More transparency between players and mods
PSAA
Member Posts: 43 ★
Yes I get it Most people always claim innocence, even if they did cheat. I know you all don't have to (or just flat out refuse to) believe me when I say I didn't cheat. My account was suspended for 7 days for supposedly an exploit or third party software. considering I only use bluestacks for other games, and play this on my mobile, I just don't get what supposed exploit i've been using, and when i appealed they said they won't tell me. For people who DON'T knowingly cheat there should be more transparency. How do I know what I did wrong and what if I get suspended for doing it again unknowingly? It's absolutely ridiculous and I think Kabam needs to at least meet us halfway here... go ahead and flame away, I know the toxicity here can be off the charts sometimes...
1
Comments
That's the root.
Transparency is the ban you got.
Your chances are good.
Kabam is not going to tell you what specifically they detected, because this would give extremely valuable information to cheaters. Very few people who cheat just do one thing. They generally do lots of things, and are detected doing some of them. Knowing what was and what was not detected would allow cheaters to refine their techniques.
It is unfortunate that because nothing is perfect, a few innocent players might get flagged doing things that are weird not but prohibited. But the alternative is a rapid escalation of cheating due to improved evolution of cheating techniques.
Perhaps you launched the game under Bluestacks without realizing it. That would be enough to trigger the ban. Or maybe you did something else they detected that you don’t mention doing because you think they can’t detect it so you believe that can’t be the reason. Or, as is the case in at least 95% of forum posts, you’re not telling the whole truth. Or you’re the one in ten thousand that got banned in error. Either way, the mods can’t generally help you because they are not in charge of enforcing fair play in the game. They can sometimes forward a request to reexamine a ban, but that’s not their specific job to do. And the fair play team is not going to give players a recipe to avoid cheat detection.
You also do not help your case by throwing around accusations of toxicity. There are times that the forums can react poorly to a post, but most of the time genuinely toxic behavior is induced. Forum posters have no obligation to respond positively to every post. They can be critical, or skeptical, or even incredulous. That’s their right just as you have a right to post complaints. But if you want to pick a fight with those who don’t support you, yes, you can ultimately get a toxic response, but once you decide to engage in Internet PvP, you can’t cry foul if you lose.
When someone gets accidentally banned, they are always doing something almost no one else has done before. In rare cases, that unusual thing is flagged as cheating because either the anticheat systems or a human being doesn’t realize that thing is possible under non-cheating conditions. When people say “how do I know that [fill in the blank] isn’t going to get me banned?” they often mention things that are very obviously things lots of players do and don’t get banned for it. And it is something cheaters often speculate aloud about, because they are specifically looking for ways to exploit the game that won’t be detected, so they are trying to determine where the lines are drawn.
Millions of people have played this game, doing billions of things in it. Anything that is happening thousands of times a month is very obviously not going to be banned behavior.
Farming a quest that is supposed to have limited entries or keys, but due to a bug, it doesn't limit the player, so they just keep going again and again accumulating massive rewards.
Unless you are an experienced MCOC player; are active on the forums; or reddit; or alternate community - you may not realize it was not supposed to be farmable. It is actually not the norm that players are as informed as those in the forums.
So Kabam then dish out a ban for the exploiting the quest. In the player's mind they haven't done anything wrong because the game allowed them to do whatever it was for which they received the ban. They obviously don't want to unknowingly repeat that mistake... so being armed with that information would be helpful.
This is why PSAs started going out into the community when exploits were found for fear of the ban hammer. Then of course it turns out that Kabam decided "too hard basket" let people keep rewards for exploits and everyone that didn't exploit miss out for following the rules, but still like to continue to hang the fear of a ban out there by reserving the right to ban you in the event of future exploits.
Of course, this is a completely different discourse.
Second they won't tell you how they know you cheated because then it just becomes easier to cheat. For instance a possible response
"We detected 3rd party software because when you loaded a fight x y and z parameters were detected at an impossible range"
Then you go back and work on the code on your mod and alter it so it modifies the game code after you pause a fight and wait 3 seconds.
