Passport/ID Verification to combat cheaters

[Pooper]

After much research into Anti cheats and software engineers decade old battle to deal with cheaters, I feel the best way to combat the issue is passport/id verification upon account creation with actual financial penalties to unlock a banned ID/account.

Steam has the ability to create waves in the industry but it seems very quiet about the cheating situation across all titles, most likely because the cheaters make up a large portion of their income.

[Crazy Tiger]

Valve isn't allowed to ask for my ID nor deny me access if I don't want to provide it. I like privacy laws.

Not sure why people are so eager to give such vital info to commercial companies...

[Gwarsbane]

If you did "much research" into anti-cheats and stuff, you would have read why your idea won't work... which I will repeat but its also in my copy and paste below because of how often people think they have a great way to stop cheaters...


Not everyone has a passport (I don't because I don't travel to other countries and I'm not paying hundreds of dollars for it to sit around and gather dust.

Valve also has no way to verify an ID because no government in their right might would ever give a gaming company access to their data base to verify an ID just to stop cheaters or anything else gaming related.

I go into more detail below why this will never happen.


Copy and paste for every time a "I have a great idea to stop cheating" and the "DO SOMETHING" posts that always happen because people don't bother to use the search feature...

While below is mainly aimed at VAC, it can be said about any anti-cheat software.

Do you really think that they just sit there saying, "oh we have the perfect way to stop all hackers/cheaters once and for all, but we're just not going to do it cause we're lazy, ohh look at that, more money just rolled in, time to sit back doing nothing again"....

You have no idea how hard it is to stop hackers/cheater.

Blocking IPs are pointless, IPs can be changed in seconds, also if you block a single IP you could end up blocking lots of innocent people specially if the ISPs reuse IPs.

Blocking Hardware IDs is also as pointless, they can be changed and if you sell off your hardware, anyone who gets it will be banned.

Asking for some form of ID is pointless without anyway for Valve to actually Verify that ID is actually real. There is this thing called photo editing, its easily done by just about anyone. So sending pictures of the ID is pointless. There is no government databases that Valve can tap into from every single country they sell in the world because no government in their right mind would ever allow a game company access to private information.

Take the US all on its own, there are 50 different states, each with their own IDs, there is no single US ID so that would be 50 different databases Valve would need access too. Canada, same thing, each province and territory has their own Provincial ID, no actual Canadian ID. Now think about the hundreds of countries out there that are setup the same way.

There is no place that people can take their IDs to get verified because it would cost Valve a lot of money to pay those places to do that for them. You would also need a lot of places because no one is going to drive even miles every time they need to get their ID checked.

Most people do not have passports and to get one is very expensive, least it is in my country and its only good for a few years. If I'm not traveling outside of my country why do I need a passport?

Phone calls to talk to someone, pointless & expensive.

Require phone numbers won't work because there are free services out there that allow you to get free numbers and free texting. Also not everyone has a cell phone.

Sending someone to persons home, very expensive.

Limiting the number of accounts people can make is not possible. For one thing, Valve has no idea who is sitting at the keyboard. If you have 1 PC but have a family of 4 or 5 or more that all use that PC for gaming, and each of them has their own account, you just made it impossible for that family to have their own games on their own accounts, which is better then every single game for kids and adults on one account.

Valve can't even use a camera on the PC to see who is behind the keyboard because not all PCs have webcam. I (and may of my friends) don't use webcams. If I had a laptop with one, I would have tape over it. Cell phone has a case that covers the selfie camera.


Valve has to know about the hack and has to get their hands on it.
Then they have to figure out how it does its thing.
Then they have to figure out how to detect someone using it.
Then they have to figure out how to make sure they don't get any false positives.
Then they make it go active for a few weeks before actually hitting the kill switch.

Even before hitting the waiting time, this could be a few weeks work or more.

Why do they wait a few weeks to hit the kill switch? To get as many cheaters as they can in the net so that once they turn it on, the roaches don't go screaming to people "don't turn on the hack, its been detected".

Valve is also working on an automated way to detect cheating with teaching an AI what to look for. BUT this takes a long time to do and even then its not going to be perfect. Valve needs it to be perfect, to not create false positives that ban people who didn't actually cheat.

Now, do you know how easy it is for a cheat maker to change the cheat to make it undetectable? Sometimes its as simple as changing a few lines of code and thats it. Basically a few minutes work, then compile the program, test it, and upload it somewhere.

So if you want to help Valve, stop making posts like this. Look for people spreading urls to websites with hacks and send those urls (for the hacks and hack sites) to steam support. Don't post them in public, just send it to steam support.

