There's some major player perception issues going on in regards to cheating and what is being done about it. And unfortunately we are in an open world server setup where it is impossible to avoid those who are perceived as cheating like you would in a small server based shooter (by leaving and going to another server, or having a server moderator deal with someone who is exhibiting bad behavior). Further, without seeing known cheaters banned there is always the constant fear by players that nothing was done. Worse yet some of these people are claiming to be back in minutes after being banned in public chat, something that in a small scale shooter would easily be handled by an administrator rebanning them until they got tired and gave up. I can propose some things, I can't really say any of these are a perfect solution but they would help ease people's minds. -Hire people to actively patrol and moderate the game You need to have people doing this, and you need to give them the tools to spectate players and ban them in real time. Yes we know you cant hire that many of them but you need someone at ground zero to be moderating. -If these people actually already exist in game we need to SEE them or see what they're doing sometimes. We need to know that they are there. APB had a huge problem with this. People eventually started realizing that they had never once seen a GM in game and started openly cheating/ throwing racial slurs around/ did their best to just be terrible. -Have guidelines for these moderatorsThis should probably go without saying, but they should know what exactly to look for when someone is cheating/misbehaving/griefing. -Have certain words flag players for moderators lets be honest here, dropping an N bomb in /yell is probably not going to be justifiable by the person who threw it out there. The FPS genre really has trouble with people just being flat out dicks and i'm sure thats not what you want from your game. -If someone gets banned for cheating/being a dick while playing, announce it in the region that they are in. This is intensely satisfying for players and would help with perception issues -Have a big list of players that you have banned publicly available, with reason for banning listed.again this just helps with player perception and should cut down on people naming and shaming. Though if you're banning a metric ton of people at once just say a wave of bans have been handed out. -Do not rely 100% on automated cheat detectionYou can have it, that's fine. Make sure it works and doesnt punish the legitimate players though. I don't mean accidental bans. I mean things like when punkbuster was kicking people off battlefield games for logging in through steam, or when punkbuster caused the entire server to have horrible lag spikes in apb (Causing everyone in a district to simultaneously lose control of their cars), or every time punkbuster boots waves of people because it did not update correctly. Or when gameguard invalidated people's copies of windows. These programs don't really prevent too much cheating, just the people who go for the most publicly available hacks. I know its common mmo policy to keep this sort of moderation under the table, but the MMOFPS appeals to a vastly different crowd. and the FPS plays by a different set of rules where cheating and the perception of cheating is much more harmful to the game and player experience. I also know that these arent counter-strike servers where two or three admins arent going to be able to handle every single thing as it comes up but you should be able to nail the most flagrant infringers quickly and publicly to at least give a sense that something is being done. -Better reporting tools for players any improvement you can think of, please go ahead and add. -Please put serifs on your i's too many people are avoiding moderation just by making their name a series of i's and L's tldr version: we need visible server admins doing real time moderation. I believe that is what will help alleviate some of people's concerns about cheating in this game. But hell this may just not be a feasible solution.
Moderators and ingame monitors cost money. the game is free to play, what they need to do is make more of the anti cheating clientside and automated.
I have argued for awhile that telling a customer that his report was valid would do a great deal in terms of reassurance. Almost every business takes the stance that they won't disclose the results of any such investigation and in the end, it only seems like nothing happens. This discourages your playerbase from actively reporting. Despite the constant rhetoric of "Report so we can deal with it," people won't report if it feels like they're wasting their time. For th erecord, I've seen GM Blackbeard in APB.
I'm aware that extra staff costs money and that this is probably something they should have set aside a budget for in the planning stages of the game but hopefully there is enough of a profit being made to work that into the game. clientside cheat detection has historically been either somewhat ineffective for all but the least cautious of cheaters or incredibly invasive (gameguard is practically a rootkit) in the past.
It hurts that you are the first person I have seen that has actually seen a mod in APB. Pre-reloaded got pretty horrendous towards the end. Dunno about post reloaded.
Ah, sorry. Yeah, during their retail run they had no administrative presence at all. This was because RTW couldn't actually afford to hire anyone to do that. Hell, being in the red at launch of an MMO that will take at least fourteen months to recoup development really means you can't launch in the first place. With Reloaded, I've seen Blackbeard and a few devs as well here and there.
It would be interesting if they had a monthly youtube video that pretty much shamed everyone who was banned previously within the month. They could call it Auraxis Blacklisted, and play some badass music to it while displaying the names and character of those banned from PS2. Truth be told, I'd enjoy it even more if they actually weapons locked the hackers first...and then the mods grouped together and just spam killed them excessively...transported them into a firing squads whenever they tried to run, transported them right in front of tanks, dropped them off the map, etc...and then banned them when they got frustrated and logged. Get a trollforce of mods who know how to put on a show...because only superior trolls can take on trolls.
