A community rating system against players cheating in multiplayer games - used for matchmaking

Hello,

Microsoft owns some game studios.

The game developers maybe could build a community rating against players cheating.

It's basically a filtering tool used by people before matchmaking.
Its purpose is to allow players to set their filters as an input and enter the matchmaking process only with other clean players.

The matchmaking process would obviously, have other rules that are not given by the cheating ranking.

The system behaves like a playground in real life with people deciding to play (most of the time) with the people that seem to play nice - with all the weird behavior that can result i.e. bullying and weird behavior when some players mark innocent players as bad or refuse to play with them or lie to other people saying that they are bad.

The community rating system should be better than using anti cheats with ring0 privileges.

The community will do the majority of the work, and all the work if they players act mostly rationally/in a fair way.

The game developer has to provide the servers, the code and record some videos and sometimes do some micro management of unfair/deviant ratings.

Obviously this has to be coded, so it takes some time and resources to do.

players start with a cheating rating that is blank/ zero.

players can vote to name other players as
- viewed them cheating/as cheaters,
- possibly cheaters

How the stats are displayed to the world:

Player 1 - 450 users , 692 users , matches played 21432, old cheating rating
or
Player 1 - 450 users , 692 users , played with 21432 x 4.5 opponents, old cheating rating
or
Player 1 - 450 users , 692 users , ratio-with-nr-of-opponents, old cheating rating

(4.5 opponents is because different game types may have different numbers of opponents)

Further details may be displayed using a twirl down arrow or hovering over the main stats with the mouse.

450 is for the option "viewed while cheating" (by watching a replay during gameplay or by watching a video recording of his/hers gameplay).
692 is for the option "possibly/perhaps cheater".

450 users are users that say - saw him/her cheat

The 450 and 692 users can be further detailed (maybe using a twirl down arrow ) and separated into opponents while playing and other users that saw the recorded videos.

Hovering over the "old cheating rating" could display a message written down by a previous cheater that was pardoned, saying that he/she admitted the cheating.

A player can be so good that a lot of human opponents can name her/him as a cheater by mistake, and for some weird reason say that they saw him/her while cheating even if false.
The saving stat for that person is the numbers of opponents that he/she played against and that didn't mention he/she was cheating.

If cheaters will play with other cheaters for a long time and not tag each other as cheaters, "the played with nr. of opponents" stat will become favorable for them and other clean players can be tricked into accepting to play with them.

A ratio (in this example , the ration between 450 and "nr. of opponents had" , or between [450+692] and "nr. of opponents had" ) option can be used by other players for match making to filter out cheaters

If you want to display a big number in the stat for a clean player with a lot of games played, the ratio can be between the "nr. of opponents had" over 450, and if you want a small number you can revers that ratio. Maybe 450 divided by nr. of opponents is easier to interpret.

Naming someone as clean has no use, because a cheater can be bad at the game, and look to the outside world as a regular/honest player, and a clean person can switch to a cheater and back to playing honestly.

The stats are guesses, but when many users tag a player as cheater, the probability of that person being a cheater is higher than for an honest player.

All the cheating ratings for "viewed them cheating" are not provable truth, are only a reference, a clue for others, a guessing.
All the cheating ratings for "possibly/perhaps cheater" are not provable truth, are guesses.

If any person seeing a certain player cheat, would realize that he/she's cheating, I think the correct way is to call a system that tags cheats as one that uses guesses or informed guesses, because sometimes people can make mistakes and sometimes people can abuse the system. You shouldn't use certainty.
That wouldn't mean that on average the rating system would just use guessing, I think it would be pretty precise if regular people can tell that someone is cheating by viewing them play.

Stats could be displayed/viewed as numbers 2 numbers, plus the old cheating rating.

You can choose if you want to play with certain players before the matchmaking.
A player should have the option to not play with the players he tagged as cheaters.
A player can retract the cheating rating for other players - they can realize they were wrong or just were bad losers and falsely named them as cheaters in rage.
Therefore a player needs to have a list with all the other players that he tagged.

