It’s a shame but ultimately it’s probably the only solution to preventing the real world trade side of the game. It should also be noted that Kabam aren’t the first company who have been effectively forced into making such bold steps to protect their game’s integrity. I know it’s one that I mention quite a lot as it’s the game I play the most, but RuneScape turned off trading between players in 2007 to attempt to halt the buying and selling of in game currency.
Black markets in gaming is a massive industry and I really do feel for devs who have to manage the 99% of legit players alongside that 1% who’ll ruin it for the rest of us.
So many people seem to miss the Gifting Badge. I don't. Not just coz it was another cheating tool. Those times was a begging fest everywhere.
The Global? Constant "Give me revive!"
Alliance? Lemme take a trip down memory lane.
- There was always those who did zero preparation to tackle big content, then couldn't join AQ or AW coz champs were stuck and they didn't want to backout so it was up to team mates to bail them out.
- There were the ones who would ask for free stuff every once in a while and never pay it back.
- There were the fresh new recruits who just as the Welcomes were over, would announce they were just about to beat so and so... but needed help.
And the internal struggle of "do we help and watch yet another leecher quit on us as soon as he's got what he wanted", "Do we refuse and risk them quitting coz we look unfriendly".
We did enventually settle for No Asking for Items, Please. A rule which someone would always break at least once a week...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but an innocent person would not be in that situation in the first place.
Kabam has lots of login data from us. So only out of the ordinary instances get flagged (like suddenly appearing in a different country for a day and back in the original country shortly). If someone genuinely traveled, I'm sure they would have some sort of proof that they did.
An innocent person could easily find themselves in this situation. A lot of the circumstantial evidence comes simply from VPN use. Obviously the occasional VPN use that doesn't result in account altering rewards isn't going to bother Kabam, but there are a ton of legitimate reasons for using VPNs and simply forgetting to turn off your VPN when you access this game shouldn't result in negative consequences.
One of the reasons I use a VPN is solely so I can access this game. MCOC isn't region locked from my country, but the routing to Kabam's servers is stuffed from my ISP. I cannot connect reliably without a VPN, ironically, I don't even have to use a VPN server outside of my own country, just one that isn't the default route of my provider.
Require them to do Legends runs at their “home” location. Anyone who magically “took a trip” during their legend run is automatically disqualified.
That’s a nuclear option I could get behind. Sucks for people actually taking a trip and doing it, but that has to be a very minimal amount of people. MOST of these magical trips have to be mercs
I agree, lay out a statement in the legends announcement to state that the geographic location of completion for your legends run must be maintained for at least 3 days to be considered for rewards. If they are truly traveling, it’s likely they’re going to remain in that area for a few days and certainly for more time than it takes to complete the legends run and return (assuming the mercs are logging in from a distant location from the original player.
All these dislikes are from mercs and people who hire them
Have you ever tried talking to one of them? They seriously dont see anything wrong with what they are doing. Scum of the earth all of them
I'll get downvote bombed for this, but you have a very narrow worldview if you think they are the "Scum of the earth".
Of course they don't see anything wrong with it, it's a source of income for them. Hell, the only thing that they're taking away from players is a digital achievement, that only holds value in the players' imaginations anyway. They're not even losing you money or something of material value(maybe the invested time would be wasted but let's be fair the time spent playing the game is always wasted if you're looking to get material returns for your time), because it's not like Kabam took money from a player who lost out on a title.
I'm not saying what they do is cool, just that it is not fair to judge someone's character based on actions/decisions which have no moral implications anyway.
That income is fraudulent. The game belongs to Kabam, and all the contents therein. It's actually a form of racketeering. The act of selling services for someone else's product is illegal, and while no one is talking lawsuit, it very well could be if there was a desire and a name. This flippant approach that no one is actually being harmed, is rationalization. It's wrong from a legal sense, it's wrong for the Players to compete at a disadvantage, it's wrong for Kabam to try and maintain fair content, and it's wrong for the buyer because they're not growing on their own. This is anything but benign.
I mean....granted, I can't judge them as people. Nor would I, really. I don't know them, and I'm not in the business of making value judgments on others. The behavior and the actions are on the table, though. I was taught at a very early age that stealing is wrong. IDK about anyone else. Lol.
The people saying Mercs aren't the problem are the same ones who believe exploits are ok and kabam should keep pro-player bugs. It's insane how people aren't in support of ridding the game of people who ruin the game.
To stop mercs, it’s might actually be very straightforward.
You just need to make the penalty to be found out harsh enough to discourage people from mercing or allowing mercs to access their accounts.
In the world of security, we generally talk about the three elements to securing anything from bank vaults to computer accounts. One: make the requirements to compromise as high as reasonably possible, to slow attackers down and force them to expose themselves for a significant period of time. Two: monitor for breaches so you can detect and potential catch (or at least deter) attackers. Three: make the penalty for failure much higher than the value of the protected resource.
