I don't play video games, but I do play online chess, and in online chess, there is a huge epidemic of cheating. Many cheaters are banned by chess.com. Some of these bans go unnoticed, but in other cases, the cheaters passionately insist that they were not cheating. And I don't believe them.
In a minuscule number of cases, chess.com has been known to reverse a ban. But chess.com does not provide the details of their anti-cheating technology.
So in the arena of chess, I do side with the provider, because as a practical matter, I believe they are almost always (>99.9%) correct. Of course, they still suffer from false negatives, because intermittent cheating is virtually impossible to prove.
I'm not sure what lessons to draw from the article.
It happened like this: we were playing the game mode Sabotage, and it went into overtime. When this happens, the game shows the exact location of every player on the map to every other player and prevents respawns until there's nobody left on one team, at which point the other wins. In CoD you can shoot through walls with a damage penalty on your shots depending on how penetrative your weapon is, and I was carrying a heavy semi-auto sniper rifle with a short range scope.
It was down to me and another player. The other player was running up some stairs inside a building, to try to get a more advantageous route to the alley where I was lurking. I popped around the corner with the intent to spam my entire ammo reserve through the wall at him, knowing I could take advantage of a body shot to chase him and probably finish him off. By some combination of map knowledge and sheer luck, my first shot hit him exactly in the head and killed him, while my entire team was spectating me. The game instantly stopped and they couldn't see any evidence I was planning on magdumping through the wall. I was pretty much instantly kicked and banned.
This has given me a lot of empathy for accused cheaters. If you're getting 10,000 kills in a year and the average player can tell whether kills are hacking with 99.9% accuracy, you're going to have 10 "ban-worthy" kills every year. I've got no idea how the numbers shake out for chess, but I would be surprised if there were zero or negligible false positives.
Playing some games on GeForce NOW (a game streaming service) can get you banned by just using the service or exhaust the allowed plays per day because it runs in ephemeral VMs and each session is from a different server. This is with the game being explicitly added and supported by the developer/publisher...
1. There is no human player at all, just a bot playing the game (maybe being paid for by a user to boost their rank). This is likely detected by all the usual anti-bot heuristics that many web services have. Another option might be looking for statistical outliers on how highly player's moves correlate to open engines like Stockfish (this was the cause of a big cheating scandal in pro chess last year, if I remember right)
2. There is a human player, but they're just feeding the moves into an engine like stock fish and copying them out. Again, this is probably based on statistical correlations.
Here's the thing with any anti-cheat, the standard for a scientific paper is based on a P value indicating the likelihood of something being chance is about 5%. This is obviously way too high a threshold for anti-cheat, it would make 1 in 20 of your bans false bans. But the logic of an "acceptable" heuristic about lucky shots, or headshot rate, or blink stalker micro saving low hp units, or stockfish-correlated chess moves is part of basically all anti-cheat systems.
I'd guess they tune their thresholds to be something more like 1 in 1000, but after a point the way you reduce false bans for these things is to ban less, which given the high rate of actual cheating, is not desirable to the game companies. So if going from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10000 requires halving the amount of bans you dish out, game companies are just not going to do that.
So then some CS drone has to answer the ticket about why the user was banned. They know that 999 of every 1000 tickets are lying, so they just automatically close it with no recourse. It's not worth the company's resources to make a recourse process. For PR purposes it's better to just pretend that isn't the case, and say there's no false positives. We've seen the PR reaction machine initially respond the same way when the "is something hooking the game process" checks detect all the Teamspeak overlay users and bans them all, until the sheer volume of affected people cause them to relent. So it's hard to believe that when they have statistical modelling based bans affecting much smaller numbers of people, they don't just steamroll them.
Heck, it's not anti-cheat, but I've had a copy of Red Alert 3 basically stolen by EA as they claimed my CD key was pirated (it wasn't, I bought it on Steam directly). Of course CS claimed infallibility, but it's made me be a lot more suspicious of other cases where CS claims infallibility.
But these games have millions of players, so 1 in 1000 is... quite a lot of people actually.
It's apparent that chess.com has tuned the detection threshold to near certainty, which lets many cheaters through, at least for a long time.
What often gets lost in criticism of the corporate entity is that undetected cheating (i.e. false negative by the anti-cheating software), which is very common, also has a cost, and victims.
This is different from chess.com, which looks purely at the in-game behaviour. Chess cheating is probably a lot easier to detect reasonably reliably, as it's so much more limited: you just have a 8x8 grid, limited game pieces, clearer win and lose conditions, etc.
So in short, I don't think the situations are really comparable.
This doesn't make sense to me - if I bought a book, paid, and never got it, then sued, would I be expected to prove they never delivered the book? That seems nuts, I'd expect the court would say "show the courier's receipt".
"The burden of proof is on the accuser" - I'd expect the required proof here to be the proof that they were banned (which should be trivial: the emails).
> A combination of the evidence I submitted... and lack of evidence submitted by Activision led to this decision.
So in the end the burden of proof wasn't on @mdswanson?
Stuff like this is an ever-present threat so I'd like to know what was effective in case it ever happens to me.
Here's what I don't get:
- At the start the blog says that Activision's case fell apart because they gave a reason - does this mean that if they said "we banned him for no reason at all" he'd have no case?
- Couldn't Activision have said "well, he got 37 hours of gameplay, we don't owe him any more"? There's no monetary damage - so how was damage actually determined here? Was there a defamation angle or something?
What laws did the Judge cite making this decision?
The burden of proof in civil cases is on both parties equally. They are decided on the preponderance of evidence basis. So in this case the author only needed to show that it was more likely that he wasn't cheating than he was cheating.
This needs to change, because their systems are not 100% accurate. They need to be able to prove that you cheated or broke ToS before they can ban you and effectively steal any money you've paid them.
Conclusions about what? Whether he actually cheated or not? If there isn't enough evidence to tell someone is guilty or not, your conclusion should be "not guilty", not "it is impossible to make conclusions".
I think we actually agree, although I would use not guilty in the court of law standard, whereby it means not enough evidence to convict, not in the not guilty == innocent way some use it.
