Curse

Fril Estelin · Feb 28, 2008, 03:30 PM // 15:30

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llsektorll · Feb 28, 2008, 03:35 PM // 15:35

i lol @ this thread..... so thats why there are no more chinese bot farmers.....

some sacrifices need to be made for the greater good

Ctb · Feb 28, 2008, 03:42 PM // 15:42

Quote:

But, unchecked before bans are issued, apparently

That's not it at all. Six-armed Venusian demondogs come into the office and chase the staff away, then randomly ban innocent, underserving children of pure heart and mind before rocketing back to their fairytale cities of jade and tears in order to plot the overthrow of Omicron-8 for their vast stores of Atlantan nightmares.

/ random, stupid speculation ftw!! wwwweeeeee!

enter_the_zone · Feb 28, 2008, 03:50 PM // 15:50

My point is simple. Mistaken bans happen, we all know that and it's pretty inevitable. But Anet seems to go the extra mile to make it very tedious to get yourself un-banned if you are innocent.

If Anet are so successful, then an un-ban shouldn't take 3 days to a week to process, as they should have better customer service than that.

If Anet are struggling, then using a ban bot and having humans dealing with appeals would be faster, since they wouldn't have to deal with the bans as well.

All of this assumes that Anet do not employ a ban bot already, which, frankly, they would be bloody stupid not too, since their human "banning machines" aren't any better than a bot would be. The bot would also be much cheaper than a human to run.

On a personal level, I don't actually care, but inefficiency annoys me and software houses are some of the most illogical and inefficient companies in the world. And games developers are amongst the worst software houses. Fourteen years of working in the IT sector is how I know.

enter_the_zone · Feb 28, 2008, 03:54 PM // 15:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ctb

That's not it at all. Six-armed Venusian demondogs come into the office and chase the staff away, then randomly ban innocent, underserving children of pure heart and mind before rocketing back to their fairytale cities of jade and tears in order to plot the overthrow of Omicron-8 for their vast stores of Atlantan nightmares.

/ random, stupid speculation ftw!! wwwweeeeee!

Ok, so if the information on the servers is checked before a ban, then most unbans would NEVER happen, since the data is the same before the ban as it is when the ban is appealed.

That's not speculation, it's called logic. Feel free to try developing some. It's something the denizens of this board seem to lack by the truckload, and as Tesco says "Every little helps"

Fril Estelin · Feb 28, 2008, 03:54 PM // 15:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by enter_the_zone

All of this assumes that Anet do not employ a ban bot already, which, frankly, they would be bloody stupid not too, since their human "banning machines" aren't any better than a bot would be. The bot would also be much cheaper than a human to run.

Just to clarify my statements: I know that Anet makes mistakes (and some forum posters have been very cool about it, which is good!); they use a ban-evidence program without a doubt, that is a program which gathers evidence from all sorts of suspicious activities and reports, but then the information is processed by a human, which issues the ban.

And the reason why it takes 3 days to unban is Anet's business model. No monthly fee means that they can't provide the same level of support as, say, WoW. End of story.

Disclaimer: GWG is not Anet's official forum and we can't do anything about the OP's friend situation (if it's true).

Ctb · Feb 28, 2008, 03:56 PM // 15:56

Quote:

balance, skill and game updates, character and weapon skins

I can see exactly how all of those things look and work by logging into the game.

Quote:

who got banned wrongly

I can't see that at all without breaking into ANET.

So... hmmm.. on the one hand we have people complaining about directly observable game mechanics and style... on the other we have people speculating wildly about things they can in now way interact with or observe... I wonder if these two things are directly equivalent in scope and validity?

Quote:

Ok, so if the information on the servers is checked before a ban, then most unbans would NEVER happen, since the data is the same before the ban as it is when the ban is appealed.

That's not speculation, it's called logic. Feel free to try developing some. It's something the denizens of this board seem to lack by the truckload, and as Tesco says "Every little helps"

Actually, if you'd bothered to think it through, it would occur to you that the information in the system is NOT the same after the ban is challenged by virtue of the challenge. Unless, I don't know, maybe when you contact anet with things you make no attempt to provide any contextual information that would be useful to them. I guess in that case you could be right...

