WG EU and FTR fail: false positive ban

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Hello everyone,

we now have an interesting turn of events. Three days ago, I posted an article about how WG EU busted a competition cheater. What happened: player PomFrit basically took a BT-2 to tier 10 via trollplatoons. He then shot a tier 10 tank several times, resulting in massive XP gain. As a result, WG EU (possibly CZ staff) banned him from the competition (plus a 7 day ingame ban) for cheating, because everyone was convinced it was rigged.

I am ashamed to say, I jumped the bandwagon too and gleefully mocked the cheater, who claimed his innocence. Well, I should have known better than to trust Wargaming EU.

PomFrit (at first I thought “conveniently”) didn’t have a recording, but he managed to get a replay from a player who was there. It’s not very good, but on it, you can see that he shoots tanks that are not cooperating with him and he simply got the huge amount of XP fair and square:

 

 

HD version can be downloaded here.

According to Czech WG staff, they are dealing with it.

I hereby apologize to PomFrit for an unjust accusation. I think that once he’s cleared officially, there might be a small gift coming his way from me via giftshop, as an apology.

Either way, it brings us to another matter: WG “system” for catching cheaters (if such a thing exists) produces false positives and noone bothers to doublecheck such stuff, WG simply bans away. It is possible there are more “victims” like this out there, so spread the word. If you got banned like this and are convinced you did nothing wrong (let’s face it, there probably were real cheating attempts happening), don’t be shy and contact support with your matter (of course, replay always helps).

138 thoughts on “WG EU and FTR fail: false positive ban”

      • “Treborn on September 27, 2013 at 6:11 pm said:
        It would be awesome if that guy would come with a legit replay. Then Karlie should get the ban.”

        Im glad one guy showed up a replay helping the banned BT-2. You need some guts to stand against WG deffending a so called “cheater”. Kudos mate!

        Now, waiting for a disclaimer from Karlie.

          • The moment I saw the text “it is impossible to get such a result without cheating”, epecially coming from anyone working for WG I felt suspicious.
            Not because I believed guy is innocent, but because I was sure thta opinion taken out of the ass of WG employee is far from being convincing enough. And the decision to ban the guy was not made after checking anything, it was just “you dealt damage to tier 10 playing BT-2 ergo you cheat”

            But their support often works that way – some guy has an opinion, he doesnt check it because he is mighty WG so he doesn’t have to be competent at anything

            • I am not with or against WG, but:
              “Not because I believed guy is innocent, but because I was sure thta opinion taken out of the ass of WG employee is far from being convincing enough.”
              How the hell do you think they should get their opinion??
              While they don’t have a serverside replay database all they can do is assume that cases like this with abnormal xp, where a low tier gets it in high tier battle are with high possibility to be rigged, so what should they do?? If they award a cheater _You Will Jump at their throat_, if something like this happens _You Jump at their throat_.
              If they accused player has no evidence that it was a fair battle sad for him….

              ! The real problem is that the competition system is not fully developed. Either we go back to: You send in replays through email to apply to competition, or wait till they finally implement serverside replays.

            • Banning people without proof because their results MIGHT be result of cheating is bullshit and in no way professional conduct.

              Similar to how a certain MMO company banned people for reaching an arbitrary amount of gold because that just seemed unreasonable.

              It is 100% bad policy, 100% wrong on WGs part.
              If they don’t have a replay that proves foul play, they should not ban players.

        • the ban was deserved,and still is,it should remain in effect IMO. Bringing a tier 2 into a tier 10 battle ruins it for the players on your team.nuff said

        • Well everybody was complaining about it and YOU guys forced WG to ban him.
          We are guilty in this case, not WG.

  2. Well done for apologising. The question now is will StatPadder have to give his Type-59 back :)

  3. Troll platoons for competitions should be punished anyway.
    It is very discouraging for anyone to put any effort for a competition when almost all of it is rigged.

    • I don’t like troll platoons either, and think they should do something about it. However, people have been complaining about troll platoons for a long time and WG doesn’t want to do anything about it, so why not use it to your advantage in a contest like this?

