Redditor buys used CPU, turns out it was banned on Valorant and they are SoL
reddit.comWhen the hardware you bought snitches on you, it is clear that you do not own it. Somewhere we got things ass-backward. The human tells the computer what it can/can't do, not the other way around.
This is not what is happening. The CPU simply has a hardware identifier, it's not 'snitching' on anyone. This has legitimate uses, can prevent things like the external packaging of the CPU being modified and sold as something else etc.
That some provider / service is limiting access to their platform based off of this is not some libre / freedom issue. It's unfortunate and probably should be tied to something else. The computer isn't doing anything wrong here.
It is an unfortunate situation.
Na, we had this conversation decades ago now and yes unique identifiers on your cpu is your cpu snitching on you because this is exactly how it was going to be used. The manufacturer has no need to put it on there.
Right, but I should be able to tell software the CPU id is whatever I want it to be. The hardware is going behind my back and talking to the software without my permission.
At least that is one game provider and you can still use the computer for normal usage and other game providers. At Nintendo Switch 2 they will completely block the device from accessing the online game center which is the only chance for downloading games when trying to use a cheat card or similar.
Big game needs you to install a rootkit to play. But hey you can trust people selling crack^wloot boxes to kids right.
We'll eventually need something like CarFax where you can look for hardware bans for multiple softwares and games before you purchase a part..
That's a well known risk when buying used hardware, although I doubt a blacklisted CPU could do that alone. I used to host a bunch of pretty popular servers for survival games many of which used hardware ID checks, and we had about a dozen people banned due to this in ~5 years. We had extremely thorough investigations and they were 100% clean.
Not sure what well-known means, I don't think I'd ever heard of even the idea of hardware bans until now. Feels like banning a student's notebook because they took notes with it to cheat in school, rather than suspending or expelling the student.
Hardware bans have existed for years.
It's really the only solution to minimize collateral damage while trying to effectively permanently ban someone from a free-to-play game that doesn't require ID verification.
Often, the only piece of info they collect from you is an e-mail address used to register an account. If you ban an e-mail address, creating a new one is trivial.
Banning an IP address has too much potential for collateral damage. You end up banning an entire household, or potentially an entire building. If you ban an IP that belongs to a VPN, you can easily end up blocking hundreds or even thousands of legitimate players.
Hardware bans are basically the best (or rather, the least bad) option. I challenge you to come with an alternative solution to be able to permanently ban a player without requiring ID verification or potentially affecting innocent players that can't be easily circumvented.
I'm not saying you can't use hardware as a factor in banning. I'm just saying there seem to be better ways of incorporating hardware checks to minimize harm to innocent people.
How about making the hardware ban temporary, like 3 months?
How about making it work when you see a consistent combination of hardware, like mobo and storage?
How about allowing unbanning of the hardware if someone sends you a notarized statement that they bought it from someone else?
Etc.
Keep in mind that Intel was shipping 50-75 million CPUs a quarter and there are like 280m PCs sold a year.:
I find a lot about this story exceedingly hard to believe.
1) a community of niche players has banned dozens of people due to HWID conflicts between their existing playerbase and their banned players.
2) that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
3) the hardware aftermarket is so small that the same players from within that niche community are swapping components unknowingly.
it' be more plausible for me personally to think that a CPU vendor fucked up on the HWID generation scheme.
1) The game or service is auto-banning players, not the community.
2) Player fingerprinting isn't CPU-only.
3) The hardware aftermarket contains every flagged component without exception.
The aspect I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the amount of money people will spend to cheat in a game for a limited amount of time. Simple account bans are useless against people who have no problem buying another copy, forever.
From my perspective, the unusual part of this claim is that OP's community hasn't gone invite-only like so many others. Open servers are a labor of love.
Maybe well-known among people whose business it is to buy and sell hardware. I personally have never heard of this, and I imagine a strong majority of normal people buying hardware don't know either.
I've been building PCs for myself and on occasion, others for 20 years. I have been playing games for as long. I never knew CPU hardware IDs were used in game permabans.
Definitely not well known to most people lol.
TIL you can ban CPUs
You can ban anything that gives up a unique identifier
The Denuvo hack uses Windows Hypervisor to intercept cpuid, maybe that would work?
When did video games get so serious that we need to do these things? Ridiculous.
When people ruined multiplayer games for everyone by cheating.
Anticheats started moving into ring0 and became rootkits in early 2000s with nProtect GameGuard, HWID checks started in mid-2000s with myAC (or even earlier? I think myAC first appeared during CS 1.5).
Those were easily worked around with unsigned drivers or physical hardware. Now Secure Boot is required to run Valorant games, which should be a harbinger for what will happen to your online banking experience if consumers allow this to continue.
Yeah that's why I stopped playing and hosting those games, ESEA Bitcoin mining scandal made me buy a physically isolated gaming machine with constant monitoring, and VM banning in EFT was the last drop. Valorant is the most paranoid and the biggest offender, but the others are close.
