Please stop punishing fair playing alliances by dropping stronger alliances who cheat down in rating
Treinin
Member Posts: 215 ★★★
Hello,
I know you get this feedback all the time, but I want to re-iterate it so you can hopefully use it to action some change.
Please stop docking alliances that cheat a few hundred war rating. We are now matched with an alliance that has been caught cheating and got bumped from Plat 2 down to Gold 1 and dropped to our war rating.
They are going to crush us, essentially punishing us because they cheated.
There needs to be a better solution. Either only deduct season points (the thing they likely care about more), kick them out of the season entirely, don't allow them to do matchmaking for X number of wars, or put them in a "low priority" type match-making like Dota 2 uses where you just pair poorly behaved alliances against one another. Keep their rating where it was.
Lowering their rating is really unfair to the alliances that end up matched with one of these piloting / modding alliances that gets dropped down to a lower tier.
Thank you,
Treinin
I know you get this feedback all the time, but I want to re-iterate it so you can hopefully use it to action some change.
Please stop docking alliances that cheat a few hundred war rating. We are now matched with an alliance that has been caught cheating and got bumped from Plat 2 down to Gold 1 and dropped to our war rating.
They are going to crush us, essentially punishing us because they cheated.
There needs to be a better solution. Either only deduct season points (the thing they likely care about more), kick them out of the season entirely, don't allow them to do matchmaking for X number of wars, or put them in a "low priority" type match-making like Dota 2 uses where you just pair poorly behaved alliances against one another. Keep their rating where it was.
Lowering their rating is really unfair to the alliances that end up matched with one of these piloting / modding alliances that gets dropped down to a lower tier.
Thank you,
Treinin
39
Comments
Assuming the cheater is piloting within his/her own alliances, the rest of the alliance members indirectly share the benefits even without their knowledge. Kabam has been refusing to disclose cheater info even to their own alliances based on their ToS so that tells me the cheaters walk right now instead of getting ban.
Yeah If they can flag the cheaters that's ideal.
Banning alliances from AW for any amount of time shouldn't be considered unless that alliance is a repeat offender
To clarify, they can still do AQ and other content, but they should be banned from joining war depends on severity (which can be longer if they are repeat offenders) or current tier. Maybe a plat 3 alliance first offense will be 1 war ban for example. Why should first time offender be spared from cheating otherwise? Because they didn't read the TOS?
Alliances being banned from AW for their 1st offense because a new recruit cheated is overkill. Alliances being banned from AW because they have a history of multiple members cheating in AW is not overkill. AW bans being implemented for 1st time offenses would only work as intended if the bans were for individual players and not alliances. Like you said AW bans shouldn't include access to other game content, just like how arena bans work.
That's quite hard to track consider the leader of the current alliance may not be the og. When one of the ex top alliance cheated everyone quit the alliance and a new leader took over, recruited because of the resources left behind and if someone cheat... Will that count as first offense or are they a repeated offender? To keep things simple an offense is an offense.
Kabam has repeatedly said severity of consequences are contingent on whether there's a history of past offenses. Get them to change that and you've got a shot of actualizing your suggestion.
Well, I would say because it doesn't in general appropriately balance the need to penalize the alliance with the desire not to punish players for conduct outside their control. When you penalize an alliance, you by necessity penalize all of its members. But when the conduct is something within their control, the penalty can and should include punitive measures to deter that player (and others) from violating the rules. But there's less justification for the penalty across an entire alliance to include punitive punishment when that conduct was outside those players' control. You can't really use strong punishment to deter them, when there's a limit to the steps they can take to avoid it.
If you believe an entire alliance, or even a majority of it, was complicit in the cheating behavior of one or more players, its entirely justified to punitively punish the entire alliance. But when one person violates the rules and the entire alliance benefits from that violation but they had no part in the actual bad conduct, the penalty for the members that did not cheat should lean in the direction of being an effective penalty (which takes away ill-gotten gains) and applies *some* additional punitive effects (Kabam can take away more points than was earned) but not an excessive amount of them.
