Remember how during the Dark XM event we had to capture 400,000 additional portals over the baseline and no one thought it would happen? I guarantee that the majority of the 22,000 bans were bots detected during this event.
Well that's a whole lot of arm waving and supposition. I know as a faction that Resistance pushed it hard. I think unless you want to lay out all your proof, minimising the work of good people on an event offers nothing to the game.
I'm glad at least one person at Niantic recognizes the need for a balance between transparency and effective enforcement. Indeed, some balance is needed, because the current system seems to be fueling FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) in the player community.
It would probably be impractical to offer full transparency or to protect the rights of the accused to the same standard we expect of a criminal justice system. OK, so we players don't have any right to confront our accusers, review or challenge the evidence against us, retain legal representation, or receive a speedy trial by peers. We can live that way, but could we at least be given some hint about what we allegedly did wrong and maybe when or where or how or with whom we did it?
Look up the definition of a "police state". Think about what it's like to live in one. Your friends, neighbors, and coworkers sometimes disappear without explanation. Occasionally, they reappear with stories about being taken in for questioning and suddenly released, with no explanation or apology, only a stern warning not to do it again. In such an atmosphere, you live in fear, wondering who's next and what you can do to protect your family from being among the next citizens to disappear.
Consider this hypothetical situation: A certain dirty rotten spammer creates 100 shady accounts and has them all played by location-spoofing bots. Niantic undertakes an enforcement action that bans 95 of those accounts, along with another 5 users who did nothing wrong. Following the bans, the spammer still has 5 active accounts, but the player community has lost 5 people. Niantic, however, says their ban campaign was 95% accurate and 95% effective. Do you agree with that statistic?
My whole family plays Ingress -- has for years. Last year for my birthday, we all went to an anomaly together. We don't cheat or spoof or even share phones. Recently, for undisclosed reasons, my wife and son got banned. After 6 weeks and several appeals, the wife was reinstated, still at Level 16 with her inventory intact. Now that we're back to playing sometimes, the unexplained ban and the forced sabbatical have lowered our enthusiasm for the game. Our teenage son shrugged off his ban and decided to stop playing rather than bothering with appeals.
The expansion of the Vanguard program sounds like a positive step, as Niantic does need to be in better touch with its player community. However, I was disappointed to read in the requirements that any player who has ever been banned is disqualified from being a Vanguard. Including a player or two that had been wrongfully banned would strengthen the Vanguards and send a clear signal that Niantic is committed to addressing the harm caused by unjust accusations and arbitrary enforcement.
You are absolutely right. You could also add that those 5 falsely banned accounts could make up 10-20% of an active community in a small city, and the declining players situation is a vicious circle - fewer players means less teamwork, means less incentive for everyone to play.
As example, we saw 4 new ENL players banned locally, 1 reinstated, others seem to have started new accounts. No change overall in terms of bot effects (maybe no one here was actually using bots). But ENL could have lost equivalent to maybe 10% of their active player base, and Niantic lost some amount of goodwill from their balance sheet.
So in terms of perceived effects to players, not terribly positive. If players weren't seeing a bot problem, was it really even happening here?
I am going to respectfully disagree on this. I was banned and was asked to provide evidence of no wrong doing. At the time I was banned I was traveling and I travel often. So I assumed I have been banned for location falsification. I went through my google maps history and collected all the airline and train tickets for the past year along with hotel receipts to prove I was where I played. Then I sent in an appeal with this details. This took a good 20 hours.
This is problem number one. Players do know why they have been banned so they will spend significant amount of time preparing the wrong defence and evidence. It looks me a few months to level up my account so I thought 20 hour investment worthwhile.
But now I have been told I am a gear seller or buyer. Last I played ingress realistically was at Casandra Prime anomaly in San Diageo. This was July 2018. This is also the last time I did a serious gear exchange as I was low in viruses but had many US and XMP. I had a motor vehicle accident soon after and has not played much since. So If I had suspect VR gear it has been there since July 2018.
Since July 2018 I have may be hacked a portal 150 times in total mostly at organized beer & farm events. I seriously doubt 150 hacks a year is the profile of a gear farmer or a bot. I have almost always given away some of the gear I farmed to the players who farmed with me in return for power cubes. I have not really picked up any VR gear since July 2018. I had a full set of key lockers with keys farmed by me and others recharging portals.
