2022 was the turning point for HWID bans. One after another, major publishers moved their anti-cheats deeper into the system — Riot's Vanguard began reading hardware before Windows finishes loading, and BattlEye started weighing TPM 2.0 signals.
For players, this had two visible effects.
Honest players started catching false bans
The more identifiers an anti-cheat reads, the more ways a normal PC can look "suspicious". A very common trigger is leftover virtual network adapters — from Hyper-V, VMware or Hamachi. They look like extra hardware, and a strict anti-cheat can read that as tampering.
If you were banned and you did not cheat, the fix is usually two steps: change your HWID to a clean fingerprint, and remove the virtual network adapters you do not use. A full Windows reinstall is almost never necessary.
A ban stopped being tied to one PC
Because the fingerprint is now a combination of many values, swapping a single component — a new GPU, a different SSD — can be enough to look like a different machine. That cuts both ways: it is why an HWID change works, and also why an honest upgrade can accidentally change how an anti-cheat sees you.
The takeaway
Since 2022, an HWID ban is no longer a life sentence for one computer — but it is not a trivial nuisance either. It is the new normal players have to live with, and changing your HWID is the practical answer when a ban is unfair or mistaken.