Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/1/fair_play_wot/
Hello everyone,
Russian Wargaming, having learned from its mistakes and started publishing the names of offenders and ban statistics. In the post above, we can read that in the first half of October alone:
- 8191 players were punished based on the reports from the ingame complaint system
- 2592 players were banned for games rigging (influencing the battle result by having an agreement with the opposing team) random and company games
- 1868 botters were banned in last two weeks only
WG even made this beautiful picture :)
Well, that’s all nice, but I have two things I would like to add to this.
First – remember how they told us that there are no bots or that the issue is marginal? Well, 2k banned players in two weeks alone doesn’t seem marginal to me – and that’s just the RU server. EU server decided not to publish any names and such (voluntary decision as Ectar confirmed, not one forced by law), so heaven knows how many botters they ban (if any).
Second – the number of punishments, based on complaint system is also important. Strictly speaking, within two weeks, there is NO way all 8k player cases would be checked manually. Looking for swearing is simple enough (open log, look for keywords, found/notfound, kkthxbie), but looking for unfair gameplay is much harder (in order to watch someone blocking someone else, you have to watch a replay, which you don’t have, remember that even in nasty cases like tournament rigging, Wargaming has to request replays from the players). What this means is, at least some players are banned automatically without doublechecking, simply because they recieved numerous reports. This is a very important thing to know (and soon, you will see why).
Wargaming claims to combat “false reports” by having an in-house internal “report reputation” system. As it go explained on RU server, basically what happens is that every player has “report reputation”, based on whether the players he reports are actually punished or not. If the “reputation” drops below certain degree, the reports of that players are ignored (or, as WG puts it, he can get punished).
Needless to say, this is an utter nonsense (if it’s even true). Consider this: the Unsportsmanlike Behavior (I’ll call it unfair gameplay) is practically impossible to doublecheck, because it includes things like “at 3:45 into battle, player X intentionally blocked me and I died” – is that unfair gameplay? Of course it is. But to prove it you’d have to watch the replay (IF you have it in the first place). So, a player reports the blocking asshole, using the Unsportsmanlike Behavior or whatever. But the asshole does this only once, in that battle. Not only does he get away with it (we all know that as long as we aren’t assholes constantly, we can get away with all sorts of stuff), but the player as a result reduces his report reputation, because the “asshole” was not banned and therefore, the report could have been false (which again cannot be proven).
Short version: even IF that report abuse punishment system actually exists (and I have NEVER heard of anyone punished for this), then unless you frivolously spam 10 reports every day on random players, you almost certainly have nothing to fear from it, even if you decide to report people for (for example) simply not liking them. This system would be effective in one specific case: massive clan reports (clan X and clan Y meet in CW/company/SH battle, clan X team reports one specific player of clan Y), but that’s pretty retarded and noone does that anyway (I hope). I can see that this would be noticed by looking into the report log quickly.
I know of one case at least, where a clan reported one member and he got banned for 3 days for “Unsportsmanlike Behavior”. In a company, all 15 players reported the same player on the enemy clan and he got banned. It was a while ago, not sure if still works.
–A clan reported one member and he got banned for 3 days for “Unsportsmanlike Behavior”.
In a company, all 15 players reported the same player on the enemy clan and he got banned–
*cough* Hami reported by his defeated opponents for “unsportsmanlike” behavior *cough*
Those were the days :D
The reputation system would be tricky to get completely right. But I can imagine how they could have a stab at it. A guy with a ban for chat abuse might find his reports of abuse ignored after. PEople who pick on a guy and use all 10 reports to reports him for all the categories avaiable woudl probably be ignored too, you can go on.
I bet an individuals “reputation” is linked to how much of a cash cow he is in part. If you have a guy that is playing for free vs a guy that drops $200+ a month on the game I could see the free player being given less leeway to be an asshole but WG is a business and keeping paying customers is primary in my mind.
The problem is, that even if you have the replay, and send it to the support, WG won’t check it. “Use the ingame report blah blah blah, go f*ck yourself blah blah, with best regards: XY”.
And as you wrote it above, the ingame report system is practically worthless.
Nobody reports => nobody gets banned => people think it doesn’t work => nobody reports
It’s tough to break this circle.
“the ingame report system is practically worthless.”
Then what is up with all the people on the forum complaining they got banned?
