Whoever reads these boards on a daily basis did likely notice a recent argument about bannings.
We all know, that only the account owner of a banned account is allowed to challenge the decission and only by using the support-mail system.
Well, that does not stop me from making a decision though.
Part of the anger of the banned players comes from the fact, that they are not informed, why exactly they were banned.
My suggestion is:
Make the information of the violation more clear and less general.
When I was banned from these forums a while back (when GG came our), the message read "quitting message in sig". That was totally clear. I did not need to wonder, if I had made an inappropriate post or something. I had broken the rules with my signature and I could properly ask AshNC (CM at that time) in a mail to lift the ban which after a few days, he did.
Now we know, that a account suspension is not so clear, to protect the usability of NCsofts detection methods.
Well, I do not need to know the detection methods, but I would like to know the conclusion the GM team came to (HGMSpam once said, that any banning will always include more than one GM.. At least one who gathers information and another, who evaluates them and judges on the ban. This is supposed to avoid one-person errors or intentional manipulation).
The following are made up situations:
Case 1:
Let's assume, that a GM comes to the conclusion, that I were using a third party tool, which bypasses GG and manipulates the original client to show me certain things, that are not meant to be shown.
The account suspension message would read "use of third party tools", but that would not tell me, what I really am supposed to have done.
We do know, that Gameguard is having false positives, like e.g. the Panda Antivirus (I test that every week) and some Logitech keyboard drivers. Well, if GG can have false positives, I assume, that a human can find false positives too.
I suggest, the suspension message would instead read: "Your account is suspended permanently, cause you were prooved to use zoom **** / HP **** / speed **** / whateverotherhack."
Case 2:
Lets assume, that 100 clients from germany are suddenly playing all from the same IP. They never did that before and the enormous IP-flood makes a GM assume, that the accounts are botted.
In fact the accounts are only all using a program named profixier, as that is at that time the only way for customers of certain european regions to play at all. Some support messages even suggest using the program.
The account suspension message would read "use of third party tools", but that would not tell me, what I really am supposed to have done.
We do know, that Gameguard is having false positives, like e.g. the Panda Antivirus (I test that every week) and some Logitech keyboard drivers. Well, if GG can have false positives, I assume, that a human can find false positives too.
I suggest, the suspension message would instead read: "Your account is suspended permanently, cause you were prooved to use zoom **** / HP **** / speed **** / whateverotherhack."
Case 2:
Lets assume, that 100 clients from germany are suddenly playing all from the same IP. They never did that before and the enormous IP-flood makes a GM assume, that the accounts are botted.
In fact the accounts are only all using a program named profixier, as that is at that time the only way for customers of certain european regions to play at all. Some support messages even suggest using the program.
The account suspension message would again read "use of third party tools", but that would not tell me, what I really am supposed to have done.
If the message would instead read: "Your account is permanently suspended due to having your account botted on Feb 15th 2006 together with 8 other players in your group." I would know what to look for in my own behaviour, to have a chance to explain it.
I do not see any danger for the actual detection methods, if the reasoning for the suspension is made more clear.
We know, what can be a reason for a ban. Only a blind and deaf person would not know the names of a couple third party tools.
Real life analogies are a bit flawed, as we basically agree in the EULA to have no rights whatsoever, but in the end, we are the customers and the customer is supposed to be king & queen:
If a cop stops me on the road, they can revoke my driver license, but they should tell me why it was done. There is a difference, if I was ignoring STOP-Signs or if I was driving drunk or stoned, or if I was doing speed violations all the time. It all ends in a driver license suspension, but I get told what the actual reason was. The processes with which the police can catch me doing any of the violations is not harmed by telling me that.
As usuall after writing a full page post, here a short summary for the lazy ones:
I suggest to give a more detailed reason for discipinary actions without telling anything about the investigative techniques.
I totally agree. When I got banned here, the only message I received was a "72 hour ban for flaming" message when I tried to sign on. No email, no PM (couldn't read it anyway), nothing. Narrows it down, huh (I flame someone every day).
It couldn't hurt to put a little effort into sending an email (not a PM) to the account with a little information. I've never been banned in game or had any close friends that have so I don't know how they inform people; if at all...
Communication has always been a problem with NCSoft, but they have been improving. It would be most welcome if this extended to bans (although I hope I won't get to try that).
In addition, such a policy might put those who are worried about false positives at ease, and enable NCSoft to take a stricter stance.
The above listed account was recently suspended due to a violation of Lineage II's User Agreement and or Rules of Conduct (ROC). The reason for the account suspension is Use/Advertise Cheater Program. Please go to PlayNC Support for further information.
And what I mean is... If you are sure, that they used a cheater program, why not tell them, what exactly you caught them at. As you are already 100% sure, that they DID use it, you can as well tell them the exact name.
