Redditor buys used CPU, turns out it was banned on Valorant and they are SoL

2OEH8eoCRo0

When did video games get so serious that we need to do these things? Ridiculous.

m-p-3

We'll eventually need something like CarFax where you can look for hardware bans for multiple softwares and games before you purchase a part..

yusyusyus

uhh.. i dont think amd or intel has even attempted to make a s/n accessible on their CPUs since the big stink in the 90's.

crostlybostly

Video Game has to be one of the areas enshitification is most visible to me. Unfinished games being released, no LAN, paywalled features, pay to win, games unusable after support ends, etc. I think we are due for surge of people just playing classic games and boycotting all the new BS that is coming out. Piracy should be encouraged as a check and balance against shitty UX.

orbital-decay

That's a well known risk when buying used hardware, although I doubt a blacklisted CPU could do that alone. I used to host a bunch of pretty popular servers for survival games many of which used hardware ID checks, and we had about a dozen people banned due to this in ~5 years. We had extremely thorough investigations and they were 100% clean.

tamimio

Same happens on smartphones btw with some apps that take the hardware fingerprint

niels8472

Big game needs you to install a rootkit to play. But hey you can trust people selling crack^wloot boxes to kids right.

wxw

TIL you can ban CPUs

xnx

When the hardware you bought snitches on you, it is clear that you do not own it. Somewhere we got things ass-backward. The human tells the computer what it can/can't do, not the other way around.

rjh29

The Denuvo hack uses Windows Hypervisor to intercept cpuid, maybe that would work?

richwater

Everyone here is talking about how games shouldn't have the ability to do this while not understanding that without it, most online games (PVP specifically) turn into a cheaters paradise and ruin it for all paying customers. Riot Vanguard has all but eliminated cheaters in Valorant (sporadic instances and DMA hardware can still be used), but the vast (99.9+%) of games are clean because of what they did. Customers place serious value in that.

oliwarner

So this is bullshit, right? We're all going along like it really happened but it doesn't smell right. If they only bought a CPU and CPUs don't have serial IDs (since P3s and some kooky server CPUs), how could Valorant fingerprint it?

m-p-3

I think at this point the issue is between the buyer and the reseller. If I bought a CPU and I wasn't able to play a game, I'd ask for a refund and ship back the CPU to them at their expense.

Fire-Dragon-DoL

And this should be illegal. This is blocking resale and creating waste for no reason.