This article comes from WeChat public account:Touch Music (ID: chuappgame), author: cattle Xu, from the title figure: vision China
The game “Valorant” has many names, “Valorant” and “Special Heroes”, the official Chinese name of the mainland China is called “Fearless Contract”. You have inevitably heard of this shooter game developed by the league’s fist game.
In order to gain a place in the first-person shooter game market, Fist tried hard to promote the “Fearless Contract”, including the characteristics of the gameplay and how stable it is when running. In order to guarantee the player’s gaming experience, Fist even developed an anti-cheat system called Vanguard specifically for Intrepid Contract.
It’s just that for a game that is still in beta, Vanguard’s performance is not mature. During the entire internal testing period, the accounts of up to tens of thousands of cheaters were blocked, which is obviously not the game environment that fists want to see. In order to solve the plug-in problem, in addition to busy repairing the loophole, Fist also tried to use more strict punishment to deter cheaters.
The Intrepid Contract is both familiar and unfamiliar
What is “soul ban”?
A few days ago, Philip Koskinas, a data engineer who was responsible for anti-cheating, posted a news on the social platform and revealed a “soul ban”(Soulbans) punishment method.
“The “Soul Ban” of “Fearless Covenant” is real. If you ever cheated, then all accounts in the past, present and future will also be banned. When the game is released, we will release some “soul” to You get a second chance, but also the last kindness.”
Koskinas did not explain the principle of this “soul ban” in detail, but it is not difficult to deduce from this passage that the entire ban mechanism revolves around the player’s account. It is likely to record certain information of the player in a certain way, make a judgment, and then determine the current account of the banned player, the account that has been cheated, and even the new account registered by the player. It’s like sticking to the player’s “soul”, you can’t get rid of it.
Koskinas said that this “soul ban” mechanism is likely to rely on Vanguard to achieve
Coskinas’s remarks are of course supported by netizens, but some new issues have also been extended during the heated discussion. Netizen Josh Mobley puts forward an interesting point about “soul ban” Can the “Soul Ban” account play “League of Legends”? Will the ban cover the entire fist account?”
Koskinas did not give an accurate reply. He just said that “the ban is currently aimed at the “Fearless Contract”, and the strategy itself may change for any reason.” The first half of the sentence will not be named, and the second half of the sentence will not say what strategy will change, which leaves players with plenty of room for imagination.
exceptIn addition to a physical board game, the other four games under Fist need to be bound to an email account, and “League of Legends” is one of them. If the “Fearless Covenant” ban is really as Mobley thought, it can be extended to “League of Legends” or several other games, then it may be the most stringent account ban in current online games. Does the fist really enable such strict punishment? Is this method really reasonable?
This is not the first time “Lian Zuo”
Think carefully, the “soul ban” described by Koskinas sounds like “Xuanhu”, but the whole mechanism is probably just drawing on the anti-cheat system VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat).
On the Steam platform, there are a total of 589 games with VAC-enabled servers. When players cheat on one of the servers and are banned, VAC will record the player’s account information, and then permanently refuse players to enter these games. The VAC-protected server allows players to lose the right to experience a batch of game online modes at the same time Joke).
In the VAC penalty mechanism, the key information for identifying cheating players is the mobile phone number bound to the account. When the player is blocked by VAC, the account bound to the same mobile phone number will be punished similarly to “seat sitting”, and also blocked by VAC, and cannot buy the game that has been cheated on other accounts. This means that once the player is punished, the “large” and “small” of his account will suffer. In addition to restricting access to the server, the VAC ban will be permanently displayed on the player’s profile interface in the form of a small red letter.
Text prompts banned by VAC
The severity of VAC’s “connected sitting” is often different from person to person. It stands to reason that the banned players will not be affected by playing on other unofficial servers except for servers with VAC protection. For example, players who have been banned by VAC in “Counter-Strike: Global Action” will only lose In addition to the ranking function, you can still play games on other third-party servers. There are also many games on the Steam platform that do not rely on the protection of the VAC function, so these games can be unimpeded.
As for the content of personal data that has permanently kept punishment records, it can only serve as a “post of shame.” It may remind developers and other players that “this person has a history”, but if the cheater does not care about his reputation in the virtual world, then there is no real impact. If a cheating player only uses an account to play a single-player game, or even sells the account to someone who only plays a single-player game, then this penalty will lose its effect.
V club gave a clear explanation of the consequences of blocked accounts
So, what is the “sit-up” that really involves players in all games?
Final punishment: “Your number is gone”
Compared with the most stringent and clearest punishment measures obtained by the V company from its own years of operating experience, most of the punishments provided by manufacturers with multiple games can be summarized in one or two sentences. They may not be as strict as they are meant to be, or they may not be implemented in many cases, but when they are actually used, the cheaters can also suffer.
In fact, the vast majority of its subsidiaries ownMany game manufacturers have hidden a “killer” in the user agreement to deal with cheating players. Under normal circumstances, the player’s cheating behavior will only affect the status of a certain game, only for one game title, and many titles have a time limit, which will not affect the player’s personal data, nor will it prevent the player from going online normally. Match, but most manufacturers have reserved for themselves the power to disable or ban all games.
This is R Star’s instructions for “block all games”
Of course, the reality is that the explicit provisions in the terms are the same thing, but there are very few players who really suffer heavy penalties for “even sitting”-only those who really “kill” will encounter special treatment. Compared with the use of plug-ins, there are more examples of punishment for reasons such as “insulting developers”, “developing cheating software”, or “significant impact on behavior”.
This kind of “final punishment” is real. For example, EA’s “FIFA” series of games have been insulted by players because of the unsatisfactory content of the game.
In addition to cursing the street and making insulting actions during the live broadcast, a player is also suspected of inciting a hacker to invade the developer’s social account. As a result, EA not only blocked the game but also completely deleted his Origin platform account on the grounds of “serious impact on employees.” Even if the other party is a creator who has bought multiple games in the entire series, pointed to live broadcasts and created videos to eat, there is no mercy-that is the real “you are gone”.
EA also did something confusing when deleting the number, for example, the old man on the picture was inexplicably deleted, and EA customer service said that Ignorant”
You may have noticed that the text descriptions of the above banned and deleted user terms are relatively vague. This may be because the final interpretation of the terms is in the hands of the manufacturer, and it will be easier to deal with different situations if they are vaguely written. Players who deliberately insult the manufacturer find a new way, then the manufacturer can directly “convict” without amending the terms.
Overall, the “dead seat” has a great deterrent effect, but the binding force is very limited. The players who are subject to the final punishment are basically the “outstanding birds” that frequently provoke the developers. The number is not large, and even the ultimate punishment will not affect their re-creation of accounts-at least there is no provision in the user agreement. New identity, sign a new user agreement, right?
Is the “seat” penalty reasonable?
Before the fist officially announced the detailed processing rules of “soul binding”, we seemed unable to make too many comments on “soul ban”. But if the original intention of “soul binding” is to increase the cost of cheating by continuously blocking accounts, it seems that it can only “bull the soft persimmon”.
From the point of continuous tracking of cheating players, it seems that the fist is somewhat overpowered. Different from what many players imagine, the two IP blocking and hardware blocking methods, which sound very powerful, are actually not very powerful. Cheating players can change the IP to play the game as usual; replacing the hardware code of the computer accessories seems to be It is also a breeze.
If you ask for identity information from the player, or ask for face recognition, this may of course be done once and for all, but it involves user privacy…Look at the Epic next door, and the player is scolded because of the suspicion of “stealing user privacy” It’s still unknown whether the fist or the fist will take this step.
Not only privacy, but some human issues that have been discussed for a long time may also be re-excited by “soul binding”: The cheater may have crossed the moral boundaries and used the pain of other players as his own fun, but Shouldn’t they have a chance to repent? When a player chooses to cheat in a certain game, how can a developer use this to define that he will repeat the same mistake in other games, and make a judgment before this player has cheated again, Is it unreasonable?
The most important thing is that increasing the cost of cheating does not seem to be an effective countermeasure. Looking at the popular “Escape from Tarkov” this year, we know that the “ticket” of this game is up to several hundred yuan, and the price of customized plug-ins is not low, and even some people want to cheat for a day. Hundreds of dollars; under the control of VAC, once the players of “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” are treated as cheaters, all the props in the entire warehouse will be frozen. How many cheaters will make these valuable, Can I exchange real gold and silver props for adventure? However, it is not the first day that the trumpeting and hacking practices have appeared.
Therefore, the only thing left for Intrepid Contract is an intractable challenge—preventing cheating starts with preventing plug-ins from entering the game. This is not easy. If the manufacturers will form a circle as in the American drama and open a “trauma group mutual aid meeting”, the fist game may see the big companies under the stage crying when they explain their experience of fighting against plug-ins. Face.
Koskinas’s “Soul Blockade” dynamic release soon, a provocative hacker appeared in the comment area
Koskinas seems to be a very serious person. From his clean and concise social account page, he can basically see that he basically only posts work-related content and rarely touches fish. In a recent message, he It seems that through some technical means, more than 1,300 hidden cheaters have been detected and sent them a “ban package.”
I certainly hope that after the official launch of the Intrepid Contract, Koskinas will continue to announce how many cheats he “hunted” on social platforms, but I don’t know if such a record means good news or bad News.
This article comes from the WeChat public account:Touch Music (ID: chuappgame) , author: cattle Asahi