We've recently taken action on accounts that have violated our Terms of Service based on ongoing internal investigations aimed at promoting fair gameplay. An update will be shared next week on the impact of the actions. In the meantime, if you believe your account has been terminated in error and you haven't already, please submit an appeal via the Ingress Help Center.
@NianticBrian I can certainly understand why Niantic might want to provide minimal information up front about these sorts actions, but I would also note that hearing about these sorts of waves generates a lot of uncertainty in the broader community. Hopefully, the ban hammer was wielded accurately, but what the average user sees is a lot of folks saying that they're banned for unknown reasons (and others in the community vouching that they don't know why said users would be banned, either). Not great for collective morale. Giving an update to the community a week or so later is good, but that gives a lot of time for the rumor mill to run unchecked. In light of that, I would venture to suggest that, despite the tradeoffs involved to OpSec (plus endless denials from the guilty), there might be virtue to consider providing a bit more information to those banned and to their communities at the time (for purposes of rumor suppression). Just a suggestion....
Having worked in large organisations that have had whole engineering teams focused on tackling abuse, I can honestly say it's an arms race…
There are two approaches (skermishing and analytical strategic battles). The reporting system (e.g. with trusted reviewers) is very much dealing on a skermishing level whereas Brian's update suggests that Niantic have been doing a detailed analysis of behaviour that breaks TOS. That work takes time and the behaviours "codified" and verified.
Once a specific behaviour is detectable, future infractions can be dealt with quickly. Organisations often backdate the detection (if they have data available) and take action on past infractions too.
I suspect that given the current wave of bans, the latter has happened.
One last thing, the #1 rule of dealing with platform abuse is to not give out any information about why a ban was instated. If the TOS-violating behaviour was a result of a specific tool being used, behaviour being done, the onus is on the userplayer to review their actions / behaviours for "legality issues". If the exact reason is given by the platform, the player / tool developers may just tweak their behaviour to avoid detection as opposed to stopping the TOS-violating behaviour. Just becomes a tit-for-tat battle which sucks up time and money for both parties.
Having worked in large organisations that have had whole engineering teams focused on tackling abuse, I can honestly say it's an arms race…
There are two approaches (skermishing and analytical strategic battles). The reporting system (e.g. with trusted reviewers) is very much dealing on a skermishing level whereas Brian's update suggests that Niantic have been doing a detailed analysis of behaviour that breaks TOS. That work takes time and the behaviours "codified" and verified.
Once a specific behaviour is detectable, future infractions can be dealt with quickly. Organisations often backdate the detection (if they have data available) and take action on past infractions too.
I suspect that given the current wave of bans, the latter has happened.
One last thing, the # 1 rule of dealing with platform abuse is to not give out any information about why a ban was instated. If the TOS-violating behaviour was a result of a specific tool being used, behaviour being done, the onus is on the userplayer to review their actions / behaviours for "legality issues". If the exact reason is given by the platform, the player / tool developers may just tweak their behaviour to avoid detection as opposed to stopping the TOS-violating behaviour. Just becomes a tit-for-tat battle which sucks up time and money for both parties.
I have been told it is likely Brian Rose, since he made a similar message on Reddit. I am excited about Brian Rose coming back. I just hope Ingress can make it through the next couple of months so we can see some of his work.
I haven't seen a single successful appeal, which is sad. And it makes me afraid for my own account, given my international travel recently (musical sim cards and devices for sure...traversing eight countries and still having to have my regular phone number for 2FA makes for an interesting situation).
Lol, we already know the impact; we play the game every day and we also answer the questions, support the players, organize the meetups...
We don't need a statement on the impact. If these players are banned and don't understand what they did wrong, they aren't coming back. In the case of our community it's an older dad of a player. In the case of the local ENL, it's a newer family of three and a newer agent who is father of a young agent.
@NianticBrian Then why does no one ever tell you what you actually did wrong?! The support page just says thast your ban is final and permanent, how useless can it be??? How in the world are we supposed to know what went wrong!?
I mean, like @sonicrx said, it really makes us afraid if we're getting a banhammer again. Its still a lot of hard work you guys are destroying here!
Its the same for the forum, I have a warning on the forum, but why?! What happened?! No one tells you. That's so great about NIA. They dont give you any info what-so-ever :)
It's a bit of a tightrope act to walk that line of sharing information that bad actors will use to try and decipher what specific signals we're using, then drop below that signal. But like many people have shared here, I hear you that there's room for improvement of what and how we communicate, and I want to help our team strike the right balance.
