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Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Should TOS violators be able to compete in competitive game modes?
NastyPhish
Posts: 583 ★★★
I’m referring to accounts that have the BIG violations. Mercing, fraud units, piloting, botting.
To my understanding, when this happens, some of these accounts aren’t permanently banned. So in this case, I believe they should be permanently and unrecoverably banned from competitive play.
Arena, AW and AQ rank rewards at a minimum.
How is it fair that a single account or alliance finished above you/me last season when they had TOS violations on their account?
This game is an accumulation of your roster/resources. So if you’ve ever cheated to get ahead. Then you are still ahead. And still cheating.
I don’t think it’s “equal” that normal, regular players have to square off against these “boosted” accounts that gained an unfair, competitive advantage through cheating.
Where do you stand?
To my understanding, when this happens, some of these accounts aren’t permanently banned. So in this case, I believe they should be permanently and unrecoverably banned from competitive play.
Arena, AW and AQ rank rewards at a minimum.
How is it fair that a single account or alliance finished above you/me last season when they had TOS violations on their account?
This game is an accumulation of your roster/resources. So if you’ve ever cheated to get ahead. Then you are still ahead. And still cheating.
I don’t think it’s “equal” that normal, regular players have to square off against these “boosted” accounts that gained an unfair, competitive advantage through cheating.
Where do you stand?
Should TOS violators be able to compete in competitive game modes? 76 votes
They should always be permanently banned
75%
57 votes
They shouldn’t be able to do aw, aq or arena
10%
8 votes
They shouldn’t be able to gain aw, aq, arena or solo rank rewards.
6%
5 votes
It’s just fine how it is.
7%
6 votes
1
Comments
1. Im glad OP put in the caveat of "big violations". I know of plenty of cases of users just not being familiar with the minutiae of the rules and regs and using some type of screen capture or something that was not used for nefarious purposes but happened to break the TOS. There is definitely a difference there.
2. Kabam, to my knowledge, has over the years taken proven mercs and other TOS violators seriously and acted accordingly. It needs to be acknowledged that there is a line between what can and cannot be easily acted upon by Kabam, and proving cheating is often more difficult than just receiving a well written complaint.
3. I think that this is a fairly reasonable idea overall. I can't speak for why Kabam has chosen to do it the way that they have, but some version of this makes sense. If the account has somehow permanently benefitted from a form of cheating, then their account is ahead. That makes sense. Some cheating is caught by Kabam and punished (by docking points in AW, or in a certain event, etc.) in a way that the "cheater" account doesn't actually profit from the cheating in the long run, and thus isn't farther ahead than it would have been because of illicit activity. An argument could still be made to give some form of ban for these players, but I think it should be considered in a different bracket. Your statement that "if you’ve ever cheated to get ahead. Then you are still ahead. And still cheating." doesn't really always apply.
This is all from my perspective of hearing about things from forums, youtube, etc as someone who hasn't experienced their cheating response firsthand. If Kabam wanted to give some insight on this and I turned out to be wrong, I would gladly hear why.
That being said the only fix is to make the downside to cheating so unbelievably bad that it would prevent people from even considering it. And having a zero tolerance policy for accounts when it comes to competing.
I get the notion that people deserve second chances, and I also get the notion that there are degrees of TOS violations. Someone moving their brother in AW in tier 12 is a completely different situation from someone botting the arena to first place. I would not want to be disproportionately harsh when it comes to relatively innocent mistakes.
The way I would do it is: if you're caught blatantly cheating or otherwise abusing the game in a competitive game mode, and this has an impact on the top tiers of a competitive leaderboard (top 500 in arena, Platinum or higher in AW seasons, for example) then separate from the individual game ban (players are supposed to get seven day bans for first time offenses, and this is supposed to rise with successive violations until they are perma banned) they must surrender all rewards earned from that game mode during the period they were caught, and they are further banned from getting any leaderboard rewards from that game mode for an extended period of time. So if they draw a seven day ban for first time offense, they also draw a 30 day reward lockout for that game mode's leaderboards. They just don't show up in leaderboards, don't get those rewards, and don't displace others from those leaderboard spots. If they are in an alliance, they can continue to participate: their alliance can still receive leaderboard rewards, but they can't.
On the second flagrant violation, I would ban them from getting rewards from that entire game mode permanently, on top of any temp ban. There's no need for any higher penalty, because on the third strike that player would be perma banned anyway.
I also think there are some violations that do not deserve second chances. For example, two *identical* flagrant violations, and they should just be gone. If you bot the arena and get caught, then bot the arena again, you should just be immediately perma banned. If you cheat with mods in AW and are caught, the second time you cheat with mods in AW you should not get a third strike. If Kabam wants to give three strikes, they should at least be three separate different offenses.
One more thing: it is often said that it is very difficult to take rewards away after the fact in many situations because rewards can get used before the player is caught, making it difficult to retroactively remove those rewards. To resolve this situation, I would implement reward debt. Just like we have negative units for cases where players buy things then refund the units, I would implement negative rewards as punishment. If you want to take away Master level rewards from a player but they spent them already, simply apply a negative amount of every kind of reward you want to reverse. If you want to take away 30000 6* shards, just make their 6* shard balance be 30k lower even if this goes negative. If you want to take away a 6* Nexus crystal, give them one 6* Nexus as debt. The next time they earn one or buy one or otherwise receive one, it will go towards paying off their reward debt first.
The advantage of reward debt is that you can apply a higher debt than the rewards themselves were. Because just removing the rewards is not enough in my opinion: the penalty must not just reverse the ill-gotten gains, there needs to be punishment above that. You don't just take back the rewards, you also fine the player. So instead of just taking back the 30k shards, you hand them -45k shard debt. They lose the 30k, and on top of that they also lose the next 15k they earn.