Woops :3 trying to get a point across, maybe not the best example.

 

For argument sake, a better example would be, if I accidentally run over someone with my car. Now, did I mean to do it? No, but do I get punished? Yes. It's not as harsh as killing someone on purpose, but yes, I still get punished.

 

I agree with what knears said: first "mistake" a harsh punishmen and on the second one perma ban or account reset OR BOTH! Hackers must not be tolerated and staff should be harsher. Enough with the excuses "he/she didn't know they were hacking" of course they know they are hacking. Do you think they download hacked clients by accident? No! Staff must toughen up and deal with the hackers fast. They are bad for both the community and the economy.

 

1 st time 7 day temp ban

2nd time balance wipe and any features to do with hacking kits etc 1 month ban

3rd time account reset or perma ban FOR GOOD not this BULLCRAP that a perma ban can be appealed

 

Seems rather harsh to me - what if this is the scenario?
1st time - my cousin came to my house and loaded this in while I was eating dinner?
2nd time - my brother broke into my computer and did this while I was eating dinner?
3rd time - I never lie, my hamster was running around loose and this was added while he was on the keyboard while I was eating dinner? I promise I have him back in his cage and this will never happen again.
On a serious note, this is why we have moderators. A blanket punishment will probably never work here on ECC.

 

For the record, I agree with your suggestion and also believe there is too much incentive for hacking just as your example shows. I also believe that more staff are currently evaluating hacks and starting to punish more when these "alt" accounts are found out. From personal experience, it takes a lot of time and effort to trace down transactions, especially with the amount of users that ECC sees on a daily basis.
We have some great programmers on our staff now and so I hope that they will be able to develop a program that will help catch these hackers/scammers. A simple hours on server vs. dollar amount earned or gained would be a quick and easy start. If player A is on the server a total of 20 hours (actual play time) and has 3 star tools, millions of dollars, and every kit available, that account should be flagged to an admin for evaluation.

 

Just don't eat dinner

 

Thanks for the smile :)

 

This pretty much sums up my thinking on this. My personal view is that SG can make far too much money at the moment and so the incentives to hack are clearly there. How can we solve this?

Well firstly, we could speed up how quickly hacking complaints take to handle which minimises the amount of profit. Or we can take a chunk of the profit out of the player's account. My preference in the first option and hopefully people will be beginning to notice that we have sped up a little compared to previous few months. Similar issues arise with taking money from people as compared to when someone is banned for scamming - Very infrequently when people are banned do they actually have any money in their account - So tracking it down is very hard, if even possible at all. We have got a few more staff members beginning to look at hacking complaints now which should hopefully speed things up. Over the past few weeks/months I have been trying to get better at doing them to help out (I'm the first person to admit my PvP knowledge isn't the best), but one thing I would like to say is what I said to someone in PM earlier this week:

'The one thing we have to be for hacking complaints is 110% certain which is why you often see complaints being dismissed. Being banned for hacking can have serious effects on your reputation which is why we do absolute everything to avoid wrongful bans.

A lot of complaints we see have suspicious elements but we just can't be 100% certain. In your video for example, because of the lag at various times in the video we couldn't rule out for sure that there was more lag during the fight. The view we take is that 95% certain isn't good enough, it has to be beyond any doubt whatsoever.'


On a related note: We're looking at the possibility of wiping/applying a reduction in sg points when someone has been banned for hacking. We know that we want to do this, there is no doubt about that, we're just looking into the best way to do it with out current sg stats setup.

 

How to prove that someone is hacking in SG? You can always say that there is lag/fps drop. I have seen complaints with like 6 videos of someone hacking and its clear as day and yet the verdict is "not enough evidence". What is enough evidence if the video (multiple videos) is not enough? If 1 in every 10 hackers is banned what is the point of reporting them at all? There is a certain group of people that have been reported numerous times and maybe the staff should look in deeper into the matter. Its good that you are trying to not ban inocent people but being over cautious gives more time to the hackers to do what they do. I don't play SG but I am a part of the same economy as everyone else here and the SG hackers have the same effect on me as they have on those who play SG every day by pumping huge amounts of ECD into the already fragile economy making the inflation even bigger.

 

Just asking, Dewsy- you do consider, and want to, wipe the SG points. But I don't see any indication in your post bout removing the ECD-s and tools/ranks obtained with hacking. So you do not consider that as an option at the moment?

