Skip to content

Archive for July 13th, 2009

13
Jul

Aloysius sheds light on the OOS / Maphack bans

 art_houseburning1

Just in case you dont want to read through all the threads taking place on Age Community ive included below some extracts from Robot Entertainment Community Manager “Aloysius”. This should help clear up the Robot position on these bans and demonstrates that accounts do get re-evaluated when an appeal is requested and that programmers have indeed looked at the code behind hack detection. Here goes – (and yes, ive added some emphasis on key points)

  • We do not ban random people, we don’t just draw names out of a hat and ban people.  No one has ever been banned because we didn’t like them or “just because,” or anything like that.
  • We examine cheating reports and our server logs, and when an account has been using out of sync and map hacks, we take action against that account.  If you get out of syncs all the time when playing multiplayer, try reinstalling the game, and checking with your ISP to ensure that your connection is working properly.
  • We examine every account individually for OOS and Map hacking, and examine claims of innocence when the case warrants.  We have never reversed a ban for OOS / Map Hacking.  After this recent wave of OOS / Map Hacking Bans, the programmers who wrote the tools re-examined the code and ran tests and determined that the bans were valid.
  • We cannot release source code, our diagnostic processes, give access to our back-end servers, release private customer data or anything else that would compromise the integrity of our online environment as well as satisfy our legal protection.  We can’t really be “transparent” in our security practices so that we can stay one step ahead of the hackers.
  •  We already permaban the guilty, after investigation.
  •  We do not re-issue accounts for the people banned. We encourage everyone to maintain secure passwords and never give them out to anyone else, ever, under any circumstance.  ESO will never ask you for your password.
  • We can tell the difference between a normal OOS and one being caused by a hacking tool.
  • Normal OOSs can happen for a wide variety of reasons, bad internet connections, bad installs, bad other software, virus scanners kicking in during a game, etc.  We even had a case where every 600 seconds (10 minutes), someone would go OOS no matter what, 100% of the time.  They eventually got it fixed by calling their ISP.  They were not banned, even though they OOS’d in dozens of games.

All of this seems very satisfactory to me. Players should be reminded that the tools used to identify cheaters at Robot Entertainment are the same as those used at Ensemble Studios. For more information keep track of the discussion at AgeCommunity:

http://forum.agecommunity.com/forums/3/826478/ShowThread.aspx

Share