We have identified the cheat, now what?

It is a fact that there is a chronic problem in video games, there are always people who try to cheat by using programs to make the gameplay easier or to get an advantage over others, these are called cheaters. Studios and game developers have been dealing with this problem differently for many years. The existence of cheaters and how to identify them is a headache as to how to act after identification.

After identifying a player as a cheater, some questions are imposed on the developer or the team that coordinates the security part of the game (or other team or person in charge of dealing with cheaters). Should a player who has used cheats once get the same treatment as one who has done it several times? Should a player who uses smurf accounts or is being boosted get the same treatment as a player who uses cheats like aimbot or rapid-fire? If a toxic player starts to harass or insult players in the chat, should he get the exact same treatment cheaters get? These are all questions that should almost be asked on a case by case basis when a player is caught cheating, otherwise, the studios are held hostage to randomness or AI that may not understand the differences between cheats, amount of times the player uses cheats, and therefore not be fair in applying the punishments.

This is where the different ways that studios have been dealing with the cheaters they identify come in. And the studios have to deal with this problem, because, there is a phenomenon happening more and more, as the honest players (the ones who don’t use cheats) see that there are more and more players using cheats and because they can’t beat them, they will have to join them and start using cheats to be able to win, which can lead to an impossible situation to solve for some games.

Let’s start by talking about “bans”. A ban is a simple act of banning a player from playing a video game because they have committed an infraction of the game rules. However, there are different bans, and each studio/gamedev can act differently. Some bans work as a small account suspension (the player can’t play for a certain period), some bans leave the player’s account in low priority in queues or the player may even have to wait a few minutes before the system puts their account in the queue, there are even perma bans, where the studio decides that it is time to ban that account forever from the game servers.

However, these bans are both a solution and a problem. With the ease with which new emails and therefore new accounts can be created, a player who receives a ban can create an account again immediately afterward and go back to playing and start cheating again. A question then arises: what can studios do to ban cheaters beyond the methods they apply today? There has been an answer to this that is presented to us in the form of cheater servers. This mechanism is almost like a “revenge”, a dose of “you can taste your own medicine” from the studios to the cheaters. Just imagine: you are a cheater, you open the game where you chose to use a program (which is not allowed) to be better than everyone else, you are happy about it because you will get an amazing result that you could not get otherwise, you get to the game and as soon as you start it you find yourself facing huge difficulties, you’ll think that the cheat you bought somewhere on the internet is fake, that you’ve been robbed of tens or hundreds of euros, you’ll leave frustrated until you realize that this is happening daily, and then you start to think that you are alone and only facing others who had the same idea as you, other cheaters. This is what a cheater goes through when he finds himself anchored to a server where only cheaters play. It is a tactic that has been used, for example, in Minecraft where you already have lists of servers only for cheaters. It can be a way to discourage players from using cheats since all the reasons why these people do so no longer make sense on such a server.

I want to end this blog post on exactly this topic: the reasons that can lead a person to use cheats, and how important it is to understand what can cause them:
Money: ever since video games and esports became a billion-dollar industry, where it becomes more affordable to have careers or make money playing video games, we have seen the problem of cheaters growing. One can conclude that money is then a big motivation to use cheats. There are quite a few known cases of groups that make and sell cheats becoming millionaires because of this service, and we have also heard that the prices for using a cheat now reach hundreds of euros, something unthinkable a few years ago;

Power: this factor may be a kind of belief on my part since I have no way of corroborating it and even find it impossible to do so unless I could interview some cheaters who could confirm this point. But, it is true that having a cheater, being better, higher, and higher in rank gives power to an account in a videogame and consequently gives a sense of power to the person behind that account. Still, within this theme, there is another source of power, that power that a person can feel for having managed to be better than the gamedevs of a certain game, for having managed to find flaws in the game’s code to be able to change it and thereby be able to ruin it or do whatever they want with it;

Itemization and prizes: there are still those who do this for the platinum or to have everything the game offers. Imagine the case where a game offers skins or emotes according to the number of victories in matches of that game. If a player has the blind goal of owning everything the game offers but is unable to win the required matches, they may turn to a cheat to help them achieve this goal. This is perhaps the easiest type of motivation to control, as this motivation shows a great love for the game in question, and a short ban can deter the player from making this mistake again.

These are all reasons why a player might use cheats, but more than anything else most of the time, the love of the game, like this particular game so much that you want to be the best there is one of the main reasons. With all this information, the studios by their game security or player satisfaction teams or the gamedevs themselves analyze case by case and apply different types of bans or suspensions to cheaters. At Anybrain we are proud to have built a tool that identifies players that use cheats but also provides a set of statistics and metrics so that the person assessing these cases can do a fair and good job. Nonetheless, we also offer tools for the video game studios with millions of active daily players like an API and real-time event fraud detection for them to be able to process and apply automatic bans. From our side, we identify and give all the tools to the studios so that they can then decide how to deal with cheaters.