Cheater & hacker update 11/18

"Boov;c-1696088" wrote:
I'm honestly a bit curious why everyone seems to be so happy about this. Do you guys really dislike other players buying an account or getting crystals cheaper so much? I mean, i get that you don't want other guys to get things cheaper or still face an account of a player who stopped playing because they're your competition in arena, but it's not like you can notice a difference while playing between a legit whale and a crystalfraud/bought whale account. What leaderboard you're placed on when you started playing most likely plays a far bigger roll in your ingame performance than these accounts that are getting banned ever did.
Maybe i'm completely wrong about this, but the way i see it is that ea/cg are mostly protecting themselves against theft instead of banning cheaters who're actively ruining the game by hacking.
Don't get me wrong, i do think "thiefs" should be punished, but it's not like i'm cheering when the local supermarket busts a thief or anything like that (eventhough pricess may go down if theft goes down, wich would be in my interrest).

My take on this is... why not do both?

Frankly this fraud stuff took over a year to investigate to the point of this weeks actions because we spend the vast majority of our time on arena/ raid / TW / battle cheaters. As gamers, we 100% agree that those cheats are the most impacting to a good game experience.

As the fraud investigations slowly unfolded in front of us we could not ignore. And this week we found ourselves in a position to take the first of what will be several waves of action.

The original post is intended to answer the question that others began posting Monday: Why are so many accounts being banned all of a sudden?

And a little fun/sad fact (coming from someone who has tracked cheaters, hackers, and fraudsters for years): rarely does one just violate the covenant of trust once, or in only one realm of play. We consistently see that a player willing to cheat a raid will soon escalate to cheating TW. Or a player willing to cheat to get crystals, will soon cheat to take first place in the arena.

I hope our actions in our little slice of the studio have a positive impact on your gaming experience.

LD