But, sure, go ahead and pretend MY logic is where the problem lies here.

TheRaven · Feb 28, 2008, 04:00 PM // 16:00

Geez, why do people create threads like this. They have no purpose other than to start a gripefest.

Your friend might be guilty as sin.
Your friend might be innocent.
Actually you yourself have no way of knowing. Your friend could be lying to you.
Your friend's little brother might have logged into his account and done some damage.
The whole "my friend is..." story could be bogus and you're the one with the banned account.

The point is, we can't help you. The only thing you're gonna get from Guru readers is...
"Awww poor thing. I hope that big bully unbans you soon"
and
"Bwahahaha!! I hope your account burns in Hell you evil botter!!!!"

Mods, can we close this one now?

enter_the_zone · Feb 28, 2008, 04:00 PM // 16:00

[QUOTE=Ctb][quote]balance, skill and game updates, character and weapon skins

Quote:

I can see exactly how all of those things look and work by logging into the game.

I can't see that at all without breaking into ANET.

So... hmmm.. on the one hand we have people complaining about directly observable game mechanics and style... on the other we have people speculating wildly about things they can in now way interact with or observe... I wonder if these two things are directly equivalent in scope and validity?

/ logic... do you use it mfer?

Neatly done, avoiding addressing my point in any way whatsoever and being reduced to name calling. That's not logic, it's avoidance.

Edit: that's why I said "most" not "all" bans would never be reversed. Show me how you contextually prove that you aren't a bot who runs. My friend was banned on that basis ie. Anet claimed she was using a bot to run. She got her account back on appeal. Exactly what contextual evidence could change their original verdict? There was none to provide... See the problem with your idea there? The data was identical apart from an email of appeal.

Fril Estelin · Feb 28, 2008, 04:06 PM // 16:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by enter_the_zone

Ok, so if the information on the servers is checked before a ban, then unbans would NEVER happen, since the data is the same before the ban as it is when the ban is appealed.

That's not speculation, it's called logic. Feel free to try developing some. It's something the denizens of this board seem to lack by the truckload, and as Tesco says "Every little helps"

You want some logic? Then put yourself in the shoes of Anet (well we can't really since most information is confidential, but your best guess is as good as mine):

logs to check are huge, horrible files full of lost of information on various layers (network communication, server status, client status, client action, etc.); you have to take a lot of things into account so you have to write smart programs for helping GMs to look through this mountain of information; all this takes developers' time (which is very precious and costly) and you just can't afford to redo it every week or so; so you tweak the system only when major threats occur (duping, new waves of bots, etc.)

anyway, my point is that it's humanly impossible to check every piece of data, just think like this: next time you're playing GW, just look at the number of things you're doing (each action may be a packet sent to the server, possibly more) over a period of, say, 15 minutes, this includes clicking in the window, using the keyboard shortcuts and typing messages in the various chat windows, plus more importantly all your interaction with other players (which themselves are doing lots of stuff that is recorded in logs)

now after this 15 minutes period, just put on the GM's shoes and look from his perspective: great, I've got to look through the logs of a player and all the players he's interacted with and try to understand what he did ... yeah, sure, very easy task! So he's opened trade window to sell this for nothing, let's look at if he talked to the other player and what he said, and what he did before the trade, and what the other guy did before the trade, and this and that also ...

I hope you're starting to understand the logic here: it's ummanageable unless you've got permanent staff (well, they'll be more like robots, but I digress) to do that, and NC Soft (which handles support for GW if I'm not mistaken) must do that for their collection of games so as to keep the cost of this staff low. In other words: GW being no-monthly-fee gets less support, which means longer times to un-ban.

Hope this helps to clarify the situation.

Disclaimer: I'm not an Anet employee (or fanboy) and have no particular knowledge of their internals, I've just gathered information from various places and used my knowledge of IT for the rest.

Quote:

Originally Posted by enter_the_zone

Show me how you contextually prove that you aren't a bot who runs.

Sorry, I couldn't resist: if you can tell me how to solve this problem, I'd like to submit this entry to the Loebner Prize (a.k.a. Turing Test competition) for $100,000 !