But there is no way to prove I did not buy gear. It is impossible to prove a negative and I have no intention of making any more of a financial, time or emotional investment with Niantic or any of their games. At least NIA Ops can have the curtesy of sending a reply outlining the reasons for the ban after some one spends hours gathering information to appeal the ban, but I seriously doubt it.
@AeroPlaneJelly I too doubt about your profile being picked as that. I myself have a serious massification of VR stuff, mostly because I'm used to not use it except for specific situations and almost all of it makes it to events, piling up dust in my inventory in the meantime.
I've also exchanged a significant amount of them, almost every time I am the giver, though cuantities are not too high (50 items at most, maybe?).
Pretty much all those items have been hacked by me, one by one.
I've come to think that "unintended" bans were actually intended perhaps to run a test on the appealing system?
About that las bit of the courtesy mail, yes, that would just be nice, but we all know is not possible: the more info Niantic gives away, the harder to catch become cheaters.
I'd say you should keep on trying to appeal, but you look a bit fed up, as many others are. Cheer up!
Hmm, @GoblinGranate , I must respectfully disagree. "We all know it is not possible" for Niantic to give players who are accused of wrongdoing at least a general clue as to the type of violation they are being punished for? No, actually, we don't know that.
One important element, and often the main goal, of rule enforcement is to improve behavior. Anyone who has tried to train a puppy knows how important it is to communicate to the animal what specific behavior is being rewarded or punished. "Sit!" At the moment the dog sits, you give a treat, or verbal praise, or make a noise (such as using a clicker). In Ingress we have "Medal Earned" notifications that appear at the very moment we do something good, such as capturing our 5000th unique portal. When the puppy does something bad, such as chew up your slippers, it doesn't do any good to yell or banish the animal to an empty room unless you somehow communicate the reason for the punishment (rub his nose in the chewed slippers). You don't have to reveal the location of the hidden camera that allowed you to record the slipper chewing, but you do need to indicate what the problem was. Otherwise, the punishment is meaningless. The dog just thinks you're mean.
If Niantic is trying to train us to be better players, their punishments should indicate what we did wrong -- not necessarily how they caught us, but what we did. Presently, banned players are left to spend weeks or months wondering, "What did I do?"
As I mentioned before, my wife and son got banned for undisclosed reasons. Feeling encouraged by this discussion and other recent posts here on the Community pages, I asked my teenage son yesterday to put in an appeal. He did, and 25 minutes later received the following response:
After a thorough review, we have concluded that your account has violated the Ingress Terms of Service and Ingress Community Guidelines. It’s our policy not to publicly discuss the specifics of an individual incident or comment on internal mechanisms which indicate cheating. Some common reasons for termination include, but are not limited to:
* Using modified or unofficial software
* Using tools or techniques to alter or falsify your location
* Selling or trading accounts
* Using multiple accounts
Our decision to terminate this account is final. We are maintaining strict policies against cheating in an effort to keep gameplay fair. Thank you for understanding.
We appreciate that you would like to continue to play Ingress and are welcome to play using a new account; as long as you play fairly, and follow the Ingress Terms of Service and the Community Guidelines.
In this case, he hasn't knowingly done any of those things and hasn't even been an active player for the past several months, only occasionally opening his scanner to bump a portal when requested by a more-active family member. Maybe he inadvertently picked up some previously-sold gear during the anomaly last year, which was the last time he seriously played? Anyway, the response from Niantic raises several questions:
How thorough a review could they possibly have done in 25 minutes? Are the appeals meaningful?
Would the outcome be different if the accused player were allowed to present evidence, such as travel receipts, testimonials, or photos showing he's a unique human player and really was at the location(s) in question?
When Niantic does realize that a ban was made in error, what steps (if any) do they take to make amends to the impacted player?
What does it mean when they say he's welcome to play using a new account? How welcome could he be when they locked his account for unknown reasons? Why would he want to create a new one at this point? If they truly think he cheated, why would they want him to?
Is the ban really final? If someone here has the authority to review the decision, please do. It seems strange for a "final" decision to come so quickly and with no dialog or opportunity to present any type of relevant evidence or explanation.
Does this approach to enforcement result in improved player behavior? It clearly results in some players getting annoyed and quitting the game, which may be OK from Niantic's perspective if they truly believe those players are cheaters. But does heavy-handed punishment with no indication of the reason actually improve anyone's behavior?
