270k plus accounts reported banned by Blizzard in December alone.

wilykcat

reazea wrote: »

Shouldn't this thread be closed as it's not about ESO?

Maybe. It depends. I say this thread is about both blizzard and eso as it is a suggestion referencing to another game's decision. I understand 🙂.

On the otherhand this forum post would of made more sense on the blizzard forums.

Tallon_IV

You would just complain that the numbers aren't high enough.

spartaxoxo

Blizzard auto-bans and has horrible follow up on appeals. Plenty of innocent people end up with bans by them. I am glad it's not like that here.

licenturion

Are these all paid game bans?

Because I know that Blizzard bans an insame amount of free to play Overwatch players for cheating or toxic behaviour on chat and voice. Even typing 'gg ez tank diff' can get you banned these days.

Also Warzone, which is also powered by Battle.net has many bans each months.

Charon_on_Vacation

Amottica wrote: »

Zenimax has in the past noted they were banning and suspending players concerning a specific exploit that has been discovered. However, it has only been concerning larger scale exploiting which is what Blizzard spoke to.

The article speaks to bans in OW2 which is a very popular FPS PvP type of game. It did not note if this ban was all at once or even due to very recent actions. OW2 is also F2P and has a very simple design. That means they can easily eclipse the player base of the largest MMORPGs making it easier to come up with such numbers. Free players are more likely to not be concerned with being banned as they can turn around and create a new account.

could you link me the article?
the only articles i found were strictly about 270970 WoW Accounts.

Vulkunne

wilykcat wrote: »

reazea wrote: »

Shouldn't this thread be closed as it's not about ESO?

Maybe. It depends. I say this thread is about both blizzard and eso as it is a suggestion referencing to another game's decision. I understand 🙂.

On the otherhand this forum post would of made more sense on the blizzard forums.

True but Blizzard is a big player in the gaming industry, of which ESO is part of.

Beilin_Balreis_Colcan

Einar_Hrafnarsson wrote: »

If Zeni did that, they would be out of players in 1 month. ESO is pretty small compared to WoW.

That means the number of banned cheaters in ESO would be correspondingly low, so the 270k in WoW would translate to a much smaller number in ESO.

valenwood_vegan

A good friend of mine was wrongly banned the other day for exchanging gold in a guild auction. Very likely an automated ban based on the amount of gold transferred. Fortunately an actual human investigated the situation relatively quickly. Would not want this to become a common experience.

SaffronCitrusflower

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Blizzard auto-bans and has horrible follow up on appeals. Plenty of innocent people end up with bans by them. I am glad it's not like that here.

It's not? Could have fooled me. I know many people who've suffered through bans from ZOS with no consideration and/or response to their appeals.

Destai

We need more Gamemasters in zones to monitor them for bots and scammers. I regularly see gold sellers in zones like Grahtwood and Eastmarch (I'm sure they're all over base game). And just this morning, I saw some bot farmers in NW Alik'r. There's regular spots where these bots and scammers exist, so it should be easy to target them and at least deal with the symptoms of the problem.

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

You really have two options:

1). Make every effort to ban all cheaters, but accept that innocent victims will be pulled in.
2). Make every effort to never ban an innocent victim, but accept that cheaters will sneak through.

Everyone wants an option where every cheater gets banned without exception but no one ever gets banned by accident. That option does not exist in the real world. Not in games with millions of players where algorithmic pattern matching is the only way to efficiently ban players. Having ZOS employees do deep manual investigations into every reported or algorithmically flagged suspicious activity in Cyrodiil is simply not feasible.

Blizzard went route #1. ZOS seem to have gone route #2. ZOS seem to only ban in cases of really overt smoking gun open-and-shut guilt.

Just last year, there were a few mistaken ban waves in this game. There was even one around endeavors. It's happened a few times actually, so I'm not sure I believe that ZOS has gone with route 2. I think a more palatable approach is having in-game Gamemasters monitoring the hotspots is at least a step in the right direction. However, you're right, that a lot of people would get banned for harmless stuff like silly names or just goofing around.

spartaxoxo

SaffronCitrusflower wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Blizzard auto-bans and has horrible follow up on appeals. Plenty of innocent people end up with bans by them. I am glad it's not like that here.

It's not? Could have fooled me. I know many people who've suffered through bans from ZOS with no consideration and/or response to their appeals.

I agree they could definitely be doing a better job with their appeals process. But, if you've seen how bad it is at Blizzard, it's not really comparable. It's not that uncommon for people to be banned for abusive chat who have all of their chat channels disabled.

twev

Sakiri wrote: »

The game is nothing like it used to be in terms of bots.

I'm fine where we're at, and reporting numbers doesn't do anything productive in the long run.

FFXIV does a weekly report of how many accounts it's banned for cheating and stuff(mostly RMT) but thats about the only example I know of that does so.

Blizzard doesn't do it often, and I don't really care about what they do in overwatch.

For a game that claims to have over 23 million licensed copies of the game sold, and an estimated 200+ thousand daily players, asking for a few active (and live) GMs in the game on a regular basis wouldn't seem to be out of line.

edit: @Destai - I hadn't read your post #41 above when I posted, but I clearly agree with you.

Amottica

Charon_on_Vacation wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Zenimax has in the past noted they were banning and suspending players concerning a specific exploit that has been discovered. However, it has only been concerning larger scale exploiting which is what Blizzard spoke to.

