Worried about Nostalrius policy on banning accounts

[LiYeds]

Could you guys stop your shitty RP ? This is supposted to be a serious discussion, thank you.

As some of you might have already noticed, the population of Nostalrius is a bit bigger than it used to be on retail servers, because of that devs had to implement "dynamic" respawn timers. It would be kind of good idea, to implement something similiar to FW flowers, because it is next to impossible to get them without "exploiting". Just sayin.

[Sethzer]

Hello, resurrecting an old thread (in the proper forum section, thus the repost).

Read below with the root tuber in mind. See earlier thread (locked for being in the wrong forum section): https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21509 lets bring up this discussion again!


TL;DR Nostalrius needs to stop banning people for ambiguous crimes. Rather than "Ban first, warn later" the order should be exactly the opposite in cases where the "exploit" isn't obvious.

After the latest ban wave (the root tubers) I'm sure I'm not the only one who, once again, is worried about the way that bans are being too liberally distributed on Nostalrius. The staff here seems to find it justified to ban whoever gains an "unfair" gold advantage by the means of "exploiting" bugs and/or game mechanics. Now, the "face value" of this rule cannot be disputed, but surely as many people realize, this rule is a very ambiguous one. The current policy that Nostalrius has on these issue seems to be something like "ban first, warn later". Such a policy is very misguided however, if it is applied to disputable cases. Now, I think a very few people would find that the silithus mining "bug" is not a disputable case.

I think the issue at hand is a matter of predictability. The issue with the root tubers, and previously, the silithus mining ban wave is that sure, it was considered an exploit according to the rules of Nostalrius, but hardly anyone ever suspected it was in fact the case. If people had KNOWN it was an exploit that would've avoid doing it. First of all, I'm not even sure it IS a bug. Secondly, even if it is, one has to realize how far from obvious it is that people actually perceive it as such. It has been working like that for a long time and the advantage one gets above others is non-existant since it does not prevent others from also looting the tubers.

Nostalrius has to understand how much time people spend on this game. Only being level 60 is a huge commitment for most players and permanently banning someone is a HUGE DEAL that really should only be used in obvious cases where the "crime" is great. The Alcor's sunrazor exploit was one such case. The Silithus mining however or the case at hand with root tubers... not so much.

I urge you, Nostalrius, to please reconsider your policy when banning people. Please, in ambiguous cases such as the present case with the root tubers, and earlier, the silithus mining "bug" it is just unfair to sentence a person to a permanent ban . I can understand that you want to keep a strict line here towards exploiting but honestly, what you are doing is making people paranoid. In terms of Pros and Cons, surely the benefits of being a bit more sensitive towards the players outweigh the potential downsides of not holding a strict line.

Good post!

Re-posting this from a locked thread that didn't lead any way constructive:
It's a Blizzard representative responding to players whom are wondering why Blizzard did not hand out permanent bans from a banwave involving players being caught using bots.
Sure, it's different situation here, both with the Blizzard reply involving action vs. botters and this situation here with a bug regarding interacting with special objects in Felwood, and with accounts being limitless and free vs. costing money on retail. Hopefully people will still get the point from where this Blizzard representative wants to go with his/her reasoning of their actions against the people who received punishments:

First reply: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... ?page=2#24
"So, here's the thing.

Through various studies (conducted both here at Blizzard and by other companies/groups), and by monitoring player behavior, we've discovered that suspensions are actually more effective than permabans for preventing repeat offenses by the same people.

There's some really interesting sociological hocus pocus behind it, but from what I understand, the TLDR is that if a botter gets permabanned, they'll often just buy a new account and go right back to botting. However, if we only suspend them -- meaning, they'll get their account back later -- they're less likely to buy a new one. Furthermore, once they do get their account back, they're EXTREMELY unlikely to bot again.

I'm not a psychology expert, but there's something about "I'll get this account back later" that leads more of these sorts of people to give up their botting ways than if their accounts had been permanently closed. It's kind of fascinating (at least I find it to be)."


