Color me skeptical. If it were like that, then people wouldn’t still be complaining about how cheaters don’t get banned.
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Alot of your reply makes sense except for two things:
No, because when player X is reported on November 2nd for building spam and the report says “over the last two weeks player X has been spamming…” They dont have to go through months or years of data, the can search for the time frame on the particular server. Sure there is still alot of information, but with the ability to search for time frames, dates, and name, its pretty quick.
This. Again. Funcom has 1000’s+ of servers, but literally less then 100 (on PC) has any kind of population over 8 players daily. Extend to Xbox and PS, and its really no where near that number. Not even close. We can very safely assume that servers with populations below 5-8 require zero moderation because those are dead servers. Trust me, the server Im on has had an average population of 1 for almost 3 years. Its ranking hit a low of around 1500 if im not mistaken. A couple weeks of 5-8 playing daily has put it over rank 100…and keep in mind thats for official and private servers through battlemetrics.
Bottom line, the excuse of 1000’s of servers is purely that - an excuse. There is literally no reason for a person not to be able to moderate the populated servers and still have time for coffee and biscuts twice a day.
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I’m not sure you’ve paid attention to the context, so I’ll summarize it for you. What some people are complaining about is that Funcom will punish everyone in the clan instead of just the person who built whatever it is that got reported. And when confronted with the fact that the game does not have any UI to see which player in a clan built what – and that the game database doesn’t store that info either – those people then asserted that this information is in the logs.
If the report is about spam, and if the report says “over the last two weeks”, and if it was truly built over the last two weeks, then the search might not end up being overly complicated.
Yes, this. Again.
Let’s ignore that you’re not playing on all of those 1000+ servers or have access to their telemetry, so you’re basically pulling numbers out of your … thin air, extrapolating from what you observe in the server list.
We can safely ignore that, because it doesn’t matter – 1000 or 100, it’s too many to have dedicated admins.
Right, I’m sure there’s no reason that a handful of people can’t dedicate their time to monitoring “a hundred populated servers” to the point that they know everything that happens on them, just like an admin that has one (or up to three) servers on their hands. 
Why don’t we ask some people who have done the work of a private server admin, like @Taemien or @Larathiel, whether they would feel confident about doing the same work for 10-100 servers?
And no moving the goalposts. You jumped in the middle of a discussion where one person asserts that “you can’t outsmart an admin because the information is in the logs” and another person explains why that’s ridiculous when there are too many servers, they don’t have dedicated admins, and those non-dedicated admins don’t have tools, so let’s stick to that, please.
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I am curious what the server administration and moderation staff size looks like.
As in, numbers.
What is a small ask for a crew of a couple dozen or so becomes significantly different when it’s in the lap of three people. Not just because we are dealing with a plurality of platforms, but also because the game has players across numerous time zones. This also assumes the staff are dedicated server staff rather than having other duties that must be juggled as well.
I also wonder what, if any, portions of the process are automated/handled by macros or logarithms.
While I personally tend to advocate for a more restrained approach (both due to the non-specifiable nature of some violations, and because the game is about dominating as the third stage of the survive build dominate tagline) to enforcement, I’ve also seen some toxic stunts in play and it’s not fun to be around.
In the case of malfeasance of a clan member or leader leading to a ban of the entire creche… I get it, but it seems inelegant.
Perhaps ban the clan leader, thus force dissolving the clan and leaving the former members to stare at their former estates and chattel now decaying and inaccessible to them while they consider how to rebuild and how to choose comrades with greater care.
Not perfect, but seems like a more measured warning shot.
Of course, what works for PvP may be less desirable for PvE, and vice versa.
Also, this is a more targeted and deliberate thing, which circles back to how many people are expect to manage the whole mess.
