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Respawn will deal with Apex Legends cheaters by making them fight each other
- setr 7y agoSo the matchmaking equivalent to hellbanning I wonder if anyone has actually put any real thought into effectiveness of such concepts? Creating a parallel universe to stick your undesirables; 4chan and reddit do something similar (though the user self-influcts it) with their containment boards, so the history definitely exists
- brokenmachine 7y ago>containment boards What are the containment boards? I assume you aren't talking about /r/thedonald.
- thatguy0900 7y agoOn 4chan at least, containment boards are a subforum created for people who are talking about generally unliked subjects. /mlp/ is an example, it was created to discuss my little pony Fandom to stop it being discussed elsewhere on the site.
- ssully 7y agoDoTA 2 has been doing this for years now with toxic players. I don't recall reading anything about how effective it ended up being, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I recently started playing DoTA again after stopping for about 2 years and I have run into a handful of toxic players, but it doesn't seem to be as frequent or as bad as it used to be. For example, when I stopped playing two years ago it was basically a 50/50 chance you would be in a game where someone would say really terrible things about Brazilian or Chinese players for the entire match.
- SpaceManNabs 7y agoIt worked and continues to work beautifully. There was a video recently by Dota Alchemy about how the system applies to high a penalty if you have an accidental abandon or just raged way too hard for a few consecutive games, but you can grind up the behavior score quickly through 10 turbo games.
- user5994461 7y agoQuickly? A turbo game is half an hour. That would be a whole evening to get 10. Not to mention that a lot of things could go wrong in that many games.
- afiori 7y agoQuickly in scale of weeks. Coming from Pokemon GO, where the anti-cheat policy is "we will do nothing to actually disincentive toxic user (as they spend good money) but still we will impose arbitrary and artificial limitations to make it worse for everyone" some grinding look like a good solution.
- de_watcher 7y agoAbandon is ruining a match for 9 other players. So 10 looks like about right.
- user5994461 7y agoThis assumes that the game is not already ruined. Out of 10 games, how many of them are already ruined because 1 or 2 people left, or players are just insulting one another with the most awful thing they can think of. I'd consider quitting to be fair in both cases.
- setr 7y agoin LoL, the system didn't penalize you for a game that already had a quitter; As for the latter issue, you would avoid the penalty by flagging the other players on exit (and it being accepted). I'd assume Dota has something similar in place
- inflatableDodo 7y agoSounds a lot like Brockian Ultra-Cricket.
- nawgszy 7y agoJust as DOTA2 does it according to a sibling comment of this, CSGO has a system called "Trust Factor". Anecdotally: I am a nice guy and a good teammate, I don't abandon, I don't team-kill, etc.. I saw quite a few cheaters when I first started playing the game, but now they are quite a lot more rare and especially more subtle, to the point where I am usually not certain even when I suspect someone. There's some pretty damning stats about how many people cheat in CSGO as well, so it's seemingly quite strong in my opinion. Of course, other's summaries will beg to differ as they see a lot of cheating and hold themselves in equally high esteem, so ymmv
- kibwen 7y agoThree-factor authentication? What's the third factor? Something you know, something you own, and... maybe something you are (biometrics)?
- FDSGSG 7y agoWhy can't it be: Something you know, something you have, something else you have?
- nameless912 7y agoBecause if I can steal one widget from you, stealing two probably isn't significantly more difficult unless you actually care about physical security and keep those two objects far apart from each other. Now, it's likely that you do the right thing given the chance, but I know for a fact that my dad keeps the keys to his safe in his filing cabinet, and the keys to his filing cabinet in another filing cabinet. It's not really an extra layer of security.
- edaemon 7y agoIt's a mistake/misunderstanding in the article. They're using two factor authentication: https://old.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/cciyx6/712_respawn_checkin/etn6r58/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/cciyx6/712_res...
- brandur 7y agoIt seems like three-factor is a mistake in the article, but what you suggest is very close to the three factors that will be involved in SCA (Strong Customer Authentication), an upcoming European regulatory requirement to reduce fraud in payments: https://stripe.com/guides/strong-customer-authentication#what-is-strong-customer-authentication https://stripe.com/guides/strong-customer-authentication#wha... (Although only two of the three will be required.)
