Kantor

PC's Stripe account is down at the time of this post, went through Mar1k/Razen to get a key. Was smooth and easy with no issues.

You are only looking at it from the consumer point of view though, not the business point of view. Let's assume he had done that, shut it down at the moment of detection without discovering HOW it was detected. Do people get banned? Well maybe a few from the initial detection but now after he freezes everything, the anti-cheat company would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have confirmed they nailed his users. This would allow Ricochet to rapidly pivot their detection method after confirmation and identify other markers off of that initial detection to ban users the second they inject outright. So he would patch what he thought was the issue, give the "All good" message and then bang ALL of his users would be banned and he then would lose his subscriber base in totality. Now, again is it totally morally correct the way he went about this? No. The correct response should have been a shutdown with a reason unrelated to detection and he should have rolled multiple test accounts to verify the detection vector. However, that would have only been feasible IF he had already been doing this but because he got a bit cocky with his detection rate. Ricochet hedged a bet that he would not do that and they were right. He has since stated he will no longer use that old approach and recognized it as an error. Sadly, this isn't some groundbreaking revelation. This is damn near an industry standard across the board these days, if you tell a company (Any company) "Hey, sacrifice 25% of your userbase now to retain 75% later or keep 100% of your userbase now to lose 90% later?" Every company on the planet will chose Option 1. Hell, there are providers out there that knowingly sell detected cheats at time of sale. In terms of this being some backstab or exit scam it doesn't quite fit the bill. Everyone takes a risk cheating, the ban was already issued the best course of action was to learn as much of it as he could to punch back in round 2.

Don't get me wrong, it absolutely sucks as a consumer but this is an understood "Risk" you take anytime you inject a cheat at any point. This used to be commonly understood but as the internet matured and we have full on corporate setups for game cheats this shared understanding went away. I feel like he fairly explained the thought process and thus the decision born of that. Had he revealed the error but not resolved the methods of detection not only would these initial users be banned but potentially the entire user-base as it would have given Ricochet the upper hand. By sacrificing the pawns he was able to save the Queen (The long term, multi-month subscriber userbase,.) The only metric in which I feel he failed, and this is just bad change management really is not having a review process in some form post-update. This could have been potentially avoided with patching down-time and test accounts. He did acknowledge this error though. Sadly, no provider or cheat will ever be 100% non-detected for all of time. It's a constant power struggle between the Anti-Cheat companies and Cheat Providers. Akin to Virus and Anti-Virus software. All said and done, was it handled great? No. Could it have been handled much worse? Oh fuck yeah. Do I think that breaches a line of integrity with his userbase? I don't think so. Other providers have just cut and run or knowingly rolled false detection's while continuing to sell as UD.