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.
I had the interesting experience of being banned from a Call of Duty 4 server, back when the franchise still had servers.
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.
I don't play online games either (or chess, for that matter), but as I understand it quite a lot of the anti-cheat tools work by trying to detect if cheating software is running. Since it's trivial to modulate the exact hash of a .exe, it works by heuristics, similar to anti-virus software. False positives with this are not uncommon, just as false positives in anti-virus isn't uncommon.
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.
Imagine if police could charge you with a crime, but refuse to show their evidence or explain how they believe you committed the crime, with the reasoning that "we must not provide details about our process, or evidence to show you committed the crime, to protect the integrity of our policing methods"
The lesson is: fight for what you believe in. The world is unfair and the more you comply, the more you will get shoved around. I bet that guy didn't even play the game anymore after he got unbanned; it does not matter at all.
> Activision explained that the burden of proof should be on me as “there is no requirement for Activision to prove that I had cheated” and “any burden rests on the Claimant” (me). The Judge agreed with this so I had the task of providing evidence that I didn’t cheat.
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?
Yes if they banned him for no reason he would have no case but steam only shows bans for cheating so this problem wouldn't have come up anyways.
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.
Whilst it was an interesting read, it still doesn't quite state why they believed he was cheating and what methods are taken on deciding that. Without that it is impossible to make conclusions.
This is by design. Anti-cheat solutions are intended to be opaque. This also applies to bans from many online platforms.
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.
To me, the fact that they didn't state those things makes it trivial to draw the conclusion: b00lin is in the right, and Activision is in the wrong. Any time one party tells their side of the story, and the other doesn't despite being given the chance to, I always side with the party that did.
>Without that it is impossible to make conclusions.
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".
That's kind of the whole point. Activision wouldn't even explain to a judge in court why they ban people or how (if) they review bans. Therefore there's no way to prove yourself innocent.
2 years? Jeez. All for a crapfest game haha. Kudos to you for going through with that. I guess they have a streaming platform so reputation was on the line, but I would not have put this much effort. Did you use AI to generate legal documents?
hilux|1 year ago
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.
strken|1 year ago
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.
ktallett|1 year ago
arp242|1 year ago
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.
LocalH|1 year ago
low_tech_love|1 year ago
rendaw|1 year ago
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?
voxic11|1 year ago
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.
ktallett|1 year ago
LocalH|1 year ago
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.
josephcsible|1 year ago
gruez|1 year ago
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".
mrgoldenbrown|1 year ago
cmpxchg8b|1 year ago
gunian|1 year ago
stuckkeys|1 year ago
florbo|1 year ago
ycombinatrix|1 year ago