Wrongly banned for hacking/exploiting. SOE, you need a policy rethink.

What I have found on other games, those that get banned and then take it up with QQ on the forums were actually deserving of the ban/suspension when the truth be told. So my guess is that those getting banned did something wrong. Maybe you were flipping planes on purpose, found to be Tking on purpose. Maybe you were just trying out that hack to see what it really does.

Oddly I have had no issue getting questions answered with other support tickets in a very timely fashion. If your reply was full of nerd rage it was probably just ignored on purpose.

The irony is, I would have agreed with you 100% 'till it happened to me. I know the VAC / PB forums are full of the stupidest kind of cheaters who try and argue to get a ban revoked. But think for a second how much it would suck if, like me, you were playing normally then just had a message pop up saying you'd been banned.

Wasn't flipping planes. Never did a single TK on purpose, not even revenge TK'ing (which is childish). I'm not going to say I never accidentally ran someone over or shot through them to hit the enemy, but I think I got TK'ed as many times as I TK'ed, and certainly not more often than in my many years of PS1.

I wasn't 'trying out a hack'. No 3rd party software has touched this PC. Not downloaded, installed, or even looked at a website for, anything that could interfere with the game, with the singular exception of the Steam overlay. Nobody else has access to this PC or my account. I played that char from creation till the time of the ban so at no point was my account hijacked. There is no smoking gun here.

Played SOE games for a decade on the banned account. 3 years of PS2 and 5-6 of EQ1 and EQ2. Never had a problem once until now. Never been banned in any other online game because I've never hacked, cheated, exploited, or attempted to.

Even then, the $ loss is next to nothing, and I could easily rebuy my kit on my new account and start over. But it's the principle of being banned whilst playing legitimately that bothers me, and why I'm happy to take this to the forums as well as to make any info I get public. It's a difficult situation to have to decide whether to fork out the cash again given the fact I've been banned for no reason, or just stick to F2P. I've done a lot of online gaming with SOE over the years and I don't begrudge them the money as their games provide great value per hour of entertainment I get, but unless it's made clear how/why this happened, I've no idea if it will just happen again.

Maybe its because you played 154 hours in the last two weeks. That's 11+ hours a day every day.

Someone was banned from WoW by Blizzard because he was playing WoW under Linux WINE (with some Wine tweaks), IIRC WoW runs an internal anti-cheat service that probably doesn't like WINE. Some games behave strangely under WINE, SWTOR is horribly inconsistent under WINE but SWG and City of Heroes runs great under it (minus the weird chat issue). I haven't tried PS2 yet.

At least Valve/Steam is supporting Linux, several developers in the past supported Linux by releasing Linux native clients (Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake series for example), but I'm excited for Valve releases int he future.

If you're going to quote me, make sure you include the entire context or it can easily jade my intention and point.

We have several methods for dealing with cheaters, some systematic, some human oriented, and some a combo of both. It's not one size fits all in these kinds of situations.

Only CS will know why he was actually banned (or suspended), and if it was done in error or a false positive or our mistake they will rectify it.

Although it's a holiday, staff is lighter than normal but people are working.

Yikes, someone needs employment

While some of your suggestions aren't bad, I have to state outright that no, stopping cheating is not a simple task, even if you devote considerable resources to it. This has many reasons, some of which boil down to the complicated question of how much users are going to let you do to their system in order to let you detect whether they are legitimate or not. Anti-cheating systems, for the most part, are a bit like an Anti-Virus-System, coupled with some DRM-like features. That means, that they'll generally need very high (that is: low) level access to the system to achieve their goals effectively.
This can work really well, but it can also go horribly wrong -- and quite a few people will simply not want to compromise their entire computer and grant some random anti-cheat software (which isn't what we're speaking of here, but it's still black boxish to the user) driver level privileges -- let alone kernel level privileges.

Still, let's assume you grant the anti-cheat software those privileges, there's a lot going on on the average computer and it's really hard to say whether what's currently scanning through the memory is a perfectly benign anti-virus software which is utilizing some active shield technology or a program that reads the memory for the purpose of displaying data to the user that he should not have. Sure, you tell people to not use active resident AV systems while gaming, but good luck with compliance -- or rather: pray you have bad luck or you'll have millions of users forget to reactivate it after gaming and exposing their systems.

Anyway, the reason you'll need kernel level privileges, in the end, is that if you really want to stop cheaters, that's where you'll have to go. Say you develop some foolproof way to identify higher level cheating systems (as is indeed possible for most any simple DirectX-based attack vector), then people will just go and write driver level hacks -- you develop something to detect those and they'll just hook directly into the graphics cards rendering pipeline and analyze the data from there on the fly. It has been done.

You can also go the route of only sending the client the information it absolutely needs, which does eliminate some forms of cheating (as you correctly state), however, given the huge dimensions of PlanetSide, the additional capacity required to do on-server plausibility checking and geometry for every single projectile of every single player is not trivial, not to say impossible.

What you could do is emulate something like OnLive, that is, send the client what amounts to an image stream and process input only. The problem is that even there, you don't beat aimbots. The first aimbots were purely pixel-based and that's what they'd again be if that was where gaming was heading.

All this is not meant to say that cheating isn't something that needs attention, but trivializing the task really isn't helpful as it leads to incorrect perceptions and hopes. The cries about cheaters have always been pretty huge for every single MMO, Online FPS etc. that has been released over the last ten years and while there certainly is some cheating and it is highly annoying, it's not all due to the fact that developers sit on their hands, it is also because combatting cheating is really, really hard, just like it's really, really, hard to combat viruses which are, in many ways, similar, even though there usually isn't intentional user collusion.

Oh, and,
Merry Christmas!

