TaSheen wrote: »

Uh. This has what to do with ESO? Oy.

ESO is a game with paying subscribers and purchasers. To show publicly what they do as far as cheating being dealt with would be a great thing. Don’t you think? If not why?

Nope. It's not my job to worry about "cheating". If the devs do something about it, fine. Citing something from another game has zero to do with ESO.

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.

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

Blizzard is making wayshrines accountwide at no extra cost. Not the ESO way most likely!

Though perhaps we could get it as a Crown Store item!

What has this to do with anything? Besides, it’s very easy to travel in ESO and there is already unlimited free “travel to player” so you can unlock a lot of wayshrines fast on a new character if you want.

Pixiepumpkin wrote: »

I personally hope with ZOS having new ownership that we'll see a shakeup internally and better communication to the customer will be implemented.

By new ownership, do you mean the acquisition by Microsoft three years ago? I think at this point we’ve seen the changes resulting directly from that.

No one bans 270K players in a month with careful, thoughtful manual review. That is just some server side algorithm banning anyone who meets various, often arbitrary, "suspicious" criteria. That may be fine for simple, F2P games without any kind of deep player engagement with the game world. Large scale algorithmic banning in a game like ESO is not going to ban 270K cheaters. It is going to do something like ban 220K cheaters and 50K innocent victims, and the bad PR from banning 50K innocent victims will be a nightmare in a game with loyal players with years worth of accumulated gear and skills and achievements and characters.

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.

Pick your poison. Option #1 or Option #2. There is good and bad with both.

Also don't forget that ZOS has moved a lot of client-side processing to server-side over the course of last 10 years. It has really hurt performance in Cyrodiil as the server has so much more to calculate compared to when the game engine was written. And that has almost all been anti-cheat efforts as server side calculations are harder to cheat than client side.

So I think ZOS does take cheating seriously. Seriously enough to hurt performance. People talk about the glory days of Cyrodiil, with keep fights featuring hundreds of players and no lag. Yeah, because all the calculations were being done on the player's machines, not the server. And cheating was rampant. You think there is cheating in Cyrodiil now? It is about 1% of the cheating in the early days of the game.

ZOS seem to approach this from a preference to stop cheating at the source, rather than let it happen, ban people, rinse and repeat.

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

No one bans 270K players in a month with careful, thoughtful manual review. That is just some server side algorithm banning anyone who meets various, often arbitrary, "suspicious" criteria. That may be fine for simple, F2P games without any kind of deep player engagement with the game world. Large scale algorithmic banning in a game like ESO is not going to ban 270K cheaters. It is going to do something like ban 220K cheaters and 50K innocent victims, and the bad PR from banning 50K innocent victims will be a nightmare in a game with loyal players with years worth of accumulated gear and skills and achievements and characters.

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.

Pick your poison. Option #1 or Option #2. There is good and bad with both.

Also don't forget that ZOS has moved a lot of client-side processing to server-side over the course of last 10 years. It has really hurt performance in Cyrodiil as the server has so much more to calculate compared to when the game engine was written. And that has almost all been anti-cheat efforts as server side calculations are harder to cheat than client side.

So I think ZOS does take cheating seriously. Seriously enough to hurt performance. People talk about the glory days of Cyrodiil, with keep fights featuring hundreds of players and no lag. Yeah, because all the calculations were being done on the player's machines, not the server. And cheating was rampant. You think there is cheating in Cyrodiil now? It is about 1% of the cheating in the early days of the game.

ZOS seem to approach this from a preference to stop cheating at the source, rather than let it happen, ban people, rinse and repeat.

Correct. It is an "AI" Blizzard uses to detect cheating in OW2, the game that had all those bans.

How well defined that AI is we do not know but it is also an extremely simplistic game compared to ESO. The game encompasses a small fraction of what makes up ESO.

Do not get me wrong. I like OW2 and prefer their PvP over our BG design and it is also much more competitive.

So many people with pitchforks these days.

Einar_Hrafnarsson wrote: »

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

I have not seen anything that stated that Blizzard banned or suspended all those players at once. It is likely over a period of time. Many are likely the same player getting banned multiple times since it is a F2P game and banning an IP address is not practical.

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.

Four_Fingers wrote: »

So many people with pitchforks these days.

Yep I miss how Zos use to run the forums...you didn't see all the non constructive/trollish posts

Araneae6537 wrote: »

So eager for people to be banned? Of course I agree that people who are really cheating should be banned, but a report of massive bans does not itself convince me that a company is being accountable. Punishing those who have done no wrong is worse. I’m not saying that Blizzard has, I know nothing about what they do.

i have seen so many people get banned by blizz wrongly, it's kinda insane tbh.

no, zos doesnt need to release these numbers.

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