- greenshackle2 7y agoSomething you know, something you have, something you love
- aznpwnzor 7y agoi would have liked this for pokemon go. i started scripting the week it came out and then was banned in the 2nd or 3rd ban wave. but i would have liked to continue playing against other scripters
- arnaudsm 7y agoA significant part of Niantic's servers were overloaded with bot requests at that time, which caused massive lag for everyone. Banning was their only option. They came with a shadowban technique later though : https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/24/15686428/pokemon-go-niantic-shadowban-bot-hack https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/24/15686428/pokemon-go-niant...
- andybak 7y agoThanks for owning up to making the world a slightly shittier place.
- afiori 7y agoSadly the nature of the game doesn't allow for this, you cannot just spin up more matches in PoGO. But on this I am very critical of how Niantic is handling both Pokemon GO and wizard Unite
- csa 7y agoWhat is your issue with WU? I can’t see scripting really impacting the play of others (at least not yet).
- afiori 7y agothe energy system, it is almost impossible not to periodically end energy and have to grind at inns to continue playing as everything needs energy in the game. In comparison in PoGO if you finish one category of scarce items you still have many part of the game you can play in (e.g. with no pokéball you can still fight in gym and raids)
- edaemon 7y agoThe reddit post the article references has some more information: https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/cciyx6/712_respawn_checkin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/cciyx6/712_res...
- insomniacity 7y agoCan someone explain how these strategies aren't standard across online games by now? They've been around for years, but it's always a big deal when a game adds them.
- Reedx 7y agoBecause it's a non-trivial feature to develop, test and maintain. Simply using a flag (banned = true or false) is lot easier / less complex / fewer potential side effects.
- ben_jones 7y agoTo go further, automated ban systems often result in a ton of customer support, and depending on the game's monetization model they can heavily affect the bottom line if too many of a certain type of player are removed from the game. Also this problem is exasperated in Apex Legends because it is a free game that is also popular in Asia.
- socialist_coder 7y agoI would disagree with that. When you ban someone, they know. They make a new account and come back. When you move them to a cheater queue, they don't know. They keep playing, none the wiser. It's infinitely better for everyone. The cheater still gets to play, and the non-cheaters aren't affected as much because the cheater doesn't just keep coming back. The complexity in your app is that you need to have multiple matchmaking queues, which you probably already support due to skill tiers. So is it really that difficult to add more matchmaking queues for the cheaters?
- egypturnash 7y agoI hope they are also keeping separate rankings for cheaters, that would be pretty cool. "I'm currently the #5 player in the cheater zone of Apex." Heck, embrace it: don't call it the cheater rankings, call it the tool-assisted rankings, by analogy with "tool-assisted speedruns". Tag people at the end of the game with which particular cheats you detected. Pop up a polite notice that "We have noticed that you seem to be using external tools to help you play better; we will now be matching you up with other cyborg players to keep things fair. Good luck, and may the best man-machine win!"
- Reedx 7y agoThat would be really interesting! Although it'd be like offering a gym for cheaters, heh. A place for them to hone cheating tools and techniques that would end up back in the regular game. But could avoid that if a game embraced it holistically, where the default is tool-assisted and anything goes.
- fzeroracer 7y agoThere's an interesting argument to be made that by embracing the cheating market wholesale, it divides the cheating community into separate units. Those that are happy to exploit games publicly and share code, versus those that would prefer to hide and benefit from it financially or otherwise. In that sense, encouraging people to come forward with hacking tools means that you'll have a stronger awareness of how they're used. Then if you were to leave the less destructive methods of hacking alone, you could design your detection methods to explicitly examine those avenues of exploitation and maintain a clean separation of people who use outside tools and those who do not. It's an attempt to combat the constant arms race of hacking by deflating it a bit.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zrobotics 7y agoIsn't one of the hardest parts of making these tools evading detection? An aimbot isn't that tremendously difficult to create, the hard part is creating an aimbot that is hard to differentiate from a skilled player. If the competition is all using assists, then the sneaky aimbot that simulates slower human reflexes will lose to the bot that positions the sights directly on the opponent in <0.1ms. I like this idea, I don't see why it would make it any easier to develop the types of cheating systems that affect human players, and it might be fun for the types of players that enjoy things like tool-assisted speed running; where the ultimate aim is more about studying the underlying game mechanics to determine the algorithmically-optimal way to play. If the default is tool-assisted, then all the human players will be excluded by default.
