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Xbox Live Labels Autistic Boy "Cheater"
Jellis55 writes "Jennifer Zdenek, the mother of an 11-year-old boy who lives with autism, is outraged at Microsoft Xbox Live for labeling her son a 'cheater' and taking away everything he's earned online. She says her son, Julias Jackson, is so good at playing X-Box games, Xbox LIVE thought he cheated. She says her son got online last week to play Xbox LIVE and saw that he was labeled a cheater and had zero achievements. Microsoft continues to ignore her requests to take 'cheater' off of his account."
Maybe he actually cheated... LOL. Naturally, the mother is biased in favor of her son.
...to take cheater off his account simply because there is evidence of cheating. From @Stepto 's Twitter feed:
We confirmed there were cheated achievements and gave the parent the details. This wasnt a "he played too good" situation at all. https://twitter.com/stepto/status/30451173655838720
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
Can someone explain to me how it's even possible to "cheat" in Microsoft's little walled playground? I thought that was the whole point of a closed console network.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Since about 2008 MS has had measures in place to establish whether an achievement unlock happened during gameplay, and they consequently delete the relevant achievements and apply the "Cheater" flag. I don't think anyone, autistic, dyslexic, or neurotic, is good enough at Xbox to unlock achievements without actually playing.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I once played an online game where you could set the robotic factories to building robotic factories, and then after a while switch them over to building ships. In one turn you could produce a huge fleet out of nowhere. When I did this, the game designers were convinced I had cheated because "there's no other way you could get that many ships." They didn't understand their own game, or how exponential growth works. Explaining this didn't help, I was banned.
P.S. So in the next round I helped my friends actually cheat by hacking the game's database and producing written spy reports of enemy movements. Ha.
While we may debate if he really cheated or not,, really has true autism or not and so on, I think there's something else that is worth discussing.
Online games are played by millions nowadays and want it or not, this shapes the society a little bit in it's own ways.
In my experience, anyone losing to the superior minded in any game involving strategy (they almost all do, including FPS and "dumb" RPGs) will eventually call it cheating. I think everyone has experienced that. Eventually, if enough people get pissed and do not understand how it is possible to lose so bad to a legitimate player, they will label him cheater.
Admins and game masters are no different - usually they also play the game. They will find any so-called proof to dismiss the person and have it banned for breaking the rules, even if no rule was broken.
Examples:
- it's statistically impossible to have 60% accuracy, it's a proof of cheating
- it's statistically impossible to win 1v10, it's obvious cheating
- he's going too much damage
- he can't click that fast
and so on - mostly based on lose "stats" and no real reference
Sadly (well - this is human), people also tend to play such games so many hours a day that such reactions are seen also in their day to day offline life.
If you find that a legless man is hiding items in his wheelchair you can still kick him out of your store.
Reminds me how a Warner Bros exec once visited the Netherlands, noticed cartoons were subtitled and demanded they be dubbed instead. Dutch kids can't possibly be that proficient at reading! They are dubbed every since.
Dumbass. Before dutch channels started to broadcast cartoons we depended on the British Sky Channel. No subtitles, no dubbing. Not a kid complained. Ever. And we all enjoyed it just as much.
No you're not an "aspie" if you're going to call yourself anything its an Autistic Psychopath. Yes thats its proper name. And being an antisocial narcissist who can pay attention to detail doesn't make you special. And its completely "fixable." giving it a special label and saying LOL MENTAL DEFECT IT MAKES ME SPECIAL just pisses off the people who work with people who have real autism and see you cocks diluting the term and drawing negative attention with your narcissism.
http://phelannguyen.blogspot.com/
I'm not sure you can consider Xbox Live "open to the public". After all, it's not available to non-Xbox owners, and if I'm not mistaken, you pay to play (subscription). How is this public again? Sounds pretty private to me. Just because it uses the interwebs to deliver the private content, does not make the content public.
I don't know, it sounds like he cheated. Whether or not the kid has a disability is really irrelevant. The ADA provides protection for the disabled so that they have EQUAL access to public services and businesses open to the public. It does not mean you give them special treatment... you give them EQUAL treatment. The point is to *not* discriminate against anyone with a disability. That also means that just because you have a disability, you are not entitled to special treatment above a person who may not have a disability, which is exactly what some posters are calling for here. If the kid cheated, then he violated the TOS and got what he deserved.
Naturally, this will get spun the wrong way by the media as the media is so good at doing, MS will have a PR nightmare on their hands, and the kid will get the cheater label dropped and his points restored.
