The exact same thing happened to me with League of Legends. I was inexplicably banned for cheating, despite never having done any such thing (and despite regularly playing on three accounts (this is fully permitted), the other two of which were not banned!) Their support people repeatedly said "we reviewed your case and the ban is correct", etc. all the while giving zero information about what I did so I could correct it. I have a couple of the rarest skins in the game, and have played thousands of hours since 2009. I only play ARAM, so the suggestion I was risking my account of great sentimental value by cheating at the most casual mode in the game is beyond ridiculous. Anyway, nothing in gaming has ever stressed me out more. I got unbanned solely because of a contact in the industry who had it looked into, and the ban was inexplicably lifted. I still play, but I think about the false ban almost every time, and League will probably be the last competitive multiplayer game I ever put any time towards. Part of me doesn't want to play it anymore because I dread that happening again. :(

I got a false permanent ban as well. Despite the fact that cheating is damn near impossible on consoles, and the fact that I worked way too long to get to an absolutely mediocre rank (gold 1) on ranked play, and the fact that I had never even had a warning or complaint for any behavior whatsoever, they permanently banned me with no explanation.

Unlike the blogpost, I just decided I would just never spend any money on an Activision product ever again. It's what everybody should do.

> This ban also ruined other games for me. If I ever did well in a game, someone would look at my profile to see how many hours I have and instantly see the red marker that shows “I am a cheater”.

I wonder if that label can be considered to be libel. Probably harder in the US, but from what I understand in UK (or just England?) the defendant must prove that it's true.

Holy ….. what a fight you had to do. So glad i hardly play any mulitiplayer shooter games. I’d hate to have my insane Steam library stripped away from me.

This is worthy of it's own submission, a very interesting post.

Interesting article

Maybe he was banned because as a developer, he had development tools installed on his machine, which increased the odds of him being labeled as a potential cheater.

Sometimes I even wonder if other hackers could not hack the machine or other players, to install a software that triggers anti-cheat system: it becomes then difficult to lift the ban.

Interesting stuff! Though I don’t get why b00lin would have to prove that they weren’t cheating. This is not a criminal case, but still. Activision was denying access to a service that was paid for.

I wonder how these anti-cheat tools are impacted by flatpak and its partial sandboxing. Otherwise they sound quite invasive.

Honestly I'd prefer it if games could permaban based on just heuristics and the EULA simply stated "tough luck, buy the game again". I'd happily pay for that, knowing my money is at least not going to some 2 year legal fight.

I get that I might be the one accused of cheating next time. But if that risk is tiny and the cost when it happens is $50 or $100 it sounds a lot more attractive than the alternative.

Also (obviously) I don't care about the account itself. I wouldn't play a game where I aggregate long term stats/items/status/whatever.

In a perfect world you just have private servers where you can have 90% effective anticheat and have humans sort out the rest.