First anti-cheat I ever ran into was PunkBuster. I don't remember when I first used it, but apparently it was released in 2000.
As someone who has played a decent of competitive games in the past, it is less about them being extremely serious, and more about how much people cheating ruins the fun for everyone else.
For example, a soccer Sunday league might not be that serious, but you still wouldn't want someone frequently running on the pitch with a golf club and whacking the ball into your goal with no consequences.
Definitely not frequently, but once or twice a lifetime would provide a measurable uplift.
GTA Online has this feeling at times. I always find it a refreshing distraction when somebody comes into a public server with obvious hacks and starts spawning bizarre weapons, vehicles, giving out money, changing the weather or day/night cycle abruptly, teleporting everyone to the same location. It's easy to leave to another server when it gets boring or frustrating, but these are the times when I put out the call on Discord for other non-currently-online friends to join me!
People buying cheats do not stop at once.
In PVP games, it's hard to have fun when there is any non-negligible amount of cheating, even if you're not playing seriously. This comment is a little like saying people who won't let you cheat in a board game are being "too serious". Maybe the more relevant disconnect is that you just don't like PVP games much...?
If on the other hand you're trying to imply that cheating in popular PVP games can be prevented without measures this extreme, as far as I know that's just wrong. It's an arms race and we've been at it long enough that we're at the hardware level now.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the rise of e-sports and the monetary aspect of "professional" multi-player games?
No, people cheat at multiplayer games that have no stakes pretty regularly.
This is more necessary with the rise of freemium games where the base account is trivially replaced and so banning people's accounts does nothing.
Not that paid games don't have cheating issues, but there's a limit on how much people are willing to spend getting rebanned regularly.
That's one of my theories. Money got involved and here we are. Now games are serious business! Remember when they were just fun?
Esports used to be just fun grassroots competition until Riot Games bulldozed over the nascent self-sustaining scenes and started the rat race of astroturf-bankrolling "professionalized" scenes lacking the foundation of any sort of viable business model, propped up only by VC sponsors. When those ran dry, the Saudi oil funds swooped in to buy up all the tournament rights as part of their sportswashing campaign.
Riot Games was also the one that introduced the nanny policing of "if you deviate from the squeaky clean advertiser-friendly image we stipulate, we'll make sure you have no future in the pro scene ever again" tribunal, presenting themselves as the bastion of "pre-eliminating all toxicity from online gaming", which is ironically hypocritical considering their scandals after scandals of toxic workplace culture.
Esports was serious loooong before Riot games existed.
Serious competition as a fulfilling grassroots activity? Sure it existed before Riot.
Artificially propped-up unsustainable "professionalization" whose eventual conclusion is to enforce spyware on casual participants? That's Riot's gift to the world.
I remember watching Counterstrike tournaments in CPL in the early 2000s and Intel Extreme Masters in 2007.
LoL (Riot's first big "esport" game) didn't really start having large tournaments until 2011. LoL didn't even come out until a few years after ESL started hosting regular professionalized Counter Strike tournaments.
Kernel spyware is at least 2 decades old, and manual scrutiny of casual participants is as old as networked competitive gaming and cheating themselves (id games had that from the start!). It has nothing to do with money. Moreover, people are paying north of $1k/mo to cheat in video games.
They were never just fun though. there were always hackers and cheaters.
Probably around the time individual games started to have the term "billion dollars" associated with them in some way.
We're talking about a free to play (no cost to being banned) game without dedicated servers (no intimate community to police the servers). Cheaters always existed but the business model used exacerbated the problem.
When tryhards flocked to ranked games; more broadly in the world with no opportunity for the young people e-sports emerged and they saw it as one.
Everyone here is talking about how games shouldn't have the ability to do this while not understanding that without it, most online games (PVP specifically) turn into a cheaters paradise and ruin it for all paying customers.
Riot Vanguard has all but eliminated cheaters in Valorant (sporadic instances and DMA hardware can still be used), but the vast (99.9+%) of games are clean because of what they did. Customers place serious value in that.
I understand that and I still say games shouldn't have the ability to do this.
So this is bullshit, right? We're all going along like it really happened but it doesn't smell right.
If they only bought a CPU and CPUs don't have serial IDs (since P3s and some kooky server CPUs), how could Valorant fingerprint it?
Modern TPMs are fTPMs and are essentially in the CPU package.
Each TPM 2.0 has a unique Endorsement Key (EK).
Thus, every CPU has a unique identifier, which assuming the fTPM is correct (big if), cannot be changed.
Same happens on smartphones btw with some apps that take the hardware fingerprint
uhh.. i dont think amd or intel has even attempted to make a s/n accessible on their CPUs since the big stink in the 90's.
TPM 2.0 Endorsement Key (EK)
Video Game has to be one of the areas enshitification is most visible to me.
Unfinished games being released, no LAN, paywalled features, pay to win, games unusable after support ends, etc.
I think we are due for surge of people just playing classic games and boycotting all the new BS that is coming out. Piracy should be encouraged as a check and balance against shitty UX.
First, they came for the gamers...