Would you install EasyAntiCheat or another app to be allowed to Participate in BG? [dev insight]
K00shMaan
Member Posts: 1,289 ★★★★
With cheating/modding being such a hot topic within Battlegrounds (and potentially other game modes like Arena), I'm wondering what the communities reception would be towards being required to install and be running a 3rd Party App such as EasyAntiCheat in order to participate in a specific game mode or MCOC itself.
Would you install EasyAntiCheat or another app to be allowed to Participate in BG? [dev insight] 204 votes
Yes, I would install AntiCheat software in order to participate in Battlegrounds
36%
75 votes
I would prefer not to install AntiCheat software but would if it was a requirement to play Battlegrounds
18%
37 votes
No, I would not install any 3rd Party App in order to participate in Battlegrounds
43%
88 votes
Other, Please Explain
1%
4 votes
Post edited by Kabam Jax on
13
Comments
To that regard, isn’t something already built in? All these people posting ban messages for using bluestacks seem to be automated bannings.
If you have a game mode where someone can do millions, I think in some cases billions of hit point damaged in one hit, but it can’t be detected within a few minutes then the mode has failed. I enjoy the mode immensely but coming up against cheaters destroys the will to play. I don’t get my points back, my elders marks back. I lose placed in victory track and gladiators circuit. But the cheaters continue on.
It’s upto Kabam to solve this, but for me to get another app.
We all wish there was an easy solution, and if there was Kabam would have implemented it already.
The problem is not Kabam, it is the cheaters. Direct your anger at them.
This is kind of what tripped the Quake bans. But on the opposite side. 0 hits received/no dsmage 0 hits done dead War opponents. It tripped and a few people got banned.
Yeah they got overturned but they were still banned. And even a few days, especially with no compensation can hurt you.
I like this idea! However, regardless of how many people would be willing to install additional software, we'd inevitably lose a large percentage of people who were not. We love our massively dedicated Summoners, but MCOC still needs to be casual-Summoner-friendly, as we love them too.
let me just say: I appreciate that you're taking the time to brainstorm and present new ideas and solutions, as opposed to being swept up in a never ending storm of frustration with the modder situation.
I think conversations like these go a long way toward providing context for how complex this issue is. It's an issue without a simple solution, and is something without a lot of visual evidence for you all; I know that can be frustrating.
Every time I address the topic of modding/cheating, I want to reassure everyone that this is being worked on consistently behind the scenes. The nature of the beast is that not a lot of the changes are visually apparent, and it's not always as quick as the snap of the fingers. We are working on ways to provide more meaningful information about actions taken throughout, and at the end of, BG seasons.
So, the issue can be massively oversimplified into two distinct areas to illustrate what's happening.
Firstly, the specific tech being used to remove modders does all tasks one at a time. After investigating a claim, when we decide to remove a modder... we have to issue an account ban, zero out their leaderboard points and remove their contributions to solo and alliance quests and then remove them visually from the leaderboard. The tech doesn't do all of this at once, so we have people working hard to do each individual task. We are working on developing further tech to streamline the process, but as it stands, the priority is ensuring players get accurate rewards and modders get none. Therefore, the leaderboard purge, as we call it, is the very last step.
The second is an issue of perspective. We all understand the frustration from encountering a modder. Say you match up against a modder, you get angry, you post their account in the forum and it get's taken down. Now you think nothing is being done about it and you check the next couple days to see they're still a live account, and now you're double angry, right? Makes sense.
But that's not how it works.
The team is going through in-game reports in the order they're received. Posting something somewhere outside of the queue, doesn't give it a higher priority than the reports already received. Just because one cheater is more egregious than another, doesn't make them a higher priority either. They get added to the (long) list just the same as everyone else. The turn around time feels long, because it is, and that's when people most feel like "nothing is being done," but it does not indicate it's not being taken seriously, or that people aren't actively working on it.
The community appreciates your transparency on these such processes, thank you for the insight and perspective!
I say a season coz phone devices can change owners per se, but wouldnt exclude the possibility of a new phone user being banned for owning the same device.
