ACE Anti-Cheat HWID Bans — How They Work & How to Bypass

ACE (Anti Cheat Expert) is Tencent's proprietary anti-cheat system. Originally developed for the Chinese gaming market — where it protects titles with hundreds of millions of players — ACE has expanded globally through games like Delta Force, Arena Breakout Infinite, Wuthering Waves, and Strinova.

Tencent built ACE to handle the scale and intensity of competitive gaming in Asia, where cheating is particularly prevalent. The system is aggressive in its approach to hardware bans, often issuing them faster than Western anti-cheats. ACE monitors system state continuously during gameplay, not just at launch, and can trigger mid-session bans if it detects a previously flagged hardware profile.

As more Tencent-published titles launch globally, ACE is becoming a more common anti-cheat for Western players to encounter. Understanding how it fingerprints hardware is essential for anyone dealing with a hardware ban in an ACE-protected game.

ACE collects hardware identifiers through a driver component that monitors system calls and directly queries hardware controllers. Its detection model was refined over years of protecting massive multiplayer titles in China, where cheating tools are widespread and sophisticated. The identifiers ACE enumerates include:

Disk drive serial numbers — ACE reads firmware-level serials from all connected storage devices. It queries the storage controller directly rather than relying on Windows APIs, making simple registry-based spoofing ineffective.

Motherboard serial number and system UUID — pulled from SMBIOS tables. ACE checks both the board serial and the chassis serial, providing redundancy if one value is unavailable on certain hardware.

Network adapter identifiers — MAC addresses from all physical adapters, with filtering to exclude virtual machines and VPN adapters. ACE also reads adapter model names to detect inconsistencies between spoofed MACs and reported hardware.

GPU identifiers — ACE reads the GPU serial number and device ID. This is less common among anti-cheats and adds an additional identifier that many spoofers miss.

Windows registry identifiers — MachineGUID, product ID, and the computer SID are logged as supplementary signals.

ACE's matching algorithm is weighted toward hardware identifiers over software-based ones. It tolerates minor software changes (like a Windows update changing a registry value) but is very sensitive to hardware changes. The system maintains a confidence score — if enough identifiers match a banned profile, the account is flagged regardless of whether some values have changed.

ACE does not currently propagate bans across unrelated games the way EAC does. However, bans are shared between games published by the same studio if they use the same ACE deployment. A ban in Delta Force does not automatically carry to Wuthering Waves, but this behavior may change as Tencent unifies its anti-cheat infrastructure.

TraceX rewrites every identifier category that ACE monitors, including the GPU identifiers that many competitors overlook. When you run TraceX before launching an ACE-protected game:

Disk drive and motherboard serials are replaced with clean values that pass ACE's format validation. The spoofed serials are structurally correct for each hardware type, so ACE's sanity checks accept them.

MAC addresses are regenerated with valid OUI prefixes. ACE's adapter model cross-referencing is handled — the spoofed addresses correspond to real hardware manufacturers.

GPU device identifiers are masked with clean values, eliminating the additional fingerprint dimension that ACE uses beyond what most anti-cheats collect.

Windows registry identifiers are rotated to values consistent with a clean installation.

TraceX operates beneath ACE's observation layer. ACE's driver reads the spoofed values as if they were genuine hardware, builds its fingerprint from them, and finds no match in its ban database. The machine appears completely new.