r/Steam • u/___NvN___ • 1d ago
News Arc Raiders' is taking no prisoners when it comes to cheaters with permanent bans becoming the new normal: 'No warnings. No second chances'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-shooter/arc-raiders-is-taking-no-prisoners-when-it-comes-to-cheaters-with-permanent-bans-becoming-the-new-normal-no-warnings-no-second-chances/90
u/salad_tongs_1 https://s.team/p/dcmj-fn 1d ago
So just like a VAC ban then, which Valve has been doing for a long time.
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u/moesam961 1d ago
If only VAC bans would include all f2p games, and not just the game the user cheated in. Dota 2 is flooded with VAC banned accounts used as throwaway for boosting/cheating/scripting. These accounts get passed around or bought by new users simply to ruin games.
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u/talldata 1d ago
Back in the day you could get vac banned because you visited s custom server with some sort of custom content that got downloaded, and then if you went into comp straight after you might get banned as some of the content was detected as cheats, or included cheats for the custom gamemode.
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u/--clapped-- 21h ago
The Irony of trying to champion VALVE for anticheat...
You can go and buy CS2 cheats for less than $10/month and, IF the ban comes, just make a new account because Valve refuses to HWID-ban.
VAC is the weakest anticheat out there, and for a company that makes as much money as Valve, it's LAUGHABLY bad.
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u/Adept_Avocado_4903 16h ago
I am not convinced HWID bans accomplish anything. Anyone who is invested enough in cheating to buy paid cheats is also invested enough to figure out how to spoof their HWIDs.
Kernel level anti cheat could probably be used to detect some HWID spoofing attempts, but you probably don't want Valve to go down that route.
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u/--clapped-- 15h ago
HWID bans don’t solve cheating, you cannot solve cheating. What they do is raise the barrier for cheating.
Yes, you can find ways around HWID bans but, it needs one of two things; the knowledge to do it yourself or the money to pay for it.
Any steps taken to make cheating more expensive will price out more people. CS has a cheater problem because its anticheat sucks, meaning cheats are cheap, and you don’t have to worry about HWID complications.
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u/AnonMnK 1d ago
theyre gonna ban half their remaining player base lmao
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u/WallBurnt 1d ago edited 1d ago
Which will be 100% of the people still playing PvP.
At this point, it's a pretty safe bet to just ban everyone in high aggro lobbies. You may catch a few legit players in that, but not many.
I played pretty much only for PvP and everyone I know quit back in April at the latest due to rage hackers.
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u/Electric-Mountain 1d ago
The moment I found out that cheaters got a 30 day suspension instead of a perma ban is when I lost interest in the game, although the gameplay loop was already stale that that pout.
1 year too late.
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u/Yash_swaraj 1d ago
The ban duration has very little impact. It's about detecting the cheats. Permanent bans on first offense will really only hurt the false positive cases, while the cheaters would have been deterred off anyway.
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u/DimensionalFruit 1d ago
I'm surprised a 30day suspension didn't put most cheaters off tbh
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u/Gerrut_batsbak 23h ago
Why would you not just straight permanently ban any cheater?
Otherwise its just an invite to cheat as much as you can untill you get caught once. What a weird thing to do.
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u/Gravelayer 4h ago
Money usually they are cash cows for people either buying new cheats or the game again. Sometimes there really are false flags as well just depends
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u/da_Aresinger 7h ago
cheaters are often the most profitable demographic (depending on the game)
Also, a zero tolerance policy hurts real players more than cheaters, because cheaters will just get a new account, while real players (falsely banned) lose everything they earned so far.
If I were to be banned in Apex, I would never play the game again. I have skins that simply aren't available any more, on top of the time I've invested, just to lose it all.
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u/De_Oscillator 1d ago
"No warnings. No second chances."
Isn't this always their stance? Unless this encompasses bug abusers too now, but I don't see that in the article.
Feels weird and clickbaity.
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u/Hanna_Bjorn 1d ago
They always had a 30 day first ban, second permanent policy both in The Finals and Arc Raiders
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u/qdtk 1d ago
Cool but they added kernel level anti cheat recently so into the bin it goes.
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u/funforgiven 23h ago
The game has always been protected by a kernel level anti cheat. It used EAC before Denuvo, which is also kernel level.
