With IP2’s history of programming skills, coupled with the TGIF dedication levels, and topped with the recent Krinklemess, the fact that they are going ahead with auto-bans is very telling about how this company functions…
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Just add a button to the login screen for banned players.
[ I believe my ban was in error and want to appeal. ]
… because we all know what’s inevitably going to happen again a couple months from now …
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Very much appreciate the transparency and details. I’m sure there are those that think IP2 just hates players and is pure evil, but please know that most of us really want to work WITH y’all, and transparency/communication goes a long way to that end.
It’s good to hear that automatic bans are being more thoroughly discussed going forwards. Thank you for your post!
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It is so sad that they don’t understand this as there is so much of their own game that they don’t seem to understand.
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I totally agree with you Scott.
We should all receive compensation because we stopped playing the game out of fear of being blacklisted as well.
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Our compensation should be the following:
- Test all new content before release to ensure it is bug free and functional.
- Have a way to ensure no dragons boss duplicates or a way to craft a specific dragon boss.
- Evaluate and listen to players experiences toward an event or troop and increase what makes your players happy and reward them for their progress and playing time.
- Have a way of having employees working when office is closed/off or on holidays.
- Have a system to enable players to know ahead of time what is in or not the chests on weekly basis.
- A way to equip medals for Specific team and specific class traits for that specific team.
- Fix the Daily offers.
- Eliminate super luck base troops such Hoard Mimic, and frustration event such as Dungeon.
This is besides what resources compensation you decide to give and it should be for everyone not only banned players.
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You forgot in your list.
- Don’t let an algorithm auto-ban players, especially based on heuristics where it is proven that this worked terribly wrong before (due to a bug. Heuristic-based algorithms are almost impossible to get right, there will be other bugs in the future and these will work wrong again).
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Or, rather (as has been suggested before):
- Release new content at 9am Developer Time on a Monday, giving you a whole working week to fix any issues
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You understand we are paying customers, yes? And whatever is greeting them is entirely their doing?
You cannot boast about having millions of players and behave like an Etsy shop.
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There is a problem with a auto ban system that goes beyond the frustration in this thread. You say that a real person will review all auto ban support tickets going forward. Let’s be honest, the most recent bans got attention because of the number of bans and the fact that even YouTubers got banned…so it got quickly fixed and compensation is going to go out.
Now let’s fast forward a few weeks…and let’s say that I…a long term money spending player gets a false auto bad. You have said in the past that ban reviews do not take priority, and if I’m not tacet…or if it’s not hundreds of false bans again it might be weeks before I get it reversed and I doubt I get any sort of compensation. So if you are going to start a auto ban system…ban reviews need to move to priority support ticket reviews.
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They couldn’t get a drop pool correct (AW) and anyone, anyone at all is to believe they will get something as technical as a ban system correct?
No chance.
Good luck to those who keep thinking it will get better.
Also how many lawyers read and edited her statement before it was released? It is not a coincidence that they blame it on a “bug” something covered in their tos and eula.
The reality is they purposefully released it as it was knowing it would ban some, what they didn’t expect was how many. This was them “testing” the system and yet again failing all of the players.
Nothing said or done by this company should be trusted.
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Very good posts and points back to back. I had been trying to tell similar things but the latest posts communicate this much better.
Something based on heuristics should NEVER be automated if it will lead to banning players. You can automate “hack” detection in the sense that e.g., if the game files are modified then there is little chance that this is detected incorrectly, however letting an automated system banning players based on metrics or thresholds? HELL NO, please.
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First up, there will be global compensation as well, sorry I didn’t mention that earlier. The players who were banned will get additional compensation though.
Fair comments about Ban Appeal tickets, we’ll have to treat Ban Appeals just like any other ticket.
It will increase waiting times for other ticket types during busy periods but it’s fair to say it’s better to improve the wait times for Ban appeals with autobans happening.
Regarding autobans happening based on metrics and thresholds, that’s what I’m doing currently manually anyway. The thresholds are intended to be as such that they can only be achieved through editing game data. There are cases we haven’t given the autoban detection for which more context is required, in those cases manual bans are still done after we look at more of the big picture with the account.
Prior to this bug I’d say there’s been less than 10 incorrect cheating bans placed in the 5 years I’ve worked here that I’m aware of. I don’t think any of them were incorrect in the autoban rollout, it was all human error.
