activision to deal with.
There's no question about any kind of anti-cheat being an incredibly difficult endavour. I don't envy anyone in the position of having to implement that, especially if their role is public-facing....
There's no question about any kind of anti-cheat being an incredibly difficult endavour. I don't envy anyone in the position of having to implement that, especially if their role is public-facing. They'll get a lot of abuse online.
However, one thing that surprised me was the devs never even considered a stat-based ban. You could've statistically evaluated the best public players (pros and streamers), checked out their Kill-Death ratio (KD), added a 10% safety margin on top of that and then just banned anyone who got over that number in a couple of games.
I'm not touting this as the ultimate solution at all. I imagine that cheat makers would catch one fairly quickly and adjust the cheats to be less effective, but in the end, the cheats would be less effective. And from having played a ton of WZ1, I can tell you that the actual top players always started at like position 6. Maybe. Everyone on top of that had such an unrealistic KD that at a glance you could tell they were just cheating.
Activision Blizzard badly automating a system and unfairly punishing players who did no wrong? Where have I seen this before... Oh yes, when they introduced that fucking Silence Penalty in WoW...
Activision Blizzard badly automating a system and unfairly punishing players who did no wrong? Where have I seen this before... Oh yes, when they introduced that fucking Silence Penalty in WoW during 2015.
Bobby Kotick's corporate greed genuinely makes me excited for the prospect of Microsoft taking over.
This is really shitty, and also an accessibility nightmare. Every time I play a multiplayer game with assistive tech, I worry about getting caught by some sort of system like this. I'm not good at things like Destiny 2, and using voice commands and pedals makes my reaction times even slower than they'd be with a keyboard and mouse, but there's always the vague threat of being caught "automating" something just because I'm not physically pressing a key.
My guess is the crashes he experienced were caused by corrupt game files, and that there's a known piece of cheating software that functions by editing those same files, resulting in a false positive.
I imagine that writing good anti-cheat software must be immensely difficult, and that there will always be false positives, which of course is a terrible user experience, especially if the appeal process is basically talking to a brick wall. But I'm a bit worried about the class action lawsuit. Worst case, it might set an impossibly high standard for proof of cheating, effectively outlawing anti-cheat policies in video games altogether.
I have a friend who works on the anti-cheat team at Activision. From what I remember from conversations with him, cheating has been an enormously difficult problem for them. It was especially tough with COD: Warzone since that game is FTP, so cheaters could create new accounts without the barrier of entry of paying for the game. Warzone at its peak had something like 125 million active players in a 30 day period, and the cheating problem was bad enough that they were starting to get some major backlash before they released Ricochet in that game. I think my friend told me that at one point the majority of new players encountered an obvious cheater within their first 3 matches. That's not going to be good for player retention, for sure.
It's harder to find numbers for MW2 but I've seen estimates that it has sold something like 10-12 million copies. That's a lot of players, and I can't imagine that it's easy to make sure that automatic anti-cheat isn't occasionally getting false positives. I don't think it's really acceptable for paying players who aren't cheating to be banned, but I at least appreciate that it's a difficult issue for the folks at Activision to deal with.
There's no question about any kind of anti-cheat being an incredibly difficult endavour. I don't envy anyone in the position of having to implement that, especially if their role is public-facing. They'll get a lot of abuse online.
However, one thing that surprised me was the devs never even considered a stat-based ban. You could've statistically evaluated the best public players (pros and streamers), checked out their Kill-Death ratio (KD), added a 10% safety margin on top of that and then just banned anyone who got over that number in a couple of games.
I'm not touting this as the ultimate solution at all. I imagine that cheat makers would catch one fairly quickly and adjust the cheats to be less effective, but in the end, the cheats would be less effective. And from having played a ton of WZ1, I can tell you that the actual top players always started at like position 6. Maybe. Everyone on top of that had such an unrealistic KD that at a glance you could tell they were just cheating.
Activision Blizzard badly automating a system and unfairly punishing players who did no wrong? Where have I seen this before... Oh yes, when they introduced that fucking Silence Penalty in WoW during 2015.
Bobby Kotick's corporate greed genuinely makes me excited for the prospect of Microsoft taking over.