Mass Bot/Hack Bans: Round 1

We left out a key patch note the other day:

• We’ve added additional logging and hack/bot detection into WildStar

The first round of mass bannings for hacking/botting will happen tonight.  Thousands of accounts will be banned based on log crawls and cheat detection.    We’ve already banned numerous accounts over the last weeks based on player reports and GM investigations.

Thousands of other accounts are on a watch list – we’re actually pretty sure they’ve been hacking/botting.  In the interest in limiting banning potential innocents, we will be looking at past logs and monitoring future behavior to see if it’s repeated and ban accordingly.

Now, what will happen over the next few days:

• Some folks will post over the next few days saying they were inappropriately banned.  They’ll fall into three categories:
  • Many were actually hacking, and will stay banned.
  • Some won't know they were hacking but their accounts were compromised and have been used for gold farming. We will resolve these issues on a case by case basis.  PLEASE consider enabling two-factor authentication, this is way more common than you’d think.   https://forums.wilds...g-your-account/.
  • It's possible some weren’t hacking and were caught in the sweep by accident.  We’ll work to resolve those cases if they happen. Based on the reports, this shouldn’t be a category – but errors can happen, and in the interest of transparency, if it happens we’ll investigate and use that to refine our searches further.
• We’ll also be further scrubbing the logs to get the next batch of folks.   And the next.

We’re also in the process of adding further click-and-report functionality to make it easier to report folks, and we’re working to automate as much of this as possible. There is no exact ETA on this, but it’s in the hopper.

After we ban the first batch, more will come back and their scripts and such will improve. Our logging will improve, and report tools will improve, and we’ll keep fighting this fight. 

(An aside, from a place of honesty here - I sincerely don’t understand the player that tries to level up by AFK botting - they make instanced Battlegrounds less fun, and we’re going to ban healthy percentages of them. This wastes money and time (both ours and theirs). And pisses you, the honest player, off.  Lose-lose-lose.  That being said, I don’t gotta understand the reasons behind such actions – they’re still going to get banned, we’re going to focus heavily on those going forwards.)

(Gold farmers I hate too, but at least I can understand the reasons behind their actions. They’re trying to make money by spamming, ripping off accounts, and gold, and wasting our support/dev time, which is unethical and borderline evil but at least rational.  I really suggest not buying gold from them if you actually care about such things).

In any case, we devs have been playing a lot of WildStar too, and have been annoyed as well by farmbots starting to appear at mining nodes, and by folks mucking up battleground games by AFKbotting. Both suck, and while there will be many stages to the war against these kinds of folks, it’s a battle that has to be fought even if it’s a distraction from what we’d rather be doing - adding content, fixing bugs, and making the game better.  We'll keep doing that as well despite the distraction.

Anyhoo, this is the first wave of what I’m sure will be an ongoing battle.  I don’t guarantee perfection, but I do guarantee we’ll do our part in the fight.   As for what you can do: if you keep reporting we’ll keep banning.