PSA: Why it's good for us that Banquet rewards are delayed
Dude17
Member Posts: 133 ★★
Credit card fraud takes time for victims to notice, then get reported to Visa/Mastercard/Amex, then to bubble up to Apple/Google, then to Kabam. Kabam also has to deal with players who do chargebacks. They will receive negative units but Kabam also needs to make sure the score doesn't affect rankings. It'll be impossible to detect all fraud as victims have up to 60 days to report it, but hopefully most of it will be caught.
I'm assuming the staff working on this work normal office hours & this is already a short week after the holidays. So patience is a good thing. The earlier Kabam finalizes the result, the more fraudsters will manage to sneak into the rankings (pushing the rest of us down to lower ranks).
I'm assuming the staff working on this work normal office hours & this is already a short week after the holidays. So patience is a good thing. The earlier Kabam finalizes the result, the more fraudsters will manage to sneak into the rankings (pushing the rest of us down to lower ranks).
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My beef with kabam is that their enforcement lacks any meaningful impact and does almost nothing to discourage modding/cheating. At this point I feel these delays to investigate are merely for show and meant to appease the masses rather than solve the issue
https://chargebacks911.com/chargebacks/
At one point, they have to be able to stop it from happening in the first place. Are arena rewards about to be delayed while they clean up the leaderboard too?
Don’t get me wrong, the fact they want to remove cheaters from the reward structure is a good thing. But what is being done to prevent it seems to be the bigger problem. That and the ridiculous sanctions being handed out to cheaters
If someone disputes the charge, asks for a refund, whatever, what happens depends on who they talk to. If they talk to Apple, Apple can decide to cancel the transaction for them. In which case, Kabam gets a notification that the player is cancelling the transaction. But they don't get that immediately as well. They get that in their next batch of data from Apple. It could be a day later, it could be a week later. If the player goes to the credit card issuer, they could decide to cancel the transaction and reverse the charge. Then it is Apple that is notified by the credit card company that the transaction is cancelled, and it is up to Apple to then notify Kabam that the transaction is cancelled and Apple is going to claw that money back (assuming they even got it in the first place).
Important to note that during all of this Kabam is told *nothing* about what happened. They are not told that the player used a credit card to buy in the first place. They are not told if the player asked for a refund, or had the transaction cancelled, or had their credit card issuer intercede on their behalf. They are just told "this transaction is cancelled and you aren't getting paid for it."
They could try to figure out, retroactively, if the transaction that was cancelled was made at a moment in time when someone else was logging into the account from a different phone in a different country, something like that. But they are not told the identity of the human making the transaction (that is protected by Apple) nor are they given the details of payment (also protected) nor are they told the specifics of how transactions are cancelled (for the most part). They can try to see if there was weird behavior on that particular account when the purchase happened, but everything else has to be inferred.
Both Apple and Google have protection mechanisms that shield customers from App vendors. App vendors are not given personal identifying information or payment information for any app store transaction. And that makes fraud detection more of an art than science. There's no obvious way to detect it except through careful reconstructive investigation.
That's why in general, they hit you with contest credits and move on.
Each hour and day that the payout is delayed increases this number of affected players. If there was a lock-in feature where the rewards will be paid out no matter your membership of that alliance, then there would be less of an issue.
Like we shouldn't need any rewards to improve our rosters - they should already have been ranked up beforehand.
If we take that to it's natural conclusion everyone should have every champ as a 6* R5 at Sig 200 so that they are never waiting on anything.
I know victim blaming can be quite fashionable but come on dude..
Other factors:
- average players don't read forums (solution: include a "latest" payout timer to manage expectations and avoid all these threads)
- players are allowed to feel frustrated at the situation, someone who can't do rankups because of a long wait for payout is understandably disappointed.
- I'm using the term "victim shaming" because that's the mindset that I felt the other poster was exhibiting. I.e. "it's all your fault you don't already have NF awakened and ready for your BG roster - how dare you make an allegation that you're being held back"
I doubt with their "robust" systems they'll be able to detect any of such CC frauds, specially where the amounts are divided over numerous insignificant transactions, which is probably what the cheaters did
These delays sound more like a placebo to make players believe that they are actually doing anything significant to catch all the cheaters
I'm not saying they don't do anything at all in the intervening period, but whatever they do is apparently of very little effect
Nexus will have Groot, Blue Cyclops, Red Cyclops.
Enjoy.
They try to catch obvious blatant fraud initially, release the rewards best they can, and then if further investigation leads to further fraud detection they retroactively go after those accounts. They *try* to focus their attention towards the top of the leaderboards, but that doesn't mean they will catch all fraud at the top. They do try to make sure that the people they don't catch tend to be lower in the leaderboards, where they will have a smaller impact on standings.
Not ideal, but that's how they've chosen to try to square this circles to balance the need to get rewards out with the need to make a reasonable attempt to clear the rewards of obvious fraud.