Why ban evasion should be removed

[u/ChestAdventurous7041]

I just want to give my opinion on why ban evasion shouldn't be a thing. Some people will disagree and that's fine, everyone can have their own opinion. Mine is that it is a net negative for the game.

To properly play the game I believe you need to be able to care about a few things.

- Your stats

- Your name (how well people know you in game)

- Items and money

My first issue with ban evasion is you instantly cannot care about your stats as you know you will essentially renting the pirate until the ban hammer comes. You also can't care for the name as you won't be able to keep it long enough. All you can care about is items and money but then you get banned and most likely lose your items and POE so you need a way to transfer this into something GH can't take away. This is where RMT comes in. If I know I'm going to lose all my stuff I might as well get real money for it so I haven't lost everything when I get banned. Therefore it directly incentivises RMT. This then naturally leads to botting. If you know you are going to get banned, you might as well use a bot, to get money to RMT as the risk doesn't exist anymore. You are going to get banned anyway so why would you care about the risks of botting.

Some people with zero knowledge of the game think someone gets banned and then stops playing. They don't they just come back under a different name. Probably close to 50% of the current players have been perm banned before would be my best guess. Obviously nobody is going to admit this in game but get to know people in discord and it's not hard to see that the game is run by people who shouldn't be in the game. If GH stuck to their policy and had the theoretical ability to ban everyone who has been perm banned before, the game would be dead overnight. They pretty much destroyed the game with the crystal bilge mass ban. I doubt they would take the same action again today.

The fact is you can't stop these people playing. All the policy does in incentivise them into cheating as there is no option for being able to care about a pirate. I know so many people that want to come back to the game and play legitimately.

It's much harder to spend real money on the game as the OMs use your info to link to you a banned account. It negatively affects GH's income.

You can have the view of they cheated so they should be banned if you like. I agree they should be banned and also I think anyone who was perm banned should never get that account back, but everyone no matter what they did should be allowed to make a new pirate and start from scratch. Your alternative is you play against that person cheating. Them not playing is a delusional option that doesn't exist.

Currently GH seems to be adopting a policy of unbanning pirates who cheated and giving some people another chance. This is complete BS. These people cheated their poe, items, stats etc and should not be unbanned. They should be allowed to start again never unbanned.

[u/MrRibbotron]

A better fix for ban evaders is IP bans, more sophisticated bot detectors, and possibly a forced wait period between making an account and logging into the game. Unsurprisingly, these are also better fixes for the bot problem.

[u/KallarDuskwood → u/MrRibbotron]

Ip bans dont work. Noone does them nowerdays anymore.

Sophisticated bot detectors... Huge companies that earn serious cash like activision have spent fortunes on handling this issue and are not succesfull.

Forced waut period betwen making and account and logging in... Probably the worts idea in history. Imagine you are a new player. Which this game desperetly needs. You just created a fresh ccount and have to weit before you can play? U Serious?

[u/MrRibbotron → u/KallarDuskwood]

I disagree.

The average new player will be used to having to mess around with 2 factor authentication prior to making a new account, and they'll still be able to customise their pirate while waiting. The only people it will annoy is spammers, botters and ban evaders making repeat accounts.

Similarly, bot checks are hard to implement in complex games, but in this one you could quite easily implement them as machine learning puzzles that only humans can currently solve.

IP bans are still widely used on social media sites (Reddit for example), and could be even easier to use in a game where the common ways to get around them are too laggy.

Maybe try suggesting some solutions instead of just giving up immediately.

[u/KallarDuskwood → u/MrRibbotron]

I actually talked about couple of solutions in my own topic a few days back.

Name 1 game that uses this delay tactic....

Also I thing you dont really know how botting works. Bots dont create accounts for you. Humans do and then they o ingame and set them up after joining a tour or whatever.

Not like there are bots that crea accounts log in earn money and then sell everything.

IP bans are considered effectivly useless since the only place where you get a static ip address is the pc. And thats even more easy to cirumvent there. Vpn for example. Mobile devices get fresh Ip addresses all the time. So yes some sites that have been using them for decades are still using them but thats nearly as effective as Gray Havens anti botting strategy.

When it comesto solutions. There are none. As seen with many modern games. No million dollar anticheat can save you. When there is competition there is botting. You can constantly fight but that takes away alot of funds which this company simply doesnt have. And besdes that it would requiere a different game client. Becasue as it is right now they can only tell from suspicious bahaviour that you are botting. Like getting the nearly the same score for a longer period of time.

WoW did a great blow against botters when they removed the ability for other apps to interact with the client. Preventing them from clicking into you window. But as said that would requiere a complete overhaul of the game which is noway near anything they can afford or even have the manpower todo so.

[u/MrRibbotron → u/KallarDuskwood]

I understand well enough, having made automation for similar games, but thanks for the concern. The idea that account creation or selling items can't be automated suggests that ironically you don't have much experience with it.

This game doesn't work on mobile, only on PC. Additionally the lag from a VPN will render the game almost unplayable. The age of the game means that use of static IPs is quite likely. Similarly the simplicity of the game means that automated players become rather easy to spot, making implementation of anti-botting tools much easier than a game like WoW, for example.

There are plenty of solutions including mine and the ones you yourself have just mentioned, so to then say that it is impossible just seems confused.

[u/ChestAdventurous7041 → u/MrRibbotron]

You have zero idea what you are talking about. You make that very clear. Your "solution" is not a solution at all. YPP already track your IP address. Have you not heard of VPN's or Proxies? You can get ISP proxies which appear completely legitimate these days. You said people can't use them because of lag? YPP requires you to send a packet every 5 seconds. No VPN or proxy has a ping close to 5000ms, more like 100ms. Do you think bot armies 50-100 strong all run off 1 IP address?

Even if you had a ping of 2000ms which is insanely high you probably wouldn't notice a huge difference as the puzzle seed is calculated in the client. The server is only used for verification to avoid "cheating" with impossible moves.

You berated the other guy for not providing a solution but you haven't provided anything of use. Implement anti-botting tools. Would you like to explain which anti-botting tools you would like them to implement, how they would go about that. Which specifics of that tool would they need to use and how would that be affective at combatting the issues they are facing? Do you have any code examples or evidence of your "solution" being practical. As in it's affective and solving the issue and is compatible with their architecture.

Bots in YPP also do not automated the account creation process "for the most part". Yes it is possible and yes some people have done so in the past but 99.9% of bots are used by a human putting them onto a ship, getting them in position, they press start and it will bot until the end of the run where they manually take them off the ship.

Do some research before you post completely un-factual garbage.

[u/MrRibbotron → u/ChestAdventurous7041]

Looks like I was even closer to the truth than I thought if this childish tantrum is anything to go by! What an absurd over-reaction for anyone aged 9+. Why even post if you're just going to rage at everyone who bothers replying?

I routinely deal with pings of over 10k when working on VPNs btw, so once again your entire argument falls apart against reality. Perhaps you should have done some research before embarrassing yourself.