Second reply: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... ?page=3#52
"Take your average botter. Let's call him... Jim. Jim is an awful person who uses various scripts and/or third party programs to give himself an unfair advantage against other players. We don't like Jim. One day, Jim gets caught, and Blizzard takes action against his account.

Now say, hypothetically, that Jim's account gets permanently closed. Everything he had on that account is now gone forever, and he has no way of getting it back. Now, many players in this case would (and do) just stop playing, but not Jim. Jim decides he still wants to play World of Warcraft, so he buys a new account and starts over fresh. And since Jim's now starting from scratch, he decides he doesn't have much to lose, so he fires up his scripts and third party programs again.

Net result: Jim is still at it. If and when he gets caught again, he just buys another account, and continues to be an awful person.

However, if Jim only gets a temporary suspension, he knows he's getting his account back, so starting over from scratch sounds much less appealing. Jim likes his characters and wants to keep them, so he decides to just wait the suspension out. Once it ends, he really doesn't want to go through that whole ordeal again, so he decides not to risk botting again.

Net result: Jim is a decent guy who made some mistakes and learned from them. We're actually pretty okay with Jim now.

I'm obviously painting a rosy picture here (not everyone responds this way), but I'm just trying to illustrate why suspending accounts tends to result in fewer cheaters long-term than permabanning. Like I said, there's some really interesting psychological shenanigans involved (which are a bit above me, I'm afraid). That's my understanding of how all this works, though.

(Also, apologies to everyone named Jim who is not a filthy cheater. I'm sure you're all lovely.)"

[Snautz]

You're forgetting to include some very key points in this whole Jim saga.
1. Blizzard had an incentive to allow cheaters back: Money
2. I haven't played since MoP but blizz was notoriously bad at detecting and banning bots at least up untill MoP. like EMBARRASSINGLY bad.
With my second point in mind it would make some kind of sense for Jim to do a hail mary and try to get back what he lost, since he most likely had gained some sort of value from botting before he got caught.
A friend of mine got multiple accounts banned during MoP for botting, but he kept creating new accounts since he always managed to make up for the money lost by farming gold with the bots and selling it for real money.

Jim nor my friend was deranged criminals who was addicted to breaking rules, they simply weighed up their options and deemed the potential gain to be greater than the risk.

TL;DR Jim isn't really relevant to this.

On topic, I think this approach which revolves around banning the first unlucky people to get caught and letting them be an example to the community is a bit worrying, instead of just warning people in an announcement.
This ofc doesn't apply to gamebreaking bug abuses like the infinite node bug etc, those people deserve whats coming to them

[Lifealert]

A permaban for something so minor is unwarranted, especially against high profile members of the community. Duplicating gold is one thing, but farming tubers is another. Just as the staff unbanned Chinese wintraders (for really no logical reason) we must urge the staff to unban the nope members.

[Uzephi]

If these items are so "useless" why exploit them in the first place? Oh, right, another 700-900 healing that is separate of the potion CD... so it is to gain an unfair advantage, no?

So, how do you not think this is a bug? "Let's see, the only way for all of us to grab this item is to click it at the same time. If we don't it will act as normal." Sounds like a legit exploit to me.

Doesn't matter if it was in vanilla or not. Blizzard fixed it later down the line, albeit they didn't permaban anyone. But all of you trying to pass the buck saying it isn't known as an exploit. Can you and someone else gather the same herb, or does it disappear? Can two skinners skin the same mob and both get leather/scales? Mining nodes... well, they have to be hit a few times, so sometimes you both get a piece of the pie.

Just sit back and think. "We have to trick the server to both give us the item/buff. It wasn't designed for us to both grab it, but if we do it at exactly the same time, the server would duplicate the item."

I will say it again: If you think that is legit and not an exploit, then go ahead and keep this debate going.

[Mryul]

If these items are so "useless" why exploit them in the first place? Oh, right, another 700-900 healing that is separate of the potion CD... so it is to gain an unfair advantage, no?

So, how do you not think this is a bug? "Let's see, the only way for all of us to grab this item is to click it at the same time. If we don't it will act as normal." Sounds like a legit exploit to me.

