A possible solution to the unfairness of cheating, losing points and fighting in a lower tier.

Yes, Kabam, we all laud and extol your efforts and actions for punishing cheaters in AW. That's not the complaint. The complaint is dropping those cheaters into lower tiers, so they can steamroll legitimate alliances fighting tooth and nail in the gold and platinum brackets.

A run-in with one of these can unfairly cause hard working alliances to drop from a bracket; especially towards the end of a season.

It seems ludicrous to me there should be even more collateral damage caused by the cheaters.

I offer a solution:

Point Debt

What is point debt?
_______________________________

1) It's an active and passive solution to AW cheating.

2) When an alliance is caught cheating, instead of getting points deducted, they keep their current score (maintaining their relative bracket) and the would-be point deduction is added as debt.

3) Half their points from any AW would go to paying off the debt (again, to maintain their relative bracket). Once their debt is paid off, they can start earning all their points towards their score again.

4) Any debt not paid off at the end of a season is deducted from their final score.

Comments

MrMaat

why not simply....
instead of docking them mid season....
just put them on a black list....
let them continue....
at the end of the season dock them points....

maybe some issues with this too but....

or just remove the multipler for X amount of wars...
depending on how bad the cheating was remove their multiplier for anywhere from 1 war to the rest of the season.

DNA3000

Lt_Magnum_1 wrote: »

Deduct all points and rewards gained from 🚫 activity. Repeat alliances should be put in a doghouse bracket, which prohibits them from getting into any season rewards.

The problem here is that no alliance would just sit in the doghouse. They are more likely to disband and reform to avoid the penalty. And if you prevent them from doing so, you would be in effect banning innocent players from even joining other alliances, and there's no justification for applying that penalty on players not found cheating.

Draenath

Just strip the player involved of the entire season rewards and give them an entire season ban. That would suffice

Kabam Vydious

We understand the concerns y'all have with this and greatly appreciate the feedback you've been sharing. We've been keeping an eye on this and passing along information.

unknown

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Hammerbro_64

Thanks @Kabam Vydious !

Idk if I already said it but you could take away season points right before it ends and reward them to the cheated alliances before/as placements for rewards are being calculated.

The only downside I see to this plan is people not knowing where they will be placed. Maybe you could send a letter to the leaders of the cheaters and cheated alliance involved in the war to say “at the end of the season, you will gain x points and the other team will lose y points and vice versa.

Spera

Personally I like the approach kabaam has made ,instead of dropping one major adjustment that can potentially backfire they are slowly but surely etching away at the problem.
This season is by far the best yet ;we have seen many alliences once thought to be getting special treatment now punished. . In my opinion cleanest season so far since personally each ally we went up against and thought they might be doing something fishy turned out getting docked.
I used to think that we the players had to send a ticket for kabam to start investigating ,now I know that's not the case ...
They are keeping a watchful eye on everybody and that is awesome ,it can only get better from here on out

DNA3000

Hammerbro_64 wrote: »

Thanks @Kabam Vydious !

Idk if I already said it but you could take away season points right before it ends and reward them to the cheated alliances before/as placements for rewards are being calculated.

The only downside I see to this plan is people not knowing where they will be placed. Maybe you could send a letter to the leaders of the cheaters and cheated alliance involved in the war to say “at the end of the season, you will gain x points and the other team will lose y points and vice versa.

What about the alliances that get bumped downward when you increase the victims' points? We normally expect to either hold our position when the season ends or maybe drift upward if cheaters get penalized downward. But what happens when at the end of the season some alliances move downward, potentially into lower brackets, when the adjustments are made?

DNA3000

Draenath wrote: »

Just strip the player involved of the entire season rewards and give them an entire season ban. That would suffice

You can't only penalize the cheating player, because if you do it opens the door to high tier alliances leveling up sock puppet accounts that take the bullet for them when they are used in AW. The puppet eats the penalty, everyone else gets the rewards. You don't want to excessively penalize the entire alliance, but you must penalize them enough to disincentivize any alliance-wide benefit you could get from cheating.

Maximus_Spankerson

Agreed in that it’s been a steady movement in the right direction. I am sure there no one will dispute that it’s a long road ahead. Seasons needs to evolve toward a championship structure relying less on matchmaking luck. Hopefully it will move in that direction.

Draenath

DNA3000 wrote: »

Draenath wrote: »

Just strip the player involved of the entire season rewards and give them an entire season ban. That would suffice

You can't only penalize the cheating player, because if you do it opens the door to high tier alliances leveling up sock puppet accounts that take the bullet for them when they are used in AW. The puppet eats the penalty, everyone else gets the rewards. You don't want to excessively penalize the entire alliance, but you must penalize them enough to disincentivize any alliance-wide benefit you could get from cheating.

@DNA3000 - My case could be essentially 4-6 players a pop. The ones that shared their accounts and the one that piloted - that is a hell of a lot of puppet accounts for a single win - once 4-6 people in an alliance have their account banned for 5 weeks and no season rewards, the point is driven home pretty fast.

DNA3000

Draenath wrote: »

DNA3000 wrote: »

Draenath wrote: »

Just strip the player involved of the entire season rewards and give them an entire season ban. That would suffice

You can't only penalize the cheating player, because if you do it opens the door to high tier alliances leveling up sock puppet accounts that take the bullet for them when they are used in AW. The puppet eats the penalty, everyone else gets the rewards. You don't want to excessively penalize the entire alliance, but you must penalize them enough to disincentivize any alliance-wide benefit you could get from cheating.

@DNA3000 - My case could be essentially 4-6 players a pop. The ones that shared their accounts and the one that piloted - that is a hell of a lot of puppet accounts for a single win - once 4-6 people in an alliance have their account banned for 5 weeks and no season rewards, the point is driven home pretty fast.

In some cases you could tell who did the piloting, but in the top tier cases involving pilot devices you probably cannot consistently tell. This punishment only works for a special case circumstance, and you did say "just strip the player involved" you didn't specify this would only apply when alliances were detected with a large number of pilots.

Draenath

Yeah, my interpretation of piloting is that both parties are as equally guilty - season bans - don't beat around the bush Kabam!

DNA3000

Draenath wrote: »

Yeah, my interpretation of piloting is that both parties are as equally guilty - season bans - don't beat around the bush Kabam!

That's my perspective as well (re:piloting). I'm just saying this isn't something that is trivial to detect and punish accurately. Suppose I get a hold of your phone. Not your MCOC account, just your phone. And I log into my account on your phone. I could with the right set of actions make it seem like you were piloting my account on your phone, because how would Kabam know it was me and not you in person playing? Normally, that would just get me punished, because the account being detected as piloted is mine. But if you automatically assume that the "pilot" is equally to blame and should be equally punished, the "pilot" in this case would logically be deduced to be you, as it is your phone. To be precise, the owner of the account that normally plays on that device. In this way, I could sabotage you, and I could do it with an account I don't care about.

You have to be very careful about zero-tolerance policies: if there isn't perfect implementation where the rubber meets the road, you could open the door to a lot of nasty side effects. In principle I agree with you, but I'm pointing out that in practice we don't detect *people* we really detect *accounts* and *account behavior* and that makes connecting bad actions to actual human beings extremely difficult. It is much easier to connect bad actions to associated accounts. The pilot is only detectable if they are idiots and connect their piloting actions to their own accounts somehow. But in practice we almost never know which human being did anything. We only know which accounts were involved in a violation. When piloting occurs, only one account is really detected, usually (sometimes not, but that drifts into investigation methods).

unknown

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