alt Hacker News> That's the gold standard in the industry though, you don't warn(suspected) cheaters to not give them opportunity to adjust their tactics.
Is this supposed to do any good? The actual cheater is still getting a signal that they've been detected, because they get banned. Then they figure out how, make a new account and go back to cheating.
Meanwhile the normal user is both confused and significantly more inconvenienced, because their rank etc. on the account you falsely banned was earned legitimately through hard work instead of low-effort cheating.
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The intent is usually to gather data then ban in waves. If a new tool comes out and you ban a couple of players the tool authors might figure out why and update it. Let it sit a while and you can get hundreds/thousands of players who get a message to rethink their choice to cheat.
An additional benefit is that this can include multiple cheat programs and versions in one ban wave, so it may be harder to narrow down exactly what the flaw was. That's the why for no warnings (or explanations) - false positives and recourse if mistakenly flagged is another matter entirely.
I mean "then they figure out how" and "make a new account" are each doing quite a bit of the heavy lifting here.
Using Activision as the example, when they do a mass ban after you've been cheating for 4 months straight how exactly are you going to figure out how it happened?
Isn't the whole point of the ban that it's not as simple as just "make a new account?" Isn't it tied to the PS+ / XBox Gold membership, or even the physical hardware?
>>The actual cheater is still getting a signal that they've been detected, because they get banned.
So....yes. But there are mitigating tactics around this, I really recommend looking into it because it's a fascinating topic. As the simplest thing - you don't ban cheaters the moment they are detected to not give off how you detected them. That's why Activision bans people in waves and all at once, even though they know some people are cheating and still active. Unfortunately a lot of people are paying for cheats nowadays, and the cheat makers usually have some kind of refund policy where if you get detected you get your money back - games companies want to inconvenience those buyers as much as possible, so you can't claim your refund straight away because hey, the game worked for a good while even while you were cheating, must have been something else :P
>>Meanwhile the normal user is both confused and significantly more inconvenienced
Yes, which is why the aim is to have 0 legitimate players getting caught by this, obviously.