Bans... Do they even happen?

[GM]Saidin wrote: »

What We're Doing

So this brings us to the section where we can discuss what we do against hackers on a daily basis.

Reviewing reports
We get a lot of reports. Period. On a good day (low hacking) on a weekend we might get somewhere around 500 reports.

Sorting these reports out means we have to run filters on them. This is some of the stuff we do to get down to a legitimate report.
First check to see if the information in the report is accurate. Did they upload a replay, is there any additional information, did they get the character name correct (we realize this puts 'work' on your part but getting the name right with a bit of information goes a long way to getting the report done faster).
Then we do things like look to see how many times the user has been reported, the dates they were reported from, then we have to look here for abuse as a lot of clans feel that if one person sees a hacker then they must get all 100 people in the clan to submit the same replay of the same hacker. This is 100 reports we don't need.
Then we have to check to see if the account has been picked up by the auto ban system, and where along in the auto ban sequence they are (ie permanently banned or not etc).
Now we're getting to a point where we have a tangible report/replay to watch and it's the GMs turn to review the case.
Duplicate reports, wrong reports, reports not being actual hackers etc all adds up to one of the most tedious jobs our team does.

We take these reports seriously because we want the game to be legitimate, but we also want to take this professionally. We are not in the business of issuing a ban because so-and-so says so. When we ban a user we want to be confident that we've made the right decision so that if someone complains we can say; "No, we have reviewed this, you were hacking end of story."

Now having said all this, we are currently working on a backlog of bans and will be issuing some large scale bans on a lot of reports that we have been reviewing. We are investigating hacking trends and will be doing a large scale ban of a few thousand accounts this week. This kind of large scale anti-hacking movement doesn't happen often but in this case, coupled with the new X-Trap changes we are approaching a level within the game where hackers are a less of a problem and we've been able to look at some old reports to get them handled.


Misconceptions

At this point we would like to clear up a couple of misconceptions that some people seem to have.

"We do ban hackers." This is also another ludicrous notion that we don't ban hackers. We're very sorry it seems that the person you reported was caught hacking again in another game you were in. This could mean a few things:
1) They were picked up by the auto ban system and the ban expired and they are no longer hacking
2) They were never hacking in the first place
3) We haven't got to your report yet

There is no limitation to who we ban. We've banned everyone from high level players to high level spenders to level 0's who have only played for 5 minutes. Whether the person was picked up by the auto ban system or manually we've banned em all! And while the backlog of reports does pile up, we get to them and hackers can't escape.

We are confident in our GM team to review replays and issue appropriate bans. They all play the game on a daily basis and they know how to spot hackers and have no tolerance for them. The fact that some people believe we don't ban hackers is such an insulting false notion.

Chimpzz wrote: »

I have replays and a report from the speed crouching right after standing speeding was patched and the one I reported is not banned after many many months.

Waste of time, don't expect support to do the job they claim they do as you will be disappointed.



Auto ban, that is nothing to do with actual banning via a ticket.

uJealous wrote: »

Lol, I'm wondering the same thing.