(on a more serious topic, coming from a computer science background I can tell you that this is no joke as programs can look very much like human beings, where you regularly perform some pauses and unrelated actions... soon bots will be PM'ing us and having a casual conversation à la Eliza)

My point being: the difficulty of detecting bots varies from "a lot" to "an incredible amount" depending on how much money the RMT companies can make on your MMO. So let's no over-simplify the situation here.

/end of loosely-related comment

Fril Estelin · Feb 28, 2008, 04:13 PM // 16:13

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Ctb · Feb 28, 2008, 04:17 PM // 16:17

Quote:

Neatly done, avoiding addressing my point in any way whatsoever and being reduced to name calling. That's not logic, it's avoidance.

Take your goalpost-moving, psuedo-intellectualism to Fark or Slashdot where there are people who won't notice what you're trying to do. Your nonsensical comment comparing two unrelated things was easily exposed as gibberish and I won't play a game of whack-a-mole with you every time you try to change your position midflight.

/ignore

Numa Pompilius · Feb 28, 2008, 04:21 PM // 16:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by Magikarp

awesome, another group of gwg jerks who automatically call everyone a liar and a cheater, because anet said so

Given the choice of beliving Random Anonymous Person On The Internets(tm) and believing ANet, I will, in the absence of evidence, pick ANet yes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Enter The Zone

All of this assumes that Anet do not employ a ban bot already, which, frankly, they would be bloody stupid not too, since their human "banning machines" aren't any better than a bot would be. The bot would also be much cheaper than a human to run.

1) I guarantee that ban-by-bot is much, much, MUCH less accurate than ban by human.
2) I strongly doubt ANet use ban-bots. They'd be idiots if they did, and besides Gaile has said they don't. They're however guaranteed to use filters which flag suspicious events (like someone cycling a set of skills with microsecond accuracy hundreds of times, or someone receiving a large amount of gold from another account) for human GM's to take a closer look at.

enter_the_zone · Feb 28, 2008, 04:22 PM // 16:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fril Estelin

Just to clarify my statements: I know that Anet makes mistakes (and some forum posters have been very cool about it, which is good!); they use a ban-evidence program without a doubt, that is a program which gathers evidence from all sorts of suspicious activities and reports, but then the information is processed by a human, which issues the ban.

And the reason why it takes 3 days to unban is Anet's business model. No monthly fee means that they can't provide the same level of support as, say, WoW. End of story.

So, either their evidence-acquisition program is faulty or some employees are suffering from chronic laziness in actually processing the evidence.

I'm sorry, but if Anet employees find giving 100k to a guildie suspicious then they need a head check. Especially when they then give you items and change back in a separate trade later on. Which the evidence gathering program should be looking for, it's not even a particularly complicated idea.

I still can't believe that they can't write a 100% automated program to ban people without human intervention.

Yes, there would probably be more appeals (I'm not convinced though, given how dodgy their banning process is currently), but this would free the people currently banning people to deal with un-bans. This is based on the assumption that 90% of those who are guilty don't appeal their bans.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fril Estelin

Sorry, I couldn't resist: if you can tell me how to solve this problem, I'd like to submit this entry to the Loebner Prize (a.k.a. Turing Test competition) for $100,000 !

(on a more serious topic, coming from a computer science background I can tell you that this is no joke as programs can look very much like human beings, where you regularly perform some pauses and unrelated actions... soon bots will be PM'ing us and having a casual conversation à la Eliza)

My point being: the difficulty of detecting bots varies from "a lot" to "an incredible amount" depending on how much money the RMT companies can make on your MMO. So let's no over-simplify the situation here.

/end of loosely-related comment

The point I was making is simple. There was no contextual information which my friend could or did supply to prove she was not botting. The data Anet had available was identical before and after, aside from an email saying "Um, hello? Yeah, not a bot!"

Quote:

Originally Posted by Numa Pompilius

1) I guarantee that ban-by-bot is much, much, MUCH less accurate than ban by human.
2) I strongly doubt ANet use ban-bots. They'd be idiots if they did, and besides Gaile has said they don't. They're however guaranteed to use filters which flag suspicious events (like someone cycling a set of skills with microsecond accuracy hundreds of times, or someone receiving a large amount of gold from another account) for human GM's to take a closer look at.