  4. i really dont know what to say…WG is so bad, terrible…grats to the guy although he was only lucky and nothing else…but obviously it was not rigged so well deserved ( Although i hate trollplatoons and may have shot him if he was in my team xD)

    They need to do something for checking replays, maybe with serverside replay function it will be better (there is always hope)

    • Whoever shots trollplatoon members is an idiot.

      I often saw such low tier vehicles loaded with gold turning the outcome of the battle + matchmaking balances tanks by their value, so other tanks in your team are stronger.

      As long as WG allows that, no reason to flame/teamkill trollplatooners

      • you often saw them turning the outcome of the battle eh? How often was that? 1 in a million? i really NEVER saw a troll platoon with t2 in T10 match having any good influence at all…mostly someone shot the bugger and got shot by his platoonmates…its bad and it will stay bad to go into hightier matches with lowtiers…

        • I did turn the game with a troll platoon once, I was platooning in a Wespe with my friend in an IS-4 (back when it was t9).
          Halfway through the game our Obj 704 got cornered by an AMX 50B while being alone, His 1st shot was a low roll (around 600) and he would be dead before he could reload. All our arties were bussy on the other flank so I responded to him. Took aim, fiered and penetrated his turret roof, blowing his ammo rack.

          The still alive Obj 704 was then able to move up and flank the majority of the enemy force which was slaughtering our incomputent top tiers.

          If I hadn’t shot the AMX 50B we would have lost.

          but then again, that was 1 game of 17k…

        • But that is not the fault of the trollplatoon, it’s the guy who started TKing fault.

    • There you go assuming WG did anything right! However dumb it is going into a high tier game with a BT-2 I was a total LOL to see him/her pumping shots into the rear ends of those beasts – he donkeyed them good. Did he know that using the system to spoof a BT-2 into a high tier game was the way to pimp XP – Fuck Yeah! So all the folk who did it through their own skill with tanks that fall within the normal tier spread of the game were wasting their time – Fuck Yeah. Does WG need to think hard about these challeges……..

  7. WG failed again hand-in-hand with the crying kid StatPadder who screams on forum that the contest were rigged by pomfrit. Hope the donkey will get him eventually

      • Statpadder came second in the contest and complained to WG that PomFrit had fixed the contest. After PomFrit was disqualified he then went on to brag on the forums big time about how “wonderful” he was.

      • He’s a reroler with 300 battles and unicum stats … average tier 1.9 or something. He’s only trolling in the WG EU forum.
        He got the second place in the contest. After PomFrit was banned he got the Type 59.

        • He also likes reporting anyone who doesn’t agree with him to Support,…

          …or asks him to have the bottle to admit to his other 4 trolling Alt-Accounts..

          ..or asks him why he dare not enter these competitions on his main account…

          Come on WG… take it back from him… he didn’t deserve it….

          • unicum stats my ass…he is a troll and not even a good player tbh…cruiser III is op and he was lucky to have two of the worst teams possible (his own and the others who just suicided into him)

            • StatsPadder is a good player, who, as many, is just frustrated by forum moderation, and is protesting against it in his own grotesque way. Those who take his bragging seriously are just seeking to be trolled.

              His cruiser III game was lucky, as is any game that wins a competition. You cannot get those games through skill alone. Skill gives you a basis, but you need to get the lucky circumstances where everything goes right. And indeed, both teams need to be a special kind of bad for that (argument against skill-based MM all the more).

            • Stats may be a good player. But what he is doing is in no way showing frustration. He tells on players to the moderators. He uses a couple of accounts to even reply to his own posts. And then he tells the moderators to close the topic. How is that protesting? What he did was whine about this player winning just so he got ANOTHER Type 59. How is that good for anyone?

      • SS, i told you about him :P The guy is a trolling moron. He knows how to bypass WG forum rules all the time. Hell, Ectar even seems to always be in favour of him…

      • I know his real identity and few other do too. Iam pretty much disgusted by that. He is tho and always was a huge troll so that bragging and shit shouldnt be taken to seriously.

        • Well ye, bragging and trolling, fine let him do that. But to go so far and demand a person to get banned from competing so his many other account can get a Type 59? Thats low…really low..