I know right now we’re talking about ensuring people don’t get autobanned incorrectly in the first place but I also think it’s worthwhile to talk about what happens after a ban:
I want to make sure you folks have the info to differentiate between a mistaken ban and an intentional one where the player was given a 2nd chance:
If a mistake is made, the account is unbanned and everything that was taken away is restored: Trophies, Campaign progress, event progress, I don’t believe Honor is taken. We apologise unreservedly to the player and give them compensation.
If a ban was correct but the player is given a second chance, the account will be unbanned, the campaign progress will be restored and the player will be dishonored 99% of the time. Trophies won’t be returned and event progress won’t be returned. So if you’re in a guild and someone says they were unbanned because of a mistake but their Trophies etc aren’t given back, staff have checked the ban and determined it was correct but think the player won’t do it again.
The only exception to this is if the guild reported their own member - in that case we will give you the Trophies back because we don’t want to punish the guild for trying to do the right thing and keep cheaters out of the game and their guild. However, even in this case, the player’s event progress won’t be restored.
Hopefully that info helps if there’s uncertainty about someone’s unbanning.
Also it’s worth noting, that most people don’t cheat to be malicious, it doesn’t usually say much if anything about their character or personality. You can still be a great person, a great guild member, friend and fun to hang out with if you cheated. Most people cheat to save time or effort, not to screw other people over (although those people exist too). So if your mate is banned then unbanned and says “hey I didn’t cheat” - and you trust them, most the time it’s probably going to be one of these reasons they’re saying that:
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They don’t understand the rules around playing the game unmodified as designed and are using an auto clicker, setup their own hot keys, macros, using an emulator with extra features to help with the game or they share their device/console/steam account/GoW login with someone else who has cheated on the account - stuff people may not think of.
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They know they cheated but they don’t want to be kicked out of their Guild
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They know they cheated but they don’t want their mates to feel differently about them
I would say that unless they’re laughing that they got away with it, if you think they’re a great guild mate or fun to play with don’t be super harsh on them, they got caught and probably got the pants scared off them that they were going to lose everything and won’t be silly enough to do it again.
I’ll talk to the team about letting players know when they were banned for reason no.1 up there.
The reason we don’t get into specifics currently is because we don’t want the case to be they were cheating 5 different ways but we tell them “you were banned for this one reason” because it sends the message that “ok here is why I got caught so from now on I’ll just stick to the other 4 cheats I’m using” or, they go complain to the person who made the cheat to get it changed to be harder to detect. Also generally, if you did break the rules and you really sit and think about how it happened, we think that most people will work it out when we list off a bunch of examples in the help center (and we link that article when we reply to ban appeals).
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I was hoping it would be today but I think it’s gotten late for that now so I will talk to the team about whether we can get it out before the weekend at least.
If there’s any issues with rolling it out tomorrow before the weekend I’ll post to let you know.
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Let’s hope before the weekend
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500 minimum
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Did you collect tribute? Because I couldn’t do that. That set me back at least 300 gems if not more. And others missed out on way more.
If you didn’t get your tributes that was on you.
Did you have to write any tickets, talk with staff, inform your guild, check your account if everything was restored correctly?
Did you lose out on a pet copy and other stuff from codes you could not use?
Be happy everyone is getting something instead of wanting the actually banned players to get no fair compensation.
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We were still able to play. I’m pretty sure the number of players who didn’t log in at all for several days to be on the safe side is quite low.
You might want to prepare for disappointment. Compensation is usually given for something missed out on, which would rather be 500 treasure maps in this case. I’d actually consider that pretty funny, I’m sure it wouldn’t go down well though. 
It’s actually quite difficult to come up with a good compensation for everyone for something with this big an impact. Suppose I was in their situation, what would I do? Possibly:
- At least partially refund event participation fees for that week. That’s something that can be pulled out of the database and reflects pretty well how everyone was individually affected.
- Throw in something that everybody finds useful and requires active participation, like a vault week, some special adventure boards or a battlecrasher that drops a small amount of a rare resource, e.g. cursed runes or dragonite.
- Rename future runs of the holiday event to Krinklemess.
Any generic refund mail is going to be perceived as way too little for the more active players, way too much for the more inactive players.
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