What gets me about Niantic's stance on trying to hide everything is that the only people they actually harm are those who are playing legit. The cheaters know they're cheating, the method of detection doesn't actually matter, they're going to keep doing it.
The only thing Niantic's gaining from not telling people more information is a greater distrust of the company and the products they publish. I wouldn't suggest anyone new start playing any of Niantic's games at this point, because they seemingly ban at random for (at the best) vague reasons, and will invite you to start up a new account to waste more time with another possible ban (because if you don't know what you did wrong, chances are you'll keep doing it without realizing it).
It ends up benefitting the cheaters, ironically, since they already know the boundaries they can push up to, and how to get away with it for long enough to cause chaos. The legit players might come back with a new account occasionally, but you treat them like that, and they'll give you bad word of mouth.
Now, if Niantic was more open, and transmitted more information to us, I think we could better self police. More people, having a better understanding of what the actual rules are, would make the real bad actors stand out more.
As it is now, the appeal process, and by extension, Niantic's support system, continues to be a huge joke, and it's best use is to be pointed at as an example of exactly how not to treat your customers and community.
@MyTHstery I didn't mean to say that this is the best way for Niantic to communicate with playerbase and I agree with you about dogs (and people), but I stand by my statement: the more info Niantic gives away, the harder will cheaters become to catch.
But, now that I've read that 25 min mail you pasted, I'd say they could perhaps reduce that list of possible reasos.
Also, I believe you can ignore the multiaccount one, but again, that is my experience.
I’ve seen this in my area, Reported it and nothing ever gets fixed but this is some crazy cheating stuff and it needs to be looked at by the people at Niantic that code the softwarez to stop these one stop shops that do all the cheating for you as I’ve seen several people have these types of bots associated with their portals!! http://www.forum.ganess.eu/portal.php
Comments
Let's do the math, 8k banned users were utilizing a spoof plugin so they woud have gear to play daily 👍🛑 these bans were legit
Make that 22k accounts, not 8k apparently.
https://nianticlabs.com/blog/cheatingupdate-081419/
And yet, it still seems like spoofing hasn't slowed down one bit. I'm not sure what to make of all this.
Depending on where you are. Where I am spoofers are rampant. Living in a high profile does that, and makes me groan.
About a hundred from 22,000 reinstatements. Ok.., but still the perception gap is lacking.
Remember how during the Dark XM event we had to capture 400,000 additional portals over the baseline and no one thought it would happen? I guarantee that the majority of the 22,000 bans were bots detected during this event.
Well that's a whole lot of arm waving and supposition. I know as a faction that Resistance pushed it hard. I think unless you want to lay out all your proof, minimising the work of good people on an event offers nothing to the game.
This is highly unlikely since that was a capture event and captures are not invisible to normal players. Most bots act silently.
I'm glad at least one person at Niantic recognizes the need for a balance between transparency and effective enforcement. Indeed, some balance is needed, because the current system seems to be fueling FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) in the player community.
It would probably be impractical to offer full transparency or to protect the rights of the accused to the same standard we expect of a criminal justice system. OK, so we players don't have any right to confront our accusers, review or challenge the evidence against us, retain legal representation, or receive a speedy trial by peers. We can live that way, but could we at least be given some hint about what we allegedly did wrong and maybe when or where or how or with whom we did it?
Look up the definition of a "police state". Think about what it's like to live in one. Your friends, neighbors, and coworkers sometimes disappear without explanation. Occasionally, they reappear with stories about being taken in for questioning and suddenly released, with no explanation or apology, only a stern warning not to do it again. In such an atmosphere, you live in fear, wondering who's next and what you can do to protect your family from being among the next citizens to disappear.
Consider this hypothetical situation: A certain dirty rotten spammer creates 100 shady accounts and has them all played by location-spoofing bots. Niantic undertakes an enforcement action that bans 95 of those accounts, along with another 5 users who did nothing wrong. Following the bans, the spammer still has 5 active accounts, but the player community has lost 5 people. Niantic, however, says their ban campaign was 95% accurate and 95% effective. Do you agree with that statistic?
