I am kind of fed up with people abusing alts... not that it's some kind of plague, but once in a while when it transpires someone cheated by having an alt in a diplo/FFA game it can be hearth-breaking, and then there's the frustration of not having good tools to detect alts... except I guess baiting their IPs via some links, but that's just extreme...

I had some suggestions I gave to Fizzer on stream, but he was kind of skeptical of their utility, so I will suggest some more here, adjust for his skepticism and hopefully someone will contribute their own ideas too.

1) Common games check for other players
Right now you can get a list of games you shared with someone else, but if you could get a list of games shared by any players of your choice that'd be a nice source of information

2) Adding an option to report for multi-acc
Just to increase awareness of this issue existing, hopefully that wouldn't result in paranoia and report spam...

3) Showing shared connections
This one has number of issues, but I think it can be somewhat doable.

It could log info such as "Player ID + IP used + date and time" and then if someone shares/recently shared IP with someone else and are in the same game (but not on the same team) it would show some kind of icon signaling that they share connection

Additionally the info can be stored and displayed on profile like "This player shared connection with XYZ"

The main issue here is probably privacy, but if it only shows this in FFA or if you aren't on the same team then it's only fair + a reminder could be given to the players joining that the fact their connection is shared is going to be revealed to others.

Then another issue is the "recently" time period. Given enough time we'll get bunch of false positives as IPs get recycled, so I guess it should only display the icon if the last time the other acc used that IP was at most 2 moths ago? I don't really know I didn't base this on anything really

And then finally proxies would have to be filtered out...

Diplo and FFA is a touchy subject imo. You can't prevent people from having fun.
Red flags would be tournaments and team games with them being in two teams.

Sure, tournaments and team games are much worse cases and would benefit from this as well, but idk how is it "fun" to essentially cheat in FFA/Diplo.

Are you implying that cheating is not fun?

the world would be a better place without this thread

I don't personally care about FFA's or diplo's, but they're not a grey area rules-wise, multi-accounting in a FFA is bannable.

If you have two alts in a game, they must be on the same team as per the rules.

Word around the Community in XYB2/PR Warzone Chat is that of that One Team in Clan War. Thanks to this Thread Addressing Alt Accounts! I cannot even keep up with the Chat lmao. Oh Man this will be Entertaining!

Edited 12/21/2022 05:00:42

Yeah there's that too, don't get too hung up on the FFA/Diplo aspect of this, that's just what I had on my mind when I wrote this, but this will certainly help dealing with alts everywhere including CW/tournaments/leagues etc etc

Any recommendations for how to detect it?

I think Fizz's main concern with this was that there is no clear/easy way to detect it ... IPs can be reused/shared in many legit ways, so IP linking alone isn't sufficient.

Yeah, false positives are big problem, but it can be significantly reduced:
(just so you know I am not a huge tech nerd so maybe there are some technical issues)

1) Check everyone's IP in a given game/tournament for various proxies/exit nodes
Apparently there are public databases to help out with that, but it's not always possible

- if it's not their IP and they exclusively (or primarily I guess) connect without revealing their own IP then perhaps it would be fair game to replace the country flag on their profile with something else (essentially telling people this person uses anonymous connection)
- if it is their IP or it's impossible to tell then step 2)

2) Check for a match between multiple people in the same tournament lobby/game lobby/in-game
Some ISPs keep your IPs same for a lot longer than others, but ultimately what are the odds that IP you just used will be reused by someone else in the SAME GAME/TOURNAMENT? Probably next to impossible, but if you can work out these probabilities please go for it
People can share proxies (friends/family/coworkers/guests/you name it)

- if there is a match indicate it somehow (perhaps by some icon next to player name instead of clan flag) and also flag the game for later review IF they get reported
- if there isn't a match log the info anyway for later comparisons, if the IP is reused soon afterwards by different account even in a different game then that's a red flag I guess, if it happens a lot between those accounts just keep track of it for later review if the player gets reported

3) Check for patterns (sounds complicated, I guess that would be difficult to automate)
how often does this happen to the accounts in question, how often do they play together etc.
Also if both accounts are often active simultaneously in DIFFERENT RT games then it probably means they just share IP cuz that'd be hard to do for a single player and aside from trying to evade detection quite useless and contra productive

I think this point would have to be done manually after the player in question gets reported

4) Possibly allow a new setting that if enabled would reveal team chats/private chats after a game/tournament is concluded
It would be tedious for alt user to create fake communication to explain how come those two accounts cooperated (and perhaps add an option to share mail threads if they say they used that I guess)
Would also be useful for players to learn strategies and learn what happened behind the scenes ;)

5) In the end it must be human who decides and swings the ban hammer
Previous steps basically just alerted others to something fishy, but it must me an authority who finally decides who is a cheater

The most important thing is to disincentivize using alts by making it hard to pull off, and making mistakes costly.
Everyone makes mistakes so even though this detection could be evaded if someone is careful enough at least it makes it annoying for them. Bottom line is as long as it doesn't take unreasonable toll on average player or innocent people sharing IPs it should be beneficial.

Edited 12/21/2022 09:23:46

Just blocklist them and move on. Or confront them. People can also live together and play all this game. They can also play it with eachother on different teams or in a FFA, while they only have 1 account.

Vena how do you propose blocking someone when it's hard to detect they are cheating? This thread is about the detection, it's already bannable offense.

Also there are many players, it's a very big pool with many fish, having each player block the cheater instead of just banning him as soon as he gets discovered sounds like a very inefficient way of dealing with them.

I think what vena is saying is that when you strongly suspect someone is cheating but can't outright sufficiently prove it to justify a site/account ban, you can blocklist the person.

But agree that it's not a good option, and pretty sure it's not going to stop you from being matched up with the person in FFAs unless you are the hoster.

The difficulty is identifying cheaters with a degree of confidence that taking action including banning is reasonable.

A number of other game sites are much stricter regarding this - anyone know how they handle it? Even some of the other Risk-like games (I recall one called something like 'Combat Conqueror ' or similarly) that was said to just outright ban accounts detected to be cheaters. They must have a decent system if they just skip right to ban, no discussion, no recourse.

The way to prevent it from being an issue is to only play 1v1s

Now that's an idea, except people could still farm stats by playing against their alt. Let's just ban all game types altogether and play idle only.

@krinid, they simply banning alts, players are not allowed to have more than one account. Well, at least that's my chess website does.

EDIT: one account

Edited 12/22/2022 03:09:34

@mobtrio
But how do they detect the alternate accounts? As discussed above, can't use potentially shared values like IP address or hostname, unless they're just limiting it to 1 account per organization and/or hostname.

IP and browser finger printing probably to make sure it’s definitely the same person, and not just someone playing from the same geographical area.

Yes, they have some kind of detection 'playing from same machine' thing. Once, I help my nephew to set his vacation from my computer without erasing my cookies first then my account got locked. Since the alts already forbidden, they do not need to check players at the same game or tournament. Of course, there is no logical need to use alts on chess so the act of creating alts already considered as cheating. In Warzone we can use alts for team games (which myself also do). It is only considered as cheating when we use alts on different teams (in single games or tournament), so it is complicated.

I don't think it is reasonable to expect system to check alts on games or tournaments only. To get rid of the problem then alts need to be banned altogether. After that. the challenge reduce to detecting alts in every users' actions. It is not easy by itself but it is more feasible.

But, I don't think we can solve it 100%. People will always find ways to do what they want.