A petition to perma-ban cheaters

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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It is my understanding that cheaters are generally given a suspension opposed to a ban. I dont know what everyone else’s feelings on this are but in my experience, cheaters don’t tend to realign behavior based on consequences.

From a financial standpoint, it can be reasonably assumed that cheaters on official servers don’t make up more than 5% of the population but that more than 5% of regular gamers will quit after encountering them.

I love playing Conan, I have nearly 2k hours invested. I played Age of Conan in 2008 when a game breaking main quest bug halted the progress of every character at level 40 and watched the game collapse as the following patch introduced more freckles for characters. Don’t let CE be the next failure for the Conan universe due to a lack of acknowledgement of feedback. People aren’t voicing their concerns for fun, it’s because they want to be heard or they will leave with their clans for something else.

It is hard enough as a non cheating player on official to document and submit evidence of cheating. You shouldn’t ask players to have to do it more than once per cheater they encounter.

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Here is my problem with perma-bans: False Positives.

People that are accused of cheating but the Funcom customer service representative investigating an incident simply got it wrong. And this isn’t a dig on Funcom. This happens EVERYWHERE in life. Someone falsely accused that was in fact innocent or there were extenuating circumstances that were not considered. This is one of the biggest arguments against something like the death penalty.

I was talking with one of the Flyhacks guys about a month ago and this topic came up. One of their clans received a temporary ban for “abusive land claim”. They had walled in brimstone lake but left it open for the server to use. Funcom came in, saw the land claim, and then banned them. But according to this guy, the reason they had walled in brimstone lake, they had just spent days clearing foundation spam all over the lake that was blocking brimstone from re-spawning. So after they cleared all the foundation spam, they then placed walls at spots that would still allow the brimstone to respawn, but would block the guys that originally blocked the lake from doing it again. The guys that did a good deed got the ban, and the original spammers got away with their bad deed.

According to this guy, Funcom came in and saw a SNAPSHOT in time and issued a ban without knowing the full context.

Don’t get me wrong, I think they should perma-ban in certain instances. But it needs to be nailed down with NO SHADOW of a doubt and not just done for everything as you will get false positives.

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I completely agree with where you’re coming from about false positives especially when it’s a conduct abuse (land claim spam, etc). When it’s actual cheating such as undermeshing I think a false positive would be especially rare. Even a solo player who figurd out how to put a box behind a wall would never be discovered nor would anyone care but when a large clan is indestructible whilst wiping out a server I dont see suspensions being of any benefit what so ever. Keep in mind that when reporting cheaters FC doesn’t want a tip, they want hard proof to even investigate.

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All Flyhacks guys ask for permaban only for constantly undemeshing and bug abuse on official servers.
They posted ton of videos on Youtube how they break the game.Same for p-firelord and Kaizer

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Never happen.

Too many trust issues already eroded and some players are still determined to make the world burn because they had a false accusation thrown their way.

Everyone will want to be a street lawyer on what is considered valid or invalid evidence on who gets banned and to what degree constitutes a ban.

Example playerA builds a vault inside the mesh for clan. PlayerC has no idea what playerA did and assumed he/she played by the rules.

Who gets perms banned? What if playerC still doesn’t realise what playerA did and builds a normal base around that meshed area none the wiser…

The point is until the dynamic volume system does its work without bugs the process will flourish as that’s the kind of rationale being applied at present.

There is always weasel out points available.

Instead of bans which are useless anyway and easily avoided, I’d rather just see clans who get caught cheating have their base and inventory wiped. As even in the above example the playerC sadly will now learn playerA was not only at fault but should now distance him/herself from them.

Deletion is a powerful ban in itself

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They probably don’t do that because it takes a lot of time. Most clans don’t have just one base. Plus smart clans are gonna stash things all over the map. Something that will just burn a lot of their labor time of hunting them down.

Most bans are at least 7 days which is going to push most of these offenders into decay state and their stuff will be deleted or even better, given to other clans. So that is my guess of their thinking.

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I reported some brazilian cheaters months ago and now they’re back, but it’s worst, cause’ they’re angry now and they don’t let anyone play. But hey, I hope they’ve learned a lesson (?

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Wait, p-firelord is the same guy that was throwing some stupid comments on the last Dev Stream chat? He has the typical pvp abuser profile hahaah

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You realise you can delete an entire clans base(s) with just an identifier and command.

It’s not delete just the bad base I am talking a complete wipe for that particular clan… characters get wiped, base blocks etc.

Now this would also mean they’ll setup a seperate set of accounts to body vault or hand off to … but meh … the first would def make the whole thing obvious and clear.

Total time to action: 15mins to an hour.

GM gets the teleport cords eyeballs the base where it shouldn’t be … keystrokes … done … next server to check

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Yeah your methods assumes they have good tools behind the scenes to do that. For all we know they have none, and to do what you suggest would require running SQL commands. Which could be a recipe for disaster if you start giving those types of permissions to a bunch of Customer Service peeps mucking around with a server database.

Evidently Funcom has a reason for why they do it this way and a ban still usually results in cheaters losing their base(s) anyway.

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Kind of. At the moment in the Admin console you can use BuildingIdentify and BuildingDestroy commands to remove buildings based on ID’s. Given the DB atm is using a SQlite DB it wouldn’t take much to lookup the clan and building ID’s associated to the clan and invoke that command (ie we know from in-game experience that the Clan Owner and Building ID are linked because it shows up in the TAB overlay).