I would say that repeat offenses would be suggestive evidence that an alliance was not taking sufficient reasonable steps to ensure their members were not cheating. But if it was a first time offender, I would want more hard evidence that there was alliance-wide complicity. If that evidence existed, I think even first time alliance offenders could be more harshly treated.
The short version is that, unless Kabam believes an entire alliance is guilty, the cheater should be *punished* but the rest of the alliance should only be *penalized*. Penalties should be proportional to the improper benefit (it can be higher, because no penalty can be crafted perfectly and some deterrent effect is reasonable). Punishment should be strong enough to make it not worth cheating for all but the most die-hard cheaters.
I agree in general, but I think that's a problematic example. If you cheat your way through Act 3, the end result might save an individual player a lot of time and/or money, but the consequences for the game as a whole will likely be unnoticable. They have cheated their way to a progress point that hundreds of thousands of other players have achieved, and one more or less isn't going to impact other players in a noticeable way.
But if you cheat your way through Act 5, you are cheating your way to a progress point that much fewer players have achieved. One more or less is a more meaningful thing to everyone else. If that player uses those rewards on champions that they subsequently use in alliance war, for example, even if they play the war perfectly legally they could have a substantial advantage they shouldn't have had.
The higher in the single player content you cheat, the greater the impact those rewards can have on everyone else if you subsequently use the rewards in competitive content afterwards. So I think cheating in single player content that is sufficiently high in value, like Act 5 or LoL, should be treated similarly to cheating in competitive content simply because it is so much harder to actually know what the impact of that cheating is without an exhaustive analysis of every single thing that player did.
Great example of this is if any players had mercenaries play their accounts to finish top 5 in Act 5 legends runs. That would be a full extra T5BC that could be used to gain illegitimate advantages in AW.
Better matchups based on overall rating.
This sounds like a solution looking for a problem, and a discussion thread.
You're right. I may be in the wrong thread. But, it pisses me off when I see ppl trying to cheat their way up. No matter wich way they use.
Sorry.
or just cut the ally from the season leaderboard and make no other change in the case of a severe breach.
or just even rest points to 0..... there is no way they could recover from 0 points to that high of a end of season position
It just really sucks for us, and I know there must be a better way. I am guessing this is a case where the alliance we are facing just had a single cheater (they are at 29/30 participating in the war), so I am sure it sucks for them also. Not blaming them, just don't like the situation.
Out of the 4 war seasons my group is being negatively affected for NOT cheating 2 of them. Either by poor match making algorithms (facing MMXIV in season 2 last war when we were p2 rank 49 lol) or by this half right "punishment."
We started this season 5-0 and made it to platinum 1 WITHOUT ANY CHEATING. Lost the 6th war to an alliance that was actually part of the hammer. Funny thing is we could have beat them if we didn't have someone go MIA for the last 6 hours of war and force us to fight linked nodes.....but either way.
Platinum 1 for our group BEFORE groups were hit and even with that loss is a huge achievement for us but now it's being taken away by cheating alliances....again.
Our current war is against a Master alliance that was docked. Not mad at them, who knows maybe they had one person screw it all up for them.
Kabam however needs to figure out a better way of making the punishment fit the crime. My group could potentially face all Master alliances that were docked to end the season and instead of potentially getting p1 we'll be fighting for our lives to MAYBE get platinum 2 by NOT cheating?!?!?
Makes no sense, I guarantee you a lot if not all of these Masters or top p1 groups that were hit will go 6-0 and possibly finish with p1 rewards. So for cheating and violating TOS they can get the second best AW rewards in the game......what is the incentive NOT to cheat?
Cheat and don't get caught, get Master
Cheat and get caught, P1
You're getting closer to doing this right Kabam, but you need to get there faster.
PLENTY of great ideas in this discussion to consider.
AQWA81
How do the top non-cheating alliances feel about this?
Just fine.