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sorry still not, the clan who has been reportedn with acknoledge of zendesk on cheating is still playing on 31, for the rest as we have all been ban and that we were compilling more material to trace all the clans they use, simply nobody is no more here to report them … we are players with more than 6k hours, have dealed with cheaters for now more than 2 years, its a no ping server.
and if you want to laugh their was one a clan who was really spamming (i mean they covered 10 square map with foundation) i reported them one year ago, and nothing was done, they were encircling my bases with foundation and gate, because they tried to enclose me, i spent 6 month to try to remove their spam with explosive and gods, but they were rebuilding each time, and you know what . if part of their spam was removed (with my base) and all others bases in proximity. on other part of the map their spam is still here and the decay timer fresh… so actually we haveon this server the tribe who use third party program, and an other one that have found fun to cover part of server with foundation, so as said multiple time i do not undestand the admin action that took place a friday evening at 22;30 ? and may be this is not a good time to do admin action a friday at 22:30…(european time, and in the exact timezone of norway)
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well, imagine the number od servers and the probable amount of tickets. We experienced it first hand. And the troll reporting is definitly a thing.
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This is apples and oranges. While logs can technically tell you where a base is, the information isn’t really readable at a glance. Its a bunch of multi-digit numbers that do not tell a whole story. That requires someone physically logging in and taking a look. Hence why AndyB said that its a case by case basis. A base doesn’t get one banned because of just where it is, or how big it is, but why it was built and how it is affecting others.
So let’s get away from the log file argument. They only tell who did something, not why, and its the latter that the rules are going to be enforced.
I’m sure there is still a few dozen reports even on ‘dead’ servers. Each ticket needs to be addressed, and each report needs to be investigated. This takes time. When I answer a report about a bad building, I usually get a ping in discord, a picture of what the structure is and a general area where it is.
But if the information is sketchy (and often is, you all are not as good at reporting as you all think you are, less than 5% of reports are good enough to not warrant extra steps, probably worse on officials… cause well official players are what they are already), then I’ve got to use other tools to figure out what the hell is going on.
Tools that I have that Funcom doesn’t. For example, I can look at a clan’s heatmap. In real time. On the server. It shows areas where their building density is, and I can sort it by building pieces, placeables, and followers. I can see how many of each they have on this too (and this is long before they added the feature to see the count on the clan page).
I can also ctrl click on this heatmap to teleport directly to that spot. Funcom has to teleport to a grid coordinate, if one is given. Otherwise they have to guess. Hopefully the report has an offending playername or clanname (many times reports forget this one). Since that will help them blindly try to figure out where this place is.
But if no coordinate is given, no name given, and no screenshot. They likely just close the report. There’s just not enough info. Now imagine they have to do that, several hundred times a day. In addition they have to sift through the troll reports as well.
Ironically some of the troll reports may have some legitimacy to them on their own (despite being done for malicious intent). Since I doubt many of you are perfect angels and saints on these servers. A lot of you like to take the two wrongs make a right mentality and lash out at people when they wrong you. Calling them slurs, using griefing stuff back against them.
So when they decide to clean up their evidence and counter-report, the admin person investigating sees them not doing anything wrong, but you’ve got logs of chat using God knows what, and you’ve ‘retaliated’ with building spam.
And you all wonder why cheaters aren’t being banned and you are. Well you got trolled, that’s why. And if that is happening, I can’t begin to think what your reports actually look like.
I’m reminded of a time when I got a report, full video evidence. Twenty minutes worth. Claimed someone was griefing, metagaming (RP servers don’t typically allow this), and several other things. Video showed the accused being the victim of literally everything the reporter claimed they did. The video literally told on the person making the report.
I was a bit shocked at that, I even asked if they sent me the right video. And they argued with me that it was. As in the video, they had their entire discord voice comm as well, in which they were conspiring to break several rules.
And that was their evidence. I wasn’t the one who banned them, that was the server owner when I was like, ‘dude you gotta look at this’. They were like, ‘how did you get this?’ And he was shocked when I told him the clan leader (who’s voice was in the video talking about how they’re going to grief someone) was the one who sent it.
Yep, that’s the reports many of you send. I’d say 70% of reports are no good. 15% have marginal info. 10% tell on themselves, and only 5% are decent enough to act on. And all of them take time. With dead servers (all several hundred of them) still having dozens in the queue, with populated ones have much much more.
And those percentages are based on my experience. I use discord primarily. So I can usually talk to the person directly for more information in real time. Not getting to a report a few days or weeks after it was made with someone in probably a different timezone and schedule. So I imagine its worse on a service with more of a disconnect compared to what I have.
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It does show in the logs like this when you demolish a piece, cant see it being that hard to make it show who built it too.