Doesn't matter if it was in vanilla or not. Blizzard fixed it later down the line, albeit they didn't permaban anyone. But all of you trying to pass the buck saying it isn't known as an exploit. Can you and someone else gather the same herb, or does it disappear? Can two skinners skin the same mob and both get leather/scales? Mining nodes... well, they have to be hit a few times, so sometimes you both get a piece of the pie.

Just sit back and think. "We have to trick the server to both give us the item/buff. It wasn't designed for us to both grab it, but if we do it at exactly the same time, the server would duplicate the item."

I will say it again: If you think that is legit and not an exploit, then go ahead and keep this debate going.

You don't even need to "click it at the same time".. there is a grace period. You just need to click sometime soon after someone else did. It's not some theorycrafted exploit.

Also, what are you supposed to do when it hasn't spawned yet and you're waiting for it? /roll for it? lmao

The only people that call this an exploit are level 20 and have never been to felwood. There is nothing more weird in multiple people getting felwood flowers than multiple people getting Ony buff.

Are you going to tell people to please leave before you pop the Onyxia buff? No? Okay, debate settled then.

You have no way to not let other people take your Onyxia buff. We have no way to not let other people click our Songflower buff.

[Ravni]

The Nihilum world first KT kill had songflower on the entire raid (along with literally every other world buff/consume possible of course). Multi-buffing songflower was standard procedure for all the top guilds back then.

Here's another guild commenting in Sept 2006 about their pre-buffing before first KT kill:

"Ya, 2x 1% wipes...go and get every buff you can get Tongue well no onyxia or nef cuz the heads were already up..so we went 2 felwood ;p managed to get the whole raid buffed at the same songflower. Fly 2 ogrimmar get a couple of zanza's + zg buff hand out new titans too everyone. HS too lhc get the north tower buff + use all other pots so we go in straight away."

http://www.andraste-guilde.com/index.php?topic=3997.15

If you do some google searching on songflower you can quickly see that this was a very common practice. So according to the retards on this forum, the entire Nihilum guild should have been banned for SERIOUS EXPLOIT (which allowed them world first kill!).

[Mryul]

All that aside, Songflowers are literally designed in such a way that those that click it within 2-3 seconds after it spawns will get the buff.

You can't ban people for waiting for the same Songflower to spawn at their location. That defeats the mechanic of the game since you have no way of choosing who gets it. It's a first come first serve mechanic.

Like, are you going to ban people if a group of 10 people that don't know eachother don't /roll for the next Songflower buff that they are waiting 25 minutes for? They are obviously all going to click it when it spawns.

Okay.. let's say IF they DO decide to /roll for it and YOU WIN... And then somene takes it anyway.. Are you going to ban both people?

If you can't see how pants on head retarded that is I'm sorry for you.


A rule that outlaws multiple people taking a felwood flower DOESN'T WORK IN PRACTICE.

If you've ever been to Felwood for one of these flowers then you'd know how they work and why this rule simply doesn't work or make any sense.

If you for some reason still think it should be banable, then explain this situation:

10 people are waiting for a Songflower to spawn. How not to get banned? Thank you.


Now, nostalrius we love the server and the people running it. But a rule that outlaws multiple people looting the same felwood flower simply doesn't work in practice. It's a mandatory raid buff and it is outside of your control if other people click it together with you.

[Uzephi]

You don't even need to "click it at the same time".. there is a grace period. You just need to click sometime soon after someone else did. It's not some theorycrafted exploit.

Also, what are you supposed to do when it hasn't spawned yet and you're waiting for it? /roll for it? lmao

The only people that call this an exploit are level 20 and have never been to felwood.

Did the staff ban for Songflower? In any event... below link from ownedcore....

http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-o ... ryone.html

They nerfed it, however it's still exploitable, the new catch is you need to all click it at EXACTLY the same time.

This is hard you might think.. You can use vent/Teamspeak to count down OR Felwood gather http://www.curse-gaming.com/mod.php?addid=2446 has added a count down timer for you. /fwg timer

Hrm...

[Lifealert]

This is going to force hundreds of people into a precarious position. Either you'll have dozens of people camping each spawn, or people will continue to abuse this 'bug'.