**WINTER OF WOE - BONUS OBJECTIVE POINT**
As previously announced, the team will be distributing an additional point toward milestones to anyone who completed the Absorbing Man fight in the first step of the Winter of Woe.
This point will be distributed at a later time as it requires the team to pull and analyze data.
The timeline has not been set, but work has started.
There is currently an issue where some Alliances are are unable to find a match in Alliance Wars, or are receiving Byes without getting the benefits of the Win. We will be adjusting the Season Points of the Alliances that are affected within the coming weeks, and will be working to compensate them for their missed Per War rewards as well.

Additionally, we are working to address an issue where new Members of an Alliance are unable to place Defenders for the next War after joining. We are working to address this, but it will require a future update.

Pros and Cons of the recent ban wave

So Kabam delivered what was promised in AW and a recent ban wave proved to be of a great impact with many docked alliances and banned members. I just want to share my opinion hoping to make things positive going forward highlighting the pros and the cons of the process

The pros:

1- The talk of the high spending alliances can’t get touched should be no more after this wave
2- The timing is excellent as the band will deprive the banned users from the season rewards. I really applaud the timing

The cons:

1- The alliances hit with the wave are getting matched to lower alliances which is not good for the lower alliances and affects their season rank which can be better if they avoid the docked alliances
2- From my point of view the members bans could have been enough as alliances punishment will be to find new members instead of the banned ones who are the main cause of the problem
3- It really messes the aliances plans in AQ especially going into map 6 so another part of the game gets affected. I don’t know if that’s in the plan

So what do you think can be done better going forward to improve the process from your point of view ?

Comments

  • AnkalagonnAnkalagonn Posts: 535 ★★
    I guess they calculated the risk. I mean, Kabam always care for their pockets so I guess they know what they have done
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    Let’s keep it clean. There are no money stuff related to the ban wave the way I see it man. It’s just a thing that they said will happen and it did. Going forward it needs to be kept fair and improving
  • OmniOmni Posts: 574 ★★★
    The good. It will slow down player progression so not everyone has their 4th rank 5 when most in platinum have 1-2.

    The bad, allys top t2 now have to face much tougher defenses.
  • DTMelodicMetalDTMelodicMetal Posts: 2,785 ★★★★★
    Omni wrote: »
    The good. It will slow down player progression so not everyone has their 4th rank 5 when most in platinum have 1-2.

    The bad, allys top t2 now have to face much tougher defenses.

    The very good - alliances know no one is safe from being penalized for piloting
  • Propane722Propane722 Posts: 14
    While a good idea, lower rated teams will suffer being matched up against far superior teams. The gold 1/platinum 3 tiers get affected the most. In addition,these teams have received rewards from “cheating” that have been used to make their rosters stronger. The teams that lost wars because these teams cheated, haven’t been compensated with rewards they lost out on (crystal shards from each war and end of season rewards).
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    Omni wrote: »
    The good. It will slow down player progression so not everyone has their 4th rank 5 when most in platinum have 1-2.

    The bad, allys top t2 now have to face much tougher defenses.

    The very good - alliances know no one is safe from being penalized for piloting

    That’s what I wouldn’t like to see going forward. Recruiting new guys who can play at top level is hard enough so it’s good as alliance punishment. Banning the piloted accounts is great but not at the expense of the whole alliance. It needs to be completely fair
  • PaytoPlayPaytoPlay Posts: 762 ★★★
    The bad will be that anyone who faces these cheating alliance may not be able to finish 100% due to the big differences in roster. In another threads we talk about alliances giving up defender remaining points for much stronger alliance, this will happen with the ban waves.

    Whoever have to face these cheating alliance will not only loses, they will lose big on points compare to other similar ranked alliances. The worst goes to the alliances who borderline between plat and gold .... They may not be able to make the differences back in the next few wars...
  • Mostu100 wrote: »
    3- It really messes the aliances plans in AQ especially going into map 6 so another part of the game gets affected. I don’t know if that’s in the plan

    I'm not sure how this can be considered a "con." This seems to imply that one of the downsides of banning a player is that it deprives their alliance of having their presence. But that's the explicit intent of banning a player: to remove them from the game either temporarily or permanently. It isn't really an upside or a downside, it is a consequence of the intentional act of banning a player that doesn't factor into the decision either way.
    Mostu100 wrote: »
    2- From my point of view the members bans could have been enough as alliances punishment will be to find new members instead of the banned ones who are the main cause of the problem