If the game is not VAC protected, then you have to contact the game developer/publisher via the games discussion area and ask them how to submit the stuff to them.

[Tito Shivan]

I'm just going to point to the fact that a country with one of the tightest system to access the internet, where every user is perfectly identified... Has one of the largest cheating problems worldwide.

[ุ]

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

I'm just going to point to the fact that a country with one of the tightest system to access the internet, where every user is perfectly identified... Has one of the largest cheating problems worldwide.

SK tried pushing this through too and faced huge backlash by netizens, iirc.

All we'd see is a spike in hijacked accounts, and a growing issue of identity theft.

Plus, internet privacy laws in the US basically prohibit this very system in the first place.

[76561198407601200]

Originally posted by Greg:

After much research into Anti cheats and software engineers decade old battle to deal with cheaters, I feel the best way to combat the issue is passport/id verification upon account creation with actual financial penalties to unlock a banned ID/account.

Steam has the ability to create waves in the industry but it seems very quiet about the cheating situation across all titles, most likely because the cheaters make up a large portion of their income.

Fixing human behavior is the only real way to combat cheats. You could start with your friends that have bans and educate them on why it is wrong.

[Dagnabbit]

Tell me you take video games too seriously without telling me you take video games too seriously.

Originally posted by Greg:

After much research into Anti cheats and software engineers decade old battle to deal with cheaters, I feel the best way to combat the issue is passport/id verification upon account creation with actual financial penalties to unlock a banned ID/account.

Steam has the ability to create waves in the industry but it seems very quiet about the cheating situation across all titles, most likely because the cheaters make up a large portion of their income.

[El poco nuez del muerte]

Originally posted by Greg:

I feel the best way to combat the issue is passport/id verification upon account creation

Right, so, how is Valve going to know that what I hand them is correct information? Do you imagine Valve gets special access to my countries ID data? A random private company? You really believe that?

Holy moly.

[blunus]

I see no point in regarding working anti-cheats. This invasive tool better not be put into effect.

Or aren't you glad of singleplayer games?

[Knee]

video games shouldn’t be taken that seriously

[Pooper]

What is it you're all trying to hide? What so important about your lives that requires that level of security?

Facebook knows more about you than your spouse's, so does google.

I don't take games any more seriously than everyone else, but i have invested into my computer, games, skins etc for an enjoyable experience (like everyone else), only to have the enjoyment cut short by the nefarious use of exploit programs.

You can't pretend it doesn't bother you, either.

I'm not on about ID to use the internet, or your computer, i'm talking about some basic level identification that's hard to script the creation of accounts. There needs to be something that links different accounts to each other, other than IP. (which most of you security warriors don't care for either)

[Pooper]

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

I'm just going to point to the fact that a country with one of the tightest system to access the internet, where every user is perfectly identified... Has one of the largest cheating problems worldwide.

Thanks for your input. This is why its import to discuss, right?

[Pooper]

Originally posted by blunus:

I see no point in regarding working anti-cheats. This invasive tool better not be put into effect.

Or aren't you glad of singleplayer games?

I don't enjoy most single player games.

I enjoy competitive games. Just like some people prefer contact sport vs non contact sport.

Not for me.

[Pooper]

Originally posted by The Living Tribunal:

Originally posted by Greg:

After much research into Anti cheats and software engineers decade old battle to deal with cheaters, I feel the best way to combat the issue is passport/id verification upon account creation with actual financial penalties to unlock a banned ID/account.

Steam has the ability to create waves in the industry but it seems very quiet about the cheating situation across all titles, most likely because the cheaters make up a large portion of their income.

Fixing human behavior is the only real way to combat cheats. You could start with your friends that have bans and educate them on why it is wrong.

Fortunately none of my friends cheat. I have yet to meet a real life cheater. I don't understand their motives, especially as cheating is pretty expensive these days, from what i understand they use hardware to process the cheats so that kernel level anti cheat doesn't detect & the hardware can be very expensive, as much as some mid range GPUs.

That's a lot of effort to ruin someone else's game.

[Pooper]

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

If you did "much research" into anti-cheats and stuff, you would have read why your idea won't work... which I will repeat but its also in my copy and paste below because of how often people think they have a great way to stop cheaters...


Not everyone has a passport (I don't because I don't travel to other countries and I'm not paying hundreds of dollars for it to sit around and gather dust.

Valve also has no way to verify an ID because no government in their right might would ever give a gaming company access to their data base to verify an ID just to stop cheaters or anything else gaming related.

