Needs to be a law against the taking away of product functionality after the sale, even if it's contractual/EULA. A ban should never take the game away from the owner, and in cases where it does then they need to be refunded (treble damages on top of license, lawyer, and court fees if it takes a judgment to induce the refund). Getting banned on Steam, say, in the sense that all of one's purchases are invalidated should be impossible legally. In cases where an account is prevented from login, items and inventory must still be accessible for trade as those represent real time effort put in by a paying customer. Want to enforce your code of ethics in a multiplayer game? Can't charge for the game or users legally have rights against bans, and bans must follow a proportionality continuum and you must have a human-attended cost capped (at license cost, and only on loss) appeals tribunal system with record.
Cheating will not get you banned on steam though, at worst your account is publicly shamed if its a VAC game.
People play multiplayer games to have fun and interact with others. If you behave badly, be it cheating or otherwise, you should be banned from using the multiplayer service because your behavior impacts other people.
> If you behave badly, be it cheating or otherwise, you should be banned from using the multiplayer service because your behavior impacts other people.
What if you behaved great but some guy fresh out of code boot camp's algorithm bans you?
Bugs and mistakes happen, when that happens it's typically some misidentification of a process or driver so a group of players get banned. And in every one of those cases I've seen they've been unbanned. The call of duty case is probably the worst one I've read about, also an outlier.
imo the problem would be solved if there was the ability and a culture of running your own game servers. Because I agree, being softlocked from a game you paid for sucks.
But also, cheaters suck, and whoever's running the server should be allowed to kick you out.
The entire Steam account is tainted: that's the issue.
Some random commercial third party can make an accusation and damage the value of thousands of games on a lark.
Meanwhile, any determined cheater just bought another copy of the game on an account dedicated solely to that task. This person suffers no extended consequence.
With Family accounts it's even worse: the tainting is attached to the account owning the licence of the game, not to the account playing the game. So if you share a game with a kid and (s)he's caught cheating, your account will be tainted, not just the kid's.
Not sure it applies with CoD in particular but my impression is a lot of these games with super invasive anti-cheat went F2P which reduces the punishment of getting caught to wasting time. Combined with the no dedicated servers resulting in little manual admin being possible with new games you've basically created the perfect environment to cheat entirely for business reasons. So then they started adding things like requiring phone verification (not even just requiring mobile numbers but requiring POST PAID mobile numbers) and kernel level modules, making a super invasive PITA solution to a problem.
Personally, I opted out of these games, F2P already perverts most game design away from fun IMO. And despite all this crap it seems like people are complaining about cheaters more than ever, but maybe I'm just old now!
I don't think it's you being older, this F2P stuff was almost non-existent outside of the MMORPG genre. If you wanted to play video games, you essentially had four choices:
- Play a limited demo of a full game.
- Buy a full offline game for your console or PC.
- Play a F2P MMORPG (no anti-cheat software to speak of).
- Pay for an MMORPG subscription (also
no anti-cheat software to speak of).
Cheats were less developed and so were anti-cheats. The F2P model was not as wide-spread either. The mobile app market didn't exist.
This is not the reality we live in anymore.
I've decided to not waste as much time as I used to on this stuff, because as I got older I learned more about how valuable time actually is.
> not even just requiring mobile numbers but requiring POST PAID mobile numbers
Wow, I live in a first world country and that would still ban like half the adults I know (Mostly because our bill pay phone plans are terrible value), along with basically every teenager (which for COD, you would think is the core target market).
