Ban wave & Add-ons.

CyberOnEso

techyeshic wrote: »

The thing with add-ons is that so long as they are using the ZOS APIs, they probably are fine. But unless you made the add-on itself or looked at it's actual code; how do you know it is simply using the approved method? There isn't really an approved distributor out there evaluating everything they share is within the TOS.

Addons can do nothing else apart from use the ZOS API, they can't do anything else. They cannot read or write to random files on your disk, they cannot access the internet. They cannot move your character, they cannot use skills.

They are allowed to read and write to 1 specific file the 'Saved Variables' file and that only happens when you ReloadUI, so you couldn't for example write to this file during combat and have your keyboard do something because of it, as addons can only interact with this file when you ReloadUI.

They can do exactly what ZOS lets them do and nothing more, this is list of everything addons can do: https://wiki.esoui.com/API

Addons can put a hat on your head because ZOS allows them to use the 'UseCollecitble' function.
If ZOS wanted to not let addons put a hat on your head they could just stop addons from being able to use the UseCollecitble function, the game runs addons and the game chooses what to do with every single line of code.
If you write, for example, UseSkill(5) the game will see that line and just not run it, simple as that.

Addons cannot, for example, open the crown store, see how many crowns you have. Even though the UI can show you that information addons cannot see it.

ZOS aren't stupid, they have created, IMO, an amazing system for incredible game customization, in an MMO of all things, and they have done so with very few issues whilst literally allowing people to write code that can see parts of what is going on in the game, it's a truly amazing system.

Ermiq

They clarified the situation in the new thread and said that it was an addon:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/588031/update-on-recent-action-against-some-eso-accounts/p1
I'm stupid. That thread is from October. So, nvm.

daim

Ermiq wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

ZOS has not specifically mentioned addons, so I personally doubt that this is related to them. The connection to addons seems to originate in the community. People are assuming that it must be addon related, but that is not really a confirmed assumption.

daim wrote: »

Also some people have used this same subject with their own agenda against addons. Only ZOS can stop these rumours but I'm not very hopeful seeing that happen.

They clarified the situation in the new thread and said that it was an addon:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/588031/update-on-recent-action-against-some-eso-accounts/p1

ZOS wrote:

We’ve spent a lot of time reviewing this matter over the past week and subsequent investigations have indicated that a potentially defective addon was at fault – it erroneously triggered our anti-cheat detection systems.

That thread is from October, over 2 months old ...

SilverBride

FeedbackOnly wrote: »

There's reports of couples with exact same addons and only one banned.

Whatever it is it's definitely blindsided and took innocent people

Maybe only one of them was cheating.

Pevey

There was an issue not too long ago with an addon that was causing server message spam in such a way that there appeared to be an exploit when there was not. Zos investigated and eventually uncovered the root cause.

With all of the publicity surrounding that, I have doubt that they would have taken these newest actions without investigating thoroughly.

Based on the wording, I believe this is related to the cheat aka “trainer” that was pretty widely known and that I always would post about whenever someone would comment that cheating in eso is not possible. I mean, there were videos on YouTube advertising the program and directing people to the hacker’s discord server. The server showed the list of what the trainer could do, and how to pay.

There were plenty of paying customers. They were very brazen about how they had done this for months and months without being caught. And this was maybe a year ago. It was clearly against the TOS. Going underground, super jumps, walking on air, etc.

Not all of these people are innocent. Maybe none of them are. We can’t know. That’s for them to work out with zos. Generally, gaming companies don’t budge when a cheater insists they didn’t cheat. If you appeal a permanent ban, better advice would be to apologize profusely, ask for a temporary ban, and promise to never do it again.

spartaxoxo

Ermiq wrote: »

And they are not "third-party programs"

They are third party programs because they aren't made by ZOS.

Basically, when the policy says "the addons are 3rd party, use it on your own risk" it means "use it if you wish but don't you dare blame ZOS and the game for all the potentially possible UI glitches, game freezes, memory leaks, increased disk read/write overload and other issues the addons could produce".

And that's why they note them as such.

TequilaFire

Has anyone on console acknowledged being banned by this latest ban?
Would give a clue.

zaria

Reverb wrote: »

Editing my post after learning that this is a known issue acknowledged by Zeni:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/593096/recent-game-account-bans-and-suspensions-for-game-client-manipulation


To answer your question, any addon that uses open API elements to facilitate in-game views or functions is allowed. Addons that capture data published through the API and stores it in folders created and managed by the game (saved variables, addon settings, etc.) are allowed.