This might be the best, most transparent update on the topic yet. A sincere thank you, this really illuminates quite a bit. I’m the spirit of 360 feedback I would suggest that the leaderboard get a little more priority in addressing cheaters. It’s like a bright neon sign broadcasting the opposite of this thoughtful messaging, with a possible side effect of attracting even more cheaters
Investigate, confirm modder -> Ban. Investigate - confirm -> Ban. Permanent ban. Then those players can't influence the leaderboard, other players placement, can't score points in the solo/alliance events.
Then, you can do all that other stuff. Clean up the game mode first, sort out the rewards later.
You can't have people modding for an entire season, ruining the experience for legit players. I bet most of us would be willing to wait for rewards longer at the end of a season while you sort out the points. You could even extend the off-season to 2 weeks. Just BAN these people asap.
Outside of the thousands, probably tens of thousands, of tickets being raised on this issue I do think that it would be worth the Kabam Ban Hammer doing a quick sweep of the leaderboard, at least the top 500 or so and picking out the obvious cheats and just zurging them. The accounts with 12-13k prestige and 1m rating for example, let alone the few floating around with 9k or something equally ridiculous.
Now I’m obviously not in tune with the ticketing architecture but if each account has a unique ID, which I presume they do, are you able to confirm that I report player A, Kabam confirms he’s a filthy cheat and deletes him, does that automatically close the rest of the open tickets against that account?
There are technological options available, but they require direct integration with the game client to work, because they need to work within the game client not outside of it (because due to operating system architectural issues, something like EasyAntiCheat can't do what it does in mobile environments generally).
The problem is time. It takes a lot of time to integrate such things into the game client. I was actually having a discussion about such technology with Kabam when this little problem came up that proved to be a bit of a distraction. You might have heard about it, something about inputs not working correctly after a Unity engine upgrade.
Tampering with the game client to integrate anti-cheat technology is a highly risky thing to do for a very mature game client like MCOC. it is not a plug-in solution generally. They are aware of such technologies in general, but I believe the sticking point is the complexity and involved nature of integrating most of them into the game. Without completely breaking everything.
It might seem obvious that there are certain events that are obvious signs of cheating, but you have to consider two complicating factors. First, the game is constantly changing. A behavior that seems to obviously be cheating today might not be tomorrow, and an automated system looking for such behavior could suddenly ban a lot of players who didn't cheat without warning. Second, the game isn't perfect. The developers are not watching your fights, they are examining the data logs. Those logs must be perfect 100% of the time if you're going to autoban based on them. Are they?
Getting back to emulators. There was an incident a while back when someone posted they got banned for using emulators, and it seemed to be a bit fishy to me, because they said they were using a phone that to the best of my knowledge was not generally available for purchase yet. So I discussed this with Kabam and discovered that this particular person was banned accidentally and had to be reinstated, for technical reasons I won't discuss. But in general, what happened was they were looking for something only emulators do, until one day that wasn't true anymore.
Multiply that by a thousand, and that's the scope of the problem of automatic BG cheat detection.
The other problem with autobanning "obvious" cheating is that there's only obvious cheating happening because it isn't autobanned. Cheaters will change their methods to whatever is the simplest that still works. We can all agree that killing something in one hit in one second is obviously cheating. Unless it is Symbiote Supreme vs Red Skull of course. Make sure to program that exception into your anticheat detection software. But if we autoban the obvious one hit kill, the cheaters will simply switch to two hit kills, then three hit kills, then four. They will simply change their dials until they aren't caught, then do that. So it is pointless to say "well, this should be obvious." it is, but it only happens because it isn't insta-banned.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to be more aggressive, but I am saying that the problem is way harder than people think, because it only looks simple because we aren't aggressive. The true scope of the problem is its hidden nature, that we would only see once we start becoming more aggressive. The faster we ban cheaters, the faster they will get immediately feedback on what works and what doesn't. They only look stupid now because stupid works.
This is exactly what the botters did with arena. Kabam got better at deteecting them, so they changed how they operated to evade those specific detection criteria. And when Kabam adjusted to that change, they changed again. That's why they disappear from the leaderboards for extended periods of time, then suddenly reappear.
There are "things you can do" and I'll leave it at that, but this is a very difficult subject to discuss without getting very deep into the technical weeds.