Please stop punishing fair playing alliances by dropping stronger alliances who cheat down in rating

Hello,

I know you get this feedback all the time, but I want to re-iterate it so you can hopefully use it to action some change.

Please stop docking alliances that cheat a few hundred war rating. We are now matched with an alliance that has been caught cheating and got bumped from Plat 2 down to Gold 1 and dropped to our war rating.

They are going to crush us, essentially punishing us because they cheated.

There needs to be a better solution. Either only deduct season points (the thing they likely care about more), kick them out of the season entirely, don't allow them to do matchmaking for X number of wars, or put them in a "low priority" type match-making like Dota 2 uses where you just pair poorly behaved alliances against one another. Keep their rating where it was.

Lowering their rating is really unfair to the alliances that end up matched with one of these piloting / modding alliances that gets dropped down to a lower tier.

Thank you,

Treinin

Comments

DTMelodicMetal

@DNA3000's suggestion to dock cheating alliances' war points multipliers instead of removing war points really should be considered. Having a cheating alliance play alliances of equal strength with a gold 1 tier points multiplier is so much more of a fair punishment than having a cheating alliance bumped down to gold 1 to save AW resources because of unfair AW matchups.

PaytoPlay

Maybe instead of dropping war rating and points immediately, just ban the cheating alliances from participating war for a certain amount of war based on severity and their current tier and then they can match again. That way their points will drop but their war rating stays and will be match against alliances with similar war rating again. Doesn't really solve all the issues but seems like a good start.

KRONOSDOUBLE

@PaytoPlay 100% support on temporarily banning alliances. However, a lot of the time 29 people in an alliance get punished for the actions of just one. I think a short term ban on alliances is good in order to discourage cheating, but a long term temporary ban on the cheaters account would also be good. (not sure if they do that)

PaytoPlay

KRONOSDOUBLE wrote: »

@PaytoPlay 100% support on temporarily banning alliances. However, a lot of the time 29 people in an alliance get punished for the actions of just one. I think a short term ban on alliances is good in order to discourage cheating, but a long term temporary ban on the cheaters account would also be good. (not sure if they do that)

Assuming the cheater is piloting within his/her own alliances, the rest of the alliance members indirectly share the benefits even without their knowledge. Kabam has been refusing to disclose cheater info even to their own alliances based on their ToS so that tells me the cheaters walk right now instead of getting ban.

Yeah If they can flag the cheaters that's ideal.

jeffgmng

101% agree on this. Just like what brian grant said, one cheater could affect atleast 89 players. 29 co-ally, the ally you fought recently before you get caught cheating (yeah their points would be affected too) and the ally you’ll face bcause your ally’s war rating went down. Your suggestions would really be a good punishment and would avoid bad matchups against lower, fair-playing alliances.

DTMelodicMetal

KRONOSDOUBLE wrote: »

@PaytoPlay 100% support on temporarily banning alliances. However, a lot of the time 29 people in an alliance get punished for the actions of just one. I think a short term ban on alliances is good in order to discourage cheating, but a long term temporary ban on the cheaters account would also be good. (not sure if they do that)

Banning alliances from AW for any amount of time shouldn't be considered unless that alliance is a repeat offender

PaytoPlay

DTMelodicMetal wrote: »

KRONOSDOUBLE wrote: »

@PaytoPlay 100% support on temporarily banning alliances. However, a lot of the time 29 people in an alliance get punished for the actions of just one. I think a short term ban on alliances is good in order to discourage cheating, but a long term temporary ban on the cheaters account would also be good. (not sure if they do that)

Banning alliances from AW for any amount of time shouldn't be considered unless that alliance is a repeat offender

To clarify, they can still do AQ and other content, but they should be banned from joining war depends on severity (which can be longer if they are repeat offenders) or current tier. Maybe a plat 3 alliance first offense will be 1 war ban for example. Why should first time offender be spared from cheating otherwise? Because they didn't read the TOS?

DTMelodicMetal

PaytoPlay wrote: »

To clarify, they can still do AQ and other content, but they should be banned from joining war depends on severity (which can be longer if they are repeat offenders) or current tier. Maybe a plat 3 alliance first offense will be 1 war ban for example. Why should first time offender be spared from cheating otherwise? Because they didn't read the TOS?

Alliances being banned from AW for their 1st offense because a new recruit cheated is overkill. Alliances being banned from AW because they have a history of multiple members cheating in AW is not overkill. AW bans being implemented for 1st time offenses would only work as intended if the bans were for individual players and not alliances. Like you said AW bans shouldn't include access to other game content, just like how arena bans work.