          • Thats what a troll does of his caliber. Honestly I dont give a fuck. The result was very suspicious, but the biggest fail was from WG side. Banning someone without a clear proof out of somones ass is way more disgusting. Props SS for clearing this situation.

        • Must be a total moron like Xensation or ipoopoou aka ProfesionalProgamerer. Maybe the latter, the creator of most useless topics on forum.

  8. it would be even better if they awarded goodies only to the players who provide battle replays. There will be less talk about the rigged competitions afterwards.

  10. It would be very simple to prevent all that shit from happening: Make it part of the rules to have replay recording turned on and have the winners send them in, in order to receive their price. It would take two decent employees a day tops to quickly cross check them.

        • come on, half of forum moderators are wannabees who wanted to be someone important in community but no one was impressed and they were more of the laughing stock.

          Then they became mods so they were at least tolerated by those who were able to get the respect of the community “because better to have mod in our clan then in the other”

          The same goes for their e-sport team. Bump is maybe not stupid but not smart either, 0xyde when they hired him had no idea about WoT but had a small dick complex so he had to do everything in his own retarded way, at least Berbo knows how WoT works.

          and don’t get me even started on support.

      • They wouldn’t need to check all replays, just the winning ones. Point was that they couldn’t get their prices if they don’t provide the replay to WG. And when WG check the replay to see if there was some “cheating” then they would reward the winner with his reward.

  11. How is being in a troll platoon ‘fair and square’? It’s not against the rules but still should be considered not fair play and abusing the system, really.

    The spirit of competition is to seek out the best of the best, a person that excels at what they do NOT by circumstance but by their own skill. I do realize some of the top xp battles are probably just lucky draws, but still, entering tier X battle on purpose does not make it “fair”.

      • This ^^

        SerB has often stated that these Platoons are not against the rules, and not a problem….

        There is NOTHING in the rules about these Platoons being “unfair”…

        Afterall.. don’t unicums use a lol for spotting sometimes??

        All is fair in love and war…. Mwah mwah…

        • It cannot be ok to fail platoon and win these contests. You top scorers will always be fail platooners because the XP possibilities are just much higher. It would contort the very basis of the contests beyond reason.

          • Rules???

            Not one rule says that you cannot “troll-platoon”… in any game, anywhere..

            All it would take is for one enemy with more than 1 brain cell to fart in his direction an light it, and boom.. gone… no XP…

            If you reckon that, then how about banning various tanks that are supposed to be mega-OP because “thats not fair either”…??

            • Yeah, you read the comment made by one of the Mods on the forum. It said that a Bt-2 would never last 5 minutes in a tier 10 game, let alone deal 2k damage.

              Whilst I do hate it when people bring lower tier tanks into the battle, at least its something like a Bt-2 which can scout rather than a loltracktor which can’t scout.

            • and since when Mods are people whos opinion is worthy of consideration?

              Most of them have no idea about wot.

              And the sentence “The spirit of competition is to seek out the best of the best, a person that excels at what they do NOT by circumstance but by their own skill” made me laugh.ou have to get highest XP in a single random battle IS about circumstances. And not much else.

              When there was a mediums contest I got 4th result on E-50 by doing nothing special – I was just shooting at targets who were coming on sand river above dune 1 after another. No skill, just point and click, enemy team was full of retards.

              Competition where y

      • luck is always a part of getting high exp and wot in general, for that matter.

        luck combined with skill gets the best yield.

      • Shoot a BT-2 with a 6000 credit ammo? RAM THE MOTHERFLUFFER! :)

        BTW trollplatoons are good. i used to be a passive scout with my MS-1 in T10 battles :)

  12. Hats off to the guy he did damage against US heavies which have terrible arse armour. Heck you could do it with non premium ammo. The fires certainly helped.

    However I think WG should ban results from outside a tanks tier spread to stop troll platoons.

    A: from buggering up high tier matches,

    B: so that those who follow the spirit of the competition rather than looking for loop holes have a chance.

    Other wise your only chance to win is to just troll platoon until you get a good result.

  13. Well it seems that if WG makes another max xp contest then they should add a new limit: NO PLATOONS. Then we can be more sure it cant be rigged.

  14. to be fair, WG seems to learn from there mistakes, currently there is a nice contest (http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/index.php?/topic/303741-tier-v-for-vendetta/#top)wich adds folowing rules:

    “Rules:
    All matches must be played between the 1st October 00:01 and the 14th of October 23:59 CEST.
    Bonus exp for premium accounts, first wins of the day, missions, battle heroes medals etc DO NOT COUNT. Only your base exp is used to calculate your score.
    All matches must include a replay hosted on wotreplays. No replay, no entry.
    Players are not allowed to platoon. All matches must be played as a solo player.
    the M24 Chaffee is excluded due to it’s unique Matchmaking. Premium tanks are excluded due to their increased exp boost.
    You can enter the contest multiple times, but a single account can win only 1 prize.
    The contest is eligible only for players in the EU region.”

    the only problem i see, is that this system is near to imposible for the big contests.

  15. Why does anyone give the slightest fuck about any of WG’s competitions anymore? The game itself is a mess and the officiating is so mockable it’s sad. Not only that, but it’s clear that things are not going to get significantly better.

    So why bother? Let the competitions be the retard sack of goat manure that they are.

  16. Awesome… It seems you have to join troll platoons to win WG competitions. Don’t like this at all…

  19. This may be a bit OT but is the report system ingame working? Was someone banned before from getting reports ?

  20. Seriously, putting a T2 tank in such a match worths 10lifetime bans. Who the fuck cares if friends were helping him or not? You should get a reward for teamshoting tanks that are >4 tiers below the top tank!

  21. Well done silentstalker for posting this correction.

    I want to say that you where right calling out a cheater when you thought you found one and you are right in posting this to clear the guy from all blame now there is evidence that he did not cheat.

    If only professional journalists had such integrity this day and age.

    • Not true.

      SS made a terrible mistake calling out a cheater without even thinking it through.
      He had some articles about rigging contests, he saw a similar situation and he lashed out on a guy that looked like a cheater at a first glance.

      Seriosuly, “BT-2 would never survive 5 minutes let alone do such damage” should at once ring a warning bell in everyone ears – such stuff happens. Yes, chances for that are extremely low, but we only know the best result of an unknown number of tries of many different players, so one of them had to be lucky.

      So it was a bad journalism (or whatever he is doing here) on his part.

      It happens :D Important is thta he found a way out from it :D

  22. I’m sorry but the fact he “won” this competition by platooning with tier Xs IS CHEATING imo. If he didn’t technically break the rules then the rules need changing. This is not the way these competitions are supposed to be won, its just another example of a complete and utter FAIL by WG.

    He should still be excluded from the competition imo, as should anyone else who got a winning score while platooned with a tank 2+ tiers higher than them.

    • Because it’s too easy doing damage in a non-rigged tier X game as a tier II tank?

      • bollox…

        as in bollox I actually agree with you for once…

        It just proves how moronic the enemy were… not that he fixed a game…

        Pure luck, especially considering how many lolplatoons I’ve been in…

    • It is your opinion and I don’t agree with it.

      First, this contestrs are purely about luck. There is no point to care too much for them, it’s not a skill based contest.

      You want skill? Make it average XP in 10 battles in a row.

      Second, even if trollpaltooning gives you so much edge in such a contest, you have to first forbid it before punishing for it.

      Third, it was non voluntary contest. Everyone who played WoT was automatically taking part.
      You can’t punish someone for playing how he likes only because there was a contest at the same time.

  24. On the bright side, perhaps WG can add another rule to the competition next time: no platoons. Single pub battles only. That would eliminate people forming troll platoons for these competitions and thus preventing this kind of misunderstanding from happening again.

  25. Can we be sure of his innocence just with this short video? We can’t see how he get behind the E4, or if anyone in the other team helps him (not shotting, telling him where to go to avoid enemies…). The E3 seems to try to turn around but the E4 doesn’t care at all, for example

    Anyway, if they let this pass, we can expect tons of troll platoons in future contests, waiting for the planets to align and have a lucky game, ruining the game for a lot of teams in the way (don’t tell me MM balance teams via vehicles weight, a tank less is a tank less).

