I disagree with anyone who says they should put more resources into things for cheaters. They shouldn’t build them their own server, give them their own titles, or make special emojis for them. Just ban them permanently. Short sweet and simple
You, and mostly everyone, are vastly oversimplifying the problem. You can’t ban what you can’t find.
Modding in mobile games has been around for over a decade. And one thing remains constant: mod developers have the upper hand. They are working with much more information than game developers are. When someone gets banned, the modders can then reverse engineer why it happened to close that gap. I’m guessing the developers have a bunch of shell accounts that cheat constantly for this purpose alone.
It’s pretty silly to say you don’t want anymore resources devoted to cheaters. Because Kabam will always devote resources to cheaters. I guarantee resources in the software engineer team and data science team are devoted to this endeavor at all times. Replicating a server can be done by one person in a day or less, but I digress.
The benefit of shadow banning them to their own server has two major benefits. One, it doesn’t easily notify cheaters that their methods are being detected. That prevents them from constantly changing their code to circumvent new security measures. Two, it provides a localized continuous stream of data of verified cheaters to Kabam to bolster their security measures.
I think people are getting caught up in the revenge aspect of this. If they see cheaters getting banned forever it makes them feel good. But that isn’t the goal here. The goal is to protect the integrity of the game and reduce cheating to near non-existent levels. I’m all for punishing people. But if a different solution reaches a better end goal but happens to have less punishing; then that solution is still the ideal one.
Remember that one guy that used aimbot on a battle royale a few years ago? Well he hacked for a joke and now his permanently banned across all accounts it should be the same here
I agree with everything said and how cheaters should be banned permanently, and there does seem to be steps being made in the right direction.
This may just be ignorance on my part as to what the flagging suspicious accounts is based on but the concern I have is, what is the robustness of the flagging/banning mechanism?
For all the current and future improvements, It will probably never catch every cheater, but is it guaranteed to never wrongly lead to someone's ban? I can't imagine there is a huge training set neatly tagged with honest cheaters saying they have cheated to train on, although there would be the very obvious cheaters winning impossible fights in seconds. With people's accounts/money/time spent on the line, Is everything flagged, manually reviewed by someone with expert knowledge to make sure the ban/flag was correct?
Lots of things in this game have bugs, it's a complex games with loads of different interactions between champions, nodes and abilities, and while we need a robust cheating detection/deterrent In place, it does need to be 100% sure it can't lead to any false bans because of an oversight of what's possible.
Maybe it isnt even an issue, it doesn't seem like the forums have been plagued with "Why have I been banned posts" and I imagine there will never be too much transparency over how the system works, because will encourage workarounds, but would be interesting to see what the perceived sensitivity/specificity of the current approach is.
If it weren't for BG, I'd be OK with just giving them a modder tag like the Legend one. But with BG (and to some extent AW), account should just be deleted.
Whether Kabam has enough moral fortitude to do this (given that modders may be spenders) is going to be interesting to watch.
I disagree with anyone who says they should put more resources into things for cheaters. They shouldn’t build them their own server, give them their own titles, or make special emojis for them. Just ban them permanently. Short sweet and simple
You, and mostly everyone, are vastly oversimplifying the problem. You can’t ban what you can’t find.
Modding in mobile games has been around for over a decade. And one thing remains constant: mod developers have the upper hand. They are working with much more information than game developers are. When someone gets banned, the modders can then reverse engineer why it happened to close that gap. I’m guessing the developers have a bunch of shell accounts that cheat constantly for this purpose alone.
It’s pretty silly to say you don’t want anymore resources devoted to cheaters. Because Kabam will always devote resources to cheaters. I guarantee resources in the software engineer team and data science team are devoted to this endeavor at all times. Replicating a server can be done by one person in a day or less, but I digress.
The benefit of shadow banning them to their own server has two major benefits. One, it doesn’t easily notify cheaters that their methods are being detected. That prevents them from constantly changing their code to circumvent new security measures. Two, it provides a localized continuous stream of data of verified cheaters to Kabam to bolster their security measures.
I think people are getting caught up in the revenge aspect of this. If they see cheaters getting banned forever it makes them feel good. But that isn’t the goal here. The goal is to protect the integrity of the game and reduce cheating to near non-existent levels. I’m all for punishing people. But if a different solution reaches a better end goal but happens to have less punishing; then that solution is still the ideal one.
You’re taking what I said out of context. I’m not saying any resources, I’m saying all these “fun” and new ways to punish them should not have resources involved. You just said you can’t band what you can’t find. How do you expect to put them in their own sever if you can’t find them? You say people are getting caught up in the revenge aspect by wanting to see people be banned. I’d argue the revenge aspect is wanting to see them be put in a different server or seeing them with a title or letting them play with their top 20 champs or so missing. We shouldn’t be thinking of fun and creative ways of punishing them. Just punish them.
Comments
Modding in mobile games has been around for over a decade. And one thing remains constant: mod developers have the upper hand. They are working with much more information than game developers are. When someone gets banned, the modders can then reverse engineer why it happened to close that gap. I’m guessing the developers have a bunch of shell accounts that cheat constantly for this purpose alone.
It’s pretty silly to say you don’t want anymore resources devoted to cheaters. Because Kabam will always devote resources to cheaters. I guarantee resources in the software engineer team and data science team are devoted to this endeavor at all times. Replicating a server can be done by one person in a day or less, but I digress.
The benefit of shadow banning them to their own server has two major benefits. One, it doesn’t easily notify cheaters that their methods are being detected. That prevents them from constantly changing their code to circumvent new security measures. Two, it provides a localized continuous stream of data of verified cheaters to Kabam to bolster their security measures.
I think people are getting caught up in the revenge aspect of this. If they see cheaters getting banned forever it makes them feel good. But that isn’t the goal here. The goal is to protect the integrity of the game and reduce cheating to near non-existent levels. I’m all for punishing people. But if a different solution reaches a better end goal but happens to have less punishing; then that solution is still the ideal one.
This may just be ignorance on my part as to what the flagging suspicious accounts is based on but the concern I have is, what is the robustness of the flagging/banning mechanism?
For all the current and future improvements, It will probably never catch every cheater, but is it guaranteed to never wrongly lead to someone's ban? I can't imagine there is a huge training set neatly tagged with honest cheaters saying they have cheated to train on, although there would be the very obvious cheaters winning impossible fights in seconds. With people's accounts/money/time spent on the line, Is everything flagged, manually reviewed by someone with expert knowledge to make sure the ban/flag was correct?
Lots of things in this game have bugs, it's a complex games with loads of different interactions between champions, nodes and abilities, and while we need a robust cheating detection/deterrent In place, it does need to be 100% sure it can't lead to any false bans because of an oversight of what's possible.
Maybe it isnt even an issue, it doesn't seem like the forums have been plagued with "Why have I been banned posts" and I imagine there will never be too much transparency over how the system works, because will encourage workarounds, but would be interesting to see what the perceived sensitivity/specificity of the current approach is.
Whether Kabam has enough moral fortitude to do this (given that modders may be spenders) is going to be interesting to watch.