We're all skeptical of OP but nowhere did they admit to cheating or using BlueStacks for MCOC.
1. How easy is it to accidentally trigger the exploitable flaw?
2. How obvious is it that the rewards gained are completely out of bounds?
3. How obviously were players deliberately attempting to leverage the exploitable flaw.
Kabam hasn't changed policy on this. When there's a flaw, and it is obviously generating ludicrous amounts of rewards, and players very obviously have to take steps they ordinarily would not take to exploit it, and they do so to extreme degrees, they can and will get banned for that. Players are supposed to exercise common sense in those cases. They haven't changed that policy, it is just that more recent flaws haven't reached that level most of the time, but it has still happened. However, when the flaw is something that a completely unaware player would still stumble into, or when the flaw is difficult to distinguish from normal rewards Kabam generally doesn't ban players for that behavior.
If there was a hypothetical side quest map that awarded a 6* awakening gem, say, and it was supposed to be non-repeatable but it was bugged to be repeatable, and a player decided to run it a hundred times, they'd likely get banned for exploiting the game. If they claimed they had no idea that wasn't allowed, they'd get banned for stupidity.
An example where Kabam wouldn't and didn't ban is the recent glory bug. There's almost no way to avoid that bug, players would trigger it just playing normally. And while it was obviously ludicrous amounts of rewards, it would be difficult for the average player to avoid getting them. They'd have to deliberately avoid collecting them from the stash constantly. Conversely, an example where they did hand out bans was during the gifting event where some players chose to send gifts to themselves from hundred or even thousands of alts. Even though Kabam did not explicitly state that gifting from alts was a violation, they did decide that doing so from a ridiculous number of alts was, and banned accordingly.
There are players out there who think that they should be allowed to do whatever they want, and if it isn't allowed the game should prevent them from doing it. If it is doable, it should be allowed. Frankly, I don't know how this attitude has survived into the 21st century, since it should have been banned out of existence by now. No one with that attitude ought to last long playing online games. Or for that matter, living among civilized society.
Again - you come from the stance there you are more educated about the game than the majority of players. A lot of first-time players or players without a community come into the forums for the first time (not necessarily meaning the OP) and get blasted for not applying common sense. i.e. you should have known better. The fact is a lot of people don't know better. People are way stupider than you give them credit for.
Equating what people can get away with in an online game to what people can get away with living amongst civilized society is a false equivalency. Perfect example is keyboard warriors duking it out in posts, but timid mice in person.
Now you might say, "people knowingly using a loophole" should be banned. I got news for you; life consistently tell us to use loopholes. Look at tax minimization; you can even walk into a court room; these are professions designed around loopholes. The difference here is Kabam are judge, jury and executioner and many people don't realize it until they're on the wrong side of it.
I completely understand it is "case-by-case" and the criteria listed. Frequent forums users or experienced players are likely to assess players very harshly on criteria 2 & 3... because they know better and apply the logic that so should the other players. The case you bring up about banning gifting from alts is a perfect example of "how would any player realistically know it was bannable until they got banned". Setting up accounts and then doing the work to get them into a position to gift is a lot of effort. Effort is usually rewarded. I also hope we are not conflating people getting bans for excessive gifting versus creating bot accounts for gifting.
And finally, I don't think if I've misrepresented anything, you might not like the straightforward language, but I feel it's an accurate distillation. I'm reading between the lines and taking it that "too hard basket" seemed flippant. I'm not saying that when an exploit occurs that Kabam don't do a remedial assessment. Because aside from deciding if someone should be banned, there are also compensation cries. They're going to look at:
- impact of the exploit
- number of players that exploited
- can a "just" remedial action be executed
- effort required in executing the remedial action.
Saying that stuff ends up in the "too hard basket" is as much a reflection of the complexity of the game as it is a sentiment towards Kabam as a company. As much as players that get the short end like to say, just hit rewind, we know it's not that easy.