It is difficult to make penalties in MCOC more than annoying, because at moderate to high levels of mercing both the mercs and the customers would probably be prepared to buy replacement accounts on the grey market to replace anything that gets banned. It is possible to make things more troublesome and expensive though, which falls into the category of bright ideas I have that I'm sharing with Kabam only for now.
Seriously...if you can confirm cheating, why not perma-ban them? Because that would solve most of this.
But I'm sure we can guess why they don't....
The reason we're not able to take action is that we can't 100% prove who broke the Terms of Service, which means that we wouldn't be able to hand out suspensions either. We also DO take action on accounts that break the Terms of Service, so not sure what you're thinking here, because accounts of all shapes and sizes have received Suspensions, including permanent ones.
If you were able to identify the violators, but not 100% that it was a coincidence, why can't you just take the action, and those 2-3 legitimate players (if there were any at all) who really did their legends run during a holiday can contact support and prove their right with an evidence of the trip like a ticket or an invoice of the accomodation or something
That would be trivially easy to photoshop. It would be easy for the airlines to prove it was fake, but it would not be for a video game operator without a legal warrant.
Require them to do Legends runs at their “home” location. Anyone who magically “took a trip” during their legend run is automatically disqualified.
That’s a nuclear option I could get behind. Sucks for people actually taking a trip and doing it, but that has to be a very minimal amount of people. MOST of these magical trips have to be mercs
As it turns out, this is not the best option for reasons I will not discuss publicly.
I will say that Kabam hunting down mercs has up to now been a game of cat and mouse, and the mice keep learning how to better avoid the cat. The game need to change to guillotine and mouse, where the mouse doesn't get a chance to learn how to avoid the guillotine. We don't need to train the cat to be smarter, we need to change the game into something the mouse no longer wants to play.
That's theoretically possible.
I believe the "home" option also would mean violation of some privacy terms. It would just be a mess.
Probably not, because it would be opt in, just like the Showdown wasn't a violation of privacy terms even though the players had to agree to be video recorded - not just their gameplay, but their own persons.
The real problem is that there are tactical responses to forcing players to "be home" and there's absolutely nothing to be gained from teaching mercs one more counter-surveillance technique. We've basically been doing the analogous equivalent to breeding resistant bacteria. We find one thing the mercs are doing and ban them, they figure out what that one thing was based on who was banned and do something else. Eventually, through dumb random chance you breed a semi-competent merc.
Instead you want to deploy a spectrum of overlapping drugs designed to give the microbes no way to evolve resistance. They are just banned, and they don't know why.
This might be a dumb question, but how do they find a merc then anyways? My understanding was Kabam are able to see the location of people who log in to your account. They see that someone or multiple someone’s from much different location than the “original” location are logging in as well as the “original” location. That would signal to me that this “original” person has shared their account information with one or multiple other somebody’s. That understanding seems to be justified by their announcement today.
Therefore, I’m not entirely sure where the harm would be in Kabam coming out and stating anyone not completing the Legend run in their home location is automatically disqualified
It is not a dumb question. It is internetworking 101, internet fundamentals 150, network security 205, and basic forensic analysis 301.
are these actual numbers? or just proverbial?
As @Ebony_Naw states, it is more metaphorical than literal. If you're familiar with how college courses are generally numbered (which varies a bit from place to place), 1xx class are usually first year introductory stuff, with the 101 and 102 classes usually the really intro stuff everyone has to take in that subject. 2xx classes are second year intermediate classes, and 3xx class are usually deep undergraduate technical classes in the subject. The numbers were just evocative short hand.
Comments
Black markets in gaming is a massive industry and I really do feel for devs who have to manage the 99% of legit players alongside that 1% who’ll ruin it for the rest of us.
The Global? Constant "Give me revive!"
Alliance? Lemme take a trip down memory lane.
- There was always those who did zero preparation to tackle big content, then couldn't join AQ or AW coz champs were stuck and they didn't want to backout so it was up to team mates to bail them out.
- There were the ones who would ask for free stuff every once in a while and never pay it back.
- There were the fresh new recruits who just as the Welcomes were over, would announce they were just about to beat so and so... but needed help.
And the internal struggle of "do we help and watch yet another leecher quit on us as soon as he's got what he wanted", "Do we refuse and risk them quitting coz we look unfriendly".
We did enventually settle for No Asking for Items, Please. A rule which someone would always break at least once a week...
Yeh I was stoked when all that ended.
One of the reasons I use a VPN is solely so I can access this game. MCOC isn't region locked from my country, but the routing to Kabam's servers is stuffed from my ISP. I cannot connect reliably without a VPN, ironically, I don't even have to use a VPN server outside of my own country, just one that isn't the default route of my provider.
It is difficult to make penalties in MCOC more than annoying, because at moderate to high levels of mercing both the mercs and the customers would probably be prepared to buy replacement accounts on the grey market to replace anything that gets banned. It is possible to make things more troublesome and expensive though, which falls into the category of bright ideas I have that I'm sharing with Kabam only for now.