How do I punish exploiters? - Dunce Cap

A1_exe · December 31, 2020, 7:04am

I appreciate your approach. You can dm/contact me if you want to discuss how “good” your detection methods are - or generally how secure your game is.

I wrote another response, but I have opted to post in a more relevant thread and reference it here:

On another topic

The traditional method of permanent banning is overrated. I am not sure if this was necrobumped and I haven’t seen any posts similar to this lately, so I will post my opinion here:

In my honest opinion, the best way to deal with exploiters is to undo/revoke everything they accomplish through exploiting. This develops a mindset that will allow game developers to focus on minimizing and preventing mistakes from slipping through to production. Permanently banning an exploiter will only make them switch to an alt and pursue your game with more conviction. If you can give them a smack on the hand, and prevent them from dealing any serious damage to your game, that’s probably the way to go. Besides, if you ban an exploiter’s primary account, they’re less likely to spend money and get items legitimately.

With that said, these are a few of the ideas I keep in mind.

Delayed bans. Applications like FiveM (the GTA client) benefit from this. If you don’t know what triggers the ban… You’re going to have a harder time bypassing it.

Temporary bans. These are more beneficial. It means an exploiter is more likely to give it up and focus on playing the game legitimately. It gives more le-way for false positives and deters average users, just trying their hand at it, from whatever they were originally planning.

Public shaming. Announcing to everyone when an exploiter has got caught is also something. If you get caught and you were trying to go under the radar… You’re probably going to rethink exploiting next time.

Some form of tracking changes to user data? Backtracking noticeable changes could prove beneficial.

Modify detected exploiters’ gaming experience. A warning before a hard reset? Maybe make things ridiculously hard for them once they get caught, or some other form of influencing what they’ve obtained in the game. (Imagine marking something as tainted and making it significantly worse.)