Bring back the GM presence, please.

Yes I know budgets are tight at SOE. Yes I know they had a lot of layoffs.

Yes, I know there's a culture of denial on this forum and in game that'd be the envy of most city police departments when reporting on their own misbehavior.

Thing is: The cheats exist. They are easy to find, easy to locate, and there is no assurance they are not used in signifigant numbers except "they aren't lol" or "mad cuz bad" or even "you can't prove it" with thought-terminating dismissiveness.

The GMs did improve the game. They were a welcome sight to honest players. And since anecdotal evidence is all we got for the "cheating doesn't happen" side of opinion, I'll provide my own anecdote: The game would noticably and immediately get less suspect in weird antics and behavior, of "how did that guy headshot my entire squad with that LMG at 100 meters" and "that guy is in the floor again" moments, right after "GM(name) here! Report cheaters to me!" showed up.

It was deterrence. To at least some extent, it worked. And simply assuming cheating doesn't happen after they left is simply solipsism at its worst.

While i have no doubt there are less in game GMs, I also have no doubt they are still there. Poblem with them announcing their presence is two-fold.

1) They get inundated with exactly what you're saying..."These things looks suspect." But many players get killed by the same guy a couple times and scream HAX. To many false positives being reported by players.

2) If they announced their presence, those actually doing blatant cheating would stop cheating, and those using subtle cheats would turn em down a bit further, or know not to be as obvious w/ them.

It is an unfortunate but necessary side of the job to seperate baseless accusations with legitimate suspicion.

Their announced precence DOES help in the immediate present because I have witnesses, as have many I have played with, that the level of "suspicious" behavior drops when the GMs show up. At worst it's making the script kiddies tune down their toys for a while, and that's still an improvement.

I just find the idea of dropping GM presence and service altogether and assuming cheating won't happen because Forumsiders say it doesn't laughable.

The apparent absence of GMs is proportionate to the apparent presence of cheats and suspicious events in the game.

Saying it doesn't happen, ESPECIALLY without GMs around, sounds like wishful thinking.

GMs are there, they are just flooded by false reports from angry xXpr0MLG360n0sc0p3101u6adXx reporting everyone who breaks their killstreak by C4-ing their HE Prowler (this is partially a joke).

But more GM presence on Live servers is alweays welcome. And lack of GM broadcasts promising aimbotters just punishment is sometimes a bit disheartening.

You say this, then proceed to ask them to allocate more resources to something they've clearly deemed non-beneficial.

When a dude headshots me I don't assume he was hacking, true.

I take it you learned this during your long tenure at SOE.

Report and move on. In 8 months of playing this game I've had 2 instances where I ran into a blatant hacker. Everything else, no matter how suspicious, wasn't enough to significantly impact my experience.

It clearly didn't work enough to justify those man-hours. And assuming cheating is rampant based on your own deaths is by definition anecdotal.

I am well aware of false accusations of cheating.

Thing is, sometimes its pretty glaringly clear, like an invulnerable Harasser ploughing into an entire convoy of tanks and Sunderers, killing the Sunderer and sort of nudging its way past, being fired into over and over with no damage blinks from anyone shooting it, and then rolling off the other way through the formation.

That needs a swift and immediate presence to stop.

"I got mine" in a few more words.

Well, some of us have seem some pretty surreal stuff, and a lot of it directly and deliberately in the favor of a player, often a player with a weird name and a low BR that is obviously making new accounts to skip what little enforcement there is, day by day.

But to some people their own experience and opinion is more valid, because it is theirs. Hard to argue with that, but not exactly in a way flattering to you.

Low battle rank players are usually dealt with quickly, it's the high level players that have been getting away with it from day one that ruin the game.

So you're here to add the same old nonsensical nonargument.

"My personal experience differs from yours. I don't like your personal experience so I hold mine in higher regard. Because it involves doing nothing on SOE's part, I WIN!"

I disagree.

I see a lot more IIiiiIilillililililililliI type names that are BR5 or so, or O0o0o0o0oOo0oooo type names that are BR10 or so, running around and doing extraordinary things that all but jaded Forumsiders might call suspicious.

Granted, I think a few BR100s who have been using "assistance" would really deserve the karmic kick in the pants from long-overdue bans.

No amount of GM presence would remove the infinite capacity to make new free accounts and resume cheating.

It might slow it down, but that's it.

Free to play had that particular dark side to it. Of course some Forumsiders will totally say cheating doesn't happen because they say it doesn't and that's final.

Come on guys, GMs are not monitoring the game properly, saying they are still in-game is laughable since a cheater that gets thousand reports keep being online for over 8 hours.
If a GM can't find a second of time to ban a dude with thousands reports on hes name, while hes getting 2000score/min and blasting away everything in hes path.
How hard can it be to find a blatant cheater like that...pretty hard for SOE apparently.

Conclusion, theres maybe one GM for all the servers combined and nobody is monitoring the game on EU servers since this one GM is napping during these times.

1) I don't percieve either of those as being a problem. They are there to take requests. They never respond anyway so they could be ignoring them for all I know or frankly care.

2) Um... good! That's the whole point! Even the nerds who just 'turn them down'; fine by me... it's LESS cheating. I have MORE of a chance. If they actually log off and/or just turn them off complete; great! Easy XP because those degenerates aren't even a challenge without their crutches. Fine with me.

Untrue. When GMs announced their presence, I have sent /tells to them and I have received replies. I didn't make a habit of this. In fact, one time it was just to say "thanks for being around" and I got back a "all a part of the service".

Well the second part I can agree with. Turning that scripting crap down is good enough when I can noticably see fights going less stupid after a GM announces himself.

I wouldn't care if they even just made this some bot / script that actually did NOTHING except say there was a GM online. As long as they didn't tell anyone and people REALLY thought there were more GMs on it would have positive effects. No matter how limited it would be totally worth it.

Make it a bot so people can still send a /tell to them without the error of "couldn't find that name". They can just send all the /tells to the bit bucket for all I care. Placebo effect would be well worth it IMHO even if it was just a fractional positive difference.

If the "bot" was found out it'd be roughly as useful as a real life scarecrow is to crows.

But in the short term it might help.

Half the time it's just an automated message, lol. Made you feel secure, though, didn't it?

Untrue for YOU. I've never got a response. I don't really care if they respond though but I'm just saying my expeirence is different.

So we agree your 'problems' listed aren't actually problems; awesome

Lets get this fired back up then!