Dear Kabam - My feelings on our recent war penalty.
Dear Kabam,
Let me start by saying I am in now way trying to ask for a reversal of our war penalty, or any concrete actions on our situation. I just wanted to give my constructive feedback on the recent penalty my alliance received due to "One or more of our members violating the terms of service". I hope you will read this and take it for what it is.
As a background, I want to be clear that we are not a 'piloting alliance'. We have never asked someone to take someone else's fights, and we have actively encouraged people not to move for each other in alliance war. To the best of our knowledge, it is not something that is happening. I am 100% certain that it is not wide-spread or 'egregious' and that it has in no way helped us win any wars if it is going on at all.
That said, we recently received a 300 war rating reduction and a loss of ~800,000 season points with very little explanation.
I understand there is a need to protect the privacy of your players, but I feel like we really do need at least a little bit more information on the violations. Which Terms of Service were broken? Was it piloting? Modding? WHEN did the offense occur? Was it in the last war, or was this a penalty from 10 wars ago that is just now catching up? Even this type of information without specifying who the offender was can help us narrow down what action might be resulting in this penalty so we can resolve it.
Without providing any details we are left stuck not knowing what we can do to prevent this situation again. I do not have intimate knowledge of every one of our members, but I am certain that if there was a violation, it was an individual case and not a wide-spread alliance wide attempt to cheat. I think in this case it would make more sense to take action against the individual, rather than the alliance as a whole.
I am fully supportive of stamping out cheating / piloting in the game, and this is in no way an attempt to suggest you stop handing out penalties. However, the way it has been handled leaves me wondering how it is going to help. General principles behind punishment, is that it is meant to correct behaviour / allow rehabilitation. Because I can't isolate what went wrong, we have no opportunity to correct our behaviour, or change the actions we are taking.
I also think before being judge, jury and executioner you should at least indicate what evidence you found of a violation. We are left wondering if your actions are based purely on a complaint from a sore loser we have faced? A player we have booted who wants revenge on the alliance? Please, please, please provide evidence or details of the offense so we aren't left in this state of limbo scratching our heads trying to figure out how to proceed.
Beyond booting every member of our alliance and starting over hoping we will get people who don't violate the ToS, we see no solution.
Please take this into consideration.
Regards,
Trein1n, proud officer Reign - an alliance that plays fair (or so we thought?)