The article speaks to bans in OW2 which is a very popular FPS PvP type of game. It did not note if this ban was all at once or even due to very recent actions. OW2 is also F2P and has a very simple design. That means they can easily eclipse the player base of the largest MMORPGs making it easier to come up with such numbers. Free players are more likely to not be concerned with being banned as they can turn around and create a new account.

could you link me the article?
the only articles i found were strictly about 270970 WoW Accounts.

@Charon_on_Vacation

Below is a link to the OW2 ban story. However, I doubt that all occurred at once or even in the same month.

I just found another article that says they banned 270k accounts across the various WoW platforms. That number is staggering even for a game that size of WoW. It is likely bloated by alt accounts. The second link is this article.

https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-bans-250000-overwatch-2-cheaters-says-its-ai-that-analyses-voice-chat-is-warning-naughty-players-and-can-often-correct-negative-behaviour-immediately/

https://egw.news/gaming/news/23649/blizzards-thunderous-ban-hammer-over-270-000-world-_vwhcqaCp

Charon_on_Vacation

Amottica wrote: »

Charon_on_Vacation wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Zenimax has in the past noted they were banning and suspending players concerning a specific exploit that has been discovered. However, it has only been concerning larger scale exploiting which is what Blizzard spoke to.

The article speaks to bans in OW2 which is a very popular FPS PvP type of game. It did not note if this ban was all at once or even due to very recent actions. OW2 is also F2P and has a very simple design. That means they can easily eclipse the player base of the largest MMORPGs making it easier to come up with such numbers. Free players are more likely to not be concerned with being banned as they can turn around and create a new account.

could you link me the article?
the only articles i found were strictly about 270970 WoW Accounts.

@Charon_on_Vacation

Below is a link to the OW2 ban story. However, I doubt that all occurred at once or even in the same month.

I just found another article that says they banned 270k accounts across the various WoW platforms. That number is staggering even for a game that size of WoW. It is likely bloated by alt accounts. The second link is this article.

https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-bans-250000-overwatch-2-cheaters-says-its-ai-that-analyses-voice-chat-is-warning-naughty-players-and-can-often-correct-negative-behaviour-immediately/

https://egw.news/gaming/news/23649/blizzards-thunderous-ban-hammer-over-270-000-world-_vwhcqaCp

thank you!
didn't find the overwatch story.
the 270k wow accounts are actually not that staggering for wow.
for example, in its first ten years, it averaged about 10 million new accounts per year.
last year eso had 2 million new accounts.
there was always a huge difference in size between those games.
this means, there is also a lot more money to be made in wow for third parties.
gold selling and boosting is a big part, so you have a lot more bad actors in it.

Panderbander

Charon_on_Vacation wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Charon_on_Vacation wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Zenimax has in the past noted they were banning and suspending players concerning a specific exploit that has been discovered. However, it has only been concerning larger scale exploiting which is what Blizzard spoke to.

The article speaks to bans in OW2 which is a very popular FPS PvP type of game. It did not note if this ban was all at once or even due to very recent actions. OW2 is also F2P and has a very simple design. That means they can easily eclipse the player base of the largest MMORPGs making it easier to come up with such numbers. Free players are more likely to not be concerned with being banned as they can turn around and create a new account.

could you link me the article?
the only articles i found were strictly about 270970 WoW Accounts.

@Charon_on_Vacation

Below is a link to the OW2 ban story. However, I doubt that all occurred at once or even in the same month.

I just found another article that says they banned 270k accounts across the various WoW platforms. That number is staggering even for a game that size of WoW. It is likely bloated by alt accounts. The second link is this article.

https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-bans-250000-overwatch-2-cheaters-says-its-ai-that-analyses-voice-chat-is-warning-naughty-players-and-can-often-correct-negative-behaviour-immediately/

https://egw.news/gaming/news/23649/blizzards-thunderous-ban-hammer-over-270-000-world-_vwhcqaCp

thank you!
didn't find the overwatch story.
the 270k wow accounts are actually not that staggering for wow.
for example, in its first ten years, it averaged about 10 million new accounts per year.
last year eso had 2 million new accounts.
there was always a huge difference in size between those games.
this means, there is also a lot more money to be made in wow for third parties.
gold selling and boosting is a big part, so you have a lot more bad actors in it.

Funny enough, I haven't seen any gold sellers since picking the game back up, a lot of which I think can be attributed to the addition of an official cash to gold option in the ability to buy game time tokens from other players with gold. I've sold tokens like this because $20 for a token is far less time than the time it takes to farm up the roughly 270k gold the tokens sell for as of now.

Ditto for Guild Wars 2 having an official gems (their version of Crowns) to gold conversion system and vice versa. Same thing where it's player to player with a studio controlled transaction rate and system. No gold sellers to be seen during my short stints of off and on playing that game.

Compare those two to ESO where my ignore list is fast filling with reports of gold sellers auto-blocking them while sending me emails to basically just ignore them if they bother me (paraphrasing here obviously). I think ESO could stand to benefit greatly by taking some inspiration from other platforms like these two and creating an official company regulated forum for handling cash to gold that removes the incentive of gold farmers and the bots that spam for them.

ZOS_Hadeostry

Greetings everyone!

We are going to go ahead and close this thread as it's becoming more and more about stats for other games, rather being focused on Elder Scrolls Online.

Thank you for your understanding!

ZOS_Kevin

Hi all, we do want to follow up and thank you for the information provided here. We see your feedback regarding this issue, especially compared to others in the space. We have this on hand for any future conversations on the topic of ban reporting. Thanks, all.