Overdriven
Dumpster Fire of The South
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2004
- Messages
- 12,745
Wow, look at all the peon cheaters. Awwwwwwwwwww!
So i got terminated on Camlann...
- Thread starter Hubix
- Start date
Davejohnson
Banned
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2007
- Messages
- 175
damnit! i always miss the bugs 
except this one time when i was walking around in connacht, and i found a copper lying on the ground!!
except this one time when i was walking around in connacht, and i found a copper lying on the ground!!
Requiel; you don't actually say how you caught out the players abusing the trial accounts and CMs. If I create a trial account there is no way you can link it to any other accounts I own. You have to rely on ingame actions. Even if you had perfect logs there is no way you can have prove that trial account is the same as the CM owner. Now I admit that if somebody puts 5 items on their CM for 50plat each and they all get purchased within 5 minutes I would think it suspicious enough to ban. How did you decide who was cheating?
Bug abuse has always existed, it does however seem to be getting alot more sophisticated. If I wanted to abuse a bug the first thing I would do is find some greedy/guilble person to frame in the same way those "Nigerian banker" spam emails work.
- English -
Resident Freddy
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2004
- Messages
- 5,263
so glad i left daoc ageees ago. Feel sorry for you innocent guys but i guess goa just shot themselves in the foot
No, because if I did then it would be harder to catch people chgeating in the future as they'd know how to avoid being caught - or at least how to avoid being caught the same way again.
Not true. We log lots of things. Ingame actions and chat are just some of the things that are monitored.
I can prove it well enough that there's no doubt in my mind that the people banned were fully aware of what they were doing. I don't have to convince a jury, I just need to be able to show compelling evidence to my boss if he asks. I'm confident I can do that for every single account that was banned.
Golena
Fledgling Freddie
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2004
- Messages
- 3,292
Cadelin said:
But how on Camlann, a PvP server would you decide who you wanted to frame?
Oh wait... nevermind.
I'm guessing without giving away all the magic secrets that GOA can see (and log) the IP addresses people are connecting to the server from. I'd also guess that most people that created a trial account were stupid enough to log both accounts on from the same PC in a fairly short space of time. Wouldn't take long to examine exactly which CM stuff was purchased from using the trial account and link it all together nicely..
This being GOA however they probably just handed around random bans to everyone with a character name beginning with C. The faster people piss off after all the sooner they can turn off the power and save all that money on the electricity bill!
None of that changes the fact that at least 80% of the people proclaiming their innocence in this thread are guilty of course, none more so than that shifty beeks bloke!
Understandable but it doesn't help solve any concerns people have here.
I wasn't clear here, I meant it is possible to create a trial account using a different comp/different IP and different credit card details so that you have no way of knowing that they are linked. Unless you have the same access to peoples bank details as the FBI nowadays....
You may not have a jury to convince but your boss has set out guidelines for you to follow. It probably says somewhere in the CoC/EULA what they are but you could always enlighten us here.
Hawkwind
FH is my second home
- Joined
- Jul 5, 2004
- Messages
- 7,541
So you have multiple Computers and different ISP/Internet accounts for each? If not then its a simple job to trace each comp to the one ISP address.
The LSOA bug was well known and anyone using it is an idiot to think they would get away with it. Amazing that people get caught cheating, then bleat they did nothing wrong. Someone purchased my 90p cloak and I got banned, lol. You cheated and got caught. Nice job GOA on catching them.
scorge
Fledgling Freddie
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2004
- Messages
- 2,721
Overdriven
Dumpster Fire of The South
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2004
- Messages
- 12,745
I would check the MAC address also..
Wouldn't make a difference if they were connecting from different computers... Single MAC address/NIC. IP/Communication between accounts etc is the best way.
Killswitch
FH is my second home
- Joined
- Jan 29, 2004
- Messages
- 1,584
Right, a trial account (or multiple ones) gets created and used to generate gold via an exploit. The best way to avoid easy detection would be to do the exploiting from a netcafe and then transfer the cash to a friend logged on to their normal IP address/ISP at home. Even better still would be to use items on a CM, although setting silly prices and selling items would be quite incriminating. You could also have multiple houses across multiple accounts and spread the cash that way. No matter how you slice it, these activities are pretty easy to spot.