    • people been jumping into higher tier for these competitions all the time. just this is the one that actually stood out. look at russian server its full of insane scores like pomfrit’s.

    • And how turning helped the E3?

      E4 had few targets around him, he ignored BT-2 nd when BT-2 was behind him there was no point turning towards it (he would never cathc him) especially if E4 had 17 sec reload and targets he was still able to damage in front of him.

      It could be rigged, but you can say the same about any winning battle.

      Also what if platoonmates help one of their platoon by spotting for him, shielding him and distracting enemy? Not neccessarily in trollplatoon, even in a normal one?

      How would you decide when they just play good and when they try to bump their friend?

      • update – i watched the video once more

        E4 kills the author of the replay and dies before reloading – killed by Heavy tank in front of him (there was also 1 td in front of e4) – what did you expect, that e4 will turn to bt2 and let amx 50B to shoot him in the back?

  26. To me.. this is cheating anyway.. with a proper platoon or solo he never every would have those tier as enemys.

  27. I have fool proof way of handeling this kind of situations – kill off troll platoons for starter. No excuses, no bs.

  28. I HEREBY PRESENT THE SIMPLEST MEASURE TO AVOID THIS:
    - inorder to participate the xp event vechile must be in a match within its’ matchmaking range

    • and what if i get into a platoon with a T5 as a T3 and i get into a fight with T7s?
      “i hoped we will get into a T5 max battle but what do you know… your MM sucks. So why punish me?”

  29. The fact is there are no rules against it so unless that changes its perfectly acceptable way of winning.

  31. As the game becomes bigger, SS becomes more WG-oriented. That’s a truth now. Shame on you, SS >:c

  32. Big plus for you SS, because of gift shop, the REAL way to say I’m sorry!!!

    p.s. SS you still have a minus for that video about people getting killed!!!

    p.p.s. + and – gives currently zero, but for all your work you still have like 1k pluses…

  33. For these sort of competitions the only battles that should count are ones that are within your tanks normal MM spread.

  34. I hate second guessing, but I’d love to know what was going on in that T-62′s mind. He didn’t even try to get the BT2. Granted it did look like that JPE100 was off screen to his front though.

    **shrug** Just curious.

  37. I think he still deserves the penalty. It is totally unfair for all those who are playing in regular games (+/- 2 tier spread).

    • I couldn’t agree more. It breaks the whole spirit of the competition and the sense of fair play. I wonder how many TX battles he ruined to get this result. I bet no one here would appreciate such a platoon in their TX battle.

  38. trollplatoons should ALWAYS be banned, I don’t care if the bt-2 guy is an ego-centric unicum, if we tolerate those trollplatoons then others will also do it and keep fucking up our games

  40. I’ve known a long time about those false positives. A friend of mine who plays without premium account got banned a long time ago for nothing. Reason was sth. about a hack he didn’t even know about those exist.

    But WG are the deciders. Maybe he didn’t put enough money into the game, which he did, since he had (and still has) a lot of garage slots, since they did not delete them, but all of his tanks he had reached at that time (i.e. IS-3 and some other Tier7/8 tanks).

    Shame on them!

  41. The likelihood of a false positive and their refusal to clarify where the line is for “cheating” by platooning is exactly why I gave up on the Light challenge. I’ve been asking since the TD challenge and the just won’t give an answer.

  42. I took a Hotchkiss into a tier 10 match once by accident when a platoonmate hit the wrong button. I actually killed something.

  43. And now this fellow getting rewarded for their troll platoon is going to inspire a whole bunch more of said platoons… GGWG. Put tier limits into the game.

  45. Afcourse 15 enemy player didnt helped to him, is enought 1-2 paper tanks, so i see its 100% rigged from replay.

  46. So from now nay SMART cmoron can rig competition very easy, like this idiot with bulshit replay. Its so easy to exploit, is enought 1-3 player ONLY in the enemy side to rig this stuff. LOL
    ANd yes BT2 cheater.

  47. hmm ,i think BT-2 was being unfair to his own team by bringing in a tier 2, dont tell me that you dont go “sigh….” when you play a tier 10 and get platoons on your team with a tier 2.