Its always tbh the one thing that has baffled me the most. Why they choose to spend weeks/months investing in a dynamic mesh solution (which isn’t going to work as effectively as they think) vs use the data itself to solve the issue.

I mentioned this in another thread, but i’ll echo the short of it here. Let’s assume 100 servers have 1x clan per server that cheats. Let’s assume these offedenders are all in unique spots. Now, the position of the building ID’s (XYZ coords) and placeables will automatically fall into a pool of “suspicious building spots”. A GM could immediately teleport to the position, grab a brush tool of some kind and just paint (using raycasting) to flag placeables (tanning benches, chests etc) as being invalid. That data then adds a SQRT buffer to it (say 10-100 units in a spherical space) … log that data into an octree storage.

Now using this, over time you remove for all servers where the 100 breaches of trust occur. The more you do this, the more you catch, the more it removes offending areas for all (one thing i’ve noticed for 6400, 6401, 6402, 6425 and 6424 is the clans that offend typically are using the same spots over and over…).

Using just the data and maybe 15mins to 1hr of work. It would reduce the offenders ability to over time continue to cheat, bans wont happen as often and maybe the playerbase will settle more.

Actually thinking on it some more, you could get even the players to “paint” using a Debug tool to also highlight the placeables themselves. As at Funcoms end all they have to do is “agree” …you have an army of anti-cheaters who would donate time to give the data over here for no cost but a simple Unreal Engine mod that uses raycast + remote sync of data… cheap as hell.

Siptah and Exile lands are static meshes…they aren’t procedural generated ones…so …why is there a need of a dynamic mesh system? …only reason i can conclude is maybe 2.3 New Lands is going to maybe turn into a more of a dynamic mesh system per server… as they’ve stated (Funcom) they aren’t happy with the notion that players know upfront early the linear steps to making things happen in game…so…yeah…maybe this is the “why”.

Suffice to say though, i feel we can all agree… time isn’t on our side and we all want players to stay on servers and play the game it was intended to be played… the more delays and avoidance Funcom has towards this issue the more that % of player abandonment goes up.

My 2c.

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1600? We encountered a group just like that months ago.

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I believe they could do a three strike you are out system. Give them a temp ban for 7 days three times if they do it a 4th time it’s a perma ban. I highly doubt the system will make the mistake of banning you more than once. If you get banned 3 times you are cheating.

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Maybe. Except, at least based on what I have heard on the forums, getting good stuff is trivially easy in this game so the cheaters could just bounce back and recover their losses.

Worse yet are the cheaters who use bugs etc. to attack innocent players, kill their thralls and steal their stuff during non-raid times or stuff. Deleting these cheaters’ possessions won’t help anything if they can just walk into your base naked and take your things and then use your own bombs to blow up your base.

Permanent bans can and do happen, but these are reserved for the most serious offenders.

If you ask some people on the forums, 50 to 100 % of official server players are cheaters. But as we know, 74 % of all percentages presented on the internet are made up with no basis in facts, anyway.

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This happened to my clan yesterday outside of raid hours. Two separate buildings were raided, each 1/2 foundation + 2 walls + fence high and they got inside both without breaking a thing to delete in progress animals and thralls. It’s impossible to determine how it was done and if I managed to do it once, I certainly wouldn’t try 2 more times when they come back and do the same thing. Seeing as they’ve already been reported with screenshots by multiple people on the server 2-3 weeks ago and nothing has been done, the server just died out. Seems to be a trend with players using Chinese symbols for character names.

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1999 and 3200, they are alphas in both servers and they wont let anyone play, everyday they do what they call a “map clean up” destroying and raiding every base around the map.

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Imho there is no reasonable answer to why a player has a base inside the mesh and knowingly climbs in / out of it using exploits.

I have watched one clan raid 6402, 6425, 6424 and 6401 (I am afk up a tree right now watching them just go in and out of the mesh) as I type this without any punishment and consistent reports from multiple server loads of players.

Their accounts continue to change and even now with family share disabled they still are using brand new steam accounts to play.

At what point does this self correct.

In the total time I first started the report process over 7,500 steam accounts have dropped off the steam chart numbers for Conan Exiles / Siptah. 300+ today alone.

Sure these numbers may very well be inflated but as long as exploits are used to kill servers players have no alternative but to quit.

Private servers just aren’t filling With the numbers to sustain their growth

So … again … what’s the actual plan now: new anti mesh system probably won’t get deployed until December with 2.2.

Funcom. What’s the plan?

Because this is yet another clan inside yet another mesh waiting for yet another ticket queue to execute that seems to never ever execute.

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This is why I created a private server but if it doesn’t grow, my clan is ready to quit. I dealt with cheaters pre Siptah and only came back because someone gifted me the game. After leaving this time I will refuse to ever spend a dollar towards Funcom again.

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FLYHACKs; when i started 2 years ago on a pvp server they were there, undermeshing, toxic chat, using 50 attributes everywhere lol, they can root in hell., so if they had a wrong ban for building cocoon around brimstone, i can swear you they desserve a permanent ban for what they did in past.

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Known those guys for quite awhile now, played with them, and NEVER known those guys to hack, use exploits, or undermesh. They do talk a lot of smack in global chat though. I will give ya that :stuck_out_tongue: