“Our System Detected Cheating”: Is That Enough for a Permanent Ban?

More than 82 hours of uninterrupted play, together with an analysis of in-game travel distances, helped establish that a player had used scripts in a dispute over an account ban.

Could an ordinary player do that?

Generally, no.

The court thought so too.

In the case of Ma v. the game companies, reported by the Beijing Internet Court, the court considered the server records and the player’s failure to produce contrary evidence. It found that the companies’ evidence met the civil standard of a high degree of probability and dismissed the player’s claims. The court’s report states that the judgment had taken effect.

A game’s anti-cheat assessment, whether made by a person or an algorithm, can certainly provide grounds for banning an account. But once a dispute reaches court, the judge needs more than a breezy customer-service response saying that “cheating was detected.”

There needs to be some hard evidence. Hard enough to make a convincing rebuttal difficult.

Wielding the user agreement still requires a justified target

Banning cheats, scripts and modifications to game data serves a legitimate purpose: protecting fair play. Fairness matters increasingly in the games industry. Whether a game is PvP or PvE, sustained fair operation helps retain players and keep revenue coming in.

Yes, these are standard terms. Yes, players often tick the box without reading them. But the fact that a company drafted the rules does not, by itself, make them invalid.

In practice, the questions are how severe a measure the agreement permits, whether that measure is fair and defensible, and whether the player received adequate notice.

Make the important terms stand out

Restrictions on paid items, temporary suspensions, permanent bans from one game and termination across an entire platform all affect important player interests. Article 496 of China’s Civil Code requires the party supplying standard terms to provide reasonable notice of the terms so that they attract the other party’s attention. If a failure to do so leaves the player unaware of, or unable to understand, the relevant provision, the player may argue that it never became part of the contract.

That makes bold text, italics and prominent notices worth considering. The point is to actually attract the player’s attention.

Even where the notice is sufficiently prominent, the substance remains open to scrutiny. Does the provision unfairly exempt the company from liability or restrict the player’s principal rights?

Clicking “I agree” does not settle everything

A company cannot necessarily relax just because “the player clicked Agree when registering.”

Article 10 of the Supreme People’s Court’s 2023 interpretation on the General Provisions of the Contract Book of the Civil Code makes clear that checkboxes and pop-ups do not, on their own, establish compliance with the duties to draw attention to and explain relevant terms.

Pre-ticked boxes must also be avoided. Players must tick the box themselves to ensure validity.

The company should also produce the version of the agreement in use at the time and evidence of how it was displayed, to support its position on the agreement’s content and validity.

Accepting server records in one case does not mean accepting them in every case

In Ma’s case, specific gameplay records and behavioural analysis supported one another. After considering both sides’ explanations, the court concluded that the player had cheated.

Did the court simply trust the company’s server records?

It would be more accurate to say that the evidence was solid enough that there was no convincing way to challenge it.

An online game is played remotely. The operator and the player are in different places. Requiring the company to film the player actually running a cheat would set the bar too high. Yet a screenshot containing nothing more than a “violation” label, with no explanation of where that conclusion came from, may be insufficient to pass judgment on the player.

A screenshot can be evidence. The question is what it proves: actual cheating, or merely that the company once labelled the account as having cheated?

Article 67 of China’s Civil Procedure Law requires each party to provide evidence for its assertions.

The player needs to establish their connection to the account, the restriction on service and the losses claimed. A company relying on a breach of the rules to terminate service should substantiate both the alleged misconduct and its contractual basis in the user agreement. It cannot demand that the player first prove they have never used any cheating tool before the company explains its reasons.

The source code need not be public, but the explanation must be convincing

An examination of the evidence may ask: which account was banned? When did the alleged abnormal behaviour occur, and in which matches? How were the server records generated? How were they extracted? Is anything missing from the export?

Most importantly, why does the alleged “abnormal behaviour” point to cheating? Why would it not be a bug, a network problem, a data error, a quirk in the statistics or simply a player with extraordinary stamina?

Every case has its own claims and facts, so these questions are examples. The central point is that a company cannot simply produce a record marked “abnormal” and declare that the player cheated. It needs to set out the facts clearly and rule out the other reasonable explanations. What remains can then be a conclusion that cannot reasonably be disputed.

Operators can take some reassurance: they generally will not be required to provide their cheating-detection algorithms or their entire anti-cheat rulebook.

Anti-cheat rules may involve trade secrets, and requiring algorithms to be made public could help cheaters evade detection. Resolving a dispute does not automatically require the company to disclose its complete source code to every player. If the dispute is serious enough to warrant examining those materials, the company can ask the court to review them confidentially.

Players have an evidential burden too

Repeating “I’ve played for years” or “I’ve spent a lot of money” is less useful than a clear appeal. Identify the account, the time of the ban, the stated reason and the points you dispute. Ask which contractual provision was applied and when the alleged abnormal behaviour occurred. Politely ask the company to check exactly what conduct led to the decision.

Most importantly, ask for a formal written response.

Preserve the full ban notice, support tickets, relevant recordings, available login records and payment receipts. Keep the original audio and screen recordings intact rather than casually editing them. Preserve the surrounding customer-service conversation and its timestamps as far as possible.

If the matter reaches court, those materials can be submitted as evidence. Where evidence may be lost or become difficult to obtain later, a party may apply to the court for evidence preservation in accordance with the law. If there are objective reasons why server records cannot be obtained independently during litigation, the party can provide specific leads and request that the court investigate and collect them.

A company that controls relevant evidence and refuses to produce it without a legitimate reason may face adverse consequences. Under Article 95 of the civil evidence provisions, the court may, where the prescribed conditions are met, accept the opposing party’s assertion that the withheld evidence would be unfavourable to the party controlling it.

That still requires a judicial assessment. A company does not automatically lose merely because a player asks for records and it fails to produce every requested item.

If the ban is found to be wrongful, the player can seek remedies such as restoring service, restoring data that was improperly affected and compensation for actual loss.

In current practice, however, money spent topping up a game account is generally treated as consumer spending. Once the player has topped up and purchased in-game items, for example by completing gacha pulls, that spending is treated as having been consumed.

How much can be recovered, and in what form, still depends on the particular circumstances.

At the very least, a player will not necessarily recover everything they have spent, and will not receive a refund plus additional compensation of three times the price.

References

• Beijing Internet Court case report: player sues game companies after an account ban for cheating, published by the Beijing political and legal affairs portal on 18 January 2022, credited to the Beijing Internet Court; the court’s English-language report of the same case, 23 March 2022. The reports state that the judgment took effect but do not disclose a case number; they are not cited as the full judgment.
• Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China, effective 1 January 2021; Articles 127, 496, 497 and 577 are relevant here.
• Supreme People’s Court interpretation on the General Provisions of the Contract Book of the Civil Code, effective 5 December 2023; Article 10.
• Consumer Rights Protection Law of the People’s Republic of China, as amended in 2013, amendments effective 15 March 2014; Articles 2 and 26.
• Supreme People’s Court provisions on evidence in civil proceedings, as amended in 2019, effective 1 May 2020; including Articles 93 and 95.
• Civil Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China, as amended in 2023, amendments effective 1 January 2024; Articles 67, 71 and 84.