For the reporter to ask: "What's your autistic 11 year old doing spending all his time playing Mature rated games that revolve around killing people?"
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Who says autistic children can't cheat? Where is the evidence that supports that assumption?
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
In this sort of case, the issue is largely the use of modified save game files. You can use standard USB storage to save games nowadays, so it shouldn't be suprising that there are tools out there to write modified saved game files which put you right at the point you get the achievements to them.
It's actually been around a while, there were adapters that let you write modified save game files direct to the hard drives of XBox 360s too.
I suspect Microsoft does some kind of signing per-console or per-player or something on files when they're written to storage, and if the user loads a save file not signed to a console they've used or their account then it's flagged up to Microsoft.
So they're not necessarily using any kind of heuristics based detection as this mother would seem to suggest, it's likely just that as they said, he actually cheated, and mummy decided to make a fuss out of it without knowing the full story.
I decided to investigate a little and found his gamertag (ZOMBIE KILL67). Looking up his stats on bungie.net for Halo 3/ODST:
http://www.bungie.net/Stats/Halo3/Default.aspx?player=ZOMBIE+KILL67&sg=0
Ranked K/D Ratio: 0.84 over 1,014 games? Not that good after all then, in fact, if he can't even break even and gets killed more than he kills, that means he's worse than most other players, and that if he got banned for being too good, so would more than half of Microsoft's other subscribers.
So it really sounds more like mummy can't cope with the idea that her son is actually fairly crap, being below average, and that he likely is in fact a cheater. A case of parent/child flaw blindness I would say.
The modern way that cheating is detected is basically simple and yes it is accurate.
Microsoft has access to the internals of the game code while you play. Here are a few examples of how MS knows if someone cheated.
All the below are a few examples are checked while the person is playing online.
1) Look for the actual cheat code in the game memory.
2) Look for the specific altered values of game code that represent what the cheats modify.
3) Look for the jump point in the game memory, that the cheat code uses to hide the cheat outside of game memory.
4) Look to see if a specific file has been altered from what is expected and/or is impossible to have that value(s)
5) look at the supporting system files the game uses for specific alterations from standard.
The methods used are accurate in detecting cheaters. I've simplified the full explanation of some and left others out. I've just listed common methods that a lot of people are aware of already. My point here is if these or similar are the methods MS used, then the kid is a cheat.
It's been my experience that parents just don't want to believe their little Johnnie or Mary is a cheat. Some will once you explain how they were caught but almost as often the parent stays in denial. Denial won't change MS's view or decision however.
This woman's threat that she will cancel her child's account is a good thing. The first and obvious is that it will remove one more cheater from the on-line game community. It will teach her child a lesson. By the parent canceling the child learns a lesson that cheating has ramifications beyond what MS did to the account. Now the child will learn that just losing achievements was a more just punishment after all and by lying to his mom jut made things worse. Now he can't play online.
In my opinion MS should have permanently banned this kid from whatever game he got caught cheating in. MS should offer one redemption and that is to buy the game a second time and he can play again unless he is caught once again cheating. If the person does it again then make the ban permanent with no further second chances.
It's been my experience that showing the cheater that there are significant consequences to their actions, does work. Some are just a little slower on the uptake than others but after a couple of bans they get the message. My experience is based on what I do and it's represented by my /. alias.
I have no idea what goes on behind the scenes at Microsoft and how they detect and handle cases of cheating. However, for quite a few years during my postgrad days and early years of employment, I was involved on the admin-side of the (PC) online gaming scene, and spent a lot of time dealing with cheaters. I have a few thoughts based on that:
A ban for just "being too good" is highly improbable, assuming that MS have even mildly competent people working on this. Back when I was running a (major, UK-based) Counter-Strike league, the kindest description of my own level of play would have been "slightly better than average". There were players in the league who could have beaten me with their eyes closed. My admin team contained people who had a range of ability levels, but none of them were top-tier players.
Adminning top-division games was therefore something that had to be taken very seriously. Accusations of cheating were always rife in CS, though in my experience the actual level of cheating, outside of a relatively small proportion of badly adminned public servers, was never as high as it was commonly perceived to be. Making sure that average players were able to tell whether a top level player was cheating or was just plain good was, therefore, one of the main challenges for an admin team and one that was taken very seriously indeed.
We had a number of principles in place regarding accusations of cheating (or independent admin suspicions when no accusation had been made). These were:
1) Any flags raised by the Valve Anti-Cheat were treated as reliable. If VAC says a player is cheating, they are kicked from the match and the league immediately. They can appeal, but would need to show very convincing evidence that there had been a false-positive (nobody ever managed this, all we ever got was "OMG my brother installed cheats").