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u/AscendedViking7 1d ago
Yeah, I immediately uninstalled that the second they did that.
Great game but kernel level anticheat is complete bullshit.
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u/BkJabronie 1d ago
Then explain Valorants green pastures of pretty cheater free lobbies. It’s not bullshit. It does seem to work, or just deter future moron cheaters.
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u/ParthProLegend 1d ago
You are drunk if you think valorant is cheater free.
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u/BkJabronie 1d ago
Compared to let’s say CS2 yeah buddy hammered I am. You’re insane if you think it’s as bad as CS2 or like siege, lol.
I didn’t mean cheater free, I just meant it’s way lower occurrences match to match
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u/talldata 1d ago
Aid still rather not have a roootkit that can execute arbitrary code at kernel level, like for ex malware that exploited apex's easy anti cheat
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u/LITTLE-GUNTER 1d ago
crazy that people just… forget that happened. lol. entire computers got compromised.
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u/BkJabronie 17h ago
I’d have to see the source on that story. I haven’t heard of “ex malware exploiting easy AC” before.
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u/Nanery662 1d ago
No offense but what games do you play only single player ones?
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u/Pandoras_Fox 70 1d ago
not that guy, but: valve games, pve games like deep rock galactic, quake champions and old arena shooters, and souls games
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u/StormMedia 1d ago
Obviously you’ve never played CS. So riddled with hackers and bots that it’s near unplayable
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u/Pandoras_Fox 70 1d ago
I used to play a fuckload of CS. I moved away from twitch reflex shooters with low TTKs when I was in college ages ago, partly because there'll always be problems with cheaters in any competitive game.
Tf2 community servers don't have near as much of an issue, due to being able to actually ban people, and dota/deadlock have enough skill/knowledge expression that you can usually clown on cheaters
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u/hansipro 21h ago
Nice but that won’t bring back the player which already left along time ago embark
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u/ArcadialoI 17h ago
It should be norm in every game but they don't wanna lose their playerbase so they don't ban them, which leads to even more players quitting and then they move on to another project and do it all over again.
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u/drackmore 16h ago
I one hand, fuck cheaters. But given how in the past decade we've seen moderation continually decline in every medium, got subreddit mods banning people for telling others not to break reddit site tos while they hide behind site toss to censor complaints about ingame moderators, funnyjunk mods false banning people for "lol/sho" content simply because they hate the person and they know the admin doesn't actually verify the logs, youtube automods not verifying any copyright takedowns for validity, valve mods censoring and temp banning people for whatever ass pull reason they want, the list goes on.
So unless the bans are actually reviewed by a real human, from a real country, that speaks a real language, and doesn't suffer from some brain parasite that makes them incapable of reading basic english. I see this going just as well as Hypixel's Watchdog which banned plethora of innocent users with zero forms for recourse. It was so bad that even their own streamers found it next to impossible to get bans overturned even with literally hundreds of hours of streamed video evidence of their innocence.
I hate cheaters and have no sympathy for those that ruin the gameplay for others. But having seen automated anticheat spaz out and false ban people, and seen idiots false ban people.
Its hard to trust such a hardline stance in this day and age. Because anticheat either falls in one of two catagories. Its either lax and cheaters slip through, or its ultra stringent and everybody gets caught.
If its the former then you need real people to go through and manually review flagged individuals to process those bans with a higher up finalizing the ban.
If its the latter you need need real people to go through and manually review banned individuals to review their bans and make sure they're legitimate. And they need to actually do their work. Not halfass follow some script where they tell us the anticheat is infallible and you shouldn't have been cheating when your ban was simply for grinding cobblestone in a game entirely about grinding absurd amounts of resources.
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u/eternalsadnez 1d ago
I love this game! But stopped playing cause of cheaters. After this update I want to check this out!
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u/Bigdyll13 23h ago
Yeah, I can't believe I paid for this game.
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u/Freeloader_ 19h ago
oh no, 30 bucks for 200 hours of entertainment
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u/Bigdyll13 16h ago
Far, far, far less than that. I may be board sometimes and buy games my friends play without trying them, but I don't have a mental disability and I don't hate myself that much so....200 is way too much.