Now, what I'D do if I knew there was an exploit (and I didn't mind getting banned, because this is not much harder to detect and prove) would be to level a trial toon to 50 on a different language sever (Avalon for example) to work the exploit and then setup a cross-server trade to my home server with some unsuspecting chump (200p on Avalon for 100p on Dyvet...should be easy to arrange out of game). I can do all the levelling to 50 and bug exploiting from a net cafe or a different IP address or whatever (VPN tunnel through work anyone?), trade the cash to a patsy on Avalon and get my guilt-free cash on Dyvet.
This would also be good because it would exploit any lack of communication between different language server GMs (if there happens to be any, I have no idea)
Now, if the player I do the trade with has his toons on the same account on both servers, that would be a bit suspicious if they recieved 200p from a trial account on Avalon and then traded 100p to a cheating scumbag on Dyvet, but if they're on different accounts, you might get away with it. Much more likely to get the innocent guy doing the trade banned.
Easier to farm the cash in DF, especially if you like to keep your accounts. I agree with anything GOA want to do to get cheats off the servers.
Now, what I'D do if I knew there was an exploit (and I didn't mind getting banned, because this is not much harder to detect and prove) would be to level a trial toon to 50 on a different language sever (Avalon for example) to work the exploit and then setup a cross-server trade to my home server with some unsuspecting chump (200p on Avalon for 100p on Dyvet...should be easy to arrange out of game). I can do all the levelling to 50 and bug exploiting from a net cafe or a different IP address or whatever (VPN tunnel through work anyone?
), trade the cash to a patsy on Avalon and get my guilt-free cash on Dyvet.This would also be good because it would exploit any lack of communication between different language server GMs (if there happens to be any, I have no idea)
Now, if the player I do the trade with has his toons on the same account on both servers, that would be a bit suspicious if they recieved 200p from a trial account on Avalon and then traded 100p to a cheating scumbag on Dyvet, but if they're on different accounts, you might get away with it. Much more likely to get the innocent guy doing the trade banned.
Easier to farm the cash in DF, especially if you like to keep your accounts. I agree with anything GOA want to do to get cheats off the servers.
Moaning Myrtle
Fledgling Freddie
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2006
- Messages
- 688
What LSOA bug? Hoe exactly did that work? I never find out about these things until well after they've been stopped
Pirkel
Fledgling Freddie
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2005
- Messages
- 1,888
Someone got banned for being a cheating fuckwit :kissit:
Malcolm
Can't get enough of FH
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2003
- Messages
- 598
What LSOA bug? Hoe exactly did that work? I never find out about these things until well after they've been stopped
https://forums.freddyshouse.com/showthread.php?t=185287
Everz
FH is my second home
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2004
- Messages
- 13,685
my acc has been inactive for some time, only reopened this month to get a mauler 30 on dyvet before leaving again.
farily easy bug to find/exploit first of all most quests are coded so that when u click on a reward u cannot get anymore, with the SI albion quest you could click mattock 2 hand weapon for pala/Armsman as many times as you like. tested it and you could push a char from level 5 - 50 in 20 mins just spaming the key, worked out on a good PC without laggs 200p in 1 hour easy mode when ur not even at your pc. this bug was avalible as far as i can remember about a year ago now but only recently its came out to public every server alb on daoc could do this bug until it was fixed 1 month ago, prior the server crash on thusday the bug reset and 1 person saw anther person ect.. and it ended up in 30 people spaming the NPC 24/7 with
/macro XxX /whisper Mattock
/macro XxX /whisper Mattock
Esselinithia
Fledgling Freddie
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2003
- Messages
- 1,110
Requiel: You don't need to present proof in a court to ban anyone, you have the right to do so, just to protect the game, even if your detection criteria would catch a few innocents.
But we both know that even when we speak about courts with jury and judge, it isn't so rare to see someone as "criminal" and later see them prove innocent.
Somehow, I doubt that you have system to determine who is guilty and who is innocent. Even more so, if you determine it by a few criteria and you can't share the details with anyone. And even more so if you don't share any pieces of the proof with accused, maybe they can explain your evidence in a way that would show they are innocent, but you simply haven't thought that way, and your reasoning is never meets any neutral party or any counter reasoning.
Another alarming factor is the fact: you are 100% sure. If you are 100% sure, you wouldn't listen to the arguments of people who might be innocent, so you wouldn't find the flaws in your reasoning, and you won't refine your methods of finding cheaters.
