This is the first time as GM of Almost Epic that I have had this happen so forgive me if I seem naive. We just had a player banned for “hacking” and I see we are not alone as countless guilds were effected by this. The player in question averaged 396 trophies weekly, nothing special. They are very kind and passive and don’t feel like putting up a fight about this. We are encouraging him to do otherwise I am not sure how that will play out.
I have two concerns about this recent bout of bans is there a chance some are in error? The timing of the bans happened at the same time as update to android devices which has led to a lot of confusion for people not being able to log into the game.
My other concern is it appears we were dinged for more trophies than this player ever earned in the guild. Is that a standard practice?
We had over 9k trophies for the week yesterday and now are showing -2k which equals -11k loss and this player had only ever earned 9500 trophies.
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Obviously the negative trophy count happened to us TUF: Unrepentant as well but afaik no one on our full roster is banned. I have opened a support ticket - through the handy in game button(!) - and we’ll see how this plays out. 
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Totally sure it’s some kind of bug in your system. Check your system one or better two times, answer all people for what they were banned, they should at least know! I hope you will unban players or at least your explanation will help people to understand what is “hacking”!
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There’s something incorrect in dev’s anticheat machine. And it seems they even don`t know it, being sure that all things ok. It’s not ok!
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DEV, please do not delay with the answer - because soon the event with a new faction
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Yes, and be aware that some blatant cheats have had their mail exploit bans revoked, which I find unbelievable. I am currently on the verge of a ban (honour is ‘warned’) because I foolishly allowed myself to react to provocation in global only to be reported by a flying snowflake who initiated the unpleasantness. Been honour warned for about 3 weeks now. Pure joke.
What’s that? I don’t think mess with your honor if you get a chat ban. I could be wrong though.
All 29 other members did at least 1 battle in the past 12 hours or so? 4.3 changed what you see after someone is banned. The accounts no longer disappear. Instead it shows them like a normal profile.
To clear things up, none of the bans that have happened are related to the 4.3.5 update release. Unfortunately, some of the bans went out on the same day, so there was a bit of confusion.
I made a post about how we have been improving our cheat and hack detection in Gems of War today.
Please be aware that after our new cheat detection has alerted us to the fact that a player is cheating, we then manually review their account to verify this information. If it is found to be true, the player is then removed from the game.
If a player feels that they have been wrongly banned they are welcome to contact our support, and we will investigate their account again.
It is also worth noting that even if a player doesn’t accrue a lot of trophies, or seem like the kind of person that would cheat, that they still may be doing so. Some players hack PVP, and these are easier for people to notice, but others hack in more subtle ways, or hack other game modes, which is less obvious to outside observers.
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I really liked this response!
I did still feel that this bit was unclear, though, or I didn’t quite understand it:
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Yeap, that is ridiculous, our guild Marshal got 3 players banned, and you see what? -114658 trophies removed…I don’t know how did they calculated that.
I have been playing for over 4 years. I’ve put a fair amount of hard earned money into this game and have 3 different GoW account that I regularly put money in. When I see this happen to someone who I know isn’t cheating, and is almost as end game as you can get, with resources coming out of his wazoo, I am left with a desire to close all three accounts and never put a nickle into the game again. Don’t get me wrong, I believe we should always support the game we love, but there is no way you should be banning people with first trying a bit of a human approach, you know, checking out the facts first. I hate cheating, period, but the guilty until proven innocent method you are using needs to be revised.
Human approach like what? Ask them why they are cheating in a video game? The “I didn’t know any better” excuse is not acceptable.
Otherwise, the software catches folks and the devs go in and manually check for cheating. If a player just simply plays gems of war… There’s no way they will be banned. When a player tries to cheat the system with a 3rd party app. It’s only a matter of time before they are caught. It sounds like the new system is going to catch a lot of long term players cheaters.
There’s a lot of reasons that folks can threaten to quit the game… In defense of banned players should never be one of them. The devs get it right 99% of the time and will happily bring a player back if they turn out to be wrong. There’s not a single judicial system that gets it right 100% of the time. Yet I only know of one single time where a player was banned by mistake. It happened on the Switch within a month of it being released.
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We do take a human approach, as we investigate the players further. We do check the facts, we don’t mass ban people who are only nominally suspected of cheating, to do so would be unfair.
The reality is this, you can never truly know if someone is cheating, because you are not them. They may tell you that they aren’t, but you have no way of being certain.
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very well said
So everyone that has been banned has been confirmed to be cheating by a human first? You don’t have an anti cheat thing that picks up on people cheating and auto bans them without being looked at by a human first?
The only auto ban is chat.
You can wait for the official word. But the devs would never leave that up to a computer to ban folks from the game without a staff member verifying it.
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I find it odd that people want to automatically believe a cheater instead of the people designing the game. Cheaters lie. It’s part of the package. The developers gain nothing by banning people at random. They don’t want to spend their time looking for people ruining the game. They want to spend time designing.
Thank you, devs, for taking the time to clean up this mess. We have way too many cheaters, and bans are the only solution.
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I hear what you are saying, but why not investigate first. I do not cheat. You can check all three of my accounts until the cows come home, but if I was suspected of cheating, I would hope I would be approached before being banned. And I’m not threatening to quit. It’s a promise. Yeah, it’s just a game, but when you have an entire guild who is working toward a goal and you punish 30 players for one persons mistake when most if not all of the others had no idea it was happening is excessive. I guess I will just have to wait until the matter is decided and then we will see if you lose one more person who used to love this game.
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They are investigating it first.
If you ask someone “Are you cheating” Do you think they are going to say “Yes”?
A guildmate send this today via pm. And i’m really or… slightly wondering, which casual from our casual guild has been cheating??? Why? For what? The fewest make more than 400-500 trophys per week or spend 1m.
The trophys are complete indifferent for me. But when they say someone in our guild has gypped, then i will know who.
It makes at least no sense (for me). It will be right, i think so… but who?!