So, either their filters are really crap, or they are banning by bot since their accuracy is pretty pitiful.

I should also add that I have never actually known someone in game who was banned and claimed to be innocent who lost an appeal. And that's heading towards the 30 mark pretty quick.

Edit : Actually, there was one guy who tried to get his second account back and didn't. He was spamming /rank on his brother in our GH and his brother and some guildies reported him. That was funny as hell, since he had just made R9 on that account.

pkodyssey · Feb 28, 2008, 04:30 PM // 16:30

Cussing out Anet on the forum is not going to help anyone get their account back.

However, persistence and patience with GW support will help if you are legitimately innocent.

Guilty until proven innocent is the standard, because everyone loves the drama and believes that everyone on-line is a liar. It's to much of a reach to assume that someone actually might be telling the truth.

/sad to say the least.

A mummified one · Feb 28, 2008, 04:32 PM // 16:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by llsektorll

some sacrifices need to be made for the greater good

yup, Hitler and Stalin already said that.

Shakkara · Feb 28, 2008, 04:32 PM // 16:32

Just handle it through support, I once got banned for botting but after I sent in the email with some evidence that I wasn't, I was unbanned within hours.

enter_the_zone · Feb 28, 2008, 04:44 PM // 16:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ctb

I can see exactly how all of those things look and work by logging into the game.

I can't see that at all without breaking into ANET.

So... hmmm.. on the one hand we have people complaining about directly observable game mechanics and style... on the other we have people speculating wildly about things they can in now way interact with or observe... I wonder if these two things are directly equivalent in scope and validity?

/ logic... do you use it mfer?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ctb

I can see exactly how all of those things look and work by logging into the game.

I can't see that at all without breaking into ANET.

So... hmmm.. on the one hand we have people complaining about directly observable game mechanics and style... on the other we have people speculating wildly about things they can in now way interact with or observe... I wonder if these two things are directly equivalent in scope and validity?

Actually, if you'd bothered to think it through, it would occur to you that the information in the system is NOT the same after the ban is challenged by virtue of the challenge. Unless, I don't know, maybe when you contact anet with things you make no attempt to provide any contextual information that would be useful to them. I guess in that case you could be right...

But, sure, go ahead and pretend MY logic is where the problem lies here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ctb

Take your goalpost-moving, psuedo-intellectualism to Fark or Slashdot where there are people who won't notice what you're trying to do. Your nonsensical comment comparing two unrelated things was easily exposed as gibberish and I won't play a game of whack-a-mole with you every time you try to change your position midflight.

/ignore

And I'm the goalpost-moving, psuedo-intellectual who tries to change my position in midflight. Which two unrelated things are gibberish, exactly? Quote and highlight please. Also, please highlight how they were nonsensical, and where exactly you exposed them as such. Oh, never mind, you can't.

Ok, maybe I haven't been clear here. Ctb, take your retarded arse back to the mental home, ok? It's almost feeding time.

afya · Feb 28, 2008, 04:52 PM // 16:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fril Estelin

Proof of that?

I very seriously doubt it, no serious company (and NC Soft is one of them) would write such an email!

I just find the email. NCsoft give me the link to the whatever Privacy Policy and the EULA.
They said that they can't provide the method for finding the offense. (I misunderstanded that email that they don't have a method. sry) And give me the EULA link that they preserve the right for doing so and so. They just didn't answer my question(whether I would be banned for transferring items or not)

Remember I had also been banned once but unlocked a week after. I'm not anti-Anet/NCsoft. I'm also contacting the support for something else and quite satisfy by their fast response. What I doesn't agree is their unclear method of banning innocent ppl. If they have a proof such as a pm "I would buy 100k for 5 bucks", they should contain that in the response.
I helped a guy for his account. NCSoft said he brought money from cash but had no proof mentioned in their reply. In this way, I'd still trust my friend that they are error banned.

Inde · Feb 28, 2008, 04:55 PM // 16:55

Besides the flaming and insulting going on in this thread, I have to lock it. If the matter has been taken up with NCSoft support that's really all that you can do.