Yet another factor: If you relly on limited amount of evidence, and must keep it secret, and some of the individual "triggers" you use to see who is guilty are based on otherwise OK actions, but you think it is good proof, since people might be unaware of this detection... It means: If cheaters are intelligent and found out these criteria they can avoid bans, and they can frame others.
If I would cheat, I wouldn't buy from my own CM, but would buy from other CMs, only overpriced items, and would try to get my money back, by contacting the owner, and claiming it was accidental purchase. If I do the purchase from a netcafe, using trial account, etc. or from my the same ISP as a victim (if you know it) it is easy to frame others.
So if your ways of proving built heavily on secrecy you can't tell if people guessed this detection filter. But lets see some more thing: You say you log more out of game data, but any information you log about person you can identify must be mentioned in privacy policy, and any unauthorized data gathering, etc. would make your software (including out of game and web based components) spyware.
So somehow I have my doubt. But it isn't the end of story either. If you use your so called evidence to ban people: It is your responsibility to protect the game, and noone can expect better investigations from you than from the police, so quite a few false positives are accepted, and they accepted this possibility when they signed up for the game. You can say this and be ok with it.
The moment you accuse them publicly, you hurt their reputation both in and out of game, which is something that can result in an issue, where you have to present your proof in a court... Why? Because their rights for their earned good reputation is granted by law, and you aren't above the law.
Yet, the story doesn't end here. I never seen GOA admiting when it done something wrong, and noone can say, they never done anything wrong. Not even after Prydwen crash, you weren't above flaming innocent people, it makes your reasoning even weaker.
You don't have to present your proof for a court unless someone sues you for the reputation damage, but you have to present how customer focused and fair you are now to the countless customers who left you and you want them and their money back. Somehow your explanation looks like a real bad job at it.
Doubt, loud disputes that can make people think, can make people think about 2 other cases:
Why, you had rollback for a few plats (when you ban cheaters, the excess value is removed from anyway) when you don't roll back for the people who lost everything in Prydwen crash, including ROG items vital for templates what you can't get back again, and make paying customers wait? That wasn't a hit on server integrity you are so eager to protect when you can show your mighty power to ban, rollback, but fail to protect when you have to help the customers? And when they pay you to play the game, why you call your minimal compensation a favor?
Not to mention the claims: It was a known problem, but you didn't check stuff, patch stuff, etc. when restarted a crashed server (same problem as with prydwen incident)
I don't know how many accounts are involved, but camlann and the english language cluster seems limited, and I know the value of plats, etc on these servers should be low (most people farmed their money, items, etc already) so you can't expect only a few people would cheat (most know. the tainted money wll vanish, unless they transfer it to another server). So you should have time to case by case investigation, with different proof, and with refining your investigation if only a few accounts are involved.
If there are more accounts involved, only a very very few will remain (which can hurt the server integrity in a different way), and even a single false positive is unnaceptable, so you should investigate complaints case by case, and not call your decision 100% sure, but be open to counter argument.
No, I am not involved in the case, for the single reason: When some people left your servers, I started playing another game, when some raid series stopped, I no longer had a reason to check back once a week, so a few months ago, I decided: if I don't play on your server, why would I pay for the accounts.
Ohh, I know quite a few people who left daoc EU, and play on the same places & games as I play now, and from what I hear from them: It will be hard to win back your customers this way.
But we both know that even when we speak about courts with jury and judge, it isn't so rare to see someone as "criminal" and later see them prove innocent.
Somehow, I doubt that you have system to determine who is guilty and who is innocent. Even more so, if you determine it by a few criteria and you can't share the details with anyone. And even more so if you don't share any pieces of the proof with accused, maybe they can explain your evidence in a way that would show they are innocent, but you simply haven't thought that way, and your reasoning is never meets any neutral party or any counter reasoning.
Another alarming factor is the fact: you are 100% sure. If you are 100% sure, you wouldn't listen to the arguments of people who might be innocent, so you wouldn't find the flaws in your reasoning, and you won't refine your methods of finding cheaters.
Yet another factor: If you relly on limited amount of evidence, and must keep it secret, and some of the individual "triggers" you use to see who is guilty are based on otherwise OK actions, but you think it is good proof, since people might be unaware of this detection... It means: If cheaters are intelligent and found out these criteria they can avoid bans, and they can frame others.