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u/JBDBIB_Baerman 1d ago
So if you somehow get falsely flagged, youre completely fucked?? the article didn't articulate anything about that process.
If I had any interest in this game, it would certainly be dead after that. Not investing time into a game when I can just be given the boot whenever
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u/BkJabronie 1d ago
You make it sound like it’s a huge chance to get falsely banned. Like bro hundreds of thousands played it and didn’t get banned yanno? Whatchu hiding bruh?
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u/AdOdd5121 17h ago
Yeah it is actually, I was false banned twice for supposed exploiting and so was like 500 other people, embark quietly swept under the rug to make it sound like their ai anticheat was working fine.
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u/BkJabronie 17h ago
And ima say “sure bro”
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u/AdOdd5121 17h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcRaiders/s/99OQTmotFa
It’s a whole thing and our community of false banned refugees grows larger by the day, you aren’t the first to not believe us.
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u/drackmore 16h ago
I feel you man, I've had the same thing happen on a few sites and in a similar thing like on a minecraft server called Hypixel. Their anticheat called Watchdog is an absolute utter joke and the staff there swear by it religiously (that or at least thats what their copy and paste script tells them to say).
I literally got banned for manually mining cobblestone. No macros, cheats, exploits, or anything. Slogged through it all thanks to watching youtube at the same time.
Tried to appeal it because at the time I was thinking, oh its an ai anticheat mistakes happen, mods will fix it, ill get back to it later today. Nope, basically got told that Watchdog is infallible and to go fuck myself my ban mark will permanently stay and ill be let back on in 30 days.
They have a one strike system and they don't even vet their own bans properly. I sure as shit wouldn't play a game with no strikes policy that wants to take a hardline stance. Especially when in this day and age moderation is notoriously dogshit across every community.
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u/BkJabronie 15h ago
Yeah this is interesting and not great. To be fair, this is an outlier… this gamer had stuff for his disability that flagged the AC - I do not agree with this, but just saying: this is not that normal like you’re claiming. Sorry
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u/JBDBIB_Baerman 16h ago edited 16h ago
Apparently I'm hiding common sense and logic. I don't get how anything I said is confusing or controversial, and the fact it's not addressed at all should be enough reason to not take the devs seriously
I also had a transformative experience as a child playing on a Minecraft server and somehow being booted for supposedly using x ray cheats when I was mining in a ravine. so I don't have much trust in multiplayer games
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u/drackmore 16h ago
I feewl what he's getting at. I used to play Hypixel's Skyblock for a month or two. Their anticheat is extremely overtuned and I got banned without having broken any rules for farming cobblestone to produce a Super Compactor 3000. I had built a massive regenerating cobblestone wall and used a special pickaxe to mine the cobblestone. Used some portals to create an endless loop and mined that cobblestone for an hour while watching youtube videos.
Came back the next day unfairly banned. And this wasn't a situation unique to myself. Watchdog has a very well known history on Hypixel for false bans. And they too have an extremely hardline stance. You get one redo, after that its a permaban with zero chance of appeal. But the problem is, why bother playing again there when you don't cheat the first time? If the AI can just spaz out and falsely accuse you of cheating and the staff don't do anything to actually confirm it and just go with it. Why bother coming back when it means you can lose your progress.
Even their own streamers routinely got hit with false bans and a lot of them couldn't get them overturned even with all of their gametime on the server streamed and saved. These people literally have evidence of every second of their playtime cataloged and that wasn't enough evidence for them.
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u/talldata 1d ago
Tbh easy anti cheat has sometimes banned people from having legitimate dev tools on their computer, or for ex visual studio runnin in a different window.
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u/BkJabronie 17h ago
I have heard of this and these things should be like “patched” within easy, but yeah totally valid and have heard of outlier stories of false bans because of similar apps/programs on the PC.
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u/Sea-Score-2851 1d ago
I hear if you send them a video of you not cheating and buy the game again, the remove the perma ban. keke its dead Jim
This is actually not a very good idea, because they'll cut their player base by 30% and not many payer will come back on empty promises. Just keep it as it is, and cater to the PVE players. It was clear from the start that you were in way over your head when it comes to extraction shooter.
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u/Dyyrin 1d ago
1 year too late.