It’s actually 5 of them.
3 lowbies, 1 main, plus the other guild alt.
Reported them with SS and all. No gems for them bots:muscle:t2:
Wow, i looked and saw what you were saying. Without any details it is obvious who is doing something abnormal. It should stand out like crazy. I dont know how they could miss something like that. Makes it disheartening for the ones that actually do things legit. Almost like they are taunting the Devs.
One of the bot accounts was not banned from the lb (the level 223 one) with like 5 minutes left to go. The other were gone tho.
And seems this week it’s back on the lb.
With a Mr in front of the same name, different guild, but still lowbiesh, and still in top.
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This is why I’ve always hated how the devs currently handle cheating.
Since it’s all hush-hush and it takes a lot of evidence gathering, it looks like they’re doing nothing and it’s very hard to verify if they did anything at all. Worse, due to the amount of time it takes to verify, they usually can only do something after events and they never reimburse prizes.
So cheaters are free to take prizes from other people and the only consequence is they have to make another account to do it again the next week. And we’re not even sure if they get banned. That’s not a very good situation.
I’m not saying there needs to be a wall of shame (because some people would see it as an honor) but more and more I appreciate how other games defer prize distribution for several days so the cheaters can be excised first. At least then even though it’s a mystery how many cheaters were banned, most players have a sense of where they were before the cutoff and can notice they “climbed”.
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I always thought that no call out policy is bad and banning or unbanning people should be public and explained. At least it would raise awareness that someone is getting banned and maybe other people would stop doing the same stuff somebody else was banned for
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I wish there was a way to report guilds. Lol
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I see two direct problems, I think one is much more important.
- People aren’t compensated for the rewards they “should have” had if known cheaters are removed from the table. (Or, if they are, this isn’t publicly known.)
- There is no public perception that cheaters are punished in a way that has meaningful consequences.
I don’t honestly care about (2). I think if we had a public announcement that named cheaters we’d eventually face some community consequences if someone well-respected made a believable argument that they were just “so good they looked suspicious”. This issue is a rat’s nest where you have to choose which community discontent you feel like dealing with.
I care a lot about (1), and I think everyone cares about it. I don’t want to know that if I commit the monumental (to me) resources to attack the leaderboard and fight up to the top 10, where every level has a different prize, cheaters could lessen the prizes I get for the effort. It’s not about the magnitude of my losses. It’s about knowing there are people who can successfully prevent me from receiving prizes by breaking the rules.
I’m pretty sure, to those people, being banned is worth it to know they took things from other people. As evidence: they come back and do it again immediately.
So I’ll fight for (1) and kind of urge the people who do consistently threaten the leaderboards to focus on that one as well. Out of the two problems, it’s the only one that takes a little joy away from the cheaters.
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Perhaps this is the true reason why the “no call out policy” exists to begin with. If we are forbidden to attach names to accusations, then the devs have an out from having to answer to why someone was or was not banned.
I agree that those caught cheating shouldn’t be held to such secrecy as it offers little deterrent to those thinking about doing it in the future. Personally I feel that if someone doesn’t want to be named and shamed, then they shouldn’t have cheated in the first place. They would get very little sympathy from me.
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Why not simply restricting access to top tier (top100) of the lb to certain levels, or certain conditions?
Maybe level 500?
Or level 500 and all kingdoms?
Or level 500, all kingdoms unlocked and 300+ unique troops?
Or other combinations of requirements, that need more than 1-2 days to reach.
Etc.
That way the cheat mules (low level alts draining resources from lb to use on the main cheater’s guild) will simply be shut out from the goodies.
They keep on coming back because it takes like 1 hour to make a new account and automate it.
If it’d take like 1-2 weeks of work before having suitable automation account, we’d see less cheaters going for it.
And legit low level and new accounts wouldn’t make it to top 100 anyway so no lose for them.
Personally in terms of “limiting access”, I wish we had “real” competitive events where team makeup and player ability had more if not the majority of influence on placement.
The PvP leaderboard as-is is a time competition. We can tell a level 100 player’s probably cheating. We can tell someone who submits 10k wins is probably cheating. But if someone running a bot or hacks clocks in with ~3100 wins spread evenly over 7 days, the only way you’re going to sniff out the cheat is to either analyze their moves (which the devs could do) or do some grey-hat API sniffing at the parts of their profile the game downloads but doesn’t display.
That kind of stinks, though. If you can’t play something like 8-10 hours per day this is out of your league no matter how long you play. And it’s easy for a bot to play 8-10 hours per day without doing something innately suspicious.
I wish there were a more puzzle-based mode with a leaderboard. This is based loosely on some other games I’ve seen and adapted for GoW, maybe something like:
- It’s sigil-based. You get a few free sigils and any further sigils are priced such that “casual farming” can get you about 1 more and you have to commit serious resources to get more than 2 or 3.
- It’s score-based. Your highest score counts for your leaderboard position.
- The board and some/all skyfall is fixed. Every player sees the same thing. Therefore, the players with the highest scores made the “best” moves with the “best” teams.
- The tiers are more thoughtful. Top 1, 2, and 3 get the best stuff. Top 5-10 get great stuff. Let the decent rewards trickle all the way down to top 500 or so, whatever hits “anyone who has a midgame team and makes a serious attempt”.
Bots can’t dominate that as easily. Casual players can still participate in a meaningful way. My only suspicion is we’d have a lot of identical scores from people who find the theoretical maximum and go for it. But I want the spirit of it: a leaderboard that someone who can’t spend 8 hours on the game daily can reach.
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I agree that players missing out on rewards due to cheaters is appalling, and I think there should be a better solution.
I don’t really like shrouds of mystery concerning things that affect us, either. It feels like being in a village where someone disappears every third night, with scratch marks and blood stains around the door frame, and just saying, “This is fine”.
If someone is determined by the Devs to be cheating, I don’t think they need to be protected - is it to give them a second chance, or protect the game/company image? If the latter, I think it would hurt more than help in the long run.
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Careful @Jonathan. The devs are great about taking a lot of criticism. But their current policy about cheaters is infallible.
Consensus = Cheaters gonna cheat, trolls gonna troll (I give up) - #58 by Saltypatra
6 months later nothing has changed. Outside of the frequency of players getting banned and then coming back to the game seems to have increased. I often wonder, has any cheater who said “I won’t do it again, promise”. Actually kept that promise?
I think the toxic effect that cheaters cause to a game is severely underappreciated by the devs. But it’s their game, their policies, and ultimately, their loss of revenue. 
game i used to play for years actually had a name and shame list of banned players on its forum it was great xD
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I actually am just curious as to what the reasoning is behind protecting the names of players confirmed to be cheating, or not disclosing occurrences of cheating. I suppose it could increase the risk of callouts, e.g., “What about this person?”, “You forgot about X!”.
I agree with this, and think it’s sensible:
I just think players (potentially) missing out on rewards due to cheaters is really bad. I don’t really have a dog in the fight aside from that, and I guess it relates more to @Slypenslyde’s thoughts, so apologies if off-topic.
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