I recently re-joined Niantic and the Ingress team, so still ramping up on how forum flair works but I think this was added retroactively after I originally replied. My name is Brian Rose, and I was part of the original team in 2012 back when we were Niantic Labs@Google.
@NianticBrian you absolutely terminated “MasterTurts” in error. I had to spend the last 10 minutes explaining how to forward an email to her. She simply does not have the basic technical skills to do anything you have accused her of. Niantic screwed up, and now you need to fix it. Or I will organize a boycott.
No offense but people with limited technical skills are also the most likely people to be tricked into clicking links from illegal item shops and other stuff that might be in violation.
Not in this user’s case. The user is very occasional / casual and pretty much only plays with me, our friends and her husband. She would have no motivation to buy gear, and as she is surrounded by people who are in community moderator or mentoring positions she would have been warned off clicking any links in COMM. No, the user absolutely did nothing to deserve a ban, Niantic is 100% wrong.
I don't buy that. If you're guilty, you know what you've done and Niantic saying "it's for falsifying your location" is not going to add anything to help you avoid a rightful ban next time. Whereas if you are innocent, the complete silence from Niantic about what you're accused of leaves you no way to defend yourself.
If you're a cheat-tool author, the very fact that Niantic has banned you is enough incentive to tweak the tool for next time.
The only account you can vouch for 100% is your own. You don't know what this agent does with her account, nor would I think she would disclose any wrongdoing anyway.
If she believes her account termination was unjust, then she should log an appeal.
@Azhreia that is unhelpful. We have appealed repeatedly. Niantic will not budge, and they are wrong. If she was cheating, then Niantic might as well ban me too. I cannot possibly fathom the user violating TOS. Someone at Niantic is too vain or stubborn to admit they effed up.
Thank you for engaging on this topic. The problem with the current ban process is that it is designed in a way that is impossible to appeal. No information is given for the reason and no matter how much information is provided as part of the appeal it will never be enough, because no where does it say way is needed to appeal.
Imagine you are driving down the road and get pulled over. The policeman takes your drivers license and cuts it up. They tell you you broke a road rule and refer you to the corpus of legislation. Can't tell you what rule specifically "for privacy reasons". But you are welcome to appeal this at to him right now and present evidence you never broke a road rule. Otherwise you can go to the DMV and apply for a new license?
This this process sound fair, transparent or reasonable?
Niantic beeing completely mute to people that get banned that have a fully developed agent profile, have a long standing in-game history like anomaly participation, purchases (frackers, character badges) and community involement I think breaks more then it fixes. Even if that did give info to bad actors, which I don't really think will be the case.
People have been reinstated before so obviously the system isn't flawless. There has to be some iota of a thing to hold on to to retort if you really didn't do anything wrong. Currently all you can essentially say is: this ban is incorrect, check again. I totally get that to be infuriating after countless hours/days/months/years of time invested in this game and some freak drift or something get's you booted right out.
(Since android uses wifi to asist in mapping location this is a very real thing. I recently moved houses, but i've spawned on my old address about 5 km away on more then one occation opening ingress on for example the toilet with wifi enabled. This is because Google thinks my router is somewhere else. Presumably this could trigger a ban. But it'd be very defensable as I can actually prove having moved.)
@Pongolyn , yes and no. Niantic could easily provide the data and still an agent could just claim they were banned unjustly. Only way that would be avoided is to make it public and no one is willing for that to happen.
This is directed at @NianticBrian or any other agent. I am definitely worried about these bans. A fellow agent I would swap gear with was just banned. So now I have to worry about being banned because of swapping gear?! I mean I haven't spoken to him about it but now I'm wondering. Can I report him to you guys so I don't have to worry?!
No, I'd be completely willing for that to happen. It isn't some wildly novel idea; many game companies are perfectly willing to speak publicly about why people were banned. You can make it public without talking about specific detection methods as well. (I believe that BRose is sincere when he worries about giving away too much signal, I just think they're drawing the line in the wrong place.)
Here's Blizzard saying that they banned people for botting. No details, but this is so much better than just banning a wave of people with no indication whatsoever of the reason.
Which results in threads like this, where people complain about bans but everyone can see exactly what's going on. You can't just sweep behavior under the rug when the specific reasons for the ban are available.
Comments
Other agent receive reply ticket and Niantics confirm the ban.
Is impossible, many agent are respect tos and don't cheat or use multiaccount.
If possible is relation with share account Pokémon ? Many player share account for raid or exchange Pokémon.
We've recently taken action on accounts that have violated our Terms of Service based on ongoing internal investigations aimed at promoting fair gameplay. An update will be shared next week on the impact of the actions. In the meantime, if you believe your account has been terminated in error and you haven't already, please submit an appeal via the Ingress Help Center.