    You can't do that because it is exploitable. Remember: people don't get banned, accounts get banned. There's no real way to ban a person. You can ban a game account, you can ban an email address, but simply because Kabam doesn't actually know which human being on Earth owns an account (they don't even ask) the ban lands on a game account, not a person. If the only punishment alliances got was for the cheating account to be banned, alliances could create dummy accounts and cheat within those, and just keep replacing them as they got banned. And if you know that account is a sacrificial account that will eventually get banned, it isn't hard to mod that account into the stratosphere for the purposes of fighting a couple of wars, so they are not hard to replace for this purpose.
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    PaytoPlay wrote: »
    The bad will be that anyone who faces these cheating alliance may not be able to finish 100% due to the big differences in roster. In another threads we talk about alliances giving up defender remaining points for much stronger alliance, this will happen with the ban waves.

    Whoever have to face these cheating alliance will not only loses, they will lose big on points compare to other similar ranked alliances. The worst goes to the alliances who borderline between plat and gold .... They may not be able to make the differences back in the next few wars...

    That’s true. It’s nit fair at all for lower rated alliances. Point deduction system should get modified or replaced with another system not affecting the other fair but lower rated alliances
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    @DNA3000 the first point is for the timing. As much as it was good timing but it could have been done in the AQ off days do alliances can adjust, but if that’s part of the planned punishment then it works. I agree with what you said on the second part but still punishing 29 accounts or guys for 1 guynor account’s mistake is a little bit harsh
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    edited September 2018
    [Edited by Mod]

    It’s a work in progress not a finished article so sometimes a miss can happen
  • Mostu100 wrote: »
    punishing 29 accounts or guys for 1 guynor account’s mistake is a little bit harsh

    It is the reality of team competitions. Ultimately, the team rises together or they fall together. You accept that when you are on a team. An alliance is not just a bunch of individuals that happen to enter the same map. It is a team that is judged on how well they work together. A team in which one person is screwing it up for everyone else is in effect a failure of a team. The other members of the team may be blameless, and the one person that screwed it up can and should bear a harsher personal penalty, but at the end of the day the team fails, and the team suffers.

    There's no way to punish a team without punishing the members of that team. And when you join a team, you agree to accept the benefits and the deficits of that team as a whole. This is not something you have a choice in, not just in MCOC but in all team competitions of any kind. You have to judge punishment based on what the team deserves, and only what the team deserves. You can't punish a team based on what each individual member of that team might deserve. That's simply not practical or even generally possible.

    If the punishment for the violation is seen as too harsh to apply to members of an entire alliance but not too harsh to apply to the alliance as a whole, the only thing you can really do is punish the violators as harshly as possible and with as much deterrent strength as possible to reduce the occurrence of the violation, to spare other alliances of that punishment through prevention in the future.
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    Agreed. Punish the one who made the mistake in any way you choose but don’t generalize the punishment onto fair players too. Some players even fear the get kicked because their level doesn’t match their peers in the alliance so they let others pilot their accounts without the alliance knowing. So it’s their own fault to pay for and then only not anyone else
  • Darkstar4387Darkstar4387 Posts: 2,145 ★★★
    edited September 2018
    It can be really bad for lower allaince after the ones who were affected by the bans get rid of the said offenders and will basically [removed by moderation] their opposition due to kabam docking their allaince and dropping them down to the lower tiers.

    Not every alliance who got docked had knowledge of cheating in some form but obviously it happened because they were penalized and then sent a message.

    Then had to do their own investigation and weed out some members with a process of elimination due to kabams policy which I really don't agree with btw.

    Truthfully I wish they would either tell us ( or hint at) who was doing the cheating/ hacking/ modding instead of us trying to figure it out because some are hard to find out especially if it's not noticable.

    Honestly I think their poilces are determential to the game though I do appreciate them trying to clean up the game and stick to their guns about going after the higher ones who spend a lot.

    Post edited by Kabam Porkchop on
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    It can be really bad for lower allaince after the ones who were affected by the bans get rid of the said offenders and will basically **** their opposition due to kabam docking their allaince and dropping them down to the lower tiers.

    Not every alliance who got docked had knowledge of cheating in some form but obviously it happened because they were penalized and then sent a message.