- yummypaint 7y agoCould be a fun revival of the counterstrike "hvh" scene
- pgt 7y agoCysports / Cylympics (Cylym?) / Cygma / Cygames
- H8crilA 7y agoCounter strike has a similar system, based on a hidden score called trust factor. Matchmaking system does some optimization and tries to pair similarly skilled people with similar trust factors. They also have a neural network setup that constantly scans match logs for cheaters. If I remember correctly it is responsible for > 50% of all cheater reports (the rest comes from players). Final conviction comes from a crowd sources system called Overwatch, where experienced players rewatch anonymous demos and convict cheaters. Conviction itself may require even 40 or more individual player convictions, and is Bayes-based.
- cameronbrown 7y ago> They also have a neural network setup that constantly scans match logs for cheaters For those wondering what this is referring to, it's a system called VACNet[0] presented at GDC last year. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnRgW54EWwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnRgW54EWwA
- stevewodil 7y agoI HATE trust factor. It's TERRIBLE for me, personally. I don't cheat but get reported a lot and my trust factor is very low. I end up playing with/against cheaters constantly. It also doesn't seem to have any affect on casual game modes, which is really irritating.
- pingyong 7y agoWhile VACNet is amazing, and completely eliminated pretty much all "exploits" that cheaters could come up with to dodge the Overwatch system, Trust Factor on the other hand has been a bit of a mess. The assigned trust values seem really random in my experience (you can't see the exact values, but if you queue with someone who has a slightly or significantly lower Trust Factor than you do, you'll get a message), tend to fluctuate wildly from one week to the next or even just between single games for some people, and there are so many players complaining about it that they had to auto filter every thread that even just contains the words Trust Factor on the CS:GO subreddit.
- ryanmarsh 7y agoSomeone should tell them about adversarial networks. Fighting each other... helps.
- spbaar 7y agoI'm surprised that Respawn has had so much trouble controlling cheaters in Apex considering they handled security in Titanfall 1/2 amazingly well. The f2p barrier probably contributes a lot to the problem. This isn't a new strategy for them btw. There were similar strategies in place for Titanfall 1. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-27-respawn-locks-titanfall-cheaters-into-the-wimbledon-of-aimbot-contests https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-27-respawn-locks-...
- nsajko 7y ago> requiring three-factor authentication in certain regions I hope obligatory two-factor authentication is not becoming a trend.
- cwkoss 7y agoI wish all games allowed botting and just pushed you onto a unique server so you can't hurt the economy. Such a great playground for developing early coding skills.
- siphon22 7y agoReminds me a lot of hacking servers in cs 1.6 back in the day. I was a regular in some of them. People in these servers would pretty much brag about how much better their hack was compared to everyone else's(often also claiming that they programmed it themselves, could be true sometimes but id say most not). I thought it was fun. Everyone has an aimbot, but the faster, better coded one will win.
- sherlock_h 7y agoThey need to add players with XIM on PS4 to this
- o_p 7y agoSo they are admiting defeat :^) This will not stop the subtle cheaters though, in a game like Apex you could even drop the aimbot and only use the information advantage of a wallhack. Good times to sell cheats
- skocznymroczny 7y agoMeh. It's one of those cases in which people will praise the decision and be like "haha stupid cheaters will cheat on each other". But the reality is, if you can tell someone is a cheater, you could have banned them. If you make decisions like this, then you are admitting that your cheat detection code isn't perfect. As a result, some people with obvious cheats will have this experience, but many people will have their cheats undetected and nothing will change.
- phalangion 7y agoNo cheat detection code is perfect. Banning cheaters encourages the creation of new cheats (or just new accounts, since it doesn't cost anything to start playing Apex). Allowing cheaters to continue playing is a win for two reasons: 1. They don't know they've been quarantined, so cheat makers will get less feedback about which cheats have been detected. 2. Cheaters are more likely to try new cheats, so it gives a sandbox of users that can be used to find other cheats as they arise.
- huhtenberg 7y agoObligatory XKCD - https://xkcd.com/350/ https://xkcd.com/350/
- just_myles 7y agoThat is a good idea. Keeps player engagement up.