So I was watching a video on Warzone and how it’s becoming a cheaters paradise as of late. The person then suggested “Hardware Bans”. Having never heard of this I looked it up and apparently it’s extremely effective. This is Fortnites answer to cheating.
Basically, it randomly bans a physical component of your PC. I got this off a forum discussing it, “What makes it hard is Fortnite doesn’t ban a particular part of the PC. Sometimes they’d ban the GPU for a PC and ban the CPU for another.” They even ban Harddrives and ram too.
It’s hilarious to see cheaters on forums buying new PC parts only for it not to work or people destroying their PCs because they don’t know how to properly change out parts. Spending over $300 on new GPUs to try and bypass the ban.
What’s crazy is I heard Epic is starting to ban Windows serial numbers too. You think this will be picked up by blizzard in the future? I mean there is always a way to bypass a ban but this method makes it expensive, frustrating and extremely hard to do.
That would be an effective means of keeping them out, yes… But I think just an account based ban is sufficient. However they would first have to actually lift a finger (or two) and start banning bots/cheats… As from what I understand, banwaves for cheats and bots are far too infrequent.
Fortnite is a free to play game. Blizzard only does game key and account bans because blocking a botter via hardware prevents the cheater from buying more keys and creating new accounts. Hammered cheaters are forced to buy new keys and make new accounts again. It’s more money out of the hacker and their new account creations adds to “Number of new accounts created in this quarter”. There are also paid VPNs that Blizzard can’t detect nor block. This is why the franchise is slammed with bots and other hacks.
I would imagine that if they banned based on Windows serial numbers that would just lead to more piracy of Windows, so not sure that’s a good idea.
As for hardware based bans, well, that’s obviously a lot harder and more expensive for the cheater to wriggle out of. However, it also has the potential to ban innocents too. Imagine Player A is naughty and cheats at a game. Player A gets a hardware ban and, unknown to them, it’s their graphics card that’s picked as the piece of hardware to ban them on. Subsequently, Player A upgrades his graphics card and sells his old one to Player B. What if Player B also plays the same game that Player A used to? Player B inherits Player A’s ban, even though Player B did nothing wrong. What happens when Player B files a ticket appealing their ban?
That is a very interesting dilemma. I suppose having the ability to ban a specific piece of hardware means they have a snapshot of your resources anyway and they’d be able to compare the two.
Player B had components XYZ and has Replaced Z, Part Z has a ban on it but the rest of the player’s history shows no cheating AND part Z would be tracked to a different account, so I think Player B would have a pretty strong argument.
That being said, it’d just be easier for the company (blizz in this case) to just hold a 0 tolerance stance and kick it back to the player telling them to try and either get their money back or sell the part on and try and buy a different one. Sucks for the player, but easiest for the company and therefore the most likely outcome.
I guess this is already happening. Just read that some kid bought a computer and it had a hardware ban on it from the previous owner. Basically it was up to the kid to request his money back from the seller. Other than that he was SoL (besides buying new components). Customer service couldn’t help him nor even give him sound advice.
So that’s one issue, though, could be remedied by asking questions before you purchase used hardware. Also things like buyer protection that various sites have. Just like anything you buy used it comes with risks.
no no no no no no no no no no. It has been demonstratively proved that account bans when it comes to cheating with D3 have NOT worked. Said cheater just goes out and buys another licence and voila, cheating again…
Easy fix. When banning GPU etc, the game can note the MAC address of the LAN card. Do a comparative check when enforcing a ban on the GPU when it reconnects to game - same MAC address? yes, continue ban. New MAC address? Allow to play.
Sure, smart cheaters will then swap out GPU and LAN card to try and avoid bans, but that just increases the cost for them to cheat and will eventually make it even harder for them.
There’s no reason why the game can’t do a system check for GPU/soundcard/motherboard/LAN card serial numbers and use them for comparative checks too. Will a cheater replace their entire hardware system to circumvent a ban? I think not…
They will just come up with some software that shows incorect ids on the comp.
Face it . Its a losing battle. Blizz is hard at work and so are the bot programers.
Him and I will play both games, but whatever game one plays, we legits can agree, together, that we want Blizz to do much better at removing cheaters from our games.
Agreed. If they’d start with consoles first, that’d be nice…cheating has all but ruined seasonal play and it’s all cos Blizzard’s D3 seasons on consoles are local saves, not online saves only…an easy fix!
With D2 our bnet only characters have a saved file in Users on C: drive, but the character files are not accessible. D3 on console has the character files saved to the machine?
Well going back on my first post, my main point was no matter what method they use to enforce the ban, they have to actually ban them to begin with… The ban hammer needs to be wielded more often.