PaytoPlay

DTMelodicMetal wrote: »

PaytoPlay wrote: »

To clarify, they can still do AQ and other content, but they should be banned from joining war depends on severity (which can be longer if they are repeat offenders) or current tier. Maybe a plat 3 alliance first offense will be 1 war ban for example. Why should first time offender be spared from cheating otherwise? Because they didn't read the TOS?

Alliances being banned from AW for their 1st offense because a new recruit cheated is overkill. Alliances being banned from AW because they have a history of multiple members cheating in AW is not overkill. AW bans being implemented for 1st time offenses would only work as intended if the bans were for individual players and not alliances. Like you said AW bans shouldn't include access to other game content, just like how arena bans work.

That's quite hard to track consider the leader of the current alliance may not be the og. When one of the ex top alliance cheated everyone quit the alliance and a new leader took over, recruited because of the resources left behind and if someone cheat... Will that count as first offense or are they a repeated offender? To keep things simple an offense is an offense.

DTMelodicMetal

PaytoPlay wrote: »

That's quite hard to track consider the leader of the current alliance may not be the og. When one of the ex top alliance cheated everyone quit the alliance and a new leader took over, recruited because of the resources left behind and if someone cheat... Will that count as first offense or are they a repeated offender? To keep things simple an offense is an offense.

Kabam has repeatedly said severity of consequences are contingent on whether there's a history of past offenses. Get them to change that and you've got a shot of actualizing your suggestion.

DNA3000

PaytoPlay wrote: »

DTMelodicMetal wrote: »

KRONOSDOUBLE wrote: »

@PaytoPlay 100% support on temporarily banning alliances. However, a lot of the time 29 people in an alliance get punished for the actions of just one. I think a short term ban on alliances is good in order to discourage cheating, but a long term temporary ban on the cheaters account would also be good. (not sure if they do that)

Banning alliances from AW for any amount of time shouldn't be considered unless that alliance is a repeat offender

To clarify, they can still do AQ and other content, but they should be banned from joining war depends on severity (which can be longer if they are repeat offenders) or current tier. Maybe a plat 3 alliance first offense will be 1 war ban for example. Why should first time offender be spared from cheating otherwise? Because they didn't read the TOS?

Well, I would say because it doesn't in general appropriately balance the need to penalize the alliance with the desire not to punish players for conduct outside their control. When you penalize an alliance, you by necessity penalize all of its members. But when the conduct is something within their control, the penalty can and should include punitive measures to deter that player (and others) from violating the rules. But there's less justification for the penalty across an entire alliance to include punitive punishment when that conduct was outside those players' control. You can't really use strong punishment to deter them, when there's a limit to the steps they can take to avoid it.

If you believe an entire alliance, or even a majority of it, was complicit in the cheating behavior of one or more players, its entirely justified to punitively punish the entire alliance. But when one person violates the rules and the entire alliance benefits from that violation but they had no part in the actual bad conduct, the penalty for the members that did not cheat should lean in the direction of being an effective penalty (which takes away ill-gotten gains) and applies *some* additional punitive effects (Kabam can take away more points than was earned) but not an excessive amount of them.

I would say that repeat offenses would be suggestive evidence that an alliance was not taking sufficient reasonable steps to ensure their members were not cheating. But if it was a first time offender, I would want more hard evidence that there was alliance-wide complicity. If that evidence existed, I think even first time alliance offenders could be more harshly treated.

The short version is that, unless Kabam believes an entire alliance is guilty, the cheater should be *punished* but the rest of the alliance should only be *penalized*. Penalties should be proportional to the improper benefit (it can be higher, because no penalty can be crafted perfectly and some deterrent effect is reasonable). Punishment should be strong enough to make it not worth cheating for all but the most die-hard cheaters.

PaytoPlay

Severity also based on whether or not the consequences is reversable or not. For example, if you cheated on act 5 to get 100% your account is the only one involved and potentially kabam can take away your rewards and make you redo act 5 again with partial rewards (eg . Forever losing the t5bs earned from act 5) . When cheating happens in AW that impacted so much more... Like someone suggested above it impact more than just one alliance even if it is a first offense. That being said, I do agree if a cheater can be flag and banned the alliance may not need to suffer but this is not the case right now. Without disclosing the cheater or cheaters the whole alliance ended up getting hurt unfortunately.

Championcritic

I agree at the very least that forcibly dropping alliances that cheat is not gonna solve the problem. In fact, it only makes things harder for the lower tier alliances because they get wrecked by alliances way over their league. And once they lose, they drop tier, which means that they once again face alliances even lower than them, which means that the even lower alliances will suffer, and the cycle continues.