The report system features only a certain number of possible issues. As stated above swearing/insulting is pretty easy to check.
Other things like team damage, unsportsmenlike behaviour or suicide are hard to check and to punish.
Suicide will be auto punished, any instance of drowning or falling damage killing the player will be tracked and punished if excessive. It was supposed to be included with the changes to punishment introduced in 9.3, but problems on test server saw it removed until fixed.
There also complains of people saying that they are not aware of having done something wrong.
Given what we now know – it might be true in some (many?) cases that the system goes wrong and people is banned just for being purple in XMV.
please, the number of players that f..k everything up are more than 10 a day! and i do feel like i’m wasting those reports! but apparently the reports are working fine when it comes to banning me!
already gave examples, of, team camps in corner, you are in med or a scout, and you go behind them to see their reaction, “oh no camper noob go scout, reported”!
when i asked for a player to be reported no one does, but everybody seem to be united to report me when i try to stay safe cause team camps!
You are not supposed to report people who fuck up. You are supposed to report players who swear, block, etc. Camping in corner is stupid, but sadly, bans won’t help there – some tutorial or hint would be better.
Any news on the NA botters?
yeah, you :P
actually they are probably on all servers!
i my self saw bots, they were very common like a year ago!
now the most i see are just afk players!
just to point out i’m on EU not NA!
I believe there is a lot of bots still in the game. Too easy to use a bot, and mods that are “cheats” and WG does nothing about it. Never did, why we would believe that now they are doing something? I dont see AKF that often.
Your example is kinda wrong in few points:
- he did it only once. This is usually overlooked in automated systems anyway (see the recent AFK checks – one game is not punished)
- I doubt that your report reputation would drop because of one report as well – it’s probably weighted in some way, to work as a prevention against trigger happy reporters (you reported ten guys and in none of these cases there were any guys who reported them as well? Suspicious)
- It’s not that hard to prevent this thing by asking your team to report the guy as well – in many cases they will, it will work more likely, and even if he reports you back – he’ll just end up in the report reputation drop (since your team likely won’t report you at that point).
First two points – didn’t miss, you are saying what I said with different words. I agree with it. Third thing – well, that’s debatable. Do you really automatically report someone when someone screams randomly “REPORT X FOR UNFAIR GAMEPLAY”? Doing that would be foolish, there are morons who would report you for simply staying back and sniping.
oh, and SS I hope that you are not basing the future artile about bans on the lone replay of that guy, that was whining that he got banned while playing arty. The thing is, that in such situation just one report could trigger ban, if he gathered numerous complains earlier, and you will be unable to check that.
System works fine, same goes with the automatic warnings for AFKers (there is significantly less of them now). I just hope that they will finally introduce the suicide punishment system, even for the arties alone (and I am saying that as someone who also likes to play arties, just hates the suciding scumbags….).
No, I don’t report in every such case, of course :) But there are many cases where you can report objectively – almost won/lost battle and clearly AFK player in base, when you are already dead and you can check the situation (for example blocking) via friend cam, insults, etc. And in these cases I have no issues helping to support a teammate report.
Yes. AFK, insults, that kind of thing, that’s proved easily and everyone can see that. Unsportsmanlike behavior however is much more complicated.
Interesting article. I am one of the guys that do use the report function a lot. But the fact that I use unsportsmanlike (for suicide arty, base camping, telling enemy our team location and various other wrongdoings) as a report probably is in my detriment, as presumably few people get banned reported for unsportsmanlike so I have high miss ratio.
On the other hand about 60% of my reports are for insults and I hope I get a high ban ratio on those. Also the bot reports are mostly correct, although I report also people that don’t move for 2 minutes and then they come back from lunch and are actually not bots.
I might alter my behavior because of this article, thanks for sharing.
Good job WG RU. WG EU sucks balls as always. I still remeber that dude drim the German WG EU office that was saying – there are not bots in WoT :-).
They are just too stupid to understand, that players perceive them as lazy fucks, and by not annoucing their actions (and results), there is a suspicion, that they are fucking around doing nothing as usual. Additionally, such annoucement discourage potential botters, but NOOOOO, Ectar knows better :-).
Just like Wargaming stated that it wasn’t possible to ‘hack’ the game – then came the cheat that allowed tracers to be coloured and shown for an extended length of time……
That claim is just hubris on WG’s part. If it’s software, it can be hacked one way or another.
