PSA: Why it's good for us that Banquet rewards are delayed

Credit card fraud takes time for victims to notice, then get reported to Visa/Mastercard/Amex, then to bubble up to Apple/Google, then to Kabam. Kabam also has to deal with players who do chargebacks. They will receive negative units but Kabam also needs to make sure the score doesn't affect rankings. It'll be impossible to detect all fraud as victims have up to 60 days to report it, but hopefully most of it will be caught.

I'm assuming the staff working on this work normal office hours & this is already a short week after the holidays. So patience is a good thing. The earlier Kabam finalizes the result, the more fraudsters will manage to sneak into the rankings (pushing the rest of us down to lower ranks).

Comments

Wakandas_Finest

Except kabam can’t detect the kind of credit card fraud you are implying. At best they can determined that someone else accessed your account from a different region than you normally use and bought units. But even then they can’t say from their end whether or not the card being used is fraudulent. I get the point you are trying to make though.

My beef with kabam is that their enforcement lacks any meaningful impact and does almost nothing to discourage modding/cheating. At this point I feel these delays to investigate are merely for show and meant to appease the masses rather than solve the issue

Dude17

Here’s more info on how credit card fraud chargebacks work. Nothing to do with modding.

https://chargebacks911.com/chargebacks/

Wakandas_Finest

I never said it did. I simply lumped fraud, modding and cheating into one category for simplicity

Vergeman78

If it can take 60 days to report a fraud, how is delaying rewards for 7 days going to help? There just seems to be a pattern of delaying rewards at the moment. And the fact it is done is an indication of rampant cheating going on and the company not being able to prevent it from happening.

At one point, they have to be able to stop it from happening in the first place. Are arena rewards about to be delayed while they clean up the leaderboard too?

Don’t get me wrong, the fact they want to remove cheaters from the reward structure is a good thing. But what is being done to prevent it seems to be the bigger problem. That and the ridiculous sanctions being handed out to cheaters

DNA3000

The charge back mechanism is itself almost completely irrelevant, because we don't buy anything from Kabam. We buy from the app stores. All Kabam is told by (for example) Apple is "someone bought this item." Kabam then gives you that item. They don't even have payment yet: Apple forwards payments periodically, not immediately.

If someone disputes the charge, asks for a refund, whatever, what happens depends on who they talk to. If they talk to Apple, Apple can decide to cancel the transaction for them. In which case, Kabam gets a notification that the player is cancelling the transaction. But they don't get that immediately as well. They get that in their next batch of data from Apple. It could be a day later, it could be a week later. If the player goes to the credit card issuer, they could decide to cancel the transaction and reverse the charge. Then it is Apple that is notified by the credit card company that the transaction is cancelled, and it is up to Apple to then notify Kabam that the transaction is cancelled and Apple is going to claw that money back (assuming they even got it in the first place).

Important to note that during all of this Kabam is told *nothing* about what happened. They are not told that the player used a credit card to buy in the first place. They are not told if the player asked for a refund, or had the transaction cancelled, or had their credit card issuer intercede on their behalf. They are just told "this transaction is cancelled and you aren't getting paid for it."

They could try to figure out, retroactively, if the transaction that was cancelled was made at a moment in time when someone else was logging into the account from a different phone in a different country, something like that. But they are not told the identity of the human making the transaction (that is protected by Apple) nor are they given the details of payment (also protected) nor are they told the specifics of how transactions are cancelled (for the most part). They can try to see if there was weird behavior on that particular account when the purchase happened, but everything else has to be inferred.

Both Apple and Google have protection mechanisms that shield customers from App vendors. App vendors are not given personal identifying information or payment information for any app store transaction. And that makes fraud detection more of an art than science. There's no obvious way to detect it except through careful reconstructive investigation.

That's why in general, they hit you with contest credits and move on.

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Dude17

Thanks for the clarity @DNA3000. You explained it more eloquently than I ever could!

Skunkcabbage

If it's good for us then wouldn't it be better if we had to wait for 2 months instead to capture all the credit card fraud?

TheLightBringer

I don't mind the delay, it can take to a month and I wouldn't care, my main problem is it's tied to staying in your alliance. Like the event already ended and the points is being calculated nw members are stuck in alliances that they're already leaving but can't do bcz of banquet rewards

Skunkcabbage

Exactly - every day, statistically a certain amount of players will be kicked from their ally (at times just for fun, or just because...)
Each hour and day that the payout is delayed increases this number of affected players. If there was a lock-in feature where the rewards will be paid out no matter your membership of that alliance, then there would be less of an issue.

