Enemy list to combat hacking

Everyone is sick of hackers ruining their games. While VAC's numbers are impressive, a simple community supported method can help keep hackers out. Similar to some IM clients, Steam should allow us to maintain an enemies list. Ideally a game's match-making system could consider the enemies list of all the players in the current game, and not permit enemies to join the gaming session. Although there are a lot of finer details to work out, allowing the community to assist in battling hackers could prove very effective.

[Seth.Sekhmet]

This would work if you owned the server.

Example: if I am on your enemy list and you play on a public server, nothing can prevent me from joining. Steam would alert you that I joined - me being the enemy - but that's it. Unless you're admin, you can't kick or ban me.

[ester25]

Originally Posted by heatpipe

Ideally a game's match-making system could consider the enemies list of all the players in the current game, and not permit enemies to join the gaming session.

That's going to far, not allowing somebody to join a public game you are in because you don't like them is plain ridiculous. Remember that your suggestion implies i can mark anyone as blacklisted, no matter what reason (cheater/griefer/abuser or just a player that is better than you)

The user blacklist was suggested a few times before, and the most that can be done is provide you with a warning that a game you are about to join has a user that you blacklisted.

TBH, i find this being totally pointless considering cheaters are often changing accounts and abandoning old ones, and with the sheer number of players out there you will so rarely find you are in the same game as a cheater you met before.

Originally Posted by Seth.Sekhmet

This would work if you owned the server.

Example: if I am on your enemy list and you play on a public server, nothing can prevent me from joining. Steam would alert you that I joined - me being the enemy - but that's it. Unless you're admin, you can't kick or ban me.

@Seth: If you consider games like COD: Modern Warfare 2 where one of the players is hosting the game then it doesn't matter so much if people use their enemies list liberally -- the match-making system should just never pair them together as there are hundreds/thousands of ongoing games to choose from.

You do bring up a good point about dedicated servers, and how it could be abused to block out a legitimate player. Well one way the algorithm could work is to allow each steam account a 1 enemy per month per game policy. An exception could be made such that the 20th instance of the same enemy being added by other steam accounts would restore your 1 enemy / month allowance. Now if you were a legitimate player, and someone really disliked you, they would have to consistently use their 1 enemy / month credit each and every month to persistently block you out of a dedicated server. Assuming it was just one person, this means you and this other person would not play at the same time on the server. If the other person is a hacker, over time, other players would have added the hacker as an enemy, and it will be less likely that the player will ever make it onto the server to prevent you from joining.

Like I said in my original post, this stuff needs tweaking, but an algorithm exists to implement this properly.

Originally Posted by ester25

That's going to far, not allowing somebody to join a public game you are in because you don't like them is plain ridiculous. Remember that your suggestion implies i can mark anyone as blacklisted, no matter what reason (cheater/griefer/abuser or just a player that is better than you)

The user blacklist was suggested a few times before, and the most that can be done is provide you with a warning that a game you are about to join has a user that you blacklisted.

TBH, i find this being totally pointless considering cheaters are often changing accounts and abandoning old ones, and with the sheer number of players out there you will so rarely find you are in the same game as a cheater you met before.

@ester, you're right that the system must defend against abusers, but clearly the algorithm must differ between centralized server, multiple dedicated servers, and player-hosted servers. I get the sense that you don't think community-driven efforts don't work. Have you seen the effectiveness of Gmail spam control? It's a community-assisted effort that is extremely effective (especially when you consider email spam account creation rate >>> steam account creation rate). And so what if cheaters create new accounts? If they're cheating (and blatant about it), they'll eventually end up in someone's blacklist again. All I'm saying is that something is desperately needed, at the very least, to prevent blatant hackers from laughing it up in game while they blaze away through walls, openly admitting they're using, while players are unable to help themselves.

...and thank you Treyarch for reviving dedicateds, and putting the power back in the hands of the people!