If I would cheat, I wouldn't buy from my own CM, but would buy from other CMs, only overpriced items, and would try to get my money back, by contacting the owner, and claiming it was accidental purchase. If I do the purchase from a netcafe, using trial account, etc. or from my the same ISP as a victim (if you know it) it is easy to frame others.
So if your ways of proving built heavily on secrecy you can't tell if people guessed this detection filter. But lets see some more thing: You say you log more out of game data, but any information you log about person you can identify must be mentioned in privacy policy, and any unauthorized data gathering, etc. would make your software (including out of game and web based components) spyware.
So somehow I have my doubt. But it isn't the end of story either. If you use your so called evidence to ban people: It is your responsibility to protect the game, and noone can expect better investigations from you than from the police, so quite a few false positives are accepted, and they accepted this possibility when they signed up for the game. You can say this and be ok with it.
The moment you accuse them publicly, you hurt their reputation both in and out of game, which is something that can result in an issue, where you have to present your proof in a court... Why? Because their rights for their earned good reputation is granted by law, and you aren't above the law.
Yet, the story doesn't end here. I never seen GOA admiting when it done something wrong, and noone can say, they never done anything wrong. Not even after Prydwen crash, you weren't above flaming innocent people, it makes your reasoning even weaker.
You don't have to present your proof for a court unless someone sues you for the reputation damage, but you have to present how customer focused and fair you are now to the countless customers who left you and you want them and their money back. Somehow your explanation looks like a real bad job at it.
Doubt, loud disputes that can make people think, can make people think about 2 other cases:
Why, you had rollback for a few plats (when you ban cheaters, the excess value is removed from anyway) when you don't roll back for the people who lost everything in Prydwen crash, including ROG items vital for templates what you can't get back again, and make paying customers wait? That wasn't a hit on server integrity you are so eager to protect when you can show your mighty power to ban, rollback, but fail to protect when you have to help the customers? And when they pay you to play the game, why you call your minimal compensation a favor?
Not to mention the claims: It was a known problem, but you didn't check stuff, patch stuff, etc. when restarted a crashed server (same problem as with prydwen incident)
I don't know how many accounts are involved, but camlann and the english language cluster seems limited, and I know the value of plats, etc on these servers should be low (most people farmed their money, items, etc already) so you can't expect only a few people would cheat (most know. the tainted money wll vanish, unless they transfer it to another server). So you should have time to case by case investigation, with different proof, and with refining your investigation if only a few accounts are involved.
If there are more accounts involved, only a very very few will remain (which can hurt the server integrity in a different way), and even a single false positive is unnaceptable, so you should investigate complaints case by case, and not call your decision 100% sure, but be open to counter argument.
No, I am not involved in the case, for the single reason: When some people left your servers, I started playing another game, when some raid series stopped, I no longer had a reason to check back once a week, so a few months ago, I decided: if I don't play on your server, why would I pay for the accounts.
Ohh, I know quite a few people who left daoc EU, and play on the same places & games as I play now, and from what I hear from them: It will be hard to win back your customers this way.
Darzil
Fledgling Freddie
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2004
- Messages
- 2,651
That'll be the crash where they tried to rollback, and the backups (using Mythic's software) were corrupt, so they couldn't. Where Mythic recommended wiping the server and starting again, but GOA put in the ridiculous man hours to fix it by hand ?
I guess their backups are better now.
Darzil
Esselinithia
Fledgling Freddie
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2003
- Messages
- 1,110
Darzil: I think a corrupted backup, when they used the same backup system bfore, and tested it, and works, is strange. It shows, that they simple backed up a bugous database and doesn't have an old enough version, if that is a case, it is their own fault. But I haven't heard your "wipe the whole thing" solution before.
Esselinithia:
Me and my team double checked each account before taking action. I am as certain as I can be that the people who got banned deserved it. Our policy is always to give the player the benefit of the doubt - particularly when facing account terminations. If there is any doubt at all then we let that person go. As much as I don't like to see cheating go unpunished, I would rather see a cheating player escape the banstick than punish someone who was innocent.
You suggest that we never admit fault and I'd say that's because our criteria and checking procedures are very thorough. We have occasionally made mistakes in the past and when the person involved has disputed their ban and demonstrated that we were wrong we have revoked their ban and apologised to them. That has happened perhaps 2 or 3 times in the 3 years or so that I've been doing this job. We do reinvestigate if there is a dispute and in almost every single case we have been able to satisfy ourselves that the punishment was justified.
