Originally Posted by
CJ54
We don't give feedback on cheat reports because 99% of what we get are reports on people who aren't cheating. You can believe that or not, but it is true. The #1 source of cheat reports is people spending gems legitimately. And we don't share financial info about other people even in a roundabout way, period.
The disconnect here is obviously about that other 1%, but I wanted to mention the environment we operate under as far the reporting structure. Since we have a policy not to discuss the particulars of another player's account (one way or another), that means when there IS something valid, it looks like we're not doing anything or don't care.
Which isn't true. A great deal of staff time over here is spent preventing or fixing bugs that allow exploits or tracking down the people exploiting them and then banning those people (personally, I spent about 20% of my work time on hings related to this).
That takes time. It is lame that it is not an instantaneous process, but the fact is that it takes time. That doesn't mean we are not on it or that we don't care.
A couple of facts:
-a banned account does not magically disappear from the game, banned does not equal deleted; people that have it in their newsfeed or their allies list can still see it for awhile. It generally won't show up in the rivals list, but sometimes does when we're shifting the algorithm about (at which point we usually get a bunch of reports about "why we haven't done anything about X"). The vast majority of valid reports are for someone who's already banned and was banned less than 24 hours after they were first reported.
-one or two dedicated griefers who find an exploit can make it look like cheaters are everywhere. Which is kind of the point; these people aren't generally as concerned about winning as they are trying to make people angry and frustrated. We ban them and fix the exploit, repeat.
-Sometimes, we would like to find out what someone is doing so that we can cut it off at the root. That can mean watching them do it. Which, again, looks like we're doing nothing from the outside.
-There's only so many end goals when it comes to cheating, honestly. Regardless of the means to do so, you're looking for better, faster items/units/buildings/guild upgrades. The problem is that there may be a whole lot of ways to go about getting those things but all anyone can really see is the end result. Hypothetical situation: We fix all the ways people could theoretically cheat more honor items (or the raw honor itself, or get too many attacks to get more honor, etc.). Three versions later, a bug in the code makes an entirely new potential exploit to get lots of honor. Over on our side, it is "Crap, a new way to do that popped up, let's squish it". Player side, and this is completely understandable, it ends up looking like "Why won't they ever fix this?!?". That's frustrating, but new bugs mimicking the effects of old ones can happen.
-The worst situation, which does happen occasionally when dealing with old code, is the situation where fixing something in the "easy" way would break some aspect of the game for everyone. In those cases, you have to stop and find a better solution. It might even require a redesign of a core part of the architecture. *We still do that when required*, but this increases the time required by a lot. It is exceedingly important to us not to break new things while fixing another issue.
All this said, what I said in the other thread about the forums is true: almost every single thread about hacking or cheating in the forums, devolves into finger pointing and harassment. Which is why we've asked people to stop making those threads. I don't like closing posts and leaving a lame "report it to support" stock response, but I also don't like it when six hours later my inbox is full of people reporting other people for calling them or their factions out or swearing or threats or whatever.
I also don't like it very much when people make new forum accounts with a new name to rile people up, but that's another story.
People need to follow the rules on the forums. Even when they're really unhappy about something. The rules need to apply to everyone.
Posting Permissions
