Last summer I found a video on Youtube about cheating in Gems of War (I send a link for that video to devs). The author used external software for cheating and he did that just to complete quests. His team composition was horrible and quests were hard for him.
Even complete casuals can cheat and sometimes they do that.
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Yeah I have to say that they manually investigate the accounts is a little above and beyond, I’m more used to algorithmic auto-bans.
Truth is I’ve seen plenty of indication there are “puzzle solvers” and overlay clients for the game. I think, to a lot of people, that’s not “cheating”. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
My guess is cheating’s probably pretty common among the casual, quiet players. They feel a lot of pressure to “keep up” and pressure finds a way.
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That’s the main issue for me about cheating…
After reading the answer of @Saltypatra about the various purposes to cheat (ie not only PVP and so trophy farming), I don’t see how me a guildmaster can detect cheaters so I can protect my guild to not get a penalty…
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Please, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying I don’t believe what your doing is right, because of course it is. In my opinion if caught cheating and it is proven that you were, I think it should be a permanent ban from the game. Period. No matter what. I have enjoyed this game very much. I have enjoyed Tacet and Salty’s streams as well. I love the fact that you have introduced the new game modes and done your best to make it a better experience for us, and I’m sad that this is a no win situation for me, my wife and the 58 guildmates I represent. I supported this game financially for over 4 years. I’m not well off financially but do believe in supporting the games I play. Please don’t bother wasting any more of your precious time with me. I’m obviously not articulate enough to convey my message adequately, so please move on to more urgent matters.
My apologies if I ruffled any feathers.
Jamie
I hear what you are saying, but why not investigate first.
Salty said they do, 2 times now.
If you are not cheating but you get a ban put in a ticket. You have nothing to worry about they will correct it. Software that detects cheating may not be 100% and is probably why they are manually checking to make sure. If you are cheating then it’s probably permanent. Good Luck.
Your guild really isn’t getting penalized. Seeing a bunch of trophies go up in smoke is disheartening and even rage-inducing if you lose some ranks because of it, but it’s actually as if the banned player was never in your guild by removing their trophies. Your guild wouldn’t have gained them in the first place had they not joined. The only loss is the opportunity to have had someone else in your guild earning legitimate trophies.
To my knowledge you don’t lose task rewards or weekly event progress gained from the banned person (maybe they do if some massive rewards were obtained), so you’re actually ahead. We had the misfortune of having a new member for 2 weeks that I didn’t do my due diligence on & he turned out to get banned. Sure we took the trophy hit but that was it. I consider the few extra LT rewards a trade for being humiliated for having a cheater in our midst and the trophy/rank loss my punishment for not paying closer attention. I think the devs are trying very hard not to impact the rest of the guild in these instances to the best of their ability but they don’t have a lot of wiggle room.
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It was. Because if the cheater was find before, you would have kicked him for another player who have gain trophies. I am not talking about 2-3 weeks long cheaters but 5-6 months, that’s a huge amount of trophies…
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I covered that:
But as I said you didn’t lose any of the task/event productivity they provided while being in the guild. So while it can be a big hit to a guild’s status & pride, it’s not really a penalty to their progression.
Don’t misunderstand that I don’t sympathize with the loss of a big chunk of trophies - I do. It sucks big time and the cheater should feel a lot of remorse for ruining 29 people’s pride & joy, but I stand by that in the true sense it’s not a penalty to the guild inflicted on the guild but an opportunity loss. Semantics either way it sucks.
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It is up to each Guild Master to get to know their Guild Mates. Talk to them, understand them, interrogate them and make sure they are not disgusting cheaters.
We had a cheater in our guild. We kicked them out so hard they cried because our guild is full of wonderful awesome people. Losing the ability to talk to those people in guild chat made that person stop using their computer for ONE YEAR. Yes, that’s right.
How did we know they were a lame disgusting horrid awful cheater? Our GM knows everyone all the way down to their soul. All GMs should do that.
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This standard you describe is a wee bit overdramatic and grossly unrealistic. Guild members or teammates in online games rarely - if ever - meet each other in person. So how can one possibly trust them to be more than words on a screen? Anyone can be fake. I think most online personas are barely reflective of their creators. It’s like being in a MMORPG to me. 
I know my spouse to her soul. I am confident that I know my other family members to their soul. I know my good real life friends very well. I know my colleagues and coworkers and neighbors in a range from fairly well to not as well to mere acquaintances.
As for anyone not included above I play video games online with? I don’t know any of them truly. I can swear some of them are even the same person with different screen names! OMG can you believe that? 
Back to the topic of cheaters… yeah I would rather not invite them into my guild and its extended family and would kick them immediately if they began cheating while a member. However how can we GMs do that then replace them in a timely manner if we are not notified that they were banned or at least under investigation? Even one day - not weeks or months(!) - is too long to compromise my legitimate guildmates and their efforts.
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I often wonder how many individual people are in each guild.
Great concept but totally unrealistic for all but a handful of hardcore guilds. Most guilds have a significant majority of chat reluctant players who will ignore any dialogue completely; even if they bother to open up the chat window at all. Communication with such players is albeit impossible, making what you suggest very difficult for the GM and other communicative members. We can only dream lol.
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I think Zepp is with me here: a guildmate that never shows up in any form of chat is not a guildmate. They’re a robot that produces trophies. Robots are unreliable. They get banned. They break down. They get stolen. You can get some benefit out of them but when they’re gone you don’t miss them.
People form bonds. They also produce trophies. But you can sort of tell if they’re a hardcore cheater and distance yourself (sometimes). When they get burned out, you can try to talk them through it. If they’re tempted by another guild, you can find out what they’re not getting out of yours. Losing a person brings sadness, so you try to prevent it.
I’m sure some guilds don’t care. I think there’s a reason most competitive guilds require participation in some form of chat.
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I totally agree; chat is a vital part of guild cohesion and teamwork. Nothing reflects that more than doom, where players ignore our scout reports and waste sigils on needless boons. It makes the event unbelievably frustrating and obviously that impacts the rewards and where you place in classification. The communicative guilds are so far in front because they understand and contribute to that concept. Sigil economy and team building knowledge feature heavily as you can see from final standings. Those who don’t chat ruin it for those of us who are trying to improve the guild as a whole by encouraging them to engage. Many just refuse, and there is little that can be done to change that.
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I disagree to certain extent as I play on console and we don’t have the epidemic that you guys are going thru but I’ve seen so many players that don’t like to chat guild or global but they deliver their req.
I’m confused how you disagree. I said people who don’t chat give you nothing but their requirements, and your counter-point is, “They don’t chat but give us their reqs?” It’s OK if you’re OK with that, but it means in your guild, getting trophies is equal to, if not greater than, being friends.
I can’t blame someone for not wanting to deal with the gross inefficiency of chat on console, but you could have a Discord where you shoot the bull with each other. Or use telegraph. Or Line. Or a Facebook group. Or an IRC server. Or heck, “in my day” we would sometimes use a phone to talk to each other!
People burn out slower if there’s a human factor!
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Do you know how many players are disabled and are able to play but it’s too much effort to communicate.
I was in this other mmo game before GOW and we do clan wars which means we need to be in party to coordinate with each other’s. Well there was this kid always in party but never spoke because he couldn’t but he performed better than people that talked too much. And he is not the only case I’ve seen or heard. So I give the benefit of doubt to ppl he could be disabled he could have social anxiety ect… just saying 
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The truth is that unless your guild is made up of yourself + 29 of your own alts, you have no way to know if someone is cheating or not. You can trust others in good faith but that doesn’t stop them from doing their own thing, and sometimes people are tempted by the “easy path”, especially when they suspect or hear of other people doing the same thing with no repercussions.
Sometimes 
just happens.
I’ve seen people who were strong communicators in chat get banned for cheating, so the social aspect of the game doesn’t necessarily prevent it. If someone decides “it’s time” or “maybe just this once”…or makes the decision to let their friend/sibling/relative use their account without realizing that that person uses cheats…they can get banned.
What each of us has is a choice - whether to trust what Salty is telling us about each case being investigated before a ban is applied, or to trust our friend/guildmate who insists they didn’t cheat. At the end of the day, there’s no way for us to definitively verify either case.
The best we can hope for is that the process is in-depth enough where innocent players don’t get caught up in it, and if one does get banned by mistake, that the player is able to recover his/her account in a timely manner. This might require additional Customer Support personnel because it’s well-known that cheaters will also try to get their accounts back, and innocent players should not need to suffer as a result. This is infrastructure that should be built-in when an anti-cheating measure is planned out.
The notion that “appeal requests are just not as important” honestly really bothers me. I’m sure most of us don’t mind the idea of a cheater crying about not being able to recover their lost account, but how would we feel if we ourselves were falsely flagged and slipped through the cracks, and then had Support tell us “sorry, it’s just not that important to review your case, we’ll get to you eventually”?
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The whole collection of Intrim guilds is actually just one really busy couple with serious multiple personality disorder and a huge bill for proxy services. True story. 
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