Just popping in to let you all know I’ve given you as much information as I have here, in the known issue article and in my support replies for now.
We will post another update sometime next week.
Nothing, we’re still early in the week I guess. 
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I’m sure they’ve got ‘better things to do’.
‘ugh, annoying players, can’t they just forget about it?!’
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Not gonna let this one blow over. They were caught red handed lying this time.
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not the first time, though.
also not the first time being caught lying has been down-played or straight up ignored. 
by now they’re pretty good at ignoring certain topics. they just don’t care.
caring would mean to realise that they majorly efd’up.
then to act quickly on it and on promised statements.
but sure, we’re still quite in the “sometime next week (we don’t really care…)” time-frame.
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Wasn’t the claim that most of the developer staff was out of the office until January 3rd? And therefore they just got back a couple of hours ago?
I know people want this resolved, but maybe a wee little bit of patience for people who came back from the holidays to be greeted with this? Wouldn’t it be better to give them a moment to breathe and get this done right instead of clubbing them to fix it quick and having a new batch of problems arise as a result?
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I don’t think is the case of getting things done quickly, is more like thinking that nothing will be done about it. Just give a read in the roadmap post of what they say to us and check the posts about people playing GW in the bugged mobile. It feels like a sinking boat, this game right now.
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Out of the office.
Am I stuck in the 90s
This is a game, they have laptops at home.
Out the office, refers to a job that can only be done in the workplace.
This job can be done 24/7 365
Just by opening a laptop
Or am I wrong.
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Quick to want more money off us
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You’re not wrong.
Even with a “limited staff” I doubt they leave “the office” completely without someone “in charge” to make “decisions”. It is nothing more than “time play”. There’s either noone there that has the green-light on making any decsions or there’s a “we don’t really care”-mentality about it - so they postpone. Or they just make an internal poll on how low they can possibly go with compensation (if there even will be any…).
I can imagine the ban wave / lying in previous statements about how bans are handled and handed out has angered and sadened many people, either directly affected by an unfair delivered ban or by being affected as player of the same guild or by knowing a friend or just “anyone” that got handed such a ban without doing anything wrong.
Normally you would imgaine the high priority for the company is to resolve this quickly (which partially happened through unban’ing - but only after players requesting it + waittime) and yes, also to decide on compensation for everyone affected (as mentioned above) to at least ease some pain for the wounds wrongfully delivered.
In the past we also had some planned announcements seemingly fall of the cliff to never be mentioned again. Just saying.
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I can guarantee
That when the dungeon code had been worked out by the players.
They we’re even opening there laptops while on the toilet.
Now that fix was
Damn quick.
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You guys do know that the possibility of them telling you anything is next to zero, right?
Hey everyone,
Thanks for your patience over the holidays.
Straight into it with the details:
Over the weekend of Christmas, incorrect bans were placed on roughly 0.37% of the active user base.
The development team noticed the issue at just after midnight on Christmas morning and we had 3 team members dropping in as they could to assist with solving the problem from that time right up until almost 11 pm the same day.
By the end of the 26th the issue was solved and all the affected players were unbanned.
When bans are placed, the game automatically removes all the banned player’s event progress and half their guild trophies to ensure they don’t keep their leaderboard positions or rewards they may have earned by cheating.
Obviously, in this case it added another layer of complexity to the issue, but by the end of the 28th everyone’s Trophies, event and Campaign progress were restored.
So that’s what happened, WHY did it happen though?
Gems of War has automatic cheat detection.
Due to a bug, players who shouldn’t have been, were detected as cheating and banned.
This happened because the tool can both detect and ban.
We’ve been developing the automatic cheat detection tool for years now.
The first step was just detection so we could ensure accuracy over the entire player base and over an extended period of time.
With that being the case, we have been slowly rolling out automatic bans in small steps to continue ensuring the tool was working appropriately.
This roll out has gone perfectly smoothly throughout all stages up until Christmas, when due to a number of unexpected interactions, the tool banned these players incorrectly.
Originally it did look like this issue was caused by Kris Kringle’s map giving ability and the way those rewards are logged on the server, however, a key factor ended up being Maps earned over not just one battle but over a number of battles - which made the problem grow exponentially as time went on regardless of whether you were using Kris Kringle or not. Kris Kringle basically exacerbated the issue but didn’t cause the issue. This is also why the issue wasn’t picked up when we were testing Kris Kringle.
We owe our community an apology
First and foremost we apologize to the affected players who were prevented from playing over the holiday weekend. We also acknowledge the stress this put on their Guilds as we know how horrible it was seeing your Guild’s progress and Leaderboard ranks drop because of this.
