Erroneous automatic ban of players
Hello,
You've recently kicked off a ban wave and flagged two of our locals as a false positive, which is pretty easy to verify because one of them hasn't even logged-in in months.
These players are:
2BDCy4D (multi-recursed)
alarsisu (recursed)
After looking around through our various communities, it appears this isn't isolated.
Post edited by jsylvis on
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if they are innocent as u say they should file a appeal for their ban to support.
Yep, that bell ringed around me too...
Some suggested IOs update, but thanks to Niantic's policies, impossible to know...
Yeah that helps. "After a thorough review" (that took all of 10 minutes and I doubt was actually done) the reply is they stand by their decision. Sound familiar? August 2019 anyone?
This has already been done. Unfortunately, the appeals personnel are impressively less useful than usual, having conducted a "thorough" investigation and closed the tickets within 15 and 5 minutes, respectively. (They didn't investigate it.)
I hope they can get some resolution! Not playing for months and then getting the email seems absurd to me!
As it did to alarsisu. His reaction on posting was "Achievement unlocked: get banned without playing at all."
This is very troubling to me. Did Niantic tweak something in an algorithm or did something go wrong with an existing one? How does a player get banned for not playing?! Come on, Niantic, do better than this!!
Should the rest of us worry about our accounts being banned at any time as well? And without the chance at a fair appeal?!? Certainly makes the work I'm putting in for medals seem a little less appealing.
(Accidental bans don't scare me as much as the lack of a true appeal process. That's just bogus on every level!)
Erroneous (false-positive) bans have a rich history, especially when it comes to OS upgrades and privacy controls.
Every time, it's taken a lot of noise to get someone to actually look into it.
Hell, we had players get banned on an Android beta just before an anomaly, appeal it with no success, then appeal it again after Niantic acknowledged the mistake and the appeal went through.
So, the appeal process being a joke also has a pretty rich history.
Edit: Clarified Accidental -> Erroneous - the bans were very much not accidental, they just hit some invalid targets.
This is just a slap in the face. We continually have to push bots through TRs for accounts that transcend time and space, jumping countries in hours, going across the gulf. We (agents) have to take time and either roll our dice with a TR or answer 20 questions with a robotic bot and hope we get a ban. Which may not even work because we can't even tell if a profile is banned half the time due to whatever messed up cache layer exists.
This reminds of August 2019 (or whenever) when another strange ban wave happened. Did it touch bots? Not the ones that affect my day to day, but instead banned a couple of spouses and child accounts.
Why is this so hard? I swear we had illicit tools years ago that could weigh an account based on a multitude of reasons and come up with damn near 100% accuracy of bot or not. How can accounts claim the same portal 500 times without a single destroy reso in comms? https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/12100/obvious-cheat-how-can-this-not-be-detected#latest
I don't even know what to say anymore. I'm rambling and mad. I want real spoofers banned before they do an action. I want illicit actions reversed. I want bafs to stay without piece of **** bots killing them while we have a legit agent in route. This vague ban-wave does nothing but continue to degrade my trust in Niantic.
A capsule full of baconomaly media was lost here. This is the part the multiple-recursed, MD POC, anomaly zealot, and creator-of-Baconomaly agent is most annoyed with. These aren't exactly casual players with low level accounts we're talking about here.
Anyway have a slice of bacon in remembrance of the lost media.
"This vague ban-wave does nothing but continue to degrade my trust in Niantic."
I'm L16 and have been here not since the beginning, but since the early days. I completely agree.
I get that these days, Ingress isn't exactly Niantic's focus, but they seem dead-set on making it harder and harder for players to care, what few of us remain anyway.
RachelLara:
“I received an email that my account was banned this morning. I haven’t played or logged in for well over a year. The applications aren’t even installed on my phone, just the offloaded icons for the beta and the old scanner. My account hasn’t been compromised so this is clearly in error. “
One of my locals was banned this morning as well and I def believe it's a false-positive. Hoping her appeal goes through.
ETA: agent in question is gitschroma. iOS version 13.7
@NianticBrian can u confirm this issue where legit players have their accounts terminated for no reason?
I've just helped another agent to write her ban appeal. I've asking her and I did not see anything ilegal. How many of you have an iOS and have been banned? This agent had the last version and iOS 13.7
The two agents in my post were both Android, though one did recently do updates on a Note phone.
Seeing that inactive agents have got caught in a wave of bans,it just looks really bad and I hope Niantic addresses this. People need to use the gaming service to violate the Terms of Service. Or are we now going to start seeing bans of agents because they are not active enough? :(
My take is that, based on the relative inactivity of most the agents in question, it's some sort of anti-backpacking measure gone wrong... but that is the takeaway, yes.
We have several players here in Copenhagen that got similar zero warning ban hammers this morning! There is something really strange going on. So much for any 3 strike warning system...
@Neku69 can you clarify this? I'd say that wasn't the case for the agent you mentioned.
Oh. 3 strike system is not for everything. That is clearly stated.
It's possible. I hope we hear soon from Niantic to actually know what is happening.
It is absolutely inexcusable that we have to deal with this type of banwave at least once per year.
It is even more inexcusable that 5 minutes counts as a "thorough review".
I missed this thread and created one in the Support and Feedback category: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/12144/multiple-agents-banned-unexpectedly-at-the-same-time#latest
Anyway, that's three more agents banned this morning.
She told her account was old and she stopped playing for years. Then, this year she started to play again without any problems until now
Niantic has in the past, banned accounts that appear to be mules, when they have a relationship to a given banned spoofer's device.
Have either of the accounts ever:
Given the sheer scope of this as illustrated in this thread, I highly doubt that's what's going on.
To the best of my knowledge, neither player has done any of those things, though one of them does have at least one backup phone.
There have been other times when people claimed "vast waves of bans". AFAIK only one of them, relating to a bug in a handset by Huawei, has ever been actually not people caught cheating.
"The sheer scope of this" so far has been less than 20 accounts from what we've seen. The scope here is overestimated.
This is false.