HWID Bans: How They Differ From Account and IP Bans, and What To Do Next

A HWID (hardware ID) is a fingerprint of your computer assembled from hardware identifiers. The anti-cheat computes it at launch and sends it to the server alongside the session. When a player is “hardware banned”, the blacklist entry is not the account — it is the fingerprint. Any account that connects from that machine is refused.

Three ban types people confuse

Row three is where money gets wasted. Buying a replacement account after an account ban is a normal recovery path. Buying one after a hardware ban is a donation: the new account is usually banned before the first full session ends.

A separate case is a league platform profile ban, such as FACEIT. It leaves your game account intact but locks you out of the platform, and the platform keeps its own fingerprint database independent of the game’s.

What actually gets read

No vendor publishes the full list; opacity is part of the defence. Combining public documentation, Windows APIs and community observation, a fingerprint typically draws on:

• Motherboard serial and UUID from SMBIOS;
• Storage serial numbers — HDD, SSD, NVMe;
• MAC addresses of network adapters, virtual ones included;
• CPU identifiers — model, feature set, sometimes platform-level serial data;
• Windows software identifiers — MachineGuid, install ID, machine name;
• TPM data where the module is mandatory (Vanguard, FACEIT AC on Windows 11);
• less often GPU, monitor EDID and BIOS values.

Those inputs are hashed into one or several values. The important design choice is redundancy: multiple sources exist specifically so that changing one or two of them does not reset the identity. Which inputs a given anti-cheat uses, and how heavily each is weighted, is not publicly confirmed.

Why bans spread to accounts you did not play on

Beyond hardware, publishers link accounts through payment methods, e-mail addresses, IP history, login devices, shared matches and trades. That is why a ban often takes down everything associated with the offending account. It is not a hardware ban; it is account linking, running on the same principle as fingerprinting: many weak signals combine into one confident one.

Cost of failure varies with the business model. In Escape from Tarkov a ban destroys a purchased copy of the game, so the stakes are much higher than in free-to-play titles such as Valorant. In Rust an EAC ban reaches every account that has launched the game on the same machine.

What to do after a hardware ban

1. Identify the ban type with the two tests described in the FAQ above. Everything else depends on the answer.
2. Do not buy a replacement account yet. While the fingerprint is blacklisted, every new account is consumable. Fix the machine question first, buy the account second.
3. Appeal once — and only if you genuinely believe it is a false positive. False positives happen and do get reversed. Appealing after real third-party software use mostly confirms your interest in the topic to a support agent.
4. Never pay for “ban removal”. No service deletes records from a vendor’s database. What is sold under that name is either a spoofer under a different label or an outright scam.
5. Address the machine. The clean options are a different PC or replacing components. The technical option is a spoofer, with its real limits: it changes what is reported, it does not revoke an existing ban and it does nothing about account or payment links.
6. Rebuild your launch routine so you do not repeat the same path — see the safe launch checklist.

What a hardware ban is not

It does not brick or physically mark hardware. The PC works, other games launch, nothing is written into your BIOS. The record lives on the vendor’s server, and your machine simply reports its identifiers honestly every time it starts. Which is why every practical discussion about hardware bans reduces to one question — what your machine says about itself — and to accepting that this question is never solved permanently.

For the full recovery sequence, read what to do after a ban.