2) Knowing that Valve Anti-Cheat was, at the time, fairly easily defeated, admins were expected to know the signs of cheating and to watch for these. We had a library of video clips that all new admins were expected to study, some of which showed players who were using wallhacks or aimbots, others which showed clips that were just of very good players pulling off shots that looked suspicious, but which were recorded at LANs and verified as legitimate.
3) If an admin suspected that a player in a game he was refereeing was cheating, he did not stop the match or kick players. No bans were given at this stage.
4) Admins recorded all matches as a matter of policy (both for anti-cheating and because players liked to download the replays later). The admin of the "dodgy" match flagged a concern in private to the senior admins.
5) 3 other admins, including at least 1 of the senior admins (usually me) scrutinised the demo from the alleged cheater's point of view. There were reliable signs of cheating (as opposed to good or lucky play) that could consistently be spotted. One classic, though by no means the only sign, was an instant-flick moment of the crosshair to an enemy, completely out of line with that player's usual mouse-sensitivity.
6) If 2 of the 3 other admins (with one of the two being the senior admin) agreed that there was cheating, then the player was banned from the league and the results of games they had played in were overturned (subject to appeal). If there was no consensus, then the original admin who raised the concern was thanked for their diligence (there was no harm in privately flagging suspicious activity - I always encouraged it) and no further action was taken.
In around 75% of cases, all 3 reviewers would agree that there had been no cheating. In around 95% of cases, 2 of the 3 agreed that there had been no cheating. We averaged around 3 player bans per season, of which 2 were usually as a result of "technical" (ie. VAC) detections. I am confident that none of the "admin" detections that were confirmed were false-positives.
My point is that this is the degree of scrutiny we applied to what was, for most of its
Except if you understand how the cheat detection works you'd know that it's mostly automated... GameSaves can't be transferred between accounts, not unless you move them to your PC and modify them. There are a group of people know as "GameSavers" who will share saves that are near completion, then people download them on their PC and modify them to look like it was there own account that the save belongs to. then put the save on their console and then earn nearly all the achievements for only a few seconds of play.
MS can detect if these have been used by running a check sum on the save game to determine that it's been modified. Similarly people cheat by modifying their console to play pirated games, and the the game code itself can be modified to give people large amounts of health, extra powerful weapons or see/shoot through walls, etc. They can detect this in the same way they can detect gamesavers.
It's my understanding that they don't just going around checking everyone's file but rather check if the account has been reported by another user, or they usually check top players of new games (IE: people leading the Halo leaderboards a month after release)
I have no idea if there are additional manual checks in place but detecting this stuff is pretty cut and dry with very little room for false positives.
Collector's Edition
1. Ideally you wouldn't do it like that at all, but have enough data transmitted and processed by the server to actually know WTH happened there.
E.g., if you have an MMO and do any money or item transfers in an atomic transaction on the server, then you just eliminated duping. And if you keep a log of who bought or transferred what, and suddenly an item appears that doesn't have such records, then you know some cheat was involved.
2. If someone did go with such statistical methods, they have the added disadvantage that
A) they don't account for flukes. As you probably know, having, say, 55% accuracy only means 55% in the very long run. Getting even 10 or 20 hits in a row is improbable but not impossible. When you have a million players shooting millions of rounds each, and more deaths per minute than at Kursk, one in a million odds will actually happen very often. You'll have several deaths a day which are the 20'th hit without a miss in a row.
B) being "that good" is actually a relative thing.
Someone who thinks they're that good against random newbies in random matches, may be completely pwned when they stumble on a major clan's server. I had exactly that nasty surprise myself in UT. You'd think I'd manage at least one frag there, but it was like skeet shooting with me being the clay pigeon ;)
Conversely, someone who isn't even playing that good may stumble upon a bunch of complete noobs, and rake up a ridiculous score by simple virtue that accuracy against stationary targets is really that much better. I've had that kind of experience too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Xbox 360 allows you to copy a game to the HDD, significantly reducing loading times. In addition, the Xbox 360 has been hacked for a while using a JTAG to run unsigned code. Once someone hacks the game, a player can download the hack by using the xbox Media Center, a USB drive to transfer the files, or just by joining a game with someone that has the mod. (Modern Warfare, I'm looking at you!)
You can also do a combination of bridging host and running unsigned code to give you all kinds of control. (Bridging host = forcing XBL to give you host). For example, one hack was able to return all players in a game lobby to level 1. (Modern Warfare 2, players would lose all of the weapons and perks that they unlocked.) There were also "10th Prestige" lobbies that would automatically boost you to the max level, unlocking all of the weapons and perks in the game.