I go into more detail below why this will never happen.


Copy and paste for every time a "I have a great idea to stop cheating" and the "DO SOMETHING" posts that always happen because people don't bother to use the search feature...

While below is mainly aimed at VAC, it can be said about any anti-cheat software.

Do you really think that they just sit there saying, "oh we have the perfect way to stop all hackers/cheaters once and for all, but we're just not going to do it cause we're lazy, ohh look at that, more money just rolled in, time to sit back doing nothing again"....

You have no idea how hard it is to stop hackers/cheater.

Blocking IPs are pointless, IPs can be changed in seconds, also if you block a single IP you could end up blocking lots of innocent people specially if the ISPs reuse IPs.

Blocking Hardware IDs is also as pointless, they can be changed and if you sell off your hardware, anyone who gets it will be banned.

Asking for some form of ID is pointless without anyway for Valve to actually Verify that ID is actually real. There is this thing called photo editing, its easily done by just about anyone. So sending pictures of the ID is pointless. There is no government databases that Valve can tap into from every single country they sell in the world because no government in their right mind would ever allow a game company access to private information.

Take the US all on its own, there are 50 different states, each with their own IDs, there is no single US ID so that would be 50 different databases Valve would need access too. Canada, same thing, each province and territory has their own Provincial ID, no actual Canadian ID. Now think about the hundreds of countries out there that are setup the same way.

There is no place that people can take their IDs to get verified because it would cost Valve a lot of money to pay those places to do that for them. You would also need a lot of places because no one is going to drive even miles every time they need to get their ID checked.

Most people do not have passports and to get one is very expensive, least it is in my country and its only good for a few years. If I'm not traveling outside of my country why do I need a passport?

Phone calls to talk to someone, pointless & expensive.

Require phone numbers won't work because there are free services out there that allow you to get free numbers and free texting. Also not everyone has a cell phone.

Sending someone to persons home, very expensive.

Limiting the number of accounts people can make is not possible. For one thing, Valve has no idea who is sitting at the keyboard. If you have 1 PC but have a family of 4 or 5 or more that all use that PC for gaming, and each of them has their own account, you just made it impossible for that family to have their own games on their own accounts, which is better then every single game for kids and adults on one account.

Valve can't even use a camera on the PC to see who is behind the keyboard because not all PCs have webcam. I (and may of my friends) don't use webcams. If I had a laptop with one, I would have tape over it. Cell phone has a case that covers the selfie camera.


Valve has to know about the hack and has to get their hands on it.
Then they have to figure out how it does its thing.
Then they have to figure out how to detect someone using it.
Then they have to figure out how to make sure they don't get any false positives.
Then they make it go active for a few weeks before actually hitting the kill switch.

Even before hitting the waiting time, this could be a few weeks work or more.

Why do they wait a few weeks to hit the kill switch? To get as many cheaters as they can in the net so that once they turn it on, the roaches don't go screaming to people "don't turn on the hack, its been detected".

Valve is also working on an automated way to detect cheating with teaching an AI what to look for. BUT this takes a long time to do and even then its not going to be perfect. Valve needs it to be perfect, to not create false positives that ban people who didn't actually cheat.

Now, do you know how easy it is for a cheat maker to change the cheat to make it undetectable? Sometimes its as simple as changing a few lines of code and thats it. Basically a few minutes work, then compile the program, test it, and upload it somewhere.

So if you want to help Valve, stop making posts like this. Look for people spreading urls to websites with hacks and send those urls (for the hacks and hack sites) to steam support. Don't post them in public, just send it to steam support.

If the game is not VAC protected, then you have to contact the game developer/publisher via the games discussion area and ask them how to submit the stuff to them.

A bit passive aggressive but insightful.

I do understand the difficulties in creating anti cheat.

My point is, having to steal identities to cheat on a game is a whole different level of wrong, and opens cheaters to the vulnerability of the dark web etc, where government level AI is already in place to detect, detain and prosecute criminals.

I'd bet 99% of the script kiddies that manage to use cheats will call it a day, many of these people only do it because there is no law preventing them so there is no consequence. If they had a simple driving license photo etc (or a parent, if there is parental responsibility on the account) then its much harder to spoof your identity for a new account.

[Pooper]

Originally posted by Greg:

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

If you did "much research" into anti-cheats and stuff, you would have read why your idea won't work... which I will repeat but its also in my copy and paste below because of how often people think they have a great way to stop cheaters...


Not everyone has a passport (I don't because I don't travel to other countries and I'm not paying hundreds of dollars for it to sit around and gather dust.