I'm not going to comment on the ways in which we investigate more complex cheating involving multiple accounts however we don't scan your computer, we don't install spyware and we don't breach any of your rights under various European privacy and data-protection laws.
The rollback on Camlann wasn't just to take the excess gold out of the system. If that was the case then we could have simply terminated the accounts and left it at that. The amount of additional gold left in the system after those accounts were gone would have been relatively low and we wouldn't have needed to upset all the honest players on the server. The problem was that the players who abused the bug didn't stop at just amassing piles of plats, they also went around buying up everything on the MEs. As a result the player market was destroyed. Amongst the reports we received at Rightnow regarding the bug use, there were actually a good few requesting a rollback because there were no items on the MEs anymore and the few that were left were at silly prices. It's not really possible for us to fix that without rolling back the server and so we had to take the decision for the sake of the server. A rollback is always a last resort and if there had been another option we would have taken it. Just to answer one of the related points you brought up, we didn't rollback Prydwen after the big database problem because that option wasn't open to us for various reasons. I wish it had been because it would have saved me thousands of hours of work and would have been a much better solution at the time.
Me and my team double checked each account before taking action. I am as certain as I can be that the people who got banned deserved it. Our policy is always to give the player the benefit of the doubt - particularly when facing account terminations. If there is any doubt at all then we let that person go. As much as I don't like to see cheating go unpunished, I would rather see a cheating player escape the banstick than punish someone who was innocent.
You suggest that we never admit fault and I'd say that's because our criteria and checking procedures are very thorough. We have occasionally made mistakes in the past and when the person involved has disputed their ban and demonstrated that we were wrong we have revoked their ban and apologised to them. That has happened perhaps 2 or 3 times in the 3 years or so that I've been doing this job. We do reinvestigate if there is a dispute and in almost every single case we have been able to satisfy ourselves that the punishment was justified.
I'm not going to comment on the ways in which we investigate more complex cheating involving multiple accounts however we don't scan your computer, we don't install spyware and we don't breach any of your rights under various European privacy and data-protection laws.
The rollback on Camlann wasn't just to take the excess gold out of the system. If that was the case then we could have simply terminated the accounts and left it at that. The amount of additional gold left in the system after those accounts were gone would have been relatively low and we wouldn't have needed to upset all the honest players on the server. The problem was that the players who abused the bug didn't stop at just amassing piles of plats, they also went around buying up everything on the MEs. As a result the player market was destroyed. Amongst the reports we received at Rightnow regarding the bug use, there were actually a good few requesting a rollback because there were no items on the MEs anymore and the few that were left were at silly prices. It's not really possible for us to fix that without rolling back the server and so we had to take the decision for the sake of the server. A rollback is always a last resort and if there had been another option we would have taken it. Just to answer one of the related points you brought up, we didn't rollback Prydwen after the big database problem because that option wasn't open to us for various reasons. I wish it had been because it would have saved me thousands of hours of work and would have been a much better solution at the time.
Everz
FH is my second home
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2004
- Messages
- 13,685
nono that could never happen
Chronictank
FH is my second home
- Joined
- Jan 21, 2004
- Messages
- 10,133
i think they are complaining they didnt cheat but were given plats because of a sale/transfer etc etc but were given a permanent ban
Thorwyn
FH is my second home
- Joined
- Dec 22, 2003
- Messages
- 4,752
hm... it´s a delicate situation.
If innocent people have been banned, it´s indeed something to be pissed off about. On the other hand, we´ve seen a couple of threads, saying "I didn´t do this and I didn´t do that" where it turned out that they are not that innocent after all.
It´s a matter of whom you trust. Personally, I don´t think GoA would ban people if there´s the slightest chance that they´re not guilty of something.
If innocent people have been banned, it´s indeed something to be pissed off about. On the other hand, we´ve seen a couple of threads, saying "I didn´t do this and I didn´t do that" where it turned out that they are not that innocent after all.
It´s a matter of whom you trust. Personally, I don´t think GoA would ban people if there´s the slightest chance that they´re not guilty of something.
Pirkel
Fledgling Freddie
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2005
- Messages
- 1,888
Yes because Camlann wasn't dead before this nope.