TheOneOmega
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- Joined
- Oct 5, 2008
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- Marie TheOne Omega
Part of the problem is that a lot of folks are obsessed with some silver bullet metric as a means to establish cheating. Sound policy enforcement is a more multifaceted process, involving correlating several metrics, interviewing the suspect (about what actions they took, why they took them, their thought processes and goals, whether they knew certain actions were disallowed by the rules, etc.) to establish a narrative, attempting to falsify any suspicious points within the narrative by investigating direct claims and collateral truths (such as by examining the suspect's other actions and conversations for contradictions), and finally, if and only if claims can be falsified to the extent that the individual is believed beyond reasonable doubt by MindArk to have intentionally violated policy in order to gain an unfair advantage, declaring that cheating has taken place and engaging in penalty issuance. In some such cases in which cheating cannot be established, unintentional violations of policy may still be established, often due to a player taking actions which have already been publicly declared as bugs unbeknown to the player. Every case is unique, and there is no magic metric or algorithm for this type of thing that can accurately replace human judgment, judgment which, while unavoidably subjective, should be based in the totality of evidence that can be collected, and not on a single red or yellow flag of suspicious behavior. Fair policy enforcement which addresses the guilty while not infringing on the innocent is a time investment that requires real effort, and transparency and productive communication with the suspect. Shortcutting the process by replacing it with a simplistic fiction leads to the abysmal policy enforcement systems we commonly see implemented on social media sites, which barely even maintain a pretense of operating in pursuit of fairness as opposed to direct profit motive. We would be better off with the admittedly suboptimal status quo of applying enforcement relatively infrequently than settling for a half-baked policy enforcement model.Though it's still early days for Mindark actually getting stricter on these, as I'm sure people who flagged this issue during this event, 'Tested' the exploits and didn't get progress rollback due to being good citizens. Which again is a bit of a mistake on Mindarks part as it simply just encourages a behaviour of exploit early, then flag to Mindark to protect your ass and prevent others from getting the same advantage.
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