All of your typical Counter-Strike style cheats can be applied to XBL. Some studios have done a significantly better job at banning cheaters than others. For example, Bungie has done a great job filtering out the cheaters, but Infinity Ward was absolutely horrible at it. (A lot of cheating) Microsoft has done a decent job, but certainly not enough.
Yes, there are also "bugs", but exploiting a bug in the game won't result in a ban.
In the end, there are a LOT of ways to cheat. XBL is not pristine, but it does have some controls to ban Cheaters.
Adding to the GP and P posts: I also play online FPS games, I am an admin with reasonable experience, and, most importantly, [b]I've had the chance to see autistic kids gameplay[/b].
And here's the thing: before I found out a player was autistic, their manner of play raised all kinds of warning flags for me. There were spurts of uncanny abilities, they wouldn't talk to anybody, they were focusing obsessively on a limited sets of actions (run this exact route, attack at these exact points), they displayed anti-social behavior (attacking their own team) for no apparent reason. My first reaction? What a cheater/asshole combo!
Has anybody considered how their repetitive/compulsive nature alone may cause autists to deviate from the player norm? Not to mention that about 1 in 10 autists show outstanding abilities ("idiot savant" kind) and about 9 in 10 exhibit enhanced sensory perceptions.
So I find it strange that most highly-moderated comments so far have completely ignored the fact the kid is autistic and how it may have affected his gameplay. My own experience tells me that unless Microsoft knows for sure he used an actual bug or exploit, I'd take that "cheater" verdict with a BIG grain of salt. I'm fairly confident that an autistic person can trip both automated and human cheater detection. They were designed for regular people.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
You're making a number of assumptions here that I don't think can be supported. First, we know nothing about the reason for the ban. Nobody's said. There's a tweet from MS saying that the kid's mother has been informed of the reasons for the decision. In fact, there's evidence that MS do have a review/appeal process; there have been cases of false-positives in the past, which have been over-turned. However, where such false positives occur, they tend to affect a large number of people and become news in their own right.
Second, you are assuming that MS is using some kind of stats tracking for its anti-cheat. I do have experience with anti-cheat and I can tell you now that for skill-based games, relying on stats tracking for any kind of anti-cheat, let alone one that is allowed to institute bans, is absolutely ludicrous. Nobody with any brains is doing this. MS are not doing this. What happens if you end up with a top-end gamer who jumps online for a quick match and gets put into a game with a bunch of newbies?
There are a few instances where you can use stats-based automatic tracking. In strategy games, it is possible to calculate the maximum possible level of resource acquisition. If somebody is exceeding this, they're cheating. But that is absolutely not the same as looking at the kills/deaths ratio in an fps. Clever games these days have a matchmaking system which looks at a spectacular kills/deaths ratio and doesn't say "this person is cheating" but rather "I will match this person against people with similar ratios in future".
I'm also surprised that you are willing to grant this kid elite powers of gaming supremacy, but not the ability to hack around with his console.
As you say, public server adminning does tend to throw up a higher number of issues than tournament adminning. However, it is still generally 100% possible to have a review and appeals mechanism, particularly for admin-detected cheating. If your customers are paying £40/year to play on your servers, you are going to have a review mechanism at the very least. Of course, my experience is that the majority of the time, the people who get hit by anti-cheat measures are indeed cheating (not true in every instance, but it does generally hold up). As most people who get a ban will appeal, this means that most appeals get rejected. Which in turn gives the impression that there isn't an appeals mechanism.
According to stepto (XBox director of enforcement) he did provide proof to the mother. He has no obligation to provide that proof to anyone else.
Sweet. I should have replied to you instead. Yes, this.
My own son is becoming a gamer, and those patterns you're seeing are exactly, precisely why he plays games at all. He gets in the zone running the same loops over, and over, and over, and over again until he has them nailed down. That precision was honed by countless hours of repetition. (Variety is NOT his thing.) So in that specific skillset, he's going to eventually demonstrate a level of absolute mastery. Popping in another game would put him back to square one, but in his own element, he could really be described as superhuman in his ability.
Here's the timeline as I see it
At this point, one of three things are happening right now:
I figure, if it's the first, we'll hear about it again in a few days. Otherwise, they're going to quietly hide and hope the media attention goes away.
* I'm still trying to find a scenario where it actually matters that the kid is autistic (other than a means to get the media attention, or as some sort of "you have to let my son cheat - he's disabled" BS. But maybe I'm just extra-cynical this morning.