It has nothing to do with this, and it also has nothing to do with piracy. We did, at one point, allow the use of the servers without valid console dumps and even provided a way to download “fake” dumps from our website, and it was just heavily abused by cheaters since there was no way to do bans outside of account bans which are easily bypassed, so we removed it
As mentioned, we require the use of valid console dumps as part of our security and moderation efforts. I’ve answered this same question many, many times on Discord, GitHub, and I’m pretty sure even on these forums
Unless we have an effective way to ban consoles, there will always be trivial ways to get around bans. Every Wii U and 3DS comes with a console-unique certificate which is cryptographically signed by Nintendo using a private key only Nintendo knows. The public keys for these certificates are known, however, which means that we can validate the signatures of these certificates to check if:
- They are legitimate
- They have been tampered with
When we ban a console, we are effectively banning this certificate. And since only Nintendo can sign these certificates, it means it’s impossible to bypass these bans without physically owning another legit console (or at least, having the dumps from one) since trying to modify an existing certificate, or sending an entirely fake one, won’t have a valid signature
This is the most effective way to ban cheaters, as there’s not really any way to bypass this without financial cost (and tbh if cheaters want to keep wasting their money buying burner consoles just to get them banned again, no skin off my back)
As mentioned previously Wiimmfi also has a similar setup, requiring dumps from real hardware to go online and for the same reasons. Here’s a quote from Reddit about it:
You definitely need a NAND backup from a real Wii or WiiU in order to play Mario Kart Wii on Wiimmfi using Dolphin. You probably also need that for other games.
We had to add this requirement because there were too many Dolphin players just getting a new identity minutes after they’ve been banned for cheating, making all the bans useless.
There is no trivial way to effectively ban cheaters outside of console bans (though, to be clear, we always start with account bans, and then only escalate to console bans if a console has many account bans)
Many people have all tried to suggest the same sort of “fixes” for this, but none of them come close to the effectiveness of console bans which can only be done via certificate banning, which requires the use of real hardware
There’s an entire issue on GitHub already which is dedicated to this exact topic, and it covers all the reasons why anything short of console bans doesn’t work long-term [Enhancement]: Update FAQ/installation docs to note that we require real consoles, even with emulators · Issue #317 · PretendoNetwork/website · GitHub