Ban List, Admin Panel, Classic Offensive tweaks, and a few more things

Release Notes 24 January 2017

Hi everyone,

As many of you have noticed our team here has been incredibly busy since the new year, and this week has been no different! While we are working on some big features that will be coming soon, we’ve got a handful of updates to share with you that will benefit both our user base and our organizers.

TL;DR:

Public ban list visible to everyone (limited to cheating bans)

Anti-Cheat statistics update

Admin Panel for Organizers now live for everyone

Added blacklist to tournaments to ban players from specific tournaments

Fixing scalability and bugs of the Client Anti-Cheat

Tweaks and bug fixes on Classic Offensive

Public Ban List

Since we released our Anti-Cheat (AC) client back in December, we have had many of our players requesting more information in regards to how the AC has affected the FACEIT platform. In an effort to provide information, we have released a few posts over the past few weeks to give an insight into the quantity and variety of bans that have been issued from our AC.

Today we’ve gone one step further and have made a Public Ban List available to you. This list shows players that have been banned due to the identification of cheating. You can find the ban list here: http://www.faceit.com/en/bans

A screenshot of the Ban List (with fake data)

Additionally, evaluating the efficacy of Anti-Cheats is not always easy. Below you can find some statistics on the amount of players that have been banned from FACEIT since our last post on the topic and how we look at these numbers in order to improve the client Anti-Cheat:

Stats between January 8th and January 20th

As you can see from the stats above two things improved since last update:

The first thing is that we started detecting cheaters way faster, moving some bans into the direct bans category instead of waiting for ban waves.

The main stat we look at to analyze this is the median matches played (3 matches) rather than the average (29.6 matches). This is because the average includes new detections that were recently introduced and these new detections ban old accounts that have played a lot of matches thanks to cheats that used to be undetected.

The median instead answers a different set of questions:

How quickly do we take action against cheaters that can already be detected?

How quickly can we update detections of known cheats?

How many of the bans are thanks to continuous monitoring?

This is one of the most difficult things to do as implementing direct bans can lead to an easier reverse engineering and updating the detection quickly enough is a challenging job.

The second thing is that we added additional detection to the ban waves, which found and banned some very old accounts that were previously undetected.

To close, you can divide the bans in to segments: i) a very large number of bans within just a few matches and ii) new bans to a few (~200) very old accounts thanks to new detection methodologies.