What Im saying is that Funcoms excuse of “well, we have thousands of servers so we cant police them all” is a petty excuse when there is a mere fraction of those that actually have a population on them, and likely a fraction of those that actually get reports from.
If someone is a paid employee to take care of reports and issues, yeah, they might have to police a bunch of servers regarding reports. Not many people are asking for a person to be logged in playing on a server to police it, but acting on reports, yeah easily doable. And, with the reporting system in place that gives the server number, platform and location on each report, it only makes it faster to deal with. I also have been an admin on a private server, although it was a different game, but I was able to play AND deal with cheaters, aimbots, exploiters as well as monitoring chat. It can be done, especially if you dont play the game, but merely hop around chasing reports.
The reason I popped in with a reply was because of the use of the excuse of “1000’s of servers” . Like Ive said, its just that - an excuse and not an answer to why it cant be done.
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Actually, those can all lead to bans. You could be build on the brimstone lake and thats blocking resources so by Funcoms rules, thats a ban. If the logs can show who dismantled a piece, why isnt it showing who built it? Right then and there you can single out and ban those that break the rules. Fairly quick if the information is there for you to look at.
Well that cut their workload down by quite a bit.
If this were accurate to Funcoms servers and their reports it may take time to go through them, but only having to actually deal with 5% is pretty minor.
If youre referring to reports from dead servers, sorry, I dont buy that. If there is one or two people on a server Ill guarantee you there is no reporting. And as Ive watched on my server jump to over rank 100 with 5-8 players, there is a massive amount of dead servers compared to active ones. I dont think the number of reports coming in are what we assume they are.
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I’m just gonna have to repeat myself.
Yes, I understood what you said. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter if you they have 100 or 1000, because even 100 is too much to get what people are asking for here.
In order to get that, Funcom would have to employ one dedicated admin for every 2-3 servers, or make much better tools and/or give their admins better tools. Both of these come with a cost. The former involves higher TCO for official servers, the latter involves prioritizing that effort over other stuff. And the same people who are complaining about this will complain if that other stuff isn’t done, because Funcom is “lazy”, “cheap”, or “petty”.
Would you also say that you would be perfectly capable of doing that for 10+ servers without proper tools?
Sure, if they receive a report saying “clan XYZ is claim spamming on server 1234 near the Sinkhole”, they should be perfectly capable of jumping onto the server, looking at the spam, deleting it, and banning the whole clan.
If that’s what you’re talking about, then yeah, I agree with you. But that’s not what people here are demanding. They want Funcom to ban only the one player who did it. The information is not in the database, and the arguments about how it’s still doable “because logs” ignore the inherent costs.
Context matters. In the context of “we want admins to do stuff that isn’t readily available in the game and would require a whole bunch of additional work”, it’s not an excuse anymore, it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation of why it can’t be done.
Even without that context, though, you’re still asking for something unsustainable. Let’s assume that there are “only a 100 or so” populated servers right now. Fine, what happens if the situation on official servers improves?
Let’s say they patch all the exploits, improve the way they police the servers, polish off most of the bugs, and stuff like that. In other words, let’s say that more players start playing on all official servers.
What then? Who’s going to pay for admin work for 1000+ servers then? Not you or me, for sure, because players aren’t paying for access to official servers.
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If its so easy, then show me the log file entry of you placing a single foundation. I just found a 1.12GB text file in just my singleplayer. Lets see you navigate that. Course if you were smart, you’d use a SQL query directly on the game.db file.
I’ll take either. Come on show us how easy this is.
I’ve seen rank 2000+ servers with active playerbases. Battlemetrics hasn’t really been that accurate. If the servers were as dead as you say, the people in my clan currently are more active than those individual servers. Yet the server isn’t ranked well.
At the end of the day, ‘Officials’ are simply private servers with a fancy tag. Funcom rents them like we do. They pay someone to help them facilitate reports (the rest of us just use discord). But outside of that, they run the servers the way they want to.
If you think you can do better, by all means try it. You seem to have all the answers, lets see you put your money where your mouth is and see how great of a server you can make.
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Do you know what really strikes me as curious? What percentage of bans are made for cheating / exploiting, how many for insults and what percentage for building right now?
What do you think?
