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.
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.
For many people, getting a new CPU is pretty trivial too. They might as well just offer the option to pay a fee to get unbanned at that point. It would reduce waste.
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.
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.
>that a community of niche game players can conduct 100% thorough investigations to the point of satisfaction w.r.t.
Since HN isn't familiar with the lengths cheaters and admins are willing to go in this cat and mouse game, here's some context: we had a healthy community with non-playing mods monitoring the game nearly 24/7 and wrote a lot of custom observability software, in particular to my knowledge we were the first to attempt eliminating duping in DayZ Mod, before DayZ Origins. Each player was tracked and recorded server-side, and observed by mods. I can safely say we never had a closet cheater operating on our servers for more than a week, and obvious ones for an hour. The longest time was a month, it was a highly respectable player, he was truly subtle and it was a big scandal after which he was provided with proofs and banished forever. Half of our server was Russians and about a quarter were Germans, in an era of brazen cheating in both communities, and HWID bans being relatively new (think early Rust/DayZ/7DtD/Ark's Great War and later on SCUM). In each case I'm talking about except for one guy, these were highly regarded players (which doesn't mean we trusted them), and each move and fight between their clans was scrutinized by default, and recorded to be shown later. They came back after the global ban, they were absolutely transparent about what happened (they bought used PCs/laptops, not CPUs, and got immediately banned), and we had to dig into a few days of activity of them and their clans manually, looking at each action and possible info they weren't supposed to have. With all our experience absolutely nothing stood out, and we had to conclude they're clean.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Artificially propped-up unsustainable "professionalization" whose eventual conclusion is to enforce spyware on casual participants? That's Riot's gift to the world.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.