Addressing Cheaters in Incursions, and More
MCOC Team
Administrator, Admin [en] Administrator › Posts: 610
Hello Summoners.
As many of you know, cheaters have taken advantage of our Danger Rooms Incursions event to access rewards they have not earned, including the Legends title.
Today we are taking action against the most obvious of these cheaters. These are accounts that were so blatant in their cheating that they don't require a longer investigation. All of these accounts will be banned permanently, effective immediately.
We have gathered substantial data about every Incursions run and are working on several different investigative avenues to identify further cheaters. We are close to being able to ban many more, we need to double-check our data to ensure no innocent Legends are caught in the net.
We intend to ban all modders and players carried by modders. Some will be banned permanently, and those who are not will be stripped of their Legends titles and will have some additional penalty applied to their account (exact details still being worked out).
Moving forward, players can expect us to come down harder on cheaters across the Contest, including permanent bans for first offences where appropriate.
As many of you know, cheaters have taken advantage of our Danger Rooms Incursions event to access rewards they have not earned, including the Legends title.
Today we are taking action against the most obvious of these cheaters. These are accounts that were so blatant in their cheating that they don't require a longer investigation. All of these accounts will be banned permanently, effective immediately.
We have gathered substantial data about every Incursions run and are working on several different investigative avenues to identify further cheaters. We are close to being able to ban many more, we need to double-check our data to ensure no innocent Legends are caught in the net.
We intend to ban all modders and players carried by modders. Some will be banned permanently, and those who are not will be stripped of their Legends titles and will have some additional penalty applied to their account (exact details still being worked out).
Moving forward, players can expect us to come down harder on cheaters across the Contest, including permanent bans for first offences where appropriate.
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Comments
Straight from the game team:
"Yesterday a larger ban wave was prepared and it ran over night. In total, we have now permanently banned 605 accounts for Incursions modding. [As always] we are applying the same permanent ban penalty to all accounts regardless of spend, including to two very high spenders. We have a team meeting Monday to greenlight another ban to happen next week. We are also finalizing the details on account penalties for the players carried by cheaters and then they will also be banned, so far we have over 500 accounts on this list. We aren't throwing around numbers to make it sound like we are doing more than we are, these players represent a significant percentage of the total players that have earned the Legends badge this month.
In the meantime, please note that seeing a low level or Prestige account with a Legends title in game is not evidence that our ban program isn't working, for a few reasons.
The first is that the data we use to ban cheaters needs to be processed, and since players are always cheating, there will always be some recent runs that are not caught. The second is that, while very challenging, it is possible for a late game player to legitimately carry another account through duo Incursions without their playing partner doing a single fight. Even if we are successful at catching every single cheater, there will likely still be a small handful of very small accounts sporting legitimate Legends badges.
There will be more news about another ban wave next week.
Battlegrounds
After our post earlier this week, we saw a number of comments amounting to "Incursions cheating doesn't impact anybody, why aren't you focusing on Battlegrounds?" We have spent some time working on the Incursions cheating problem, but the majority of our anti-cheating efforts are still being dedicated to Battlegrounds. Our Battlegrounds [automated cheat detection] system runs daily. Yesterday morning, the system identified 104 players to ban. An update we added in the afternoon identified an additional 47 players that would not have been caught without the update, including at least one player in the current top 10 of the leaderboards. These players were all banned late last night. As with the Incursions bans, these penalties are applied without filtering for spend, and included a number of large spenders that were permanently banned. We have at least one more major update to our Battlegrounds [automated cheat detection] coming later this month that should show further improvement.
Please continue to use the in game report function to report suspicious matches. That data is being directly used to improve these cheat detection systems."
Last night we banned an additional 1,800+ accounts for having modders carry them through incursions to acquire a Legends title.
All account suspensions will remain in place until the time indicated. The Kabam Support team is unable to overturn an account suspension. Any such actions are considered final.