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What do you think is easier to verify: cheating, toxicity in chat, or abuse of the building system?
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I think companies should be more transparent with this sort of thing.
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If it were about being objective, things would be this way from easier to more difficult: 1) -Cheating (it is clearly seen when someone uses speedhak / magnit hak) 2) -toxicity (you could agree more or less, but for example in the Wow one knows what words to avoid to avoid going to the ban, and here it is more or less the same) 3) -buildings (not counting the people who cover important resources / places or claim like crazy several pictures of the map, there are a lot of constructions that you really don’t know if they are bannable or not because of the imprecise rules (a lot of people was banned for build a pretty normal bases (because today very few people are stupid enough to build just to troll, close spots, etc. knowing they gonna be banned))).
But here the issue is different: I am still curious how many people have banned for cheating compared to those who have banned for building, and especially the amount: how many cheaters have banned for each person who have banned for building?
On the other hand, I think that, curiously, this policy of banning normal players will also end the cheaters: when the official pvp servers are emptied, the cheaters will leave because they are not going to fight each other (that mob likes to have an advantage, in otherwise it is not funny).
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So much for being objective. I did ask you what’s easier to verify. Do I really have to explain why “the admin has to blindly trust a video you sent them” is the opposite of “objective”?
Sounds legit, just like all the other things that “killed PVP”, “killed the game”, and “emptied the servers” before this one.
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I honestly do not know.
I imagine it is somewhat different across server types, but I have read more statements about build related bans.
But that’s a two stage anecdote.
if policy is to make quit all legit players, to after make quit cheaters, who are the real problem since early access on conan, i think it would have been best to close all servers. but i dont think that those who have been ban for playing normally and building defensive base able tor resist to a raid, and saw cheaters using third party program not ban, will never forgive it. so this policy is simply scorchen earth.
and i still not understand how fc have let that happens, because this is not hard to understand what effect it will have on the players who were the backbone of the game system. but more on that what will be the effect on those players in the long term with fc.
but you are right it is far more easy to erase the base of legit player; because i still wait for an clear explanation of the abuse building system definition (what is it ? building differents base ? how many ? base building size what limit ? why not put limit in game now that the game count number of building piece).
and yes cheatings take a long time to track, i know it very well by the number of underrmesh i reported, you can spend 2 weeks to search one, retreive coordinates, taking picture, then you provide wolrd coordinate to zendesk in my case they just treated 50% an closed others reports, and when reminded to zendesk that i did 100 more very precise reports on about real cheating, have seen lot of them not treated, in exchange i had with them when my legit base was instant decay and my clan ban, and that was hard to believe they erase normal base like that when problem is cheating and refering to all the reports i did about real case of abuse, i had this answer 'Checking your previous tickets it seems that our system closed them for lack of activity. We apologize for the inconvenience.
In order to clarify, this ticket was submitted on the “Ban information” queue. Therefore, to report the mentioned offenses please submit a new ticket on the “Report a player” option."
what do you think when you receive that ? because the guy think i will spend against time to rebsubmit tickets they closed like that, when they just ban me and erased all my gameplay for no reason from my point of view.
so i will still recommend to fc to do urgently a meeting to talk of the way they deal actually with their players, and to determine if the problem is cheaters or their core community. because actually this is really not understandble. and you should preserve those who have not been yet hit by this “policy” that appear to me to be a nonsense.
I am curious by which metric you are determining that cheaters, toxic chatters, and build abusers are normal players.
If you mean normal in the scope of all CE players I have to disagree. Most players are on private servers, where those three issues are much more likely to be moderated and removed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a server openly invite those kinds of players to join them.
FC stepping up it moderation to bring it’s officially offered servers more in line with the ideals of it playerbase is not a bad thing. Even if breaking TOS has become normalized on officials ( which is arguable) I don’t see why FC is obligated to leave it that way.
Is your argument is that it’s better to keep the cheaters, toxic chatters and build abusers than to risk losing them by making officials more like what players attracted to CE prefer? I’m not sure what the math on that looks like tbh.
I never said that, what I am saying is that many players have been banned simply for having large bases, they have not claimed entire frames or blocked resources or content. These types of players are the ones that seem normal to me and they are the ones who are mainly suffering from this policy.
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