@NianticBrian I can certainly understand why Niantic might want to provide minimal information up front about these sorts actions, but I would also note that hearing about these sorts of waves generates a lot of uncertainty in the broader community. Hopefully, the ban hammer was wielded accurately, but what the average user sees is a lot of folks saying that they're banned for unknown reasons (and others in the community vouching that they don't know why said users would be banned, either). Not great for collective morale. Giving an update to the community a week or so later is good, but that gives a lot of time for the rumor mill to run unchecked. In light of that, I would venture to suggest that, despite the tradeoffs involved to OpSec (plus endless denials from the guilty), there might be virtue to consider providing a bit more information to those banned and to their communities at the time (for purposes of rumor suppression). Just a suggestion....
Are you really a Niantic employee? Why don't you have Niantic "flair" in the forum/community?
Having worked in large organisations that have had whole engineering teams focused on tackling abuse, I can honestly say it's an arms race…
There are two approaches (skermishing and analytical strategic battles). The reporting system (e.g. with trusted reviewers) is very much dealing on a skermishing level whereas Brian's update suggests that Niantic have been doing a detailed analysis of behaviour that breaks TOS. That work takes time and the behaviours "codified" and verified.
Once a specific behaviour is detectable, future infractions can be dealt with quickly. Organisations often backdate the detection (if they have data available) and take action on past infractions too.
I suspect that given the current wave of bans, the latter has happened.
One last thing, the #1 rule of dealing with platform abuse is to not give out any information about why a ban was instated. If the TOS-violating behaviour was a result of a specific tool being used, behaviour being done, the onus is on the userplayer to review their actions / behaviours for "legality issues". If the exact reason is given by the platform, the player / tool developers may just tweak their behaviour to avoid detection as opposed to stopping the TOS-violating behaviour. Just becomes a tit-for-tat battle which sucks up time and money for both parties.
Having worked in large organisations that have had whole engineering teams focused on tackling abuse, I can honestly say it's an arms race…
There are two approaches (skermishing and analytical strategic battles). The reporting system (e.g. with trusted reviewers) is very much dealing on a skermishing level whereas Brian's update suggests that Niantic have been doing a detailed analysis of behaviour that breaks TOS. That work takes time and the behaviours "codified" and verified.
Once a specific behaviour is detectable, future infractions can be dealt with quickly. Organisations often backdate the detection (if they have data available) and take action on past infractions too.
I suspect that given the current wave of bans, the latter has happened.
One last thing, the # 1 rule of dealing with platform abuse is to not give out any information about why a ban was instated. If the TOS-violating behaviour was a result of a specific tool being used, behaviour being done, the onus is on the userplayer to review their actions / behaviours for "legality issues". If the exact reason is given by the platform, the player / tool developers may just tweak their behaviour to avoid detection as opposed to stopping the TOS-violating behaviour. Just becomes a tit-for-tat battle which sucks up time and money for both parties.
This was corrected.
I have been told it is likely Brian Rose, since he made a similar message on Reddit. I am excited about Brian Rose coming back. I just hope Ingress can make it through the next couple of months so we can see some of his work.
I haven't seen a single successful appeal, which is sad. And it makes me afraid for my own account, given my international travel recently (musical sim cards and devices for sure...traversing eight countries and still having to have my regular phone number for 2FA makes for an interesting situation).
Lol, we already know the impact; we play the game every day and we also answer the questions, support the players, organize the meetups...
We don't need a statement on the impact. If these players are banned and don't understand what they did wrong, they aren't coming back. In the case of our community it's an older dad of a player. In the case of the local ENL, it's a newer family of three and a newer agent who is father of a young agent.
Bye, new players! Enjoyed your experience?
@NianticBrian Then why does no one ever tell you what you actually did wrong?! The support page just says thast your ban is final and permanent, how useless can it be??? How in the world are we supposed to know what went wrong!?
I mean, like @sonicrx said, it really makes us afraid if we're getting a banhammer again. Its still a lot of hard work you guys are destroying here!
Its the same for the forum, I have a warning on the forum, but why?! What happened?! No one tells you. That's so great about NIA. They dont give you any info what-so-ever :)
It's a bit of a tightrope act to walk that line of sharing information that bad actors will use to try and decipher what specific signals we're using, then drop below that signal. But like many people have shared here, I hear you that there's room for improvement of what and how we communicate, and I want to help our team strike the right balance.
I recently re-joined Niantic and the Ingress team, so still ramping up on how forum flair works but I think this was added retroactively after I originally replied. My name is Brian Rose, and I was part of the original team in 2012 back when we were Niantic Labs@Google.