Valve also has no way to verify an ID because no government in their right might would ever give a gaming company access to their data base to verify an ID just to stop cheaters or anything else gaming related.

I go into more detail below why this will never happen.


Copy and paste for every time a "I have a great idea to stop cheating" and the "DO SOMETHING" posts that always happen because people don't bother to use the search feature...

While below is mainly aimed at VAC, it can be said about any anti-cheat software.

Do you really think that they just sit there saying, "oh we have the perfect way to stop all hackers/cheaters once and for all, but we're just not going to do it cause we're lazy, ohh look at that, more money just rolled in, time to sit back doing nothing again"....

You have no idea how hard it is to stop hackers/cheater.

Blocking IPs are pointless, IPs can be changed in seconds, also if you block a single IP you could end up blocking lots of innocent people specially if the ISPs reuse IPs.

Blocking Hardware IDs is also as pointless, they can be changed and if you sell off your hardware, anyone who gets it will be banned.

Asking for some form of ID is pointless without anyway for Valve to actually Verify that ID is actually real. There is this thing called photo editing, its easily done by just about anyone. So sending pictures of the ID is pointless. There is no government databases that Valve can tap into from every single country they sell in the world because no government in their right mind would ever allow a game company access to private information.

Take the US all on its own, there are 50 different states, each with their own IDs, there is no single US ID so that would be 50 different databases Valve would need access too. Canada, same thing, each province and territory has their own Provincial ID, no actual Canadian ID. Now think about the hundreds of countries out there that are setup the same way.

There is no place that people can take their IDs to get verified because it would cost Valve a lot of money to pay those places to do that for them. You would also need a lot of places because no one is going to drive even miles every time they need to get their ID checked.

Most people do not have passports and to get one is very expensive, least it is in my country and its only good for a few years. If I'm not traveling outside of my country why do I need a passport?

Phone calls to talk to someone, pointless & expensive.

Require phone numbers won't work because there are free services out there that allow you to get free numbers and free texting. Also not everyone has a cell phone.

Sending someone to persons home, very expensive.

Limiting the number of accounts people can make is not possible. For one thing, Valve has no idea who is sitting at the keyboard. If you have 1 PC but have a family of 4 or 5 or more that all use that PC for gaming, and each of them has their own account, you just made it impossible for that family to have their own games on their own accounts, which is better then every single game for kids and adults on one account.

Valve can't even use a camera on the PC to see who is behind the keyboard because not all PCs have webcam. I (and may of my friends) don't use webcams. If I had a laptop with one, I would have tape over it. Cell phone has a case that covers the selfie camera.


Valve has to know about the hack and has to get their hands on it.
Then they have to figure out how it does its thing.
Then they have to figure out how to detect someone using it.
Then they have to figure out how to make sure they don't get any false positives.
Then they make it go active for a few weeks before actually hitting the kill switch.

Even before hitting the waiting time, this could be a few weeks work or more.

Why do they wait a few weeks to hit the kill switch? To get as many cheaters as they can in the net so that once they turn it on, the roaches don't go screaming to people "don't turn on the hack, its been detected".

Valve is also working on an automated way to detect cheating with teaching an AI what to look for. BUT this takes a long time to do and even then its not going to be perfect. Valve needs it to be perfect, to not create false positives that ban people who didn't actually cheat.

Now, do you know how easy it is for a cheat maker to change the cheat to make it undetectable? Sometimes its as simple as changing a few lines of code and thats it. Basically a few minutes work, then compile the program, test it, and upload it somewhere.

So if you want to help Valve, stop making posts like this. Look for people spreading urls to websites with hacks and send those urls (for the hacks and hack sites) to steam support. Don't post them in public, just send it to steam support.

If the game is not VAC protected, then you have to contact the game developer/publisher via the games discussion area and ask them how to submit the stuff to them.

A bit passive aggressive but insightful.

I do understand the difficulties in creating anti cheat.

My point is, having to steal identities to cheat on a game is a whole different level of wrong, and opens cheaters to the vulnerability of the dark web etc, where government level AI is already in place to detect, detain and prosecute criminals.

I'd bet 99% of the script kiddies that manage to use cheats will call it a day, many of these people only do it because there is no law preventing them so there is no consequence. If they had a simple driving license photo etc (or a parent, if there is parental responsibility on the account) then its much harder to spoof your identity for a new account.

And I'm not saying cheating should be illegal, but this system protects the unknowing cheater from jail, while also making to exceptionally inconvenient that they wont bother, or at least give up after a few bans.

The banning would be much easier with the lower amount of offenders.