We also want to acknowledge that we can and should have been more transparent about the rollout of the cheat detection tool. We’re usually quite reserved in discussing anything to do with cheat detection as we’re always trying to stay ahead of people creating cheat tools and bots. While we do feel that the tool is a very positive addition to our toolkit in assisting us with managing such a large community, in retrospect we should have let everyone know that we were taking the next steps from detection to testing actual automatic bans.
With that said, for full transparency, we will be using automatic bans moving forward.
In light of what happened over Christmas we are obviously keeping an extra close eye on all bans.
However, due to what happened we’re currently discussing taking a step back from full automation to still requiring a staff member to approve ban batches, so that if the number of players in the ban queue spikes like it did over Christmas, a staff member will see that and be able to reject the batch before the bans are actually placed. This is an ongoing discussion after having this issue so that we can prevent anything like this happening for any reason again.
With that said, anyone who writes a ban appeal for their account still has their ban checked manually by staff.
Now that the bugs have been fixed and everyone’s progress corrected and we have more staff back from holidays, we will be organizing compensation for the banned players. If you’d like to be notified once compensation has been sent out please follow the help center article here.
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@Kafka thanks for transparency, however, being the GM of the most active guild in the game, and the fact that these “incorrect” bans seems to be hitting more active people more frequently (well more play, more likely to be detecting as “cheating” by an automated tool, I get it), what assurance do we get that players that are not cheating are not banned as part of small batches moving forward? You mention that the “staff” will review whether there is a spike on the number of automated bans, but your message does not suggest that each automated ban will be reviewed by at least a staff member.
Also, given that ban appeals is one of the least priority support tickets and the fact that I personally know multiple people who had been banned incorrectly in the past, I really fear that this is a HUGE stepback against the active player base. I still fear that my account will get banned mistakedly every day and there are multiple people in my guild that live with the same fear.
You did mention that the incorrect bans were for a small percent (0.37%) of the active player base. But, can you share what percent of the player base that play more than (let’s say) 4 hours a day on average was banned incorrectly? I imagine that you define anyone that logs in, even at least one a day or week, as active playerbase.
I understand that you cannot have full transparency on bans, but even having full secrecy through support channels (I also know multiple people who asked for details on their bans and got no word) is putting things on the extreme oppposite.
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Will Kris Krinkle be restored to giving two maps per cast?
It made an already existing game mechanic viable and interesting so we would like to see him back to how he was before.
As for the automatic banning: bots are stupid.
Not saying that I don’t understand that it may be necessary but tools are only as clever as the humans who feed them information allow them to be.
0.37% sounds like a tiny little number but if the active user base is even 1M people that is still 3.700 players, or 370 per 100k players. Still a significant amount of people.
A whole lot of stress and chaos for the players and for you as well.
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I agree with this 100%! We want to play and enjoy game in fun, not in fear of getting incorrect ban.
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We are quite tired of all this… Now you are speaking about some kind of compensation to the banned players. But what about all others? As always, we had no presents or gifts on New Year holidays - 100 gems looked like some joke… You cancelled the Vault event!!! WHY?! Instead we have buy-new-cards kingdom pass… Why are you so disrespectful to players? At least bring back the Vault event!!! Stop making everything MUCH worse in order to make it SLIGHTLY better afterwards.
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There should be compensation for all players as the bans affected everyone even if you were not directly banned yourself. Having to cover for team mates shares in events when they are wrongly banned. Addition overhead within guilds trying to make sure everyone knows what’s going on etc. Yes banned ones deserve more but everyone deserves compensation for this.
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Yea, things are feeling like a let down. I could be wrong and they’re saving the most important best information for last… 
Yup, that’s gotta be it. I’m holding on to the edge of my seat because I can’t wait for this information (
)
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Ah, the “testing”.
Must’ve been much testing, when something that “exacerbates” a situation isn’t picked up.
You seemingly don’t understand the problem. Whole guilds and therefore all players were involved - directly or indirectly.
After the ban-wave was announced due to many respected players in the forum, I personally didn’t really play for a few days and only grabbed some hourly tributes “because of that”. I could’ve played because xmas isn’t that big of a deal for me (small family) and I mainly was ill at home.
A possible ban, which at the time was unclear what’s the cause of it, which at the time had no guarantee of a quick unban or even a guarantee of a unban felt more severe. But I guess, that’s on me? Thanks for nothing then.
expected™
I supsect someone internally made a mistake by appointing that vault event. Maybe their system appointed it automatically. But someone noticed, that it could be contra-beneficial to have a vault event shortly after planned introduction of new crap-Orbs. After all, this could diminish the number of possible purchases f.e. for Flash Offer sales (750gems + orb of minions … just 14,99$) etc.
But in all fairness, maybe also had something to do with some people complaining and whining about “too many events here” and “switch out this event with that” and “especially during christmas holidays”…
Well, someone then enjoyed rotating out the fun & player beneficial events.
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