It would be a nice gesture toward the benefit of the doubt. If I would get the above message, I would spend day and night trying to figure out, just what behaviour of mine was falsely interpreted as cheating. If the mail would just tell me "The reason for the account suspension is use of a duping exploit." I would still be banned, and I would still not know anything about the investigative cycle, but I would be able to think about my recent gameplay and maybe that information would call up a srtange situation, that I already forgot, where maybe I thought myself lucky to pickup an item, that I already had. Maybe in that process, I could even provide additional info, that I would never think about otherwise and maybe it could even help to find a rare bug, that only happens once a month to one player on the world.
Please do not take my suggestion as any attempt to hinder the fight against cheaters. But since there was at least one account falsely banned in the past, the process is not 100% reliable. 99.9% is good, but the 0.01% who got falsely banned deserve a chance to try to proove their innocence.
Well written point kitten =)
Althought I have never had to go through the pain of having to deal with that, it is a great point ^_^
If it were me being falsely accused I woud definately want to know the specifics.
Here's a role reversal tho...I don't know how many times I have reported 9-bot trains with random letter names like "qwertyuiop" and "askdjas" (just example) and see nothing happen to them...infact I have petitioned a bunch of them in the past, and I have yet to see one of them get banned, temporarily suspended, etc...they just run there day and night non-stop to this day. And there's a constant struggle for a soloing TK to get any mobs at all.
I guess banning 9 accounts would cause NC soft to lose too much money? *boggle* :confused:
Actually Hyper, that is probably the real reasoning behind alot of what Ncsoft does. For example let's take a simple hunting area like Hardins/DeathPass on my server Hindemith.
Yesterday a clannie and I were leveling our hatchlings there.
We counted 7 botted trains. None using soulshot all moving in perfect sync with each other, with healers sitting to regen mp and heal when needed. All of these parties had at least 5 people in them sometimes 9, let's just average it into being 7 people per group.
7 times 7 equals- 49
49 times 14.99 (at least I think I remember subscription price going up to 14.99)equals- 734.51
That's alot of money, and that's just one hunting spot.
Consider all the new features Ncsoft has implemented for new players. Now turn around and go to any of the mainland starter villages. Elven Village for example. And look at all the illegal program users who do the same quest over and over again until they do not get quest items. These same new players who are benefiting from the new features are the same ones who port to Guldio and then kamikaze the guards there until they delevel to a point where they get back to the level where questing is good and they get the better newbie buffs.
If I were a new player and I started in any of the new towns, I can tell you how long I would be playing. Not very long.
Well I think that if NC Soft is going to be set on a policy like such as banning people for using third party softwares, they should stick to it and not be "selective" about it.
IMO these large adena-farming ebay bot trains make up for a large majority of the issues and griefs that a lotof players experience in the gameto begin with. :mad:
I completely agree... I must admit that I have yet to be banned (but give it time... the chronicle is young :p ) but I've thought about this quite a bit.
Not only should they be more specific with the reasons for certain instances of bannings but I also feel that they should not perma ban right off the bat. No matter what.
So... if a player does do something that is against the rules they should get a 72 hour ban and be placed on probation. If they do it again they should then get perma banned.
But then again I believe that peoplecan redeem themselves.
Please do not turn this thread into a discussion about bot trains and about bot detection methods. There is an official thread for that and I do not want to get this suggestion deleted.
This thread is solely asking for a better explanation of the supposed wrongdoing to protect innocents. I couldn't care less about people, who really did break the rules. They are not supposed to be topic in this thread.
/agree
Most of you who know me know where I stand when it comes to these sorts of things. I haven't sympathy for those who get caught. That said, I do believe in due process and the tyransparency and clarity that kitten is advocating.
That is how I would run things, anyway. But the only thing I run around here is my mouth.
Part of the anger of the banned players comes from the fact, that they are not informed, why exactly they were banned.
Being angry doesn't equate with being innocent. I think the anger stems from losing the account more then not being told why. I'm sure if everything was explained to them as to why they lost the account they would still be angry.
When I was banned from these forums a while back (when GG came our), the message read "quitting message in sig". That was totally clear. I did not need to wonder, if I had made an inappropriate post or something. I had broken the rules with my signature and I could properly ask AshNC (CM at that time) in a mail to lift the ban which after a few days, he did.
This was a banning designed to alter user behavior and not the same thing as a permanent ban which has no real concern for what the player does after the fact. Punishment with reasoning is all about attempted behavior modification.
Well, I do not need to know the detection methods, but I would like to know the conclusion the GM team came to (HGMSpam once said, that any banning will always include more than one GM.. At least one who gathers information and another, who evaluates them and judges on the ban. This is supposed to avoid one-person errors or intentional manipulation).
Stating the conclusion is unnecessary since the GM's don't care what you do once you're permanently banned. All they'd be doing is letting people know what they are capable of detecting even if the means themselves are unknown. This tells them what they can't do for the time being until there have been changes made.
The following are made up situations:
Case 1:
Let's assume, that a GM comes to the conclusion, that I were using a third party tool, which bypasses GG and manipulates the original client to show me certain things, that are not meant to be shown.
The account suspension message would read "use of third party tools", but that would not tell me, what I really am supposed to have done.
We do know, that Gameguard is having false positives, like e.g. the Panda Antivirus (I test that every week) and some Logitech keyboard drivers. Well, if GG can have false positives, I assume, that a human can find false positives too.
