Beyond the Ban: Advanced Techniques for Mitigating Online Game Cheating
Cheating in online games disrupts fair play, undermines player trust and engagement, and drains game studio revenues. Mitigating cheating is crucial to overcoming these challenges. This post focuses on effective strategies to mitigate cheating. It emphasizes the importance of understanding cheaters’ motivations (the why) and methods (the how) in order to do it effectively. By taking the correct action against each type of cheater, game studios can implement better defenses and create a more enjoyable and profitable gaming experience.
Know Who You Are Up Against
A crucial first step to stem the tide of cheaters is understanding the type of cheaters you’re dealing with. For example, commercial cheating operations are typically well-organized, work in groups, and are motivated by profit. In contrast, individual cheaters might be solo players who love the game but exploit cheats for personal gain or to enhance their enjoyment.
To effectively counteract these cheaters, you need to start monitoring their activities for at least several weeks. This observation period helps you gather information on their activities, the number of cheaters or devices involved, and their motivations. Without this understanding, your actions will likely be ineffective, like a game of whack-a-mole where you hit them in one spot, only for them to pop up in another.
Even after you take action, continuous monitoring is essential. Cheaters often reappear and adapt their methods to evade detection. Keeping a close watch ensures you can promptly address new cheating tactics as they arise, maintaining the integrity and enjoyment of your game.
Mitigating Commercial Cheating Operations
Understanding the motivations of commercial cheating operations is crucial for effective mitigation. These entities operate as businesses, generating millions of dollars through cheating. For a deeper dive into their typologies, see our cheating typologies guide.
For commercial cheaters, simple warnings or outright bans are just speed bumps. With numerous backup accounts and tools at their disposal, they can quickly return to the game and resume their activities. It’s important not to alert them to your mitigation methods, since they will figure them out eventually. No matter what you do, it is a constant cat-and-mouse game with these operations, similar to how a virus evolves and adapts to survive.
Reduce Commercial Cheaters’ ROI
To hit commercial cheaters where it hurts—their return on investment (ROI)—you need to understand and disrupt their business model, making it unprofitable for them to continue. For instance, if a cheating operation sells cheating tools, you can give the users who use the tool (typically legitimate players) a warning. This demonstrates to players (the commercial cheaters’ customers) that the game studio is aware of the cheat. As a result, they may complain about the cheat provider or choose not to purchase from them in the future. These actions reduce customer demand, ultimately making it not worthwhile for the cheating tool operator.
Going Beyond the Ban
An outright ban of commercial cheaters can be largely ineffective. They typically return within days, often using backup accounts, new devices, or other evasive tactics to bypass restrictions. Banning based on geography? They’ll simply use a VPN to appear from a different location. Ban based on session length? They’ll alter their session durations. Any action that is clear to the cheaters that they were detected will not work for commercial cheaters since they still have the monetary incentive to continue.
Improve Ban Effectiveness Through Misdirection
A ban can delay, but rarely stop, the impact of commercial cheating operations. If bans occur too quickly, cheaters may refine their scripts and “A/B test” to evade detection, sharpening their tactics over time. Instead, bans should be carefully timed and sometimes combined with tactics that mislead cheaters about the real detection method. For example, if they have been detected through sensor data, the ban could appear to be based on their IP or device type. This prompts cheaters to alter superficial details, thinking they’ve evaded detection, while in reality, ongoing monitoring reveals their evolving strategies.
Disrupt Cheater Account Sales
Commercial cheating operations often “pamper” accounts to prepare them for sale, providing certain advantages from day one (e.g., more lives, better tools, or powers). One way to mitigate this is by targeting this entire pool of accounts, even those that are not actively being used. If the cheater is growing multiple accounts to sell, it’s far more effective to identify and ban their entire operation network by analyzing patterns of similar behaviors across associated accounts. Banning these accounts soon after they’re sold and have changed hands can also damage the cheater’s reputation within the marketplace, as buyers who experience bans are likely to demand refunds.
Targeting Cheaters Selling In-Game Items
For cases where cheaters farm in-game items and sell them outside the game, the process is more complex. These cheater accounts generate new items, but banning them doesn’t affect the inventory they’ve already accumulated and sold. Here, identifying existing accounts by tracing suspicious activity patterns associated with known farming techniques can help. This approach locates old cheater accounts and addresses both new and old supplies.
Boosting Services for Indie Cheaters Requires Nuanced Detection
Lastly, some cheaters offer “boosting” services, temporarily taking control of legitimate player accounts and using bots or scripts to boost in-game resources. These accounts can blend into the legitimate player base, requiring more nuanced detection to distinguish them from other legitimate players. In such cases, cheating operations are less predictable and require multiple detection methods to remain effective. These tactics can include analyzing play patterns, connections between players, devices, and other elements, as well as identifying suspicious activity.