My whole family plays Ingress -- has for years. Last year for my birthday, we all went to an anomaly together. We don't cheat or spoof or even share phones. Recently, for undisclosed reasons, my wife and son got banned. After 6 weeks and several appeals, the wife was reinstated, still at Level 16 with her inventory intact. Now that we're back to playing sometimes, the unexplained ban and the forced sabbatical have lowered our enthusiasm for the game. Our teenage son shrugged off his ban and decided to stop playing rather than bothering with appeals.
The expansion of the Vanguard program sounds like a positive step, as Niantic does need to be in better touch with its player community. However, I was disappointed to read in the requirements that any player who has ever been banned is disqualified from being a Vanguard. Including a player or two that had been wrongfully banned would strengthen the Vanguards and send a clear signal that Niantic is committed to addressing the harm caused by unjust accusations and arbitrary enforcement.
You are absolutely right. You could also add that those 5 falsely banned accounts could make up 10-20% of an active community in a small city, and the declining players situation is a vicious circle - fewer players means less teamwork, means less incentive for everyone to play.
As example, we saw 4 new ENL players banned locally, 1 reinstated, others seem to have started new accounts. No change overall in terms of bot effects (maybe no one here was actually using bots). But ENL could have lost equivalent to maybe 10% of their active player base, and Niantic lost some amount of goodwill from their balance sheet.
So in terms of perceived effects to players, not terribly positive. If players weren't seeing a bot problem, was it really even happening here?
I am going to respectfully disagree on this. I was banned and was asked to provide evidence of no wrong doing. At the time I was banned I was traveling and I travel often. So I assumed I have been banned for location falsification. I went through my google maps history and collected all the airline and train tickets for the past year along with hotel receipts to prove I was where I played. Then I sent in an appeal with this details. This took a good 20 hours.
This is problem number one. Players do know why they have been banned so they will spend significant amount of time preparing the wrong defence and evidence. It looks me a few months to level up my account so I thought 20 hour investment worthwhile.
But now I have been told I am a gear seller or buyer. Last I played ingress realistically was at Casandra Prime anomaly in San Diageo. This was July 2018. This is also the last time I did a serious gear exchange as I was low in viruses but had many US and XMP. I had a motor vehicle accident soon after and has not played much since. So If I had suspect VR gear it has been there since July 2018.
Since July 2018 I have may be hacked a portal 150 times in total mostly at organized beer & farm events. I seriously doubt 150 hacks a year is the profile of a gear farmer or a bot. I have almost always given away some of the gear I farmed to the players who farmed with me in return for power cubes. I have not really picked up any VR gear since July 2018. I had a full set of key lockers with keys farmed by me and others recharging portals.
But there is no way to prove I did not buy gear. It is impossible to prove a negative and I have no intention of making any more of a financial, time or emotional investment with Niantic or any of their games. At least NIA Ops can have the curtesy of sending a reply outlining the reasons for the ban after some one spends hours gathering information to appeal the ban, but I seriously doubt it.
@AeroPlaneJelly I too doubt about your profile being picked as that. I myself have a serious massification of VR stuff, mostly because I'm used to not use it except for specific situations and almost all of it makes it to events, piling up dust in my inventory in the meantime.
I've also exchanged a significant amount of them, almost every time I am the giver, though cuantities are not too high (50 items at most, maybe?).
Pretty much all those items have been hacked by me, one by one.
I've come to think that "unintended" bans were actually intended perhaps to run a test on the appealing system?
About that las bit of the courtesy mail, yes, that would just be nice, but we all know is not possible: the more info Niantic gives away, the harder to catch become cheaters.
I'd say you should keep on trying to appeal, but you look a bit fed up, as many others are. Cheer up!
Hmm, @GoblinGranate , I must respectfully disagree. "We all know it is not possible" for Niantic to give players who are accused of wrongdoing at least a general clue as to the type of violation they are being punished for? No, actually, we don't know that.
One important element, and often the main goal, of rule enforcement is to improve behavior. Anyone who has tried to train a puppy knows how important it is to communicate to the animal what specific behavior is being rewarded or punished. "Sit!" At the moment the dog sits, you give a treat, or verbal praise, or make a noise (such as using a clicker). In Ingress we have "Medal Earned" notifications that appear at the very moment we do something good, such as capturing our 5000th unique portal. When the puppy does something bad, such as chew up your slippers, it doesn't do any good to yell or banish the animal to an empty room unless you somehow communicate the reason for the punishment (rub his nose in the chewed slippers). You don't have to reveal the location of the hidden camera that allowed you to record the slipper chewing, but you do need to indicate what the problem was. Otherwise, the punishment is meaningless. The dog just thinks you're mean.