DNA3000

PaytoPlay wrote: »

Severity also based on whether or not the consequences is reversable or not. For example, if you cheated on act 5 to get 100% your account is the only one involved and potentially kabam can take away your rewards and make you redo act 5 again with partial rewards (eg . Forever losing the t5bs earned from act 5) . When cheating happens in AW that impacted so much more...

I agree in general, but I think that's a problematic example. If you cheat your way through Act 3, the end result might save an individual player a lot of time and/or money, but the consequences for the game as a whole will likely be unnoticable. They have cheated their way to a progress point that hundreds of thousands of other players have achieved, and one more or less isn't going to impact other players in a noticeable way.

But if you cheat your way through Act 5, you are cheating your way to a progress point that much fewer players have achieved. One more or less is a more meaningful thing to everyone else. If that player uses those rewards on champions that they subsequently use in alliance war, for example, even if they play the war perfectly legally they could have a substantial advantage they shouldn't have had.

The higher in the single player content you cheat, the greater the impact those rewards can have on everyone else if you subsequently use the rewards in competitive content afterwards. So I think cheating in single player content that is sufficiently high in value, like Act 5 or LoL, should be treated similarly to cheating in competitive content simply because it is so much harder to actually know what the impact of that cheating is without an exhaustive analysis of every single thing that player did.

DTMelodicMetal

DNA3000 wrote: »

The higher in the single player content you cheat, the greater the impact those rewards can have on everyone else if you subsequently use the rewards in competitive content afterwards. So I think cheating in single player content that is sufficiently high in value, like Act 5 or LoL, should be treated similarly to cheating in competitive content simply because it is so much harder to actually know what the impact of that cheating is without an exhaustive analysis of every single thing that player did.

Great example of this is if any players had mercenaries play their accounts to finish top 5 in Act 5 legends runs. That would be a full extra T5BC that could be used to gain illegitimate advantages in AW.

NEO_mr_Anderson

My opinion is, each players should have a rating based on their top 10 champs. Then, you take the 30 memebers of that alliance and have an overall rating. that way, even if you sell off your champs, they will keep the top ones for sure, you will get an accurate rating of each players.
Better matchups based on overall rating.

DNA3000

NEO_mr_Anderson wrote: »

My opinion is, each players should have a rating based on their top 10 champs. Then, you take the 30 memebers of that alliance and have an overall rating. that way, even if you sell off your champs, they will keep the top ones for sure, you will get an accurate rating of each players.
Better matchups based on overall rating.

This sounds like a solution looking for a problem, and a discussion thread.

polverine15

I know my alliance was inadvertently lowered by Kabam punishing the cheaters. We dropped by over 300 positions in gold 1 after they handed out the punishments. I'm sure this was an unfortunate side effect, but we also got punished for playing the fame without paying someone to do our AWs.

polverine15

Game not fame. Stupid thumbs.

NEO_mr_Anderson

DNA3000 wrote: »

This sounds like a solution looking for a problem, and a discussion thread.[/quote]

You're right. I may be in the wrong thread. But, it pisses me off when I see ppl trying to cheat their way up. No matter wich way they use.

Sorry.

LeNoirFaineant

I have to say, I think the argument that an alliance benefits from the one cheater is almost always garbage. If it's alliance wide piloting as has happened at the top, then of course it makes sense to punish the entire alliance. If one player is modding and taking out bosses no one else could fight, then at least he gets banned and the alliance knows how to proceed. But in cases where one person is piloting because he isn't good enough on his own and the alliance is unaware are they really benefiting? If he were playing honestly and couldn't clear his path he would likely be replaced by someone who could. It isn't as though the other 29 players are reaping some sort of benefit. In any case, I agree that the demotion of master/plat one alliances to gold hurts the gold alliances. The entire system of punishment and the bizarre stance of protecting the guilty needs an overhaul.

MrMaat

just simply drop the multiplier.
or just cut the ally from the season leaderboard and make no other change in the case of a severe breach.

or just even rest points to 0..... there is no way they could recover from 0 points to that high of a end of season position

xNig

Just do a Season Point deduction without a drop in war ratings. This will remove their ability to string consecutive wins together and not punish lower tiered alliances.

Aleor

just take away all the points gained in war where cheating happened and ban those cheaters - first for 2 days, than 4, 8, 16, 32, 64... simple as that

Treinin

I appreciate the discussion guys - I think there is a lot of support and acceptance in the community that dropping these guys to a lower war rating is not a good solution. I hope someone from Kabam will pay attention to this and make a change to the way they do punishments. We had finally squeezed our way into the bottom of Plat 1 after several seasons of Gold 1 on the backs of a strong start to the season. Then as soon as they handed out these punishments we are up against a Platinum 2 alliance that has been dropped.