@NianticBrian Exactly, as hitting someone right in the face is not always the right response. If you know what I mean 😜
@NianticBrian you absolutely terminated “MasterTurts” in error. I had to spend the last 10 minutes explaining how to forward an email to her. She simply does not have the basic technical skills to do anything you have accused her of. Niantic screwed up, and now you need to fix it. Or I will organize a boycott.
@und1sk0
No offense but people with limited technical skills are also the most likely people to be tricked into clicking links from illegal item shops and other stuff that might be in violation.
Not in this user’s case. The user is very occasional / casual and pretty much only plays with me, our friends and her husband. She would have no motivation to buy gear, and as she is surrounded by people who are in community moderator or mentoring positions she would have been warned off clicking any links in COMM. No, the user absolutely did nothing to deserve a ban, Niantic is 100% wrong.
I don't buy that. If you're guilty, you know what you've done and Niantic saying "it's for falsifying your location" is not going to add anything to help you avoid a rightful ban next time. Whereas if you are innocent, the complete silence from Niantic about what you're accused of leaves you no way to defend yourself.
If you're a cheat-tool author, the very fact that Niantic has banned you is enough incentive to tweak the tool for next time.
The only account you can vouch for 100% is your own. You don't know what this agent does with her account, nor would I think she would disclose any wrongdoing anyway.
If she believes her account termination was unjust, then she should log an appeal.
missed you buddy. welcome back.
@Azhreia that is unhelpful. We have appealed repeatedly. Niantic will not budge, and they are wrong. If she was cheating, then Niantic might as well ban me too. I cannot possibly fathom the user violating TOS. Someone at Niantic is too vain or stubborn to admit they effed up.
Thank you for engaging on this topic. The problem with the current ban process is that it is designed in a way that is impossible to appeal. No information is given for the reason and no matter how much information is provided as part of the appeal it will never be enough, because no where does it say way is needed to appeal.
Imagine you are driving down the road and get pulled over. The policeman takes your drivers license and cuts it up. They tell you you broke a road rule and refer you to the corpus of legislation. Can't tell you what rule specifically "for privacy reasons". But you are welcome to appeal this at to him right now and present evidence you never broke a road rule. Otherwise you can go to the DMV and apply for a new license?
This this process sound fair, transparent or reasonable?
Thank you for the reversal.
Niantic beeing completely mute to people that get banned that have a fully developed agent profile, have a long standing in-game history like anomaly participation, purchases (frackers, character badges) and community involement I think breaks more then it fixes. Even if that did give info to bad actors, which I don't really think will be the case.
People have been reinstated before so obviously the system isn't flawless. There has to be some iota of a thing to hold on to to retort if you really didn't do anything wrong. Currently all you can essentially say is: this ban is incorrect, check again. I totally get that to be infuriating after countless hours/days/months/years of time invested in this game and some freak drift or something get's you booted right out.
(Since android uses wifi to asist in mapping location this is a very real thing. I recently moved houses, but i've spawned on my old address about 5 km away on more then one occation opening ingress on for example the toilet with wifi enabled. This is because Google thinks my router is somewhere else. Presumably this could trigger a ban. But it'd be very defensable as I can actually prove having moved.)
My appeal took about 12 hours and was approved.
One effect of refusing to disclose to a user why they were banned is that it encourages everyone to claim they were banned unjustly.
@Pongolyn , yes and no. Niantic could easily provide the data and still an agent could just claim they were banned unjustly. Only way that would be avoided is to make it public and no one is willing for that to happen.
This is directed at @NianticBrian or any other agent. I am definitely worried about these bans. A fellow agent I would swap gear with was just banned. So now I have to worry about being banned because of swapping gear?! I mean I haven't spoken to him about it but now I'm wondering. Can I report him to you guys so I don't have to worry?!
No, I'd be completely willing for that to happen. It isn't some wildly novel idea; many game companies are perfectly willing to speak publicly about why people were banned. You can make it public without talking about specific detection methods as well. (I believe that BRose is sincere when he worries about giving away too much signal, I just think they're drawing the line in the wrong place.)
Here's Blizzard saying that they banned people for botting. No details, but this is so much better than just banning a wave of people with no indication whatsoever of the reason.
Here's Blizzard getting into some details.
Here's Riot's warning card system. It's similar to the three strike system we're going to see soon, but it explains why you're getting a warning.
Which results in threads like this, where people complain about bans but everyone can see exactly what's going on. You can't just sweep behavior under the rug when the specific reasons for the ban are available.