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Comment by Drupon | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that's what the people love to say on the Steam forums when they've gotten busted in one of its many ban waves.

Both of you can be right.

Never claimed otherwise. Just saying it's a fact of life that every test has false positives and false negatives. The "is this player cheating" test is no exception.

Check out this amazing episode:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

Dude got so fed up with long loading times he debugged the game and not only discovered the cause but actually fixed it. Billion dollar corporation couldn't be assed to do it.

Gotta wonder if this guy wouldn't have gotten banned by the anticheat for having the audacity to hook into the game with a debugger or something. Only cheaters do that sort of thing right?

Yeah that would be a reasonable thing to ban for. Companies can't afford to audit every single unauthorized tampering with their software to ensure that it's benign. If it results in better cheat detection, far better to have a policy that's unobstrusive and non-applicable to 99.99% of users and something the marginal outliers will understand is a risk.

It's a false positive. He would get banned even though he was not cheating.

Whether it's "reasonable" or not comes down to politics. Optimizing for either false positives or false negatives is a policy decision. Do you punish innocents to ensure you catch every single cheater? Do you let cheaters go to ensure you don't punish innocents?

I don't really intend to discuss the above questions. I'm just pointing out the fact one of those so called complainers in the forums could very well turn out to be one of these false positives. That's what the system is optimized for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com