Improvement to Cheat Detection (and Consequent Bans)

And justice is done by cheating back in your opinion?

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I do not propose to cancel everything. But equally punishing the killer and the child who stole the food is a bad idea. Second chance. Just a second chance.

Let’s say I am walking down the street at night. I pass a shop and notice the door is open. Someone comes out with a stolen TV. Other people are in the shop and stealing TVs.

Justice is not achieved by me also stealing a TV. If I also walk in and steal a TV, I am not less of a criminal then the first person. I am not “the child that stole the food” compared to “a killer”. I was not “forced” to steal. I’m just a criminal that stole a TV.

Justice is giving the same punishment to everyone that did the same crime.

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And what led to a situation in which everyone steals TVs? What if no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to get a TV, because others steal them and the authorities do nothing? And if this situation is not only with TVs, but with a lot more things?

There is a difference between the instigators of bar fights and those who have to fight back.

Not just a real legal system is very complicated.

Cheating because others are cheating still makes you a cheater. This isn’t professional sports where livelihoods are dependent on success. It’s a video game and to think there’s any sort of justification to cheat in a video game is just asinine.
This is the “nice” version of the meme I wanted to post.
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Christ. Devs aren’t going out of their way to ban people who are playing their game unless they have good reason to. They’ve got better things to do than effectively lose customers, paying or otherwise. I’m glad most people in here realize this. My only complaints would be that this wasn’t done sooner or in greater quantities (face it, we didn’t get them all yet).

Doing something dumb because you saw other people doing it makes you just as dumb as they are. I could use any of a hundred+ different analogies for that.

I will happily refer any doubters/whiners/whatever to my post in the script thread -

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IIt was important for me to express my opinion, even without a chance for support. Just know - not everyone thinks the same way

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It really does not matter at all if others think the same way about it.

Cheating is against the ToS iirc. (havent read it in ages) If not, it is against 1 of the legal documents.

I could cheat and do my treasure hunts cause I know others do it, and I hate that mode (soooo tedious) but I decided I wont cheat, I will either use them myself if I really want to, or I wont play it.

Everyone else has the same choice for every single mode.

You can either cheat, Play it yourself, or not play it at all.

If you “have” to play a mode fro a guild, and you really do not want to, then leave and find a different guild. If there isnt a guild like that, make 1.

To think that you are entitled to cheat because someone else is, is just idiotic at best.

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I will say that I do still think it’s unfair that rewards (generally speaking) aren’t adjusted after cheating players are banned in leaderboard events.

Medals are awarded retroactively if this happens in the Olympics – the pinnacle of competitive sport, and an event about which the GemMakin’BobsledTeam is very passionate!

I don’t know, have you ever seen it log off? Seems like no matter when I play it’s around. I’m pretty sure it’s account sharing.

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I just sat down at my desk with a coffee in order to read how this thread has progressed since yesterday, and it’s definitely interesting.

A lot of points were raised about ethics, and the motivations behind cheating. I believe that it was summed up well in the TV argument. Just because someone else steals something, doesn’t mean you should. If the police showed up, and you said you were taking a TV because you saw other people doing it, you will still be held accountable for your actions. The actions of the person before you change nothing, and both parties will be held responsible for stealing a TV. I personally believe this to be fair, but everyone has different opinion on morals and ethics.

However, this is also the view we take as a company, and we have terms of service for a reason. We are well within our rights to act on these issues, as they are outlined in the agreement players enter into when choosing to play Gems of War.

Also, banning cheaters isn’t really in our best interest. A lot of the cheaters we ban are players that have made purchases in game. If we were only worried about the bottom line, it’s not something we would feel as strongly about. However, we do want the game to be fair, which is why we have been working on our cheat detection for some time, and are now acting on a lot of the information it has gathered.

I really feel like everything that needs to be said has been said. If a player feels like they were unfairly banned they are welcome to contact our support team to discuss the issue further.

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“I resorted to cheating out of despair because it was the only way I could compete” is a bogus, straw man argument. Either you play by the rules or you don’t play. And it doesn’t matter if you wanted that orb of power more, Rocket. It’s still cheating and you should be held accountable for it.