There could be a global setting - you can choose to play only with players rated with blank/zero cheat rating. Or you can let the auto-matchmaking on allowing any player to enter.

This means a cheaters can play directly with other cheaters which is better. Maybe cheaters will be forced to be played against each other.
Some cheater may want to play explicitly/only with other cheaters and not want to stop cheating.

Maybe The admins could have a couple of pardon rights each year to fix/ reset a player cheating rating to clean if they are innocent/ not cheating but are bullied by other players/ the community.
All this should be written down/ publicly visible always for everyone in order to keep the admin in check, to prevent abuse.

What if everyone or almost everyone names all the other players as cheaters?
The rating is like a community of people in the real world. If they want to/they do create chaos and lie in their ratings, they will have to deal/live with a toxic system where you can't tell if someone is a cheater for a long time.
Obviously if you see someone cheat you know that they are cheating, but you can't tell if they do it frequently. If other players falsely tag other players and create a toxic system, you can't tell if the person you saw cheating is doing it regularly.

A player that is tagged as a cheater cannot view what player tagged him as a cheater because they can lie and do the same thing to the other player, in spite.
The cheating rating shouldn't be updated live because of this, but with a delay, maybe in a couple of hours, a day or two.

This should be displayed visibly to users as a reminder, maybe in the interface.
It's obvious that this would be a community/people interaction rating system, but players should still be always reminded about this, maybe in the interfaces using a simple/1 sentence message and encourage them to do the right thing for their own profit/enjoyment later.

This review system is difficult to implement because the players:
- can create new accounts with blank cheating ratings
- can sell the accounts to new user that may want a clean cheating rating.
This means cheaters may want to say that they sold their account and that they are a new player wanting a clean cheating rating
1 solution for this is the system to limit the selling of the accounts 2 times a year, or something like this.

The system could store random plays for some time (short play videos or an entire game) for top players or players tagged by other players to be video tracked

The videos store time may increase for player1 if other players vote that player1 to be video tagged i.e. the system should store videos of his/hers plays.
The videos could be recorded automatically using the first ratings 450 and 692 for "viewed as cheating" and "probably a cheater".

The system should inform, in a non intrusive way, the player that is probably cheating, that his stats are worsening. This may make cheaters who want to play with clean player to stop cheating.

It is difficult to tie down a person to a single account and verify when the account was sold to another person.
Using phone numbers to tie down a person to an account has privacy issues somewhat, but cheaters can use other phone numbers.

The system can work even if cheaters would be able to create multiple accounts

Maybe you can tie down a cheating rating of a player to the serial number used to activate the game online.
The selling of the game can happen 2 times a year so the cheater can have 3 accounts for the first year and 2 accounts for the following years.

Excessive "selling" of a game account could be flagged to in the rating system.
It would be rare for a game to be sold 2 in a year, than 2 in the following year and even more rare to be sold again.

Using multiple accounts is useless because the player cheating rating is tied to the serial number used to activate the game.

The system should allow:

1) pardoning a cheater if he/she decides to become clean ; with an easily visible interface cue for the other players, about this.

A cheater has to admit (using a button/ an interface build for this) that he/she was cheating and write down a sentence somewhere publicly visible, that he/she was cheating.
Maybe 2 chances for forgiveness / 2 strikes, after that the stats cheating stat cannot be cleaned by admitting.

2) selling of accounts with cleaning of the cheating rating - this is difficult to do easily.

I think - maybe I'm wrong - the following: It's very important that each player should be able to rate a finite/reasonable large (or small, depending on your view) number of players per month (or other time interval) in order to prevent abuse of some badly intentioned players that try to hurt innocent players by giving the false ratings and tag them as cheaters.