If Niantic is trying to train us to be better players, their punishments should indicate what we did wrong -- not necessarily how they caught us, but what we did. Presently, banned players are left to spend weeks or months wondering, "What did I do?"
As I mentioned before, my wife and son got banned for undisclosed reasons. Feeling encouraged by this discussion and other recent posts here on the Community pages, I asked my teenage son yesterday to put in an appeal. He did, and 25 minutes later received the following response:
After a thorough review, we have concluded that your account has violated the Ingress Terms of Service and Ingress Community Guidelines. It’s our policy not to publicly discuss the specifics of an individual incident or comment on internal mechanisms which indicate cheating. Some common reasons for termination include, but are not limited to:
* Using modified or unofficial software
* Using tools or techniques to alter or falsify your location
* Selling or trading accounts
* Using multiple accounts
Our decision to terminate this account is final. We are maintaining strict policies against cheating in an effort to keep gameplay fair. Thank you for understanding.
We appreciate that you would like to continue to play Ingress and are welcome to play using a new account; as long as you play fairly, and follow the Ingress Terms of Service and the Community Guidelines.
In this case, he hasn't knowingly done any of those things and hasn't even been an active player for the past several months, only occasionally opening his scanner to bump a portal when requested by a more-active family member. Maybe he inadvertently picked up some previously-sold gear during the anomaly last year, which was the last time he seriously played? Anyway, the response from Niantic raises several questions:
How thorough a review could they possibly have done in 25 minutes? Are the appeals meaningful?
Would the outcome be different if the accused player were allowed to present evidence, such as travel receipts, testimonials, or photos showing he's a unique human player and really was at the location(s) in question?
When Niantic does realize that a ban was made in error, what steps (if any) do they take to make amends to the impacted player?
What does it mean when they say he's welcome to play using a new account? How welcome could he be when they locked his account for unknown reasons? Why would he want to create a new one at this point? If they truly think he cheated, why would they want him to?
Is the ban really final? If someone here has the authority to review the decision, please do. It seems strange for a "final" decision to come so quickly and with no dialog or opportunity to present any type of relevant evidence or explanation.
Does this approach to enforcement result in improved player behavior? It clearly results in some players getting annoyed and quitting the game, which may be OK from Niantic's perspective if they truly believe those players are cheaters. But does heavy-handed punishment with no indication of the reason actually improve anyone's behavior?
What gets me about Niantic's stance on trying to hide everything is that the only people they actually harm are those who are playing legit. The cheaters know they're cheating, the method of detection doesn't actually matter, they're going to keep doing it.
The only thing Niantic's gaining from not telling people more information is a greater distrust of the company and the products they publish. I wouldn't suggest anyone new start playing any of Niantic's games at this point, because they seemingly ban at random for (at the best) vague reasons, and will invite you to start up a new account to waste more time with another possible ban (because if you don't know what you did wrong, chances are you'll keep doing it without realizing it).
It ends up benefitting the cheaters, ironically, since they already know the boundaries they can push up to, and how to get away with it for long enough to cause chaos. The legit players might come back with a new account occasionally, but you treat them like that, and they'll give you bad word of mouth.
Now, if Niantic was more open, and transmitted more information to us, I think we could better self police. More people, having a better understanding of what the actual rules are, would make the real bad actors stand out more.
As it is now, the appeal process, and by extension, Niantic's support system, continues to be a huge joke, and it's best use is to be pointed at as an example of exactly how not to treat your customers and community.
@MyTHstery I didn't mean to say that this is the best way for Niantic to communicate with playerbase and I agree with you about dogs (and people), but I stand by my statement: the more info Niantic gives away, the harder will cheaters become to catch.
But, now that I've read that 25 min mail you pasted, I'd say they could perhaps reduce that list of possible reasos.
Also, I believe you can ignore the multiaccount one, but again, that is my experience.
I wish you and your family the best :)
I’ve seen this in my area, Reported it and nothing ever gets fixed but this is some crazy cheating stuff and it needs to be looked at by the people at Niantic that code the softwarez to stop these one stop shops that do all the cheating for you as I’ve seen several people have these types of bots associated with their portals!! http://www.forum.ganess.eu/portal.php