What I wonder most – it’s obvious Wargaming is lying to it’s customer.
This summer, nRicochet (famous for his fake CV on LinkedIn) the new Community Manager EU has given an interview: “There are no bots – I know it”.
And now, some months later, there are bots, it’s not even marginal there thousands of bots.
What kind of people is working for Wargaming, do they have no sense of shame? Are there in a way socially disadvantaged it doesn’t matter anymore?
Report system is bunch of bullshit! The only reports they need are: “Asshole”, “Retard”, “Bot”. And being “Retard” can’t even be punished because game allows “Retards” to play… It would narrow the search for the problem if nothing else…
P.S. I almost forgot, also an report option when the battle itself was rigged by WG…
I hope you’d report yourself every match if those report categories actually went in.
“Unsportsmanlike Behavior (I’ll call it unfair gameplay) is practically impossible to doublecheck”
No, it’s not. Just check if the reported player played arty.
That’s what Unsportsmanlike Behavior is for, right?
Reports against arties are ignored, unless they involve chat spam, gold selling, etc. The only thing an arty can do that falls under unfairness would be to throw itself off a cliff, and even that is debatable unless the arty announces it in chat. (Not the first time I accidently hit cruise control and reversed off a cliff.)
Yesterday Tiger on the enemy team shouted “reported for pen hack” to our WT Pz4… (yes)
I said “lol”…
I got “reported for collusion”.. (iirc)….
I’m quaking in my boots….. that ban can’t be far away now…
Yesterday I rushed to the hill on Prokhorovka with type 59 and killed a SU-152 who went to the village in the open field mindlessly, also killed a freshly spoted T-34/85 who had low hp in the middle of the map.
then the following happened in the chat:
su-152: Hax!
Report type 59 for wallhacking!
T-34/85: Yes!
seriously? (facepalm)
This is a case of a player that got banned because he reported 10 times another player misusing the report system.
http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/index.php?/topic/436795-the-last-drop-what-i-think-about-wg/page__p__9192823__hl__+ban%20+system#entry9192823
This comment is more clear than what SS posted:
“Each player has an informant ranking. This ranking decreases for making false complaints and increases for justified complaints. Should any complaints remain unprocessed, the ranking does not change. Players who accrue a very low score will be penalised.”
In other words this rank system works as follow:
If you make reports that are false, just because a somebody one shot you in your Maus, then that counts against you.
If you report somebody and nothing happens, because it cannot be proved without a replay (probably a large % of them), then your rank remains unchanged.
If you make a report that ends with WG penalizing the reported behavior, then your rank increases.
This system will penalize you if you make too many false reports.
EU not banning bots. We report afk/bot with my 2 friends in same match. Then i watch the botter’s clan page for any ban. But nothing happened next 5 days…
So i stop watching that page. His stats below average and his clan is very small 15-20 players.
EU not banning any bots.
“First – remember how they told us that there are no bots or that the issue is marginal? Well, 2k banned players in two weeks alone doesn’t seem marginal to me”
It sounds pretty marginal to me, given the number of active RU accounts and the likelihood that such a system would naturally ban more accounts on startup.
It should be possible to automate the reporting of blocking or pushing out cases. The victim is reversing and has zero speed or is not moving in the desired direction due to the proximity of blocking/pushing tank. Start recording the Replay information to central reporting server – Ping pushers client to determine if connection lost. Victim tank is taking hits from the enemy so escalate to very serious level. Victim tank dies auto ban pusher subject to review of that part of the replay by the victim and WG where both have to agree to not continue the ban. The pusher/blocker is sent that part of the replay to show them what they have done and why they have been punished.
you realize how much data that would create?
Not video — Just the same data stream that makes replays and just for the time of the incident. Since the max replay file size is about 1500 KB for a full length game then the data should be at maximum 100KB per minute.
Report system is a placebo. It does nothing except maybe bad words chatbans etc. It’s bunch of bullshit.
on 29 August proximately 1,000 accounts on the EU server were given a 2 week suspension and final warning for using bots
that’s what the news say :) so there are numbers
http://worldoftanks.eu/en/news/pc-browser/46/changes-to-fairplay-system/
I’m gay for S.S