I suggest, the suspension message would instead read: "Your account is suspended permanently, cause you were prooved to use zoom **** / HP **** / speed **** / whateverotherhack."
So now the cheaters would know which hacks can be detected and which ones need to be updated to try to avoid detection. Oh and the people that didn't get banned can change their behavior to avoid being detected in the meantime but will have escaped being punished for cheating.
Case 2:
Lets assume, that 100 clients from germany are suddenly playing all from the same IP. They never did that before and the enormous IP-flood makes a GM assume, that the accounts are botted.
In fact the accounts are only all using a program named profixier, as that is at that time the only way for customers of certain european regions to play at all. Some support messages even suggest using the program.
The account suspension message would again read "use of third party tools", but that would not tell me, what I really am supposed to have done.
If the message would instead read: "Your account is permanently suspended due to having your account botted on Feb 15th 2006 together with 8 other players in your group." I would know what to look for in my own behaviour, to have a chance to explain it.
Are they really banning people for using the same IP? If so then this isn't so much a transparency issue as an obvious logical fallacy that all people using the same IP are botting. There are just too many completely legitimate situations for the GM's to react in such a fashion so I seriously doubt that's the way they handle that situation. This scenario might prompt an investigation but I doubt its the sole grounds for a ban.
I do not see any danger for the actual detection methods, if the reasoning for the suspension is made more clear.
We know, what can be a reason for a ban. Only a blind and deaf person would not know the names of a couple third party tools.
Real life analogies are a bit flawed, as we basically agree in the EULA to have no rights whatsoever, but in the end, we are the customers and the customer is supposed to be king & queen:
If a cop stops me on the road, they can revoke my driver license, but they should tell me why it was done. There is a difference, if I was ignoring STOP-Signs or if I was driving drunk or stoned, or if I was doing speed violations all the time. It all ends in a driver license suspension, but I get told what the actual reason was. The processes with which the police can catch me doing any of the violations is not harmed by telling me that.
As usuall after writing a full page post, here a short summary for the lazy ones:
I suggest to give a more detailed reason for discipinary actions without telling anything about the investigative techniques.
Disciplinary Kitten
If you're caught speeding then you know that the police can detect it. If you're caught running a stop sign then you know that the police have the methods for detecting it. If you're caught for driving while drunk then you know that the police have a method for detecting it.
If the cheaters know which programs can be detected then they know which programs need to be modified to try to avoid detection. If you want to extend this to your driving example... imagine being pulled over by a police officer after running a red light while doing 100km/h over the speed limit and the police officer only writes a ticket for running the red light. This teaches you that you can get away speeding but now you have to watch out for red lights.
Well written Schmuze. Even if you made the mistake in having a part of the message repeat itself!
Sounds to me like an easy to implement procedure that would show that NCSoft cares about their customers. A thing that is lacking in their behavior right now.
Only problem is that it is probably hard to tell cheathack 1 from cheathack 2 with 100% accuracy. So if they banned someone for using cheathack 1 while he was using cheathack 2 that could turn out to be more hassle then they would like. Saying you used a **** simply solves that problem from happening.
Torg, I know for a fact, that at least one player was falsely banned for a couple days.
He got the same message about being permanently banned, but he could solve the issue, as he had gotten a much mroe detailed message than the one I mentioned. The message included a char name and a server on which the rulebreaking was said to have taken place.
Now that guy did never have a char on the server mentioned in the ban note, so he got a real easy time at prooving his own innocence.
However that situation prooves, that mistakes can happen, and I sure as hell will not blame anyone for making a mistake, as I am making enough of my own.
But knowing that you made a mistake and correct it, that is a real sign of grace.
Once again, my suggestion is in no way catered towards cheaters. The cheaters can rot in hell as far as I am concerned.
But if I would ever be victim to a mistake, I would like to know, what I am accused of, so I can solve the issue.
Torg, I know for a fact, that at least one player was falsely banned for a couple days.
He got the same message about being permanently banned, but he could solve the issue, as he had gotten a much mroe detailed message than the one I mentioned. The message included a char name and a server on which the rulebreaking was said to have taken place.
Now that guy did never have a char on the server mentioned in the ban note, so he got a real easy time at prooving his own innocence.
However that situation prooves, that mistakes can happen, and I sure as hell will not blame anyone for making a mistake, as I am making enough of my own.
But knowing that you made a mistake and correct it, that is a real sign of grace.
Once again, my suggestion is in no way catered towards cheaters. The cheaters can rot in hell as far as I am concerned.
But if I would ever be victim to a mistake, I would like to know, what I am accused of, so I can solve the issue.
Solved Kitten
If the banned player received a detailed message then I don't see the issue.
Lots of players are NOT recieving detailed messages. At least two people I know have recieved the message that they were caught advertising/using a 3rd party programme. Surely NC is aware which one of the two the user was found guilty of.
They could atleast tell us what type of crime we have been found guilty of. Be it modidying our L2 files, using a **** or all out botting.
People are confused, angry and don't know what to tell NC when they get a message like that.