Hmm, well, I have been playing a lot over the last few weeks, but I do (allegedly) have a job - one I don't need to be in the office for though and even spent 3 of those days at a conference in Rome

I think if that's Steam it's probably that I'd drop to the login screen rather than fully exiting the game sometimes on an evening. You don't get inactivity kicked if you're at the character select screen, but Steam would still be recording that as logged in time. Come to think of it I may have left my desktop on before flying out, so that would be 64 free hours there.

Anyway, you can criticize my terrible carbon footprint, but surely playing a lot is a good thing, right?

I just talked to phone CS and they said that a 3-day suspension is actually a 4-day suspension because they first day "doesn't count".

They also told me that they will not be responding to my appeal for a while because
1. I was banned right before the weekend (it would seem the police CSRs don't listen to appeals on weekends)
2. Holidays

If you are going to suspend people for 4 days and not listen to their appeal, then don't ban.

ROME!! You lucky Panda, always wanted to go there

LOL I have at least 50 total hours since release.

I will first say I read the first post but not the entire thread.

Next... I am fairly certain that Smed once commented that if they banned players for the reason implied in the OP... over half the player base would have been banned.

Those of us on the forums have no clue why you were banned.. beyond what you said because SOE won't comment on such matters (beyond the exception made for the one guy who was streaming his cheats early on).

For all we know.. you were exploiting...

So its kind of pointless to start a thread like this. There are a multitude of ways to get feedback to SOE and SOE is the only Party that can do anything about this. As a long time EQ2 player I do know that there have been people banned that did nothing wrong. However, they followed the proper channels of submitting a ticket.. the incident was reviewed and their accounts were reinstated. This mostly happened after a duping situation and likely someone had purchased items off their broker with duped coin. So they had no ability to know that they had illegally obtained currency.

So that's your best path and you said you had done that (submitted a ticket).. so you will just have to wait and see. If you did nothing wrong you should get your account back... and on the other hand if you did.. you won't.

*edit to add* By the way mistakes do happen. I once recieved an email from Mythic Entertainment (before they were purchased by EA) saying my account was getting a 3 day suspension for exploiting pathing. I figured it was a fishing email as I wasn't ever pve'ing at that time just RvR and you can't pathing exploit a human. So I logged in and a CSR instantly sent me a message saying I was getting a 3 day suspension and then I did a *boggle* and said I don't have a character by that name and I've never played on the server indicated...

about 5 minutes later he sends back "you are not getting an official ban.. it was a clerical error." So yes stuff happens... they apparantly misspelled the account name (was before master accounts etc).

Is it possible for the server to just autokick everyone it detects as moving too fast on foot? That could help, assuming it's not going to do a lot of false positives.

Rest assured that CS investigates every ban thoroughly. No one will be banned simply due to an outfit, platoon or squad spamming /report; in every player report we receive both the reporter(s) and reportee are investigated to make sure that sort of thing does not happen.

If you've submitted a ticket to our Support department, we will look at it and will be in touch with you as soon as possible. If you haven't submitted an appeal yet, please do so at http://help.station.sony.com/app/ask. As Veratu stated staff is lighter around the holidays so it may take slightly longer than usual, but if an error was made we'll make it right.

Dude, they are leniant as can be with the ban policy, dont ask me how i know, i just do.

If they banned you, you were hacking in such an obvious manner that everyone at that SoE round table nodded.

It burns getting banned doesn't it? Especially if you payed 20 bucks a month for the hack.

There is data used far beyond our comprehension. One for instance, is reaction to shooting time, anything below .3 secs is considered "inhuman"

I have gone on killstreaks of over 100, have i been banned? No, becouse i dont hack, simple as that, you sir, are lying

This is their response to my ban:

That's a funny thing to say to someone who has never, nor will ever, use a hack.

I need to talk to someone at SOE now who can give me a real response. Not the "guilty because we said so and there's nothing you can ever do about it".

Since none of these methods are in any way effective against workarounds and spoofing, I severely doubt that SOE are using any of them. These would cause more issues for legitimate customers hit by proxy, rather than repeat offenders.

Respectfully, saying 'don't ask how I know' doesn't make anyone look credible. However, I have to take issue with the quoted part of your post.

First, human reaction time to *unexpected* events is in the region of 0.15 to 0.3 seconds, which is already below the threshold you quoted as inhuman. You often see 'pro' fps gamers guzzling caffeine drinks - as unhealthy as it is, it does boost reaction times slightly.

However, for 'expected' (or anticipated) events it can be even lower - if I'm coming around a corner with the expectation that there's an enemy there (for example, because I can see a body at the corner), my finger will already be on the trigger. I may even begin firing before I've cleared the corner out of anticipation. In this example, my reaction time would appear to be zero (or negative), because I'm not reacting, but am anticipating.

Game logging can't tell you who's reacting and who's anticipating, so any metric based on reaction time is effectively useless unless you have some way of weeding out anticipation; the only way I could see someone doing this is if they only counted reactions to being shot in the back.



Full disclosure: I'm currently using the MCG so have to anticipate as much as possible - if I waited until I could see the enemy before pressing the trigger I'd be dead before the gun spun up. That said, the concept I'm talking about should be familiar to any experienced FPS player - even Quake players would regularly start firing the nailgun across corners if they thought they heard someone nearby.

Caught red handed, eh? As funny as this thread has become, it really should be locked. Forums are no place to contest account bans.

You got a real response. If you disagree with what was said, then submit another ticket. Otherwise, deal with it.

Hey OP, please do post what support tells you, if you do not, then we will assume you cheated and got banned deservedly. The reason I say this, is because back in beta number of player posted that they got banned claiming to be as clear as water...and opened support tickets.....funny thing was they never posted back as to what happened next, so obviously cheaters got caught and they had nothing to post.