CONSTRUCTIVE..... Should cheating alliances forfeit season awards??
Go_Grems
Member Posts: 127 ★
Keeping this constructive, what are your thoughts? I think they should be able to keep doing wars and earn individual war rewards and just forfeit season awards. Just demoting them only means they start lower and will win back to the top. So actually more wins in the end.
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Comments
Yes, these groups won't be able to make up the points they've been deducted but when a 3k rating alliance gets dropped down to 2600-2800 rating they'll smoke everybody in their path. Is that fair to those lower rated alliances that now have to face the top 10 alliances in the world and ruin their chances at whatever their goal is?
Deducting points and forcing the cheating alliances to face other groups of their same rating is a fair punishment but deducting points AND dropping rating actually gives the cheating alliance a way to salvage their season but punish everybody they face.......
That's not exactly true, but more importantly punishment cannot be just about deducting what was earned improperly. If that were true, there would be a huge incentive to cheat since all you can lose is the gains from cheating. If you're caught, it is as if you didn't cheat, and if you aren't caught you're way ahead. Punishment must be punitive, or it isn't a deterrent.
Well, if you're not practicing quality control on recruits and not paying enough attention to notice when they do squirrelly stuff, you deserve to get punished.
I think it's important to recognize that it's not just about the cheaters, but it's about doing right by the victims of the cheaters. Lowering an Alliance's War Rating thrusts them into lower brackets where players of lesser skill (or who don't have as strong of a roster as their opponents) are going to get crushed by the "penalized" Alliance. So, now you're penalizing the Alliance they're playing against as well, because the "penalized" Alliance is playing against a less skilled (or weaker) Alliance and will likely steamroll them on their way back up the ladder. That's not a fair means of dealing with the problem for Alliances lower on the ladder.
You want to stop cheaters? All Alliance War rewards are delivered 24 hours after the close of a War, giving time for investigation of any cheating allegations. When cheating is confirmed, every Alliance member is presented with clear evidence from Kabam (sending a message to 30 members isn't hard) and receive War challenger rewards instead of War victory rewards. All players that participated in the cheating get zero rewards, and the points they contributed toward War are deducted from the Alliance score for that War. Should that drop them below the opposing Alliance's score, the opposing Alliance is retroactively granted victory (and the rewards that come with it; so yes, it's possible for both Alliances to receive challenger rewards only). Repeat offenders receive a six-month ban from joining an Alliance (the option to be a part of an Alliance gets disabled). Let Alliances keep their War Rating (based upon victory or challenger results, of course) so as not to punish honest players in future War battles. A 300 point loss could drop an Alliance one or more brackets; a 50-ish point loss is no worse than normally losing a war fair-and-square.
This would guarantee transparency, give time for investigation, punish the guilty parties, not punish the Alliances that were victims of cheating, and would incentivize all players to actively shun cheaters from joining or remaining within their Alliances. It's certainly a hell of a lot more fair than dropping Alliances where someone cheats by 300 points and doing absolutely nothing for the Alliances that were the victims of the cheating.
Best wishes!
You benefited from an unfair advantage; why shouldn't you penalized?
I think if an alliance benefits from cheating but there's no proof that the other members of the alliance was aware of or assisted in that cheating, they should still be penalized. That penalty must remove more than the gains due to cheating to both remedy the illegal gains and to apply some pressure to encourage the alliance to do all it can to weed out cheaters. But there is only so much an alliance can do. That's different from when a player deliberately cheats: there the remedy should go beyond penalty to punishment. Punishment doesn't just remove the illegally obtained gains, it must apply a sufficiently high magnitude loss so as to actively discourage further acts of cheating. Not all cheaters are caught: the penalty must be high enough that the cost/benefit analysis for the gains possible verses the losses likely are overwhelming bad enough to make cheating not worth it in most people's eyes.
Here's the deal, if you drop 300 points most alliances drop a tier. Multiplier goes down. You lost AW points. Climb back up isn't easy.
Further, one person can mess the whole alliance up. At least now they can kick that member and know who he or she is. I've been lead, member, officer at different alliances. You can't know what you can't know. Of the alliances that I'm aware of that were punished two of them sure as heck knew it was happening. Two others had one guy and there was no way they would know. It's not like the letter "P" shows up by their name in the alliance to make it clear.
I worry at times some guy in an alliance I'm in at some point will go rogue trying not to get booted and call in a pilot.
This
It has taken them months to finally develop a system to identify piloting, how can leaders and officers possibly do that with the little info we can see on members ? Kabam could even keep the offenders name private, just say the player in bg2 who fought node 24 was found to have been in violation for that fight. Easy enough, no names mentioned and the officers can track who did that path and act accordingly.
Without giving us this knowledge, all it does is lead to finger pointing and added stress to everyone. We've never had any issue, but I can just imagine how that would create chaos in an alliance when points are docked. Maybe this time there were bans placed so the cheaters can be removed from the alliances who were penalized, and the people who played fair can work to restore themselves.
The roster is still full, so presumably the cheater(s) have not been banned. So, how to we prevent future punitive measures unless Kabam is willing to inform leaders as to who the perpetrators are?
Banned players are not automatically removed from alliances. But because they cannot log in to the game, it is theoretically possible to know if someone was banned by checking to see if one or more players appear to be absent for an extended period of time without any communication, and if their last login time indicates they aren't just logging in when you aren't looking.
“Banned players are not automatically removed from alliances. But because they cannot log in to the game, it is theoretically possible to know if someone was banned by checking to see if one or more players appear to be absent for an extended period of time without any communication, and if their last login time indicates they aren't just logging in when you aren't looking.”
DNA3000, that’s in interesting theory. Do we know how long someone would be prevented from logging in, for a first offense?
I do agree, and that occurred to me, but I'm operating on a bare minimum of removing the ill-gotten Rewards. However, what we have is quite an epidemic considering the number of Allies that have been penalized. If you consider removing Season Rewards altogether, I think it has greater side-effects on the overall Ranking for everyone.
I would suggest a somwehat different route for punishment. Perhaps even Season Suspensions. Fact is, if they're earning a portion fairly, it's not as reasonable to take that away. It's a tricky predicament in my view. Don't get me wrong, I'm anti-cheating. I'm just not convinced that the harshest outcome is always feasible.
You can't really ban people. You can only ban accounts. When they ban an account for account sharing, they are banning the specific account they have detected as been accessed by more than one player. It is possible they are also banning associated accounts, i.e. the account associated with the pilot and not the piloted account but I have no first hand accounts of that happening. However, even if Kabam doesn't do this deliberately, it could still happen as a consequence of the methods they use to prove account sharing. They could, for example, prove that two accounts were involved in piloting but it wasn't clear who was piloting who in complex situations, and simply ban them all. I don't have any knowledge of that happening, but it is theoretically possible under some detection methodologies.