They’ve been hardware finger printing for years now. They one hundred percent know if you’re a piss drinking titty fucker just from your chipset.

Pfft, like they need my chipset for that

Their fingerprinting is flawed if this story is true. If I take someone else’s CPU and drop it into what is otherwise different hardware then the fingerprint should absolutely change. If it doesn’t then their fingerprinting is broken and this is going to happen whether any particular CPU has been banned or not.

It seems far more plausible that someone got themselves banned and they’re lying to try to get out of it.

Fingerprinting that is that hyperspecific is the one that’s actually flawed. If you could circumvent a hardware ban by rearranging your RAM sticks, it wouldn’t be much good.

As it is, the CPU is the one most stable, expensive, and difficult piece to replace, so it makes sense to ban on that alone.

But, I do agree that cheaters are really slimy fuckers, so what you’re saying is certainly possible. I remember a kid that had his grandmother bring his computer into the shop to see we could evade his hw ban, talked his grandmother into agrreing to buy him a new GPU right in front of us before we turned him down flat.

In this case they even had a completely different install of Windows. There is simply no way at all that the fingerprint should match. If it did match, then their implementation sucks. Fuck them if they made it that bad intentionally. Better to have to catch and ban the same person 10 times than ban an innocent person even once.

I can’t verify that each CPU has a unique id, the way a network card does (MAC address), but it might be a trade secret, who knows.

As far as banning innocent people, if the math is that one cheater drives away 100 honest players, it’s better to ban up to 99 honest players to get to that 1 cheater.

A CPU serial number or other ID is more unique than a MAC address, as those can be spoofed, and are not guaranteed to be unique, either. I heard one case of someone tearing their hair out over a mystery network issue, eventually discovering two NICs with the same MAC. And also the case of someone buying a whole pallet of NICs, which turned out to all have the same MAC address.

But I don’t think that math checks out. A player driven away might return, but a banned player can’t.

That pallet of NIC’s: oof! I thought there were complicated methods in place to assure that didn’t happen.

As for the math, cheating is a problem because it drives players away. Whatever the math is, there is a number of innocent players that could get swept up in a ban that would be acceptable if enough cheaters were also kicked out. I’m not talking morally, just the viability of an online game.