 

I can completely see why we should do this - The idea that a player shouldn't benefit in anyway from hacking. The issue is how to practically do this. Firstly, in my experience the vast majority of people who are banned, for a variety of reasons, have no money in their balances. This means that it would very rarely be as simple as just taking money out of someone's balance.

Now - items/tools/blocks? Let's say I had 500k, I hacked in sg which approximately earned me 100k and I bought a star tool for 600k. I am then caught and banned for hacking. The staff are able to find the tool (which is not a given at all) what would we do? Do we just confiscate the whole tool? Some people may think that that should be just be part of the punishment, but then to others losing a 600k tool when 500k of it was legit money may not be a proportionate punishment if we are also going to ban them, remove their sg medals, reduce points as well etc. We could sell it? That then depends on a staff member finding the tool, then finding a buyer. What then if the staff member sells it at a reduced rate to just cover the 'punishment ECD amount' gained form hacking, meaning the person may only get 300k out of his 500k.

Blocks? Firstly have to find them.. then lava them?

Ranks? I suppose we could say remove someone's rank but then take the situation of a town. Someone ranked up to mayor and has no co-mayors. Sells perms and a load of players join as residents. Do we remove the town? If we don't, who is the mayor? Would someone benefit from this person being caught for hacking and gain a town out of it? If not and we remove it, what happens tot he people who bought perms and their buildings which would now be unprotected?

_____________________

Basically what I am trying to get at is that it is very easy to say 'Oh they punish them in every way possible - remove ranks/tools/ECD'. Whilst this sounds great, there are a HUGE number of follow-on consequences. Some which may be possible to get around, some won't, but if they can be it still requires a massive time cost on staff (for example having to find assets which to seize).

My thoughts? Rather than having to solve these issues, lets try and stop them from arising in the first place:

1. Promptly handle hacking complaints to minimise potential for profiting.
2. Reduce incentives to hack - I think we can all agree that the amount that can be made from sg currently is insane.
   • Also has the benefit of slowing down the profit pre-ban if hacking.

Hopefully this all kinda makes sense!

 

Thank you for such a detailed response explaining in very simple terms exactly what is involved with each and every decision made for us each and every day.
I hope that every player reads this and begins to understand what it takes to make changes on a server such as ECC. Perhaps a couple of examples like this could be put in the suggestion thread before anybody posts there?
And finally, it seems everyone agrees that SG is way out of line in earnings so why have they simply not adjusted prices back to what they were before hacking became so popular? I understand that they did this for the Holidays, however, they never were returned to normal and thus began the new "hack" economy.
If this is the new economy, is it not also fair to think that mining, farming, and fishing should have also received a price increase as well?

 

When criminals are cought all of their stuff are confiscated and sold on an auction to the public regardless of how the objects are aquired so that is the way staff should handle repossessed items/towns. If you can't find any items and money make the felon pay a large fine to the server.

 

There should be a fine system and a harsh one too. A hacker shouldn't turn a profit from cheating.
Lets go through a hypotetical situation here.
Lets say I decide I need some easy money but I'm rubbish at SG and can't be bothered to mine or farm so I download a hack for SG. I go in and I start wrecking people left and right and I make a million before I am cought and there is enough evidence against me for a ban. I get banned for a month (I have never seen a month long ban but its a worst case scenario) so what? My cash is in hidden signs or a friend and the same goes for my items. So what are staff gonna do except for the ban? Currently nothing. So a month goes by, I scrible down a lame teat jerking appeal and after a few days I'm back in the server a rich man. I gather up my cash and buy a star tool or maybe a feature or two and maybe if I want some more easy money and I don't really feel like playing MC I do it again.
When you compare the risks vs rewards from hacking its a miracle that there isn't a full-blown hacking rampage going on in the server and if I was a lesser person I would hack without a doubt.
That is the reason there should be harsher punishments. If someone hacks take their rank or their msword, or their town, or something else. Why should staff care if they got those stuff with honest earn money? The felon doesn't care about our time, our money or our experience in the server so why should we? Make hacking not worth it and as a result you will have a lot fewer hackers both in SG and out of it. But if you decide to stick to the current hacker friendly system the server will be always full with hackers and once everyone realizes that hacking is worth it and its really hard to prove that someone is indeed hacking, the economy will fall appart really fast.

 

lol