2022 was the turning point: major publishers shipped kernel-level anti-cheat drivers one after another. Riot's Vanguard learned to read SMBIOS before user mode ever runs, and BattlEye in its summer-2022 update started weighing TPM 2.0 signals.
In practice that means a player who buys a new GPU or swaps an SSD can suddenly find their ban "lifted" — while honest players catch a false positive because of leftover virtual network adapters (Hyper-V, VMware, Hamachi).
In our support inbox, the share of "banned unfairly" tickets jumped from 18% to 41% in six months. Most of these resolve with a clean HWID profile rewrite plus a sweep of virtual interfaces — no Windows reinstall needed.
A separate story is cohort bans, where the system bans not one machine but the whole group of devices that ever connected from the same IP or shared a common MAC. Here HWID change only helps in tandem with cleaning up the anti-cheat's local registry.
The 2022 takeaway: HWID bans are no longer a one-device life sentence, but they're not a trivial inconvenience either. It's the new normal that both players and developers have to adapt to.