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I know when I spent a lot of time dealing with fraud in a different market, the most effective tool was to catch and shadowban the accounts rather than banning

I know when I spent a lot of time dealing with fraud in a different market, the most effective tool was to catch and shadowban the accounts rather than banning them. If we banned them, they just created a new account and kept doing the same things. When we detected them and the isolated them from all other good standing accounts, only allowing them to interact with other shadowbanned users, it virtually solved the problem. Normal users went about their day and the cheaters/fraudsters wasted a lot of time never getting through to anyone. In gaming it seems like creating a cheaters purgatory where they are stuck competing against other cheaters forever would probably end up being its own special league after a while. Like when people suggested steroids in pro-baseball should be legal.

dijit 10mo ago
Yeah, we actually discussed doing something like that. That's what GTA5 did (though, they marked you with a dunce cap)... .. even though it's a good idea (and we nearly implemented it actually), there's probably a reason that GTA5 is still plagued with cheaters.
sylware 10mo ago
And to manage this purgatory and detect the accounts which will end up there, a live-service game needs an active, permanent and competent team of honnest people, period. If a game studio is not ready to do just that for its live-service game, it has to stop developping that game and move to another type of game. Give this team server side data, user level 'traps' and 'pitfalls' with frequent updates (they do that for dota2 and probably cs2, they don't need a kernel module), and you should end up with a rather sane gaming experience.