Clean Up and Focus on New Accounts
Although outright banning is not a long-term solution, it can be useful for a temporary clean slate. Once the slate is clean, you can focus on new account detection, which reduces the number of users to monitor. Strengthening account validation for new users can involve combining registration requirements with real-time sensor data. Standard requirements like CAPTCHA or device verification can be complemented with sensor data to identify and track new accounts with suspicious patterns, reducing large-scale account creation by cheaters and creating a more manageable group to monitor.
Limit Cheaters with “Bugs” and Lags
A more subtle way to sabotage commercial cheaters is to introduce “bugs” into the game, making it difficult for cheaters to realize they have been targeted. For example, making a button unclickable or intermittently functional can frustrate automated cheating operations. Preventing players from performing specific actions, like trading above a certain amount or halting trading altogether, can also be effective. It will take time and an advanced monitoring system for the cheaters to identify what is happening, and in the meantime, their profitability will be impacted.
Another method to disrupt commercial cheating networks is to insert lags into their gameplay. While legitimate players would complain if they experienced such lags, automated commercial cheating operations might not notice it immediately, reducing their profit margins by slowing down their bots, hacks, and automations. These small, annoying interferences reduce the cheaters’ ROI and could eventually make them reconsider targeting that specific game.
The Legal Approach
Some game studios have attempted to prosecute commercial cheaters or take legal actions against the marketplaces that facilitate their trade. However, identifying these cheaters is nearly impossible due to their communication channels like Discord and Reddit. In one case, Activision won an aimbot lawsuit, but there is no confirmation that the cheater paid the damages. Even if a game studio could get a commercial cheating network to pay, the damage goes far beyond the monetary; it is almost impossible to regain community trust once overall sentiment has deteriorated. As a result, we are unaware of any legal actions that have effectively mitigated commercial cheating networks.
These tactics are flexible guidelines that need to be tailored to each game’s structure and player interactions. Each game’s systems, player dynamics, and communication channels differ, so studios must analyze the specific components of cheating operations in their own game before implementing countermeasures.
Mitigating Individual (Indie) Cheaters
Indie cheaters are vastly different from their commercial counterparts. Many indie cheaters genuinely love the game and seek to enhance their experience. They require a completely different set of countermeasures.
Classify Indie Cheaters into Groups
Understanding indie cheaters is even more critical than understanding commercial cheaters. You don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm for the game. We recommend taking a holistic approach, tracking everything you can, both outside and inside the game. By outside the game, we refer to player sentiment, into which you can gain insights by following conversations in player forums on Telegram or Discord. Inside the game, you need to monitor the same sensor data that you do for commercial cheating networks.
To treat different groups of indie cheaters appropriately, classify them according to their behavior and impact on the game. For instance, indie cheaters who create negative community sentiment might be better addressed through bans. Other groups might benefit from warnings or specific restrictions tailored to their actions. This nuanced approach helps maintain the positive aspects of their engagement while minimizing disruptive behavior.
Turning Cheats into Game Features
If an indie cheater has purchased an external tool to gain an unfair advantage, consider whether it’s a feature worth offering within the game itself. This approach not only retains revenue within the game but also enhances the overall gaming experience. For example, you could introduce automation for boring parts of the game, turning a common cheat into a legitimate – possibly revenue-generating – feature.
By adding new features inspired by popular cheats, you can cater to indie cheaters’ desires, thereby improving player satisfaction and increasing in-game spending.
Temporary Restrictions for Unfair Play
If indie cheaters are disrupting leaderboards or competitions, consider issuing a warning followed by a temporary ban. This could be a partial ban, such as temporarily turning off a particular game feature, preventing them from benefiting from their cheating behavior. Coupling this with a warning lets the cheater know they’ve been detected. You can prevent or limit specific indie cheaters from participating in a tournament or block them from appearing on the leaderboard. These measures help maintain fair play while allowing cheaters to correct their behavior without permanently losing their place in the game.
Winning the Battle Against Cheating
Cheating undermines the integrity and enjoyment of online games. To effectively mitigate it, you need to know WHO you’re up against (commercial or indie cheaters), WHAT they are doing to cheat, and WHY they are cheating (for profit, fun, or prestige). Once you understand the cheating landscape, you can use the methods described here to combat it. However, it is not a “one-and-done” process; it’s more of a game-within-a-game, one that the game studios play against the cheaters. One that the game studios need to win.
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