Dude17

Fair point. I agree, this is a flaw in the process.

Renaxqq

Problem for me is I want to awaken R3 6* Fury with generic awakening gem for BG defense but what if I'm going to get ag crystal from banquet rank rewards and it's going to be skill gem? What if I'm going to get him from 6* nexus crystal?

pseudosane

One week isnt really gonna affect you that much

Skunkcabbage

It sounds like it is going to affect him because he wants to utilise the rewards for an event that's starting in less than 4 hours, but won't have the rewards for days. In effect he won't be able to use NF in his BG deck until the rewards drop, and realistically that could lose him some matches.

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Ravens20

I agree with them taking their time however i do think this process is flawed also due to alliance war season and a lot of alliances are starting to get players to push AW and some players want to leave alliance but now they're stuck, my alliance for example has players that don't want to play new season of AW and we have players who we would like to bring back and now we are prob going to lose the first 2 wars until we are able to bring back those players for AW.

VanillaCoke

If you’re banking your win strategy on one champion, it’s a poor strategy. What has he been doing for the past 3 BG seasons? I understand the inconvenience, but to imply “I’m going to have a bad Season 4 start without my Nick Fury” doesn't seem right

Renaxqq

It's going to be R4 Nick. I have unawakened R4 Herc and Nimrod so I might use that gem for one of these champs + might get 2 R3 rank up gems. One will use for Hulkling and one for another great defender like Mephisto, Man-Thing or IMIW. And AW are about to begin too😱😱😱 I need 70K loyalty to get 50% t6bc fragments for third t6bc. Then I could use NF for war defense too.

Skunkcabbage

So you're blaming the inconvenience caused by the long wait on the player?

Like we shouldn't need any rewards to improve our rosters - they should already have been ranked up beforehand.

If we take that to it's natural conclusion everyone should have every champ as a 6* R5 at Sig 200 so that they are never waiting on anything.

I know victim blaming can be quite fashionable but come on dude..

GroundedWisdom

There is no victim with waiting for Rewards. They are distributed when Kabam distributes them. They're as prompt as they can be with these things, and in this case they've indicated there will be a delay all along. So yes, waiting on an undefined wait for upcoming content is user error.

Skunkcabbage

Agree that Kabam said all along it would take a while.
Other factors:
- average players don't read forums (solution: include a "latest" payout timer to manage expectations and avoid all these threads)
- players are allowed to feel frustrated at the situation, someone who can't do rankups because of a long wait for payout is understandably disappointed.
- I'm using the term "victim shaming" because that's the mindset that I felt the other poster was exhibiting. I.e. "it's all your fault you don't already have NF awakened and ready for your BG roster - how dare you make an allegation that you're being held back"

AMS94

They can't detect most of the cheaters in BGs even after accounts are reported numerous times

I doubt with their "robust" systems they'll be able to detect any of such CC frauds, specially where the amounts are divided over numerous insignificant transactions, which is probably what the cheaters did

These delays sound more like a placebo to make players believe that they are actually doing anything significant to catch all the cheaters
I'm not saying they don't do anything at all in the intervening period, but whatever they do is apparently of very little effect

Dude17

Don’t worry, obviously you’re getting a Science gem.
Nexus will have Groot, Blue Cyclops, Red Cyclops.
Enjoy.

Renaxqq

Science would be awesome for Void, Scorpion or Quicksilver. I don't care about any new champs. Pretty stacked roster. Will definitely enjoy!

DNA3000

From a fraud detection perspective yes. From a players would go nuts waiting for rewards perspective, probably not. So they have to compromise to try to balance these different factors. And with any compromise, most people will probably think they picked the wrong compromise point.

They try to catch obvious blatant fraud initially, release the rewards best they can, and then if further investigation leads to further fraud detection they retroactively go after those accounts. They *try* to focus their attention towards the top of the leaderboards, but that doesn't mean they will catch all fraud at the top. They do try to make sure that the people they don't catch tend to be lower in the leaderboards, where they will have a smaller impact on standings.

Not ideal, but that's how they've chosen to try to square this circles to balance the need to get rewards out with the need to make a reasonable attempt to clear the rewards of obvious fraud.