This is what happens if you "buy" Activision/Blizzard software - they're driving the service model to the max and will exploit it as much and as deeply as possible. They're the worst of the worst and anyone familiar with their games will tell you the same.
In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect you as a customer, which is very rare in AAA. These companies hate you. No one will listen to you and nothing will change, as it's extremely profitable. No one will regulate it. In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
its not just Activision/Blizzard. Single player bans are in a lot of AAAs.
> In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect
Could always pick up a copy of IDA...
> In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.
As a side note if you want some fun you should fire up wireshark when you're playing a game and watch how much "metadata" is sent from your PC to the game company. They know more about you than your doctor in some cases. EasyAntiCheat and Denuvo seem to be the worst offenders.
This is why my games run in a Windows VM, which touches none of my personal info. The most they know about me is my dark mode preference, monitor size / model, CPU, and GPU. Everything else is abstracted. It can't see any of my storage space. Only the virtual disks I have for booting the VM, and games.
A lot of games anticheat detects and bans if you're in a VM. It seems like it is only for multiplayer though (for now anyway...until they think you might be getting free DLC pants for your single player character).
A lot of them are pretty easy to bypass. EAC is one. Been playing a game with a friend that uses it for the last month or so, and it's been smooth, ever since I must've discovered what they use to check.
It's a disassembler/binary analysis tool, widely used for creating, for example, cracks/executable patches for games and other programs. https://hex-rays.com/ida-pro/
Google is the worst of the worst. At least you can easily choose not to play Activison games. It's much harder to choose not to participate in the Google ecosystem, and actions in one service or account can have deep repercussions to other services and "associated" accounts. Appealing to an actual Google support human being is seemingly impossible
In the end, there's nothing you can do but to put your money into games that respect you as a customer, which is very rare in AAA. These companies hate you. No one will listen to you and nothing will change, as it's extremely profitable. No one will regulate it. In 3 weeks, a dev there will notice that some updater code can break game files which flags people's accounts or something like that, it'll be quietly patched and everybody will forget about it.