MediusSyberia
10-21-13, 02:08 AM
Unlike some of the older hacks (crown boosting, etc.) which only benefit the hackers, the latest hacks also cost innocent players a lot of crowns, coins and spellstones as well as a bit of time in trying to get them back.
I'm not sure what tools Storm8 support staff and community managers have access to when it comes to reviewing and/or banning hackers. However I do have a few ideas that might make the process easier if the developers were able to code a few things.
1) Currently it seems when a player is banned for hacking in a way that costs others crowns and resources (like the the <50% win hack used by sose and many others recently), all the people who have lost crowns need to individually contact support with proof to get these crowns back. It would be much easier when you ban a player if you had an option to reverse the wins the hacker had within a specified time period. E.g. sose is found hacking wins from date x to date y so when you ban his account you choose to reverse all attacks between dates x & y and anyone who lost an attack to him during that date range automatically gets the crowns & resources they lost back.
This would save support getting overloaded with a bunch of emails and having to investigate each individual case. It would also result in people getting their crowns back much faster and so there would be less anger/frustration/etc.
2) Following on from the above, a prompt in game to notify the user of this could also be beneficial. Some people win/lose a lot of crowns daily so trying to keep check of whether or not crowns have been refunded can be quite difficult sometimes. Instead when you reverse a players battles, anyone affected could get a popup message next time they open KC advising them that they're been given back x crowns and y resources.
3) Rather than wait for everyone to complain about hackers via forum, email, etc. why not add an option to report a suspicious replay? You already have a report button in chat... you could add another one next to replays. To avoid overload when a replay is reported it should create a file for that player and each new report adds to that players file. This way if 1 person reports player A and 1000 people report player B, support can see this and review player B's account first for suspicious activity (as well as having easy access to the replays in question).
As for people going silly with this, just like you have a warning that reporting legitimate chat could have account consequences, you could do the same thing here. If a player reports an obviously innocent person you could warn them once/twice/whatever. If they continue then a simple "ban user from reporting replays" button for a period of time would stop supports time being wasted reviewing silly reports.
4) Going one step further, rather then waiting for people to report *****ers why not try implementing a few behind the scenes monitoring features that automatically flag suspicious accounts for review? If you did this hackers may be able to be caught much sooner and before the damage has been done.
One example is looking at the Top 50 list where the minimum crowns to get on it is around 1600 and the average rank for the guys with 1600+ crowns is roughly 40-45+. Many of the top is 50 is ranks 5x/6x and some at the top are 71. However you'll notice there is currently 3 guys in the Top 50 who are only on ranks 20, 25 and 35. 2 of these 3 have already been reported by several people for hacking with proof (while the 3rd account looks mighty suspicious). This seems to be a continuous occurrence... hackers regularly go up the rankings very fast even with a really low rank and a very bad un-upgraded base.
To combat this, you could monitor and automatically flag/report for further review any accounts who either 1) made it into the top 50 or to a crown level where their rank is well below the average of other peoples with the same number of crowns (e.g. flagging rank 5's with 800 crowns or rank 20's with 1600+ crowns and 2) flag accounts whose crowns have risen dramatically yet their base upgrades haven't and are still very low level (e.g someone with 2 army posts and lvl 2 barracks who suddenly ends up on 1000+ crowns within a day or 2).
If you did those 2 things you would probably have caught all the hackers we are complaining about before they end up in the top 20 and did the damage they did (and still continue to do). As well as catching them earlier you'd also only have to push one button (if your devs coded the above) to ban them, reverse their attacks and refund the innocent players who lost crowns & resources. This would reduce the complaints and save you guys a lot of time dealing with all the angry support requests that come in later.
Anyway just my 2 cents. Hope you guys might be able to discuss and potentially do something similar to the above :cool:
I'm not sure what tools Storm8 support staff and community managers have access to when it comes to reviewing and/or banning hackers. However I do have a few ideas that might make the process easier if the developers were able to code a few things.
1) Currently it seems when a player is banned for hacking in a way that costs others crowns and resources (like the the <50% win hack used by sose and many others recently), all the people who have lost crowns need to individually contact support with proof to get these crowns back. It would be much easier when you ban a player if you had an option to reverse the wins the hacker had within a specified time period. E.g. sose is found hacking wins from date x to date y so when you ban his account you choose to reverse all attacks between dates x & y and anyone who lost an attack to him during that date range automatically gets the crowns & resources they lost back.
This would save support getting overloaded with a bunch of emails and having to investigate each individual case. It would also result in people getting their crowns back much faster and so there would be less anger/frustration/etc.
2) Following on from the above, a prompt in game to notify the user of this could also be beneficial. Some people win/lose a lot of crowns daily so trying to keep check of whether or not crowns have been refunded can be quite difficult sometimes. Instead when you reverse a players battles, anyone affected could get a popup message next time they open KC advising them that they're been given back x crowns and y resources.
3) Rather than wait for everyone to complain about hackers via forum, email, etc. why not add an option to report a suspicious replay? You already have a report button in chat... you could add another one next to replays. To avoid overload when a replay is reported it should create a file for that player and each new report adds to that players file. This way if 1 person reports player A and 1000 people report player B, support can see this and review player B's account first for suspicious activity (as well as having easy access to the replays in question).
As for people going silly with this, just like you have a warning that reporting legitimate chat could have account consequences, you could do the same thing here. If a player reports an obviously innocent person you could warn them once/twice/whatever. If they continue then a simple "ban user from reporting replays" button for a period of time would stop supports time being wasted reviewing silly reports.
4) Going one step further, rather then waiting for people to report *****ers why not try implementing a few behind the scenes monitoring features that automatically flag suspicious accounts for review? If you did this hackers may be able to be caught much sooner and before the damage has been done.
One example is looking at the Top 50 list where the minimum crowns to get on it is around 1600 and the average rank for the guys with 1600+ crowns is roughly 40-45+. Many of the top is 50 is ranks 5x/6x and some at the top are 71. However you'll notice there is currently 3 guys in the Top 50 who are only on ranks 20, 25 and 35. 2 of these 3 have already been reported by several people for hacking with proof (while the 3rd account looks mighty suspicious). This seems to be a continuous occurrence... hackers regularly go up the rankings very fast even with a really low rank and a very bad un-upgraded base.
To combat this, you could monitor and automatically flag/report for further review any accounts who either 1) made it into the top 50 or to a crown level where their rank is well below the average of other peoples with the same number of crowns (e.g. flagging rank 5's with 800 crowns or rank 20's with 1600+ crowns and 2) flag accounts whose crowns have risen dramatically yet their base upgrades haven't and are still very low level (e.g someone with 2 army posts and lvl 2 barracks who suddenly ends up on 1000+ crowns within a day or 2).
If you did those 2 things you would probably have caught all the hackers we are complaining about before they end up in the top 20 and did the damage they did (and still continue to do). As well as catching them earlier you'd also only have to push one button (if your devs coded the above) to ban them, reverse their attacks and refund the innocent players who lost crowns & resources. This would reduce the complaints and save you guys a lot of time dealing with all the angry support requests that come in later.
Anyway just my 2 cents. Hope you guys might be able to discuss and potentially do something similar to the above :cool: