For anyone who has been watching the dumpsterfire of new world launch (Amazons new mmo) they will have seen a level of blatant cheating and exploiting heavily violating the TOS players agreed to. What would VR do in their place? Will bans be slaps on wrists in order to save future income? More and more in MMOs blatant cheating ends with slaps on wrists. How comfortable is VR with enforcing their TOS? Does VR plan to be upfront about it? IE Will botting clearly be an instant account ban? Will common cheating be considered lawful cheating?
Third party tools giving players in game minimaps are common. Some of these tools even show friendly and enemy players on the map like a radar which is a clear PVP advantage. The cheating is so common for income reasons AGS came out and said they won't ban people for this without warning them first, even though it violates the literal wording of the TOS. What path will or should VR take to widespread TOS breaches? Should VR be willing to lose future income from these players to enforce the rules?
Third party tools exploiting built in animation canceling effects uses such as shooting or swinging your weapon insanely fast. (Animation canceling not only looks bad but it frequently ruins games) This is blatant cheating. AGS is giving out 24 hour bans only. Many of the same people go right back to cheating.
Item and currency duping, crippled the game and AGS is actually taking it seriously by slowly banning people who have done this. The only escalation I could see here would be a server rollback or a way to delete all duplicated items from the server if one exists. Will items all be tagged to do a forced recall when duplicated in such a game breaking manner?
IMO:
From what I've seen with MMOs since 1996, most companies that have more than 100k customers will ban people permanently once they have proof of actual cheating, and it's a public issue. Otherise, temp bans only.
Those with less/fewer customers are not so inclined, as permanent bans can remove significant revenue. So, they ONLY issue warnings and/or temporary bans. I mean, would you blame them? If 50% of your paying customers are cheating, and if you delete all of them and ban all those CC/addresses, you just deleted half your revenue? Caution might be warranted.
As far as tools that display what the server sends the client, in a different fashion? That will always happen, and is technically undetecable. It's up to the designers to only send what the client needs from the server. If you send the client more than what it needs, whose 'fault' is that? Why did you (the company/server/developer) send that extraneous data?
The reality is, tools that give players a situational advantage will be used, if that situational advantage is tangible. Take away the tangible advantage, and there's no value in using such a tool.
Don't trust the MMO Client. Don't send more data than is required.
In the case of New World, evidently they did not anticipate or test for the use case of a malicious customer. Retrospectively, that seems short sighted and a rather glaring omission in the test plan.
But that requires a team that understands what the server is actually sending to the client, and how that information can be monitored via the network, read out of client process memory, parsed and/or rendered.
I've also seen (first hand) the Elite:Dangerous style of bans, which are definitely the worst case for everyone. In those situations, they use the 'dragnet' or 'tuna net' approach, and out of ignorance, punish tens or hundreds of thousands of customers who weren't actually cheating. I recall within the first 1-2 months of Elite:Dangerous, the developers didn't enforce the restriction on a Early Backer rewards planet. Essentially, anyone could go to the planet instead of just early backers. As a consequence, players all went there as their normal part of playing.
Their respones? Any player that visited this planet who wasn't an early backer was temp banned and had all their money and ships deleted off the server.
Customers (justifiably) freaked out, given they had done exactly nothing wrong, and were simply playing the game normally, and visiting a planet. There was no indication, warning, or 'special' tool required. Fly to planet, buy ship. Ok, just like any other planet or ship.
Eventually, the company recanted, apologized, and tried to fix it. Unfortunately, their fix was botched, and all of those players were permanently flagged so they couldn't reach certain achievements in the game. Once this was found out, the company said they would not be adjusting those accounts retroactively. So, due to absolutely no fault, they were punished forever and permanently. Extremely negative customer experience, entirely due to incompentent customer support, and really bad company processes and policies.
I have no idea if the NW bans are similar. They could have laser accurate logging, audit trails, alerts, alarms, metrics, reporting, the best DBAs on the planet pulling the best data out of their persistence layers. They could be fully compliant with all their compliance frameworks and legal requirements for such an implementation. Maybe.
Or maybe not, and terrible greedy imperfect humans are involved. :) Like every other corporation on earth.
In which case, perfection shouldn't be an expectation, but at the same time, innocent until proven guilty is probably better than the opposite, when dealing with paying customers.
As far as compensation/deletions go, there's a few variables. If you have designed the persistence layer appropriately, you can rollback any and all transactions within any scope. It makes selective and global rollbacks and adjustments trivial.
But.. (and this is a big one)
You have to anticipate the necessity of that requirement. What I mean by that is, you have to know you will NEED to selectively roll back individual players as well as whole zones or servers to previous moments in time. If you never think that will happen, never test it, and/or never build the CS tool? You're gonna have a bad time. Expecting developers to chronically perform CS actions is just.. guaranteeing failure.
As far as the cause of item & currency duping, it's a solved problem. It can be done right, it can be done wrong. Atomicity and atomic operations are not new. Beyond that, it's entirely up to the developers to implement a secure transaction based system, regardless of the context.
The short of my feeling is that cheating, exploits and use of non-3rd-party grata tools should all be permanent banable offences. Harassment and that sort of anti-social behaviour likewise. The severity of the ban depends of a number of things, but I feel that most should be permanent bans so to discourage the behaviour.
For example:
The company, VR for example, could provide players a readily accessible terms of use that specifically outlines explanations on such matters along with examples and outcomes.
Yes, there are gray areas. For example, maybe finding an exploit that is not known, or publicised. Or performing a given action but being uncertain whether it is against the ToU. The expectations from a player in such cases, for me anyway, is simple; ask VR. And in such cases, one would expect amnesty.
Ultimately I feel the responsibility is on the player to "play right". Sadly, there is something about online gaming and in general how people behave online these days that is more... boundary pushing, then way back when. Many people may gladly accept a short-term ban as a consequence of engaging in non-permitted behaviours or activities. Thus, the aforementioned comment about "playing right" may be my wishful thinking.
Ultimately, VR, AGS, etc, provide us the pleasure of their company in trade for money. But that doesn't mean that they need to keep our company.
Players are responsible for their own actions.
I agree with about everything above - not least vjek's detailed analysis.
Serious cheating in areas that aren't at all debatable should be punished appropriately, especially where it hurts the game itself. By this I mean that draconian action is appropiate for something like currency duping that can destroy a server's economy. Something that just helps one player without hurting anyone else calls for sanctions, of course, perhaps including a temporary ban and rollback of character progress.
I think the type of punishment should be based on how the cheat affects the game. If the person gets money rewards for the cheating that affects the economy of the game and should be a ban. the length of the ban is all dependent on how much and how they got said economic avantage. People who buy from a gold farmer should always be a perma ban, not only does the gold farmer use some kind of exploit to get gold, they also tend to hack other players accounts. so buying from them not only encourages gold farming exploits but account hacking.
Mob, dungeon, raid exploit/hacking would depend on how long the person(s) has been using it. If it was an exlploit the found that day/week and used it, and later was found out by the dev then a 1 day ban is needed. If said player found said exploit and reported it after, then I do not think a ban is needed as they reported it, but whatever they gained should be taken away. Now if the person found it say in beta and sat on it for weeks, months, or even years well that would probably be a perma ban situation because the person used it for so long and decided they would benifit from it for as long as they could.
EVE Online had an interesting penalty if you were caught RMT: They not only took the money away from the person who received it, they deducted the same amount of the bank account of the account that sold it. And because EVE merchants all charged a tax, if your bank account was below 0.00 they would not trade with you. You had to find ways to earn money without using merchants to get your balance above 0.00 so merchants were then open to you.
Now that clearly wont work for Pantheon, takin your bank account below 0.00 but setting all your characters on your accounts to have a balance of 0.00 would be hilarious.
All this said, I do not believe that VR will be handing out bans. Their ToS will be too vaguely worded to be an absolute set of rules. Instead everything will be open to interpretation by a GM, and because VR will not have a huge staff at release, the workload of those GMs will be overwhelming so a lot of stuff will fall through the cracks. Instead, VR will hand out penalites and temporary bans, nothing more except for the most eggregious actions.
I do not believe VR will have a robust set of reporting tools to track every single transaction that takes place in the game. There are just too few VR developers who already have way to much to do to be devoting much time to this. What will be put in will be rudimentary at best and most transaction will not be logged and, thus, cannot be scrutinized later.
So many activities in a game come down to 'he said, she said' with little to no direct evidence in support of one side of the argument or the other. The game sure won't be logging everything and unless everyone is recording their gameplay every second they are playing, whoever is the better litigator will have an easier time influencing the GM.
The easiest way to prevent the use of 3rd party programs/parsers is to create in game programs/parsers that cater to the desires of those who will absolutely use them - because communication to and from server/client will obviously be needed, and there will be no (legal) way to stop data collection without manipulating the client. i.e. have comprehensive maps and combat parsers that players can choose to use or not use.
People who choose not to use tools like this will be the minority.
Exploits like duping money, or intentionally access dev tools (like godmode, or teleportation) should be bannable - but utilitizing a 3rd party app should be an absolute non-issue (and will be a non-issue if they simply allow players to utilize an in-game version... which would put the majority of players on the same playing field... if they choose).
Darch said:The easiest way to prevent the use of 3rd party programs/parsers is to create > in game programs/parsers < that cater to the desires of those who will absolutely use them - because communication to and from server/client will obviously be needed, and there will be no (legal) way to stop data collection without manipulating the client. i.e. have comprehensive maps and combat parsers that players can choose to use or not use.
People who choose not to use tools like this will be the minority.
Exploits like duping money, or intentionally access dev tools (like godmode, or teleportation) should be bannable - but utilitizing a 3rd party app should be an absolute non-issue (and will be a non-issue if they simply allow players to utilize an in-game version... which would put the majority of players on the same playing field... if they choose).
I have yet to see such programs implemented in a game. But if this is implemented I bet the game will feel wholesome for a lot of players.
Kind of a sadistic alternative, but maybe there's something to the following approach. If not, feel free to pick it apart.
All but the absolute worst offenders are moved to a Lord of the Flies PvP server, with the previous list of servers no longer being available to them and with that specific server being inaccessible to the general playerbase. Repeat offenders would be given warnings beforehand, and then an ultimatum. "One more offense and it's off to no man's land for you." A world with no official events or petitions, privileges that would only exist on servers where community mattered to the players and not just the staff. Then maybe after several months the offender's case would get reviewed, with the possibility of being granted a trial period wherein they could join their old civilized server again. And maybe there would be those who would prefer to remain on the server of misfits instead. Either way, it could potentially help prevent a loss of subs. Players who abided by the rules wouldn't feel that doing so put them at a constant disadvantage when trying to compete. Players who refused to abide by the rules would still have access to the game, albeit restricted access, through one server populated with players just like them. Though half-joking, staff over on p99 threatened to do something to this effect years ago, so credit where credit is due.
As for those who engage in the worst acts that jeopardize the brand and game world, I would be glad to see a finely crafted ban hammer swung and swung hard.
A fun idea Leevolen but more overhead for CS.
Maybe we can pretend to give them an out before they are simply removed altogether ;)
BigBadAzz1 said:Darch said:The easiest way to prevent the use of 3rd party programs/parsers is to create > in game programs/parsers < that cater to the desires of those who will absolutely use them - because communication to and from server/client will obviously be needed, and there will be no (legal) way to stop data collection without manipulating the client. i.e. have comprehensive maps and combat parsers that players can choose to use or not use.
People who choose not to use tools like this will be the minority.
Exploits like duping money, or intentionally access dev tools (like godmode, or teleportation) should be bannable - but utilitizing a 3rd party app should be an absolute non-issue (and will be a non-issue if they simply allow players to utilize an in-game version... which would put the majority of players on the same playing field... if they choose).
I have yet to see such programs implemented in a game. But if this is implemented I bet the game will feel wholesome for a lot of players.
Go and watch the streams in Amberfaet and you'll see after every kill there is a parse that shows up. The devs have one for themselves already.
That's just so dope. I'm really excited for this game!
Lafael said:A fun idea Leevolen but more overhead for CS.
Maybe we can pretent to give them an out before they are simply removed altogether ;)
Scaled down than, maybe a penal colony zone. Players put in timeout, sent to an otherwise inaccessible zone far removed from the rest of Terminus. Gates and ports disabled. Zoneline out of reach. Basically one giant cat room, minus the cat.
I think for all peoples sake, I would prefer to have separate servers dedicated for a specific type of like rules that don't really affect a certain type of players, due to their customs or backgrounds. I know it's a little over the top but ideally..I think it's a good idea to have certain type of servers made for each type of personality trait (call it Rated M or Rated PG-13) that makes each group of people different from the rest. I know from time to time I like to talk s**t and have fun but I feel not a lot of people want to deal with in their minds seem as 'obnoxious'. I know from experience I know when exactly to say stuff at the right time and I always give the person the benefit of the doubt and I analyze whether that person took it wrong and I fix it. It seems like a huge task, but, honestly, I think it would bring everyone together in a game where we can be ourselves and have fun doing it.
As far as cheating programs go, I rather not have any type of program having an advantage over other people.
I absolutely agree that the company benefiting from gold farmers being the one that also decides if they are banned is a conflict of interest.
I think the best way to handle this, from the standpoint of building trust with the community, is to have a seperate company to handle CS and grant them ability to handle banning.
Tough one. I think this day and age there will always be someone(s) that can find profitability in RMT and those that support it in MMO's. Hiring a third party to monitor is- a cost and the third party is often not subject to oversight.
The only other thing I can think of, is, go big or go home, like, make everything an NFT tied to the account holder. if its sold, funds will go straight to VR and account closed. Sure they can open another account but the end result is, they are essentially paying VR via subscription to...pay VR when they try to RMT their NFT's. The "buyer" gets a pledge notice and a thank you...and an offer to sub and play the game. but the cost to set that up may drive the sub cost into the 100's
If you find a bug or glitch in-game and exploit it without reporting it to us you will most likely be banned. There are always underlying circumstances to take into account and these are typically dealt with on a case by case basis but I have no problem in banning people who abuse bugs and glitches in our game to gain an advantage.
If you find it and tell us, it's unlikely anything would happen to you unless there were other factors involved but finding say an item or money dupe and telling your friends and guildies on the down-low to keep it to yourself and use secretly will, in my mind, earn you a permaban. We don't want that type of behaviour in our community or game, it ruins it for everyone.
I really hope all 3rd party software/radar/botting/showeq style program usage ends in a permanent ban. Other TOS violations are a little more difficult to be so cut and dry with, but duping should also be a perma ban.
People just abuse everything they can and it honestly ruins a game for me. I was having fun with New World but the bots/exploits/3rd party software usage has ruined it for me.