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An Update on the Battle Against Cheaters - February 1st 2023
MCOC Team
Administrator, Admin [en] Administrator › Posts: 724
Hello Summoners!
We wanted to provide an update in our ongoing battle against modders/cheaters as this most recent Battlegrounds and AW seasons come to an end,
One of the most impactful changes we’ve made since our last update has been tweaks and updates to our automated systems. We have, once again, bolstered our parameters and approach to identifying and banning modders, not just in Battlegrounds, but everywhere across the Contest.
By making these adjustments to the system and continuing with multiple manual sweeps each week, our team has been identifying and banning at least 75% more cheaters over the last month. We feel that this was a change that was felt by many of our Summoners, especially those competing for the top spots in Battlegrounds.
We made a lot of progress over the last month, but the war on cheaters will be a long one. We have plans for more additions and adjustments in the near future that will continue to improve the game experience for honest Summoners everywhere, including shortening the time required to release Battlegrounds rewards.
Thank you for your continued patience,
- MCOC Team
We wanted to provide an update in our ongoing battle against modders/cheaters as this most recent Battlegrounds and AW seasons come to an end,
One of the most impactful changes we’ve made since our last update has been tweaks and updates to our automated systems. We have, once again, bolstered our parameters and approach to identifying and banning modders, not just in Battlegrounds, but everywhere across the Contest.
By making these adjustments to the system and continuing with multiple manual sweeps each week, our team has been identifying and banning at least 75% more cheaters over the last month. We feel that this was a change that was felt by many of our Summoners, especially those competing for the top spots in Battlegrounds.
We made a lot of progress over the last month, but the war on cheaters will be a long one. We have plans for more additions and adjustments in the near future that will continue to improve the game experience for honest Summoners everywhere, including shortening the time required to release Battlegrounds rewards.
Thank you for your continued patience,
- MCOC Team
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Comments
There obviously needs to be harder consequences eg. no season rewards for 3 months, or permanently banning the hardware MAC address for repeat offenders (if you have access to that info).
OR shadow ban them where they fight unwinnable fights against AI competitors. Pls do that!
If you banned 10,000 cheaters last month, but 17,500 cheaters this month, that is also a 75% increase.
Some more concrete numbers would be nice.
One area of the game where it’s hard to see any impact from the improved efforts is Arena. There also has been no mention in cheating in Arena since the massive ban from a year or so ago where you guys have players the rewards they would have earned if not for cheaters finishing above them. Since that time Arena cut off scores have only gone up. Any comments on Arena?
I'm going to be a Debbie-downer and show the "power of statistics" to mislead stats without enough information.
saying you banned 75% more people does not necessarily mean a 75% improvement. There can be many reasons for this beyond the improvements made.
Some easy to identify ones before I go into numbers include:
1: more people thought they could get away with it, so more people cheated. Catching more cheaters may just mean more people tried.
2: 75% of what? Letting go of #1 / assuming same population size... were there 1,000,000 players before, with 100,000 "actual cheaters" but only 12 got banned? If so, a 75% increase to 21 people getting banned this season... really isn't statistically significant. you still have effectively the same number of cheaters and had a negligible improvement.
now... those are all hypothetical numbers to some extreme, and I doubt things were anywhere near that bad. I just really have a pet peev when someone say "4 out of 5 dentists prefer this tooth brush"... and forget that there are maybe 1,000,000 dentists out there, so having a population size of 5 and getting an 80% rate is meaningless.
Last before I get off my soap box... I agree with several above including @Eb0ny-O-M4w that bans need to have larger teeth... all rewards remotely associated with anything potentially gained from modding needs to be stripped "rounding up", and while I am all for a 3 strikes rule... the first strike needs to be severe enough that someone doesn't do it once or twice and then stops knowing its only the 3rd strike that matters.
Having an alliance fall from P1 to further down P1... does not make it up to the other alliances they the a modded alliance might have faced. The opponents need to be "given wins" in those matches, and while I'm not a fan of punning say 28 members of an alliance if only 2 cheated... in this case a small penalty (at least to the officers) wouldn't be a bad thing, plus an actual flag on an account saying "this account has been bannend before"... so that a simple change in profile pic an change name token can't be used to hide one's history. (maybe after a year of good behavior that flag could go away... but I don't think a single post needs to solve every little detail about the game... so I'll end there
(Note: NAL, just another schmuck who watches too many legal dramas)
On the other hand on the other game modes there are plenty. For example in incursions, lots of players complete the 25 rooms with their account and another fake account with a bot in order to win without any difficulty. It's frustrating to see that, personally I did it solo, and I spent 1500-2000u...
I'm not even talking about the EOP, there are plenty of players who cheat to get the rewards quickly. There is still a lot of work to do to remove all the cheaters...
I appreciate the effort from Kabam but honestly, I could quite happily put the game down for 10 days after modding a bunch of content* and I doubt modders care about 10 days of calendar rewards.
*not a cheater, never will be.