We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

This isn't about stopping cheaters (cheat detection). This is about stopping repeat cheaters trying to ban evade. Detecting cheats, especially nowadays with hardware cheats (DMA, etc), is an entirely different ballgame.

IMHO, one of the most effective way to stop ban evaders is to actually charge money for the game.

At the time of the events in the blog, CS:GO was NOT free, and yet there were still cheaters that apparently had access to 80+ accounts.

Why pay for the game when you can go to an onion site that will sell you hundreds of compromised accounts that own the game for a fraction of the price?

That's fair. There will always be cheaters like this. However, anecdotally, after CS or any other game I've played that went free-to-play, cheaters became a much much larger problem: from seeing one every now and again, to at least one in nearly every match.

Charging money and banning at the payment provider level can be quite effective. It isn't a perfect answer but it cuts out gigantic chunks of the problem space.

I'll take a ~99% cheat-free experience over not having any improvement at all.

Agreed, but in this particular case the blog writer was running private servers, rather than being Valve. They had no control over payment processing etc.

Banning by TPM also makes ban evasion pretty expensive. At which point the cheater has to either buy a new mobo or solder a new TPM chip onto their mobo (not always possible). Though I guess at some point a sloppy vendor will leak TPM keys and it'll be spoof-able.

I could be wrong but couldn't you just get a pcie card that is effective a tpm card?

Ah you're right, I didn't know external TPM modules were a thing. Looks like they're only ~10ish usd too.

At that time CS:GO would cost around $3 during various Steam sales and it was possible to buy a huge amount of gift copies that could be stored in your Steam inventory. So one "legit" account would buy lots of copies and then "gift" them to new accounts that would go on a cheating spree.

>IMHO, one of the most effective way to stop ban evaders is to actually charge money for the game.

Cheaters are NOT price sensitive. This is their preferred form of entertainment, ie being a king in their little kiddie pool, so they don't care to spend $60 every month on a new account/gamekey/whatever you charge them.

People in CS:GO are perfectly happy to be banned with hundreds of dollars of skins in an account, because they either spent like $5 getting someone else's compromised account, or they are paying $30 a month to a cheat service anyway.

I bet there is a shit ton of overlap between frequent cheaters and pay-to-win whales.

The reliable way to make people cheat in your game less is cheater honeypots. Instead of banning and just starting the hunt for a cheater all over again when they buy a new account, you silently force them into matchmaking with only other cheaters, purposely abusive bots, or artificially harming the cheater's gameplay like with fake lag, or just ignore keypresses sometimes. Ruin their fun and they will stop ruining your game. Then you turn the adverse knowledge game on them, they have to figure out if they are regularly playing with cheaters or bots in order to know they need to buy a new account.

Knowing how well Valve handles stuff like this you re-roll the keys in Proxmox and play again