**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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I didn't talk about an instaban system. You are giving arguments to something I never spoke about. Wanting to fill up those lines I guess.
The team is still working hard to get these rewards out asap; please be patient.
In the meantime, Q&A:
Why not ban cheaters incrementally throughout the season, instead of at the end?
The team does monitor and ban players throughout the season, then do a further, more meticulous skim once the season has concluded.
Why not send out rewards, then double back to remove cheaters and claw back rewards, then adjust them for non-cheaters?
Woof, just typing it is a lot - this approach has many issues. Firstly, there is zero clarity for who's been removed for cheating. And secondly, it is infinitely more work for the team.
Cheaters should have their solo and alliance points revoked! Alliances should be punished for their cheating members!
Not a question, but, yes we will be removing contributions to Solo and Alliance Events from players found cheating. At this point in time, there is no additional punishment for alliances with cheating members, because it is often outside of Alliance Leadership's capabilities to know when their members are cheating.
Can you post a list of all the cheaters who have been banned?
We've seen a lot of speculation on the reasons that have been previously provided for not posting cheaters in-game IDs, legal and otherwise. The short answer is: no, we will not be publicly posting names of accounts that were found cheating. There are a number of contributing factors, and regardless of whether you think there are legal grounds to stand on, the precedent was set long ago and will continue on this matter.
Why is the wait so long?
There will be a short period after each BG season where we do these checks before providing rewards. In the name of transparency, there has been a snag internally with some software refusing to co-operate resulting in a longer wait than anticipated. As the team problem-solves these issues they are also working to try to shorten the wait time for future seasons.
They can look at the screenshots, confirm (or cross-reference) it with real data and be done with it
Dr. Zola
cf:
My own conversations with Kabam go back to 2018, but Jax joined more recently and this is almost certainly still the current position at Kabam.
By policy, I do not directly quote private conversations, especially from Kabam staff or developers, without permission. I will bend that rule a very small amount just so you know that when I say my information comes from Kabam's lawyers, that is not me just inferring stuff from off-hand conversations. I went back to the exchange I had back in 2018, and this is the first sentence from the first message I got from the person I was discussing this with after they said they would consult with Kabam's legal team back in 2018:
This is not a case of me inferring the person I was discussing this with was passing information along from Kabam's legal department. I was told they presented my inquiry to Kabam legal, and legal responded in kind. Also, while I will not quote the full response without permission, I will say that what was said was consistent with someone more or less quoting a lawyer addressing my points from a legal perspective.
It’s unfair that members are being kicked without their rewards because some leaders don’t want to wait, and for us leaders that aren’t douchebags it’s unfair for us to wait so long before we can make changes within our alliance. We already have the 5 war season rule, now we are waiting yet again for another part of the games content to release rewards before we can make changes again. Something needs to be implemented in the future to avoid this if at all possible
You need to comb through the data
That implies that there is too much data to go through. I said that they simply have to cross-reference it. I'm done here
Either way, we can certainly move on. My bottom line is it takes time. For good reason.
First, disclosing that a particular player cheated would not necessarily be considered a breach of personal information if that player ID cannot be directly connected to a real life person. However, that doesn't immunize Kabam from libel. There have been cases where people have successfully sued for libel where the libelous content only targeted a pseudonym and not the actual person's personal identity. It is difficult to win, but a person can legally argue that the damage done was not to their personal identity, but rather the pseudonymous identity when that identity itself has a reputation that can be damaged. For example, if I write novels under the name DNA3000 and someone makes false accusations against DNA3000, while they might not know who I am, I can still sue claiming they are damaging the reputation of DNA300 as an author. It would be a novel argument, but a player could argue that being called a cheater damaged their reputation in the game, which deprived them of the opportunity to join alliances or otherwise associate with other players. And if they are a Youtuber, now there's income on the line. They could argue deprivation of revenue as damages.
Second, when Kabam punishes someone they believe to be cheating, they are operating under their umbrella rights in the terms of service to take any action against any game account they believe is reasonable and necessary. They do not need to prove in a court of law that the player cheated. The player has no real recourse. Even if Kabam can't prove beyond preponderance of evidence that the player cheated, they can simply exercise their right to refuse service to anyone. But when they *declare* that someone cheated, they could expose themselves to a legal challenge to that statement, as above. And even if they are in a position to win, they would still expose themselves to many things they could want to avoid. For example, the publicity of a civil trial. Or the discovery process whereby a player can demand that Kabam disclose to the player all of their evidence of cheating and all of the processes they use to find cheaters. They could tie up the fair play team at Kabam to the tune of hundreds of hours or more in documentation, discovery, and testimony.
Again, the issue is not what's legal. The issue is what Kabam wants to expose themselves to. What risks they are willing to take. You can't force or demand Kabam to take risks they just don't want to take. And they just don't want to take these.
And as I was told once by an experienced lawyer: in criminal court the question is what's legal. But in civil court the question is what's winnable. Those are two completely different things. And in civil court, just because you walk out the door with the decision, doesn't mean you won. You can win a piece of paper, and still lose big overall.
It would be good to get more solid timelines attached to rewards payouts. While in some ways this is only season 2… the presence of these low life modders was well documented in arena scores, Facebook adds selling the mod tools, and throughout the Beta. So while a part of me is happy that the team is taking it seriously now I remain frustrated that it took this long and about the residual impact
They can say Friday or they can say two weeks. All I'm asking for is Communication. Which they just did. Still not great news, but it's something.
The team does monitor and ban players throughout the season, then do a further, more meticulous skim once the season has concluded."
What a LIE. The number 1 guy was a well known cheater and you didn't even banned the obvious number 1 player in the leaderboard throught the season. If you don't even ban the obvious player who has been in front of everyone's eyes the whole season then I don't trust this comment.
Estimates have to be reasonably close or they are less than worthless. And if an accurate estimate can't be determined, it is usually better to say nothing. My recollection is that after the end of the season they said it would take a few days at least, which I interpreted to be in the general vicinity of a week. Absent further information, I think that's still a reasonable guess. I don't expect them to be giving out daily progress reports, and in fact I don't want them to stop and take time to give them while they are working on it. In this case, we just have to let them do their work as fast as they are capable of doing it, and if that's not fast enough for some players, I can understand that, but there's nothing else you can do about it. Complaining about it and demanding updates will only slow things down, not speed them up.
I will however disagree regarding the updates they can give.
I have no doubt they can ascertain how many people participated in BGs through the season. With that knowledge, at the end of each day they could say "We cleared 400 accounts." (better articulated as a percentage...let's call it 5%). The next day they could provide their close of business update to say "We've cleared 20%." Then "We've cleared 30%".
I think most would welcome that update, cause while it doesn't explicitly call out a date the rewards will come out, it does provide the desired status update without detracting from the more important work of actually clearing the accounts.
Now more is being done... more != less time. Let's at least try to be patient people.