Note from the Producer on Botting & Cheating

Hello,

Unfortunately, it’s been a little quiet from my end, as it’s been a busy couple of weeks.

One of the things we’ve been dealing with during that time is the series of bannings that have occurred this week.

We just banned just over 800 players (involving 6000+ accounts) for using different bots, which is in clear violation of the posted terms and conditions.

It’s unfortunate that people choose to cheat, but we realize that it’s always going to be something we have to monitor and combat.

Despite some claims to the contrary, we are always actively monitoring, researching, and banning cheaters of a variety of types, using a range of different tools and methodologies. But naturally, we’re never going to catch all of the cheaters, all at once, and end the problem in perpetuity.

As you’ve seen, we continue to regularly ban players for botting. This has resulted in over 20,000 unique accounts (linked to a much greater number of accounts across all instances) being banned this year.

This doesn’t mean, however, that each set of bannings inkludes all of the accounts that are under investigation.

Certain “ban waves” include action that is the culmination of weeks, and even months, of monitoring and work. Just because an account wasn’t banned in a certain set of actions, doesn’t mean it (and the methodology being used to cheat) isn’t being reviewed.

As new forms of cheating are developed, modified, or re-enabled by their creators and used by cheaters, we expand our research, tracking, and verification techniques.

People that feel our efforts on banning don't have an effect, likely don't read some of the forums we read.

Players who feel there’s benefit to cheating should realize, at some point it’s going to cause them to lose that account.


To dispel another set of rumors:
These bannings are handled in an objective and independent manner. We don’t avoid banning people based on who they know, how much they’ve paid, their level, time investment, Rank, or any other criteria. You'll likely notice that today.

Once an account is verified as part of our banning process, we flag it, ban it, and leave it banned. There’s no playing favorites. And when we find someone has circumvented this process, we deal with it swiftly and directly.

It's possible some cheater you've seen has received a temporary suspension in the past, got missed, or otherwise found their way back to the game - but trust me when I say, when it's us (the team) banning them - that account is staying banned.


For all of our awesome, high-quality, non-cheating players out there:
We’re actively working to improve the quality and fairness of the game. Just because we don’t directly respond to all of your reports, concerns, or feedback, doesn’t mean we’re not listening and working diligently to address these problems. We'll be apply more effort than ever to make this as fair a game as possible.

Thank you for reading.

More information on our status and plans for 2016 to come shortly!


Thanks,

RickDekard