Greetings,

Gamers and game designers share a woe, that being cheaters. Ever bought and logged into an incredibly well designed and interesting game only to find cheaters rule it and it's barely worth playing? Sure, we all have. No matter how hard game designers try to ban cheaters it never actually works and is only a mild deterrent if even.

This is because game cheat prevention bans cheaters who simply return on another copy or use another ruse to overcome the ban and carry on. Hardware bans are slightly more efficient but only slightly.

However, what if cheaters once detected were NOT banned, they simply had random debuffs meted out to them every time they were caught cheating that lasted a preset amount of time? Perhaps their speed would be altered, perhaps their weapons/armour would misfire/disrepair, unable to store loot etc ect. I'm sure devs can think of a plethora of ways they could torture those who cheated. Make the punishments short lived but regrettable, and random so they never know what grief they will encounter next. Short lived so it's not worth getting another account as when you cheat it will just happen to that one too and so it's simply easier to endure the punishment and move on.

Cheaters of course can have the situation reviewed to ensure they are guilty, but otherwise it will boost general player moral when players see cheaters suffering for their misdeeds rather than just vanishing to reappear with a new account.

The cheater does not even need to know or be told, their game simply starts acting negatively and they will soon associate the glitches in their gaming with their cheating. Say the “anti cheat punishment” lasted three days per incident and the “punishments” were auto started by the game on detection.

Game designers lose MILLIONS when player (customer) numbers start falling off because some coder designed and sells a cheat to grief players with. Players lose interest when they are griefed by cheaters. Players would be THRILLED to find cheater X that had great stats can't even walk properly or is otherwise obviously suffering from having cheated. It's more of a deterrent to make rule breakers suffer in front of rule abiders, than it is to simply ban them and have them return on a new account 20 minutes later.

Win for the game devs, WIN for the rule abiding player base, BIG lose to cheaters when they are auto plagued with disadvantages every time they cheat.

I see you've met the gate keeper.
Now that this has been moved out of the guarded forum categories I can share this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKfZmcvo_2g
It's the white hat hackers that could save the game.
Probably, the only way to really win is to make cheaters the laughingstock of the party.

Then again there are also these from the developer side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avtHAmz6js
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c-VThGEoUk

I havn't watched all of them fully but those are the jist. :P

For multiplayer games, skill-based ranking and a hidden “badness” ranking are common, and fit in with existing matchmaking systems. Cheaters quickly escalate to be considered high-skill players, and get bundled with both high-skill players and with cheaters. Hidden ‘badness’ ranking means ‘bad’ players get grouped and ‘non-bad’ players get grouped, so suspected cheaters get bundled into “high skill, suspected cheater” buckets, and “high skill, not bad” get bundled with other “high skill, not bad”. If there are enough players, enough suspected cheater reports, and a good enough suspicious behavior detection, the groups get sorted out pretty quickly. Cheaters tend to not mind so much when they're bundled with other cheaters, and high skill players are quick to report.

Same with a hidden profanity report as a skill. Profanity users get bundled with other profanity users, non-profanity players with non-profanity players, and like-minded players end up filtering goether quite quickly.

I think it was Sacred or Sacred 2 where suspected online cheaters appeared in a bunny suit that couldn't be removed or modified, and if a god-mode game was played they'd get a data file flag giving the bunny suit in a non-god-mode playback.

For single player games, cheating itself usually isn't a huge deal. Modify your save file all you want if you're only affecting yourself. Internally it can make sense to flip a bit in save files, but other games it doesn't. I know one game I can't disclose yet had a similar feature, a small visual watermark if players entered admin cheats permanently added to their save data. Some people notice it in YT videos, but so far I don't know of people discussing the association. People online have talked about the visual watermark, but have just casually dismissed it for months as just being something that shows up sometimes, not yet knowing why.

For single player games, adding “we know you're pirated” features can be a small addition, and usually there will be several. On titles I've worked on we've had cinematic views go from instead of being small black bars on top/bottom to be ENORMOUS bars leaving only the middle of the screen, aim getting a random modifier, and bosses getting extreme buffs. The better ones tend to be non-obvious to the crack systems or come later in the game, late enough that attackers can assume they cracked the game because they're not playing 20 hours into it to find where the fun starts, or not paying enough attention that shots missing are due to the crack. On several games we've had people out themselves on forums for weeks before it gets discovered as an anti-crack issue. Some are never discovered to be piracy countermeasures, we just silently note it on the support forums. Typically there are multiple, some that get picked up easily by automated scans, some that are unlikely to be automatically picked up and show up early in game, some that are unlikely to be picked up and show up mid-game, and some that only show up late in game.

As always, it's also a cost/benefit analysis. You've got to have a game that's going to be commercially successful before it is worth it. If you're adding the countermeasure features, you're not adding gameplay features with that time.