Addons which use a script or executable to populate a 3rd party application, site, or database aren’t allowed. Zeni may or may not be aware of them, and may or may not take action on that knowledge, but they reserve the right to at any time

Addons which use a script to populate an database, is this not that the trading mods like TTC does?
And TTC is very well know and has been around forever.

Now I say any mods in minion is safe, you should be more careful about an mod not from there.

Jeremy

LashanW wrote: »

Jeremy wrote: »

FeedbackOnly wrote: »

My next guess is pvp cheat engine

It couldn't be that because cheating doesn't exist on this game.

It does exist. But I've only seen them in Cyrodiil.

I was being sarcastic. I've seen them too.

Charlotte_Loreley

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Ermiq wrote: »

And they are not "third-party programs"

They are third party programs because they aren't made by ZOS.

Basically, when the policy says "the addons are 3rd party, use it on your own risk" it means "use it if you wish but don't you dare blame ZOS and the game for all the potentially possible UI glitches, game freezes, memory leaks, increased disk read/write overload and other issues the addons could produce".

And that's why they note them as such.

You misunderstood the point of that commenter. The emphasis is not on "third party".

In a broader spectrum, sure; you can be excused when you call them programs.
However, technically, they are not programs/applications. They are just a set of additional instructions that the official client can read and decide whether it approves them or not.

An easy analogy for this would be an essay and an amendment/comment. ESO client in this case is the whole essay, while addons are just comments and amendments at the end of the essay further going into detail about a certain sentence/paragraph in the essay.
Thesis and the main goal of an essay does not change whether we have comments or additional amendments. We can still understand the idea the essay tries to convey to us, but with comments pertaining to certain sections of the essay we can understand those particular sections much better.

zaria

LashanW wrote: »

Jeremy wrote: »

FeedbackOnly wrote: »

My next guess is pvp cheat engine

It couldn't be that because cheating doesn't exist on this game.

It does exist. But I've only seen them in Cyrodiil.

As outside of Cyrodiil and battlegrounds all hard content is instanced as in dungeons and raids. Raid bosses don't complains if killed because cheating. Now they might have some traps here like flagging weird stuff.

It was an insane story from WOW there an player got an gamemaster special weapon who one shot anything by accident, for some reason this was not bound. He gave it to an friend as he knew it was illegal and the friend had problems with an boss or something. Well that guy was not so smart as he got together an raid group and did an raid in the hardest difficulty on first try, none had done that before, yes it raised lots of flags and got permabanned.

Elsonso

Ermiq wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

ZOS has not specifically mentioned addons, so I personally doubt that this is related to them. The connection to addons seems to originate in the community. People are assuming that it must be addon related, but that is not really a confirmed assumption.

daim wrote: »

Also some people have used this same subject with their own agenda against addons. Only ZOS can stop these rumours but I'm not very hopeful seeing that happen.

They clarified the situation in the new thread and said that it was an addon:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/588031/update-on-recent-action-against-some-eso-accounts/p1

ZOS wrote:

We’ve spent a lot of time reviewing this matter over the past week and subsequent investigations have indicated that a potentially defective addon was at fault – it erroneously triggered our anti-cheat detection systems.

That is not the same incident that we have today.

The current incident is described here: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/593096/recent-game-account-bans-and-suspensions-for-game-client-manipulation

monitoiul

I think the point was to prove that addons, even though they should not be capable of influencing the game client, *did* in the past result in false positives for cheat engine.

I can appreciate their position, in that they have to manage a huge community and make sure things are fair for everyone. Probably revealing too many details would enable cheaters to improve their methods.

However, it is quite disheartening to see the current approach. No response to tickets etc. Especially given that they made the promise to improve this exact aspect.

I was more than happy to constantly get ESO+, and definitely got my money's worth of monthly entertainment. The community is great.

However, I don't know if I can continue to justify the time and money investment given this feeling of shouting-into-void.

zaria

Elsonso wrote: »

Ermiq wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

ZOS has not specifically mentioned addons, so I personally doubt that this is related to them. The connection to addons seems to originate in the community. People are assuming that it must be addon related, but that is not really a confirmed assumption.

daim wrote: »

Also some people have used this same subject with their own agenda against addons. Only ZOS can stop these rumours but I'm not very hopeful seeing that happen.