It just really sucks for us, and I know there must be a better way. I am guessing this is a case where the alliance we are facing just had a single cheater (they are at 29/30 participating in the war), so I am sure it sucks for them also. Not blaming them, just don't like the situation.

Greywarden

Totally agree with the OP.

Out of the 4 war seasons my group is being negatively affected for NOT cheating 2 of them. Either by poor match making algorithms (facing MMXIV in season 2 last war when we were p2 rank 49 lol) or by this half right "punishment."

We started this season 5-0 and made it to platinum 1 WITHOUT ANY CHEATING. Lost the 6th war to an alliance that was actually part of the hammer. Funny thing is we could have beat them if we didn't have someone go MIA for the last 6 hours of war and force us to fight linked nodes.....but either way.

Platinum 1 for our group BEFORE groups were hit and even with that loss is a huge achievement for us but now it's being taken away by cheating alliances....again.

Our current war is against a Master alliance that was docked. Not mad at them, who knows maybe they had one person screw it all up for them.

Kabam however needs to figure out a better way of making the punishment fit the crime. My group could potentially face all Master alliances that were docked to end the season and instead of potentially getting p1 we'll be fighting for our lives to MAYBE get platinum 2 by NOT cheating?!?!?

Makes no sense, I guarantee you a lot if not all of these Masters or top p1 groups that were hit will go 6-0 and possibly finish with p1 rewards. So for cheating and violating TOS they can get the second best AW rewards in the game......what is the incentive NOT to cheat?

Cheat and don't get caught, get Master
Cheat and get caught, P1

You're getting closer to doing this right Kabam, but you need to get there faster.

PLENTY of great ideas in this discussion to consider.

Boowoo

I don’t see kabam acknowledging this.

Boowoo

We were on top of p2. Got matched against 3 master allies that got docked. Missed a war due to searching over 3 hours. Now we’re in gold 1 and got matched with another master alliance that got docked to plat 3. SIGH. Not sure why I still play.

Aqwa81

I'm wondering tho. How full proof is this system that's being used to take back points and places on these alliances? And if u are 100 % sure of these teams doing it. Put them up against eachother. Seems to be the only fair solution. They get time to rank up even more guys and when u are that high in the ranks. U are able to rank your guys even faster. Make the cheaters fight the cheaters. My alliance has been in3/4 of war that just arn't even close to fair. They wipe out out in less then 14 hours. It's just sick and takes the fun right out of it. Instead of pulling them back. Bump them up. This way they start getting all the unfair match up. And make it so that whatever their rewards are. They get half or a 1/4 of them. We were on a huge winning steak and moving up fast and had a great system in place. I hate to think after all the hours of breaking down months of data on each node and players on each node and lanes that it doest matter cause we are just getting crushed. If our whole team made it with 2 full energy guys we couldn't take out their boss... we are gold 2. Since are new system we went from silver 3 to gold 2 tier 7. That's pretty damn good jump in a season and a half. We had one loss and got kicked back to silver 3 tier 7. We should be killing these guys but they are like 2x 3x even 4x our ratings. It's stupid. Every champ on D is like a r4 5*or r5 5*. I think them being dropped is more unfair then just leaving it the way it is and just take away a portion of their rewards because it's hurting everyone else more then them. Hit them where it hurts. Bump them up but give them silver 3 tier 12 rewards till they prove themselves. Something has to change and no effect the very one from gold 1 up to silver 3. PLEASE HELP US OUT. TAKE THEIR REWARDS AWAY FROM THEM. GIVE THEM A FRACTION OF WHAT THEY WOULD NORMALLY GET. DON'T SEND THEM TO OUR TIERS. THAT'S JUST SO BOT FAIR. SPECIALLY WHEN IT SAYS. FINDING A FAIR FIGHT FOR YOUR ALLIANCE. DEF NOT FAIR. THANK U FOR LISTENING TO MY WELL AND TRUE AND HONEST RANT....

AQWA81

klobberintyme

Treinin wrote: »

I appreciate the discussion guys - I think there is a lot of support and acceptance in the community that dropping these guys to a lower war rating is not a good solution. I hope someone from Kabam will pay attention to this and make a change to the way they do punishments. We had finally squeezed our way into the bottom of Plat 1 after several seasons of Gold 1 on the backs of a strong start to the season. Then as soon as they handed out these punishments we are up against a Platinum 2 alliance that has been dropped.

It just really sucks for us, and I know there must be a better way. I am guessing this is a case where the alliance we are facing just had a single cheater (they are at 29/30 participating in the war), so I am sure it sucks for them also. Not blaming them, just don't like the situation.

How do the top non-cheating alliances feel about this?

Just fine.