The real issue with gifting - Arena Botters

Grub

How about Kabam focuses on this aspect of the game and improves their ability to detect and ban botting? It’s absolutely still rampant in the game. I think you did a mass ban last gifting season.

However, why are these accounts allowed to run unaffected year round? People use these bots at all times of the year. Ban them for life.

Riptide

It’s a lot harder than you think to catch arena botters, plus they could just make new ones

Shadowstrike

Well it's easy to look at the ones that say "name one", "name two", "name three" and then those guys, what do you do then when you see somebody who isn't in an alliance and yet only really does Arena grinding? Are you going to automatically get rid of them too just because they're not in on a team?

DNA3000

Grub said:

How about Kabam focuses on this aspect of the game and improves their ability to detect and ban botting? It’s absolutely still rampant in the game. I think you did a mass ban last gifting season.

However, why are these accounts allowed to run unaffected year round? People use these bots at all times of the year. Ban them for life.

They do ban bots, but they just come back. Bot accounts have no real skin in the game, so it isn't a big loss if a bot account is banned. The bot operator just makes another one.

it is very difficult to ban a *person* from making new accounts. You can target the recipient of the botted resources, like the units if they are used during gifting. But there are practical limits to doing that aggressively as well.

The two biggest TOS issues at the moment - bots and mercs - are actually extremely difficult to target directly, because in both cases you have people who don't care much about what happens to the accounts they are using. Getting rid of them is a non-trivial problem.

In the past Kabam has done ban waves, especially just before things like the gifting event. The logic is if they ban the bots the instant they are detected, the bot farmer will just make more. But if those bots are banned just before the units would normally be used, there's no time to grind more, the bots and the resources inside them get removed from circulation before they can be transferred. However, this creates the problem of the bots causing problems in the meantime, especially if they get onto leaderboards. There are ways to try to address that as well, but unfortunately I can't say what Kabam might be thinking in that area.