The players shouldn't be allowed to gang up and bully other players with high cheating ratings, so players shouldn't be allowed to view the cheating ratings for all the players in the world.
The system maybe should stick to showing a player the players that he/she played with, as team mates or adversaries, and maybe allow a player to view and rate players without knowing the global cheating rankings. That would mean a player would view videos for random players because the cheating rating would be unknown in the review UI. The cheating ratings maybe could be visible during gameplay.

Maybe players with great stats like very high aim stat, should be prioritized and have their videos reviewed more by other players.

The system could let the players with a high cheating rating to play with other similar players from the matchmaking interface, if no player with better ratings wants to play with them. This could allow cheaters to play, or be thought of as encouraging cheating, which could be considered bad.

The rating system should use numbers because it can be easily scaled to games with a small or a big number of players.

If a cheating player had a number of years where he/she played without cheating, his/her cheating rating could be cleaned by the system.

Cheating players could try and give clean players bad ratings and mark them as cheaters in order to disturb the rating system and prevent creating an efficient anti-cheat system, but if the majority of the players are clean and do the right thing while rating others, these cheating players should not succeed.

Players could be presented in a quick way, a histogram (or both histograms, one for every rating value ) i.e. the distribution of the cheating ratings for all the players, so they would know how a certain cheating score/number would fit to the global rankings.

The players can use these histograms to filter the other players they will directly play with, or they can go by how the game feels and ignore these settings, if they think they are still inaccurate.
They can turn up or down the numbers (or number if only one setting is used, but maybe using both is better) that control the value/values for the max. accepted cheating rating, if the players feel there are globally more or less cheaters playing the game on multiplayer.

From time to time the matchmaking system probably should directly allow players to choose the type of adversaries they like, strong, very strong, or weak players, or play with their friends.
I believe a lot of games allow players to join a certain server, so you can play with your friends, but sometimes some players would like to play in matches with strong players, in order to learn from them.
Strong players maybe would like to play against less advanced players too, from time to time for some reasons, like receiving bonus content for their improving game stats.

The developers could present the players with a tutorial and show them some videos with examples of different types of ways of cheating. Some cheating programs are pretty advanced, but usually they offer the spectators some clue that a player is cheating.
If a perfect cheating program would exist, that program would turn a player at most into a very good one, but not inhumanly good.

In the beginning, players should be given all the information about how the anti cheating system works, without bothering them too much with very detailed implementation or coding details, and should be warned about how important their actions are regarding giving ratings and trying to cheat in the game.

Players should be made aware that they should rate a player with "viewed while cheating" only if they viewed the player cheating live or by watching a video recording on the game platform and not rate someone from information gathered outside the game, which could be untrue or distorted.

Players should have to work a little harder in the beginning to decrease the number of cheaters, but after that, the better the system would function, the less time the players would have to spend rating other players, because the majority of the players should realize that they would get caught, that is not worth the effort.

Players should be warned that the rating system is very powerful and that they shouldn't give a cheater rating to someone innocent, because all the clean players will benefit from a good system.

There is a difference between multiplayer games where players compete against other players and social networks. A similar ranking system would not work for social networks because in games a cheater is directly against other players and their enjoyment of the game, but on social networks a user that is making public his/her ideas could be loved by the people that is persecuting/oppressing behind their backs, in an indirect way. There may be many other reasons why a similar rating system would not work on social networks.

Maybe multiple game developers should join and create a system that can be used by multiple platforms(developers)/ games as a single interface, which maybe would be better for players, as opposed to having it integrated separately in each game or for each developer.

Using game bugs should not be considered as cheating because is the responsibility of the developer to produce good code.

The system can be run in parallel to other systems (until it has proven its worth and replaces other systems, or is proven bad/lacking ), maybe those that are already implemented, because the player chooses during matchmaking the other player types, with the ratings that he/she likes.
It's a filtering system used by players.
It can cause some players to be excluded somewhat from entering matches with other players, but in the end all the players with bad ratings can be allowed by the system to play each other.

submitted by /u/ttntrddit
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