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Someone said a VIP 20 should be banned. I find it highly unlikely a VIP 20 is cheating. I find it more likely FTP people cheat because they do not want to spend the money as others do. Why in the world would a VIP 20 cheat when they probably have every troop or heck a VIP 10 even. Someone said that xbox doesn’t seem to get bans but I remember the free gems people got and I think many on every platform got a ban.

i’m sure there are a lot of honest high VIP people out there but at the same time, you’d have to be competitive to the extreme in order to shell out the amount of money that lvl 20 VIP requires. i could easily see that competitive edge compelling some of those same people to cheat to bring their superiority to the next level. just a thought though, what do i know?

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I know you’re trying to be philosophical here but let me assure you, any decent ethical scholar would note you’re drawing a false equivalence.

So like, the thing that comes to mind that we do consider somewhat acceptable is when a starving man steals food. This puts our mores in conflict: we believe that life should be preserved, but we also believe theft is wrong. The kinds of ideas that this creates are what leads to ideas like Universal Basic Income. Even when people agree “this was OK”, that’s an oversimplification. What people usually mean is, “Theft is always wrong, but in this case if it were not allowed something worse would happen, so we will accept the lesser wrong.”

But that scenario has a lot of variants. Sometimes the starving man goes about stealing something extravagant like lobster and we consider his motives less pure. Sometimes he hurts a person in a way we think he could have avoided. There are a thousand different ways we might still be upset with the starving man.

And even so, people who have sympathy for the man often agree he should try obtaining food without stealing it. Very few people believe theft is ever so justified it should be the first option.

This is a far cry from your TV situation. Nobody needs a TV under any circumstances. It doesn’t matter if they’re priced so out of reach a person can never buy one. There are lots of things I know I can never afford, that doesn’t allow me to steal them. I know where a Lamborghini is parked. No matter how strongly I feel I can never achieve that, no jury will ever agree stealing it is justified. I’ve never seen a serious philosophical discussion in support of theft of non-essential items. It’s just not a defensible position.

It’s not even a good analogy to this game. Nothing in it is permanent. Nobody “owns” anything. Everything is dust. Yet there are people who are paid to create that dust, and we are expected to occasionally exchange money for the dust at whatever rate we deem appropriate. We’re free to decide we don’t want to pay money for the dust. In return, we have no recourse when it blows away in the wind.

So it’s all ego. But that still matters, in an ethical sense. Everyone is competing to play the game and be awarded with various amounts of dust. The competition relies upon fair play. When a person cheats, it hurts everyone else who is competing. Rampant cheating can shake player faith enough to cause players to quit if they think the competition is invalid. So the devs’ best interests include aggressively removing cheaters from the game, and there’s very little player sympathy for cheating.

We sometimes like to discuss whether a particular action constitutes cheating. We sometimes like to squabble about if some forms of cheating are more harmful than others. But one of the few things most GoW players agree on is that cheating is worthy of punishment.

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If a VIP player who wanted to speed up their progression pays real money to do so, seems perfectly logical they’d resort to cheating to speed it up even more.

And a lot of FTP players are more than willing to take more time to progress slower in order to not pay anything and are happy doing so.

Your statements are disingenuous stereotyping.

Why do billionaires steal things when they can clearly buy the stuff themselves without even batting an eye and an impoverished person would give their shirt off their back?

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I’m not saying people that spend money don’t cheat I said Vip 20. That’s 8 grand. They get several Gem keys every day so like I said it’s highly unlikely they cheat. I’m wasn’t saying all ftp chest either. I just think it’s more likely they are cheating then a VIP 20.

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Cheaters get caught.

Banned for good if they don’t appeal and the devs know they won’t spend a considerable amount of money in the game if the ban is permanent.

Not calling anyone out here but seen it happen recently :wink:

Otherwise they are back playing 2 weeks later,

hi, @Saltypatra ! what about the tools which are used to extract game data for statistic purposes? like guild donations, log in of users and so on. there are such data tools by Taran. are they considered cheating as well?

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They Did it because of GREED ! Or EGO . GREED fits the bill better though .