They clarified the situation in the new thread and said that it was an addon:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/588031/update-on-recent-action-against-some-eso-accounts/p1

ZOS wrote:

We’ve spent a lot of time reviewing this matter over the past week and subsequent investigations have indicated that a potentially defective addon was at fault – it erroneously triggered our anti-cheat detection systems.

That is not the same incident that we have today.

The current incident is described here: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/593096/recent-game-account-bans-and-suspensions-for-game-client-manipulation

This, now the game has some anti bot system, ZoS will obviously not discus this as it will let the bot makers write around the system. I know that learning potion ingredients will boot you from server as making too many potions is suspect.
No making spell power pots is not dangerous as you make an stack. making potions 100 times gives you an problem.
Some on console got booted for parsing on dummies for 20 minutes. On console you don't have combat metric so you need to kill the trial dummy to get your dps. Hint, make an way to reset an dummy and give your dps.

spitfire1525

They should never do automated bans for addons. You cannot allow addons to your game and then ban without atleast a warning.

If you load illegal addon you should get 1 warning while at character selection screen. If you don't remove addon by the next login, THEN you get banned for 24/48/72 hours (whatever).

If I was auto banned for an addon without warning, I will immediately cancel ESO plus.

BlueRaven

I just want to point out a further possible complication in determining the cause of a ban.

It may have been nothing about what you did, or what addons you had, rather it could have been done by someone you were grouped with. Or even purchased something from.

An illegal “dupe” could get a person banned even if the person who got the item had no idea it was fraudulent.

In addition someone in a group could have been using an illegal addon that helped the whole group, even if the group had no idea it was happening. (For example they could have been using an addon that dramatically increased their dps by artificially firing off light attacks. There are other examples.)

Just wanted to point out that some of the people banned could have done nothing wrong themselves, but zos still needs to investigate, so the account needs to be shut down until it’s figured out.

scorpius2k1

daim wrote: »

Only grey area third party addon I can think of is ReShade, but I doubt the ban wave does have anything to do with it.

You are correct, ReShade is not part of any of the recent or presumably any other bans and should not be suspect at this time. ReShade uses modified DirectX rendering libraries (DLL's) copied only into the game client folder, not any modification or memory hook to the actual client. ZOSDanBatson has kindly confirmed this for us in the ESOUI Developer channel a short time ago. I wanted to post his response here for context to clear up any speculation and rumors for those using ReShade.

Elsonso

BlueRaven wrote: »

It may have been nothing about what you did, or what addons you had, rather it could have been done by someone you were grouped with. Or even purchased something from.

According to the official post, this was for "manipulating the game client in unintended ways", so it isn't something that a person grouped with you, or selling something to you, will be able to do. I don't think people need to worry about that.

Ermiq

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Ermiq wrote: »

And they are not "third-party programs"

They are third party programs because they aren't made by ZOS.

They are not programs. They are scripts, and they can not function on their own, they are compiled and executed by the game's eso64.exe program.
Obviously, they are 3rd party, but they are not 3rd party software/programs, and that's the reason why they have their own Terms of Service that is separate from the common ToS that regulates the usage of 3rd party software, client modifications and such.

daim

Elsonso wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

It may have been nothing about what you did, or what addons you had, rather it could have been done by someone you were grouped with. Or even purchased something from.

According to the official post, this was for "manipulating the game client in unintended ways", so it isn't something that a person grouped with you, or selling something to you, will be able to do. I don't think people need to worry about that.

Yeah that wording reeks of some sort of trainer and those people know what they did and deserve the perm ban. However im conserned about the people whom might have been flagged falsely. I guess we have to wait for more information, and hope they explain it further - otherwise why would anyone want to invest into a game where you can get a ban when you dont even know why.

Nanfoodle

Sometimes an add on mess up and make a spam amount of requests to the game servers. That will get you a ban. Zeni can't tell when it's an add on spamming or you.

ZOS_GregoryV

Greetings!

After review, we have decided to close this thread for Discussing Disciplinary Action. Discussing Disciplinary Actions is a violation of the Community Guidelines, and is stated as follows:

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