Banning players
When banning players for cheating, it is generally pretty difficult to communicate to them why they’re getting banned.
You can’t give players the exact detection log, even if they ask for it. You will have to give a rounded reason, which is often not enough to satisfy the person getting banned.
The issue is that if you hand out the exact detection log, a cheater can use that to make their cheat more undetected. But if you don’t give a reason, it makes the player feel like they’re getting banned wrongfully, and they will complain about it. Though, giving the player an exact detection log won’t change this, so giving out the log is pointless anyway.
Usually, the best course of action is to give a rough reason why the player is suspected of cheating, eg. “our system detected you using artificial weapon modifications”.
This won’t give cheaters any more information than is required.
After the ban
After banning a cheater or a gang of cheaters, it is recommended to not communicate with them in any way. Salty cheaters may try to re-join with a new account or with their friends’ accounts.
The automatic banning system included with Fini Anti-Cheat & Admin Tools will usually get any multi-accounting attempts, but being on the lookout for cheaters is still required.
After getting banned, the cheaters might want to talk to you on Discord or TeamSpeak. Responding to them is usually not worth it. You as a server admin will rarely get anything from talking to cheaters. You may get some information about what type of cheats they were using, but you can also easily figure that out from the montages they post.
The motive for wanting to talk to server admins/owners is to get clips/memes. The clips will usually be put into a cheating montage and shared around. Some of these clips are actually pretty funny because the cheaters may not know all the facts or may have gotten banned, but not show that in the montage.
Saying anything personal to cheaters is never a good idea. The cheaters will think that you personally care about them, when realistically cheaters are just a small and unfortunate part of hosting an Arma server.
Why do people cheat?
Well, you might say they cheat because they are bad at the game, but this may not always be the whole truth.
The average cheater enjoys the feeling of *being outside the law*. They like the excitement of doing something naughty.
When a cheater comes on your server, they will get satisfaction from it, regardless of what you do.
You ban them: They feel like they’ve been so good that you had to ban them. It’s only $3 for a new account.
You don’t ban them: The server is shit, the admins are shit, the anti-cheat is shit, they are clearly so much above all that.
These are generally the only feelings cheaters have. The average cheater is of low IQ and they believe their $150 per month cheat subscription makes them gods. A cheater might waste a few accounts on the alt-account detection system, but after that, they will get a new router, a new VPN, and a new computer. After finally getting back on the server, they claim victory, as if bypassing profileNamespace and IP-bans is a great achievement.
The cheater
If you are a cheater and you feel like this post is quite funny; that’s good for you. That’s how I would feel if I spent money buying other people’s cheats.
If you write cheats: You probably feel slightly insulted by the text above. “How could a scripted anti-cheat ever catch my cheat?”