    Then had to do their own investigation and weed out some members with a process of elimination due to kabams policy which I really don't agree with btw.

    Truthfully I wish they would either tell us ( or hint at) who was doing the cheating/ hacking/ modding instead of us trying to figure it out because some are hard to find out especially if it's not noticable.

    Honestly I think their poilces are determential to the game though I do appreciate them trying to clean up the game and stick to their guns about going after the higher ones who spend a lot.

    They do tell in an indirect way. A member in your alliance gets banned and you can tell from their last login and activity
  • Darkstar4387Darkstar4387 Posts: 2,145 ★★★
    edited September 2018
    Mostu100 wrote: »
    It can be really bad for lower allaince after the ones who were affected by the bans get rid of the said offenders and will basically **** their opposition due to kabam docking their allaince and dropping them down to the lower tiers.

    Not every alliance who got docked had knowledge of cheating in some form but obviously it happened because they were penalized and then sent a message.

    Then had to do their own investigation and weed out some members with a process of elimination due to kabams policy which I really don't agree with btw.

    Truthfully I wish they would either tell us ( or hint at) who was doing the cheating/ hacking/ modding instead of us trying to figure it out because some are hard to find out especially if it's not noticable.

    Honestly I think their poilces are determential to the game though I do appreciate them trying to clean up the game and stick to their guns about going after the higher ones who spend a lot.

    They do tell in an indirect way. A member in your alliance gets banned and you can tell from their last login and activity

    Not necessarily, they don't always get banned right away kabam will dock first then do the individual one and if it's not serious they won't hand a ban down.

    Only if they got banned will you be able to find out which isn't always the case since bans time spans can vary, and then theres the things that your members can say to explain.

    You have no way of knowing if they are lying or telling the truth but obviously something happened just you need to figure out did what and when and try to see if your alliance knows and if said vilation was noticable or not

    It's not always clear cut and kabam is basically useless in this case due to their policies and the fact they will close threads and comments about it which makes it harder to figure out especially if it's account sharring/ piolting you have no idea who's running the accounts.

    Only they and kabam know but it takes some time for kabam to investigate and heavily rely on reports and their detection system.
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    This time it’s done for sure. The ban wave was very effective
  • New_Noob168New_Noob168 Posts: 1,562 ★★★★
    what was the ban wave this time for?
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    what was the ban wave this time for?

    Piloting in AW season
  • Darkstar4387Darkstar4387 Posts: 2,145 ★★★
    edited September 2018
    what was the ban wave this time for?

    Account sharing/ piolting and or hacking/ modding during the wars, wasn't just a ban wave it was also a dock hammer.
  • Deadbyrd9Deadbyrd9 Posts: 3,469 ★★★★
    edited September 2018
    I’ve heard of a few people banned for arena bots. It’s not just piloting or aw related unless the arena bot checked the war for some reason for a couple players. Still against TOS to have someone log in to do arena
  • Darkstar4387Darkstar4387 Posts: 2,145 ★★★
    Deadbyrd9 wrote: »
    I’ve heard of a few people banned for arena bots. It’s not just piloting or aw related unless the arena bot checked the war for some reason for a couple players. Still against TOS to have someone log in to do arena

    I don't doubt it, but a lot of what's going on is the fact that kabam docked a lot of alliances in various tiers over the past week for stuff in the war.

    People cheat all the time in this game maybe it's time to improve their security and make it harder to hack and mod the game
  • Mostu100Mostu100 Posts: 79
    Deadbyrd9 wrote: »
    I’ve heard of a few people banned for arena bots. It’s not just piloting or aw related unless the arena bot checked the war for some reason for a couple players. Still against TOS to have someone log in to do arena

    I think this is done regularly not only during the AW ban wave. Use of mods and bots is definitely against the TOS
  • Hello everyone,

    We understand that when users break the rules and the spirit of the game in order to cheat that it can be very frustrating. We take these instances very seriously and investigate each case of cheating brought forward to us.

    You can find out more information on Account Sharing and Piloting on the link below:
    https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/64936/regarding-account-sharing-and-piloting#latest

    If you suspect a user or alliance of cheating, please report it to our Support Team on the link below so we can investigate further:
    http://kabam.force.com/PKB/KbContactUsForm

    Kind Regards,

    Porkchop
This discussion has been closed.