EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE
There was an issue with an offer that sent out a surplus of Tier 7 Basic Catalysts.
While the Game Team investigates a way to remedy this issue, we will be putting the Game into Emergency Maintanance.
We do not currently have an estimate on how long this will take, however, we will let you know as soon as we know anything.
Thank you for your patience.
There was an issue with an offer that sent out a surplus of Tier 7 Basic Catalysts.
While the Game Team investigates a way to remedy this issue, we will be putting the Game into Emergency Maintanance.
We do not currently have an estimate on how long this will take, however, we will let you know as soon as we know anything.
Thank you for your patience.
Comments
Modding in mobile games has been around for over a decade. And one thing remains constant: mod developers have the upper hand. They are working with much more information than game developers are. When someone gets banned, the modders can then reverse engineer why it happened to close that gap. I’m guessing the developers have a bunch of shell accounts that cheat constantly for this purpose alone.
It’s pretty silly to say you don’t want anymore resources devoted to cheaters. Because Kabam will always devote resources to cheaters. I guarantee resources in the software engineer team and data science team are devoted to this endeavor at all times. Replicating a server can be done by one person in a day or less, but I digress.
The benefit of shadow banning them to their own server has two major benefits. One, it doesn’t easily notify cheaters that their methods are being detected. That prevents them from constantly changing their code to circumvent new security measures. Two, it provides a localized continuous stream of data of verified cheaters to Kabam to bolster their security measures.
I think people are getting caught up in the revenge aspect of this. If they see cheaters getting banned forever it makes them feel good. But that isn’t the goal here. The goal is to protect the integrity of the game and reduce cheating to near non-existent levels. I’m all for punishing people. But if a different solution reaches a better end goal but happens to have less punishing; then that solution is still the ideal one.
This may just be ignorance on my part as to what the flagging suspicious accounts is based on but the concern I have is, what is the robustness of the flagging/banning mechanism?
For all the current and future improvements, It will probably never catch every cheater, but is it guaranteed to never wrongly lead to someone's ban? I can't imagine there is a huge training set neatly tagged with honest cheaters saying they have cheated to train on, although there would be the very obvious cheaters winning impossible fights in seconds. With people's accounts/money/time spent on the line, Is everything flagged, manually reviewed by someone with expert knowledge to make sure the ban/flag was correct?
Lots of things in this game have bugs, it's a complex games with loads of different interactions between champions, nodes and abilities, and while we need a robust cheating detection/deterrent In place, it does need to be 100% sure it can't lead to any false bans because of an oversight of what's possible.
Maybe it isnt even an issue, it doesn't seem like the forums have been plagued with "Why have I been banned posts" and I imagine there will never be too much transparency over how the system works, because will encourage workarounds, but would be interesting to see what the perceived sensitivity/specificity of the current approach is.
Whether Kabam has enough moral fortitude to do this (given that modders may be spenders) is going to be interesting to watch.