So the question is:
Why doesn’t Gaijin ban the referer accounts too?
Thanks for the perspective. However, this doesn’t directly address my argument or support yours, which is that the policing of the high amount of NRB player bots significantly decreases such policing of non-NRB-bot players.
I would assume it is rather easy to do; given the incredibly predictable nature of the bots, it would be easy to automate a majority of the enforcement process work.
Players can share their referral links widely. But the intent/ presence of collaboration with the referrer is near impossible to prove, even if collaboration is likely. So such a mechanism would be flawed, and even maliciously abused to ban innocent players.
I’m sure you’ve heard stories of supposedly wrongful bans; no system is 100% accurate in reducing Type I error. However, the effect on community opinion is much higher in the case of Type I errors than in the case of Type II errors, so naturally the enforcement system would be focused upon reducing the former.
Answered higher up. Because you currently have no choice over whether you receive GE from someone else’s referral, banning the referral accounts from a banned account could catch innocent people.
Is that a serious threat? Not really (and answerable by an acceptance step: “would you like 100 GE from this account you’ve never heard of?”). But it was the response when I suggested it yesterday here.
In a general sense, I agree, there’s still 4,000 ish real player bans over two months here, which is nice.
I do think it puts paid though to the whole idea of player reporting, at least in Naval. There’s been dozens of threads these last few months with people saying “I’ve banned my 10 players a day already in naval and they just keep coming”. If they’re being banned (as I suspect you’re right that they are) by an automated process, that’s a lot of player energy that is being wasted in making those reports, and a lot of company effort in looking over them when they don’t need to. Because those reports are being made in good faith, because the mode itself is clearly heavily impacted, I think Gaijin could say more here about what else they’re considering to affect the one audience being botted into the ground here (specifically, NRB on the NA server).
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Eh, I would say the effect is acceptable given the situation. Company effort would be very low in the case of automated process work. In theory the enforcement system can be set up to auto-report and summarize the chance of and variables surrounding a potential rule violation, with only need for final decision for enforcement staff.
As for player efforts, it’s fine in this state. I don’t think even a majority of relevant (NRB bot) banned accounts are attributable to player reporting. The effect is overstated since players who feel the civic duty to report rule violations also tend to be more vocal members of the community. It’s easy to picture most players just not caring to do reporting themselves, given the effort needed. Also, as an aside, if Gaijin truly is using automated measures, they would avoid announcing it openly for multiple reasons.
The “acceptable effect” here being the complete trashing of one mode on one server, with no end in sight. “Our cheater-catching plan is working, except in this one case… but we’ll still take the credit for the way they pad our numbers.” And the risk is not players not caring to do reporting, it’s players not caring to play the mode any more and leaving it.
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Well, I got to play this to see it myself. In air RB, they were cannon fodder. I actually looked for them to do tasks.
Isn’t your initial point about the negative effects on rules enforcement in other modes, due to attention given to NRB enforcement? But here you focus instead on the argument that NRB is made insufferable by the bots? I don’t dispute the latter, but these arguments clearly contradict.
This seems to imply the belief that Gaijin is purposefully neglecting NRB-related policing, in order to have a sustainable source of perceived action (to raise community opinion). However, this is unlikely due to multiple reasons, not the least of which is loss of profits in the case of referral abuse (2500 GE per player for Rank 5 Naval). And the effect of driving players away from the mode or even the game altogether.
You can also rule out the otherwise plausible case of profit motive from premium sales, since you said they are a separate phenomenon. Needless to say, I cannot see a scenario in which Gaijin would choose to neglect this issue. In total, the risks appear to greatly outweigh possible benefits, not to mention the benefits of the other possibility, which is the lack of weakness towards enforcement.
So it’s hard to believe now but before October, 2021, there was no bot problem in NRB. None. Some of us have been there from the beginning. And the initial response, which lasted nearly two years the first time, was to deny there was a problem, and close any forum threads that tried to bring it up. I collected my first caution from the management on 10 October of that year, for reporting being in an all-bot match, which was really unique at the time.
That first strategy of complete denial ended in July, 2023, with this article, which started the sequence of events we see here in this most recent “Fair Play” article. And over all the intervening years there have been waves of naval botting and scripting for various reasons, interspersed with occasional pleasant no-bot periods, with the most recent Leopardbot plague starting only in October (as we can confirm via Statshark stats).
So yes, I do think it’s fair to say Gaijin has neglected NRB-related policing in the past, as they did 2021-23, and stood to lose by doing so then about as much as it does now. It is up to them to convince us they are not slipping back into old ways, in this case not by actual denial, but by just adding a list of autobanned fake accounts to a list (that are all being immediately replaced in game with new accounts) and pretending that’s somehow helping the problem.
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HWID can be spoofed.
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It’s only speculation with no evidence, and a heavy accusation at that. You overestimate Gaijin here as a calculating, intimidating entity. When in reality this result can only be blamed on sheer incompetence, lack of staff or time, and the ever-present pressures of the relevant mode of production (ie, economically).
What is the point or intent of all of your arguments here today? 🤔 You do not even play Naval RB, and hardly play Naval Arcade. I honestly do not understand what you are trying to accomplish here today.
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This is a product. That we pay for.
If a grocer’s lettuce has ground glass in it, it really doesn’t matter to me as a consumer whether it was malicious or incompetent. Do you spend a lot of time asking yourself which it is? Or do you just eat the lettuce?
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What about the culture in certain countries that promotes this shady behaviour and cheating in online games? We all know where these bots are originating from.
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They just need to start iP banning the human scum known as a cheater.
I am so sick of returning cheaters. Like I want my game to be fun and fair.
And after last night, MY GOD, did it feel like a breath of fresh air, no suspicious as hell shots were taking, no xray specs were being used, and pretty much every game I had 5 or more kills a match, usually first on my team, as it usually is, except when they drop the events and the cheaters come out of their hidey holes.
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What is the punishment for tk’ing a nuke again? I’m just curious since for some odd reason 1 of 5 of my nukes, my blueberries try to tk me. M163 did it last night lol. He hit my wing tip and poof gone. Lmao
The culture which is most individualistic, values “personal freedom” above the well-being of others, and turns a blind eye to violence and drug use? We all know where these bots are originating from.
That would just cause bot farms to put a timer on there bots. There are some OP bot farms out there that are really good at hiding what they do. Mostly run by people who formally worked in the anti bot / hack world.