Chris With Guns got screwed.

I am posting this for Chris as I feel there must be something we can do for him.


Post in Reddit

TL;DR: Got banned in automated sweep because I'm level 548. This banning process punishes the hardcore payers that buy cash cards and support the game. They need to make ban appeals faster (hope you guys never find out how that goes) and create different associations with high-level players.

Hi,

I'm *********** on Social Club for GTA Online. I have 77 days 18 hours 37 minutes played, 19.4 million career RP, and I'm rank 548. I've been playing since launch and in that time I've bought two cash cards. I've published over a dozen custom jobs, one of which (GTA: You Are A Pirate!) actually has a decent number of plays. I have $7.8 million in the bank and multiple LSPD blue weapons (600+ kills).

By the stats, I'm one of the "hardcore" players that form the revenue-generating base of GTA: Online, and right now, I can't play because I've been banned for cheating.

This is the sign of two very bad, systemic things about GTA online: a broken level system and an ineffective system in place for appealing bans.

One by one, this type of ban sends the message to hardcore players: This is what you have to look forward to if you really play this game and get serious about it, maybe run a crew or just make videos or just play a lot because you're a work-at-home adult like me. If you end up getting a high level, you can expect at some point to be banned without effective appeal.because you get reported by noobs and banned in automated sweeps.

I have an appeal in process (the ticket number referenced above, #2504583) but despite several (actually very cordial and professional) phone calls with Rockstar Technical support (hi Zachary M., Tristan and whoever else, it's me, the guy that keeps calling!), I'm still banned because customer service apparently cannot transfer me to the guy who does ban appeals and the guy who does ban appeals does not have a number or email address I can reach.

First, let's get one thing clear: By the stats, I'm either not a cheater, or the worst cheater ever, since it apparently takes me 77 days of play time to get any advantage. I received hacked cash then had it wiped like everyone else (I actually was wiped down to $550,000, the most I've heard of, because I was playing missions on hard repeatedly to make the guide prior to the wipe). I never joined a hacked lobby, never ran a hacked DNS server, and I've even been avoiding public free roam since the recent UFO hacks. I'm an adult player (as you might guess from my writing) and I don't spam lobbies like the "squeakers" do.

I know what I'm talking about when it comes to cheaters too. I've published a popular mission guide for GTA: Online, in addition to a blog on ethical and literary issues in GTA Online. I hunted down a lot of cheaters and I know what a DNS-leveled character looks like. Let me describe that real quick.

A cheater who found a way to attain my level will differ from my profile in a few key ways:
•First, and most easily, stats: they will have either deficient flying or stealth. There were rumored to be some methods of attaining maxed-out basic stats through early versions of the tunables.js hack, but from my experience, the vast majority of level hackers did not take advantage of them.
•Most often, they won't own a boat. Not owning a boat is a telltale sign of a level and RP cheaters because in the first DLC patch - the Beach Bum DLC - everyone got a boat (it's as simple as going to the website and getting it for free). This is easy to see from the lobby screen. Assuming someone is my level (500+) lack of a boat suggests that they started playing after the Beach Bum DLC and cannot have played since launch, subtracting 3+ months (or 30 days of play time at my ratio of days since release to days played) from the amount of time they could have spent reaching my level.
•Playstyle. I see this more than you - DNS cheaters are uniformly terrible players. They drive poorly, the do survivals and missions poorly, they lose races and in general are assholes to people.

For you, cheater profiles will vary in one key way, and this is really the only stat you need to look at to ban: The ratio of RP to hours played. An easy way to do this math is just to substitute rank. Let's take me for example: Rank 548 divided by 1866 hours = 0.29 rank per hour. Using RP, 12.7 million RP divided by 1866 hours = 6806 RP per hour.

I'm most familiar with RP returns from missions, so in terms of missions, 6806 RP per hour is not at all a difficult rate to sustain; that's Rooftop Rumble on Hard twice, or 4 Crystal Clear Out III runs in a Buzzard on hard (less than 40 minutes for a competent player, more like 20 in my experience). Think about those numbers in terms of cheating: What is the point of me cheating to attain this level when I can simply play Rooftop Rumble a few times or even just a random mixture of missions on hard? Even a more time-intensive mission like Base Invaders or Chopper Tail easily deliver 4000+ RP / hour returns. This number also represents a lot of minimal RP/hour activity - noodling around in free roam, hunting other players, failing missions and just generally messing about... like you're supposed to.

I'll go out on a limb here and speculate - I'm willing to bet that out of every 100 people you banned, 20 were actually legit players like me (the Pareto principle). This isn't a huge number unless you also consider that these people are the ones who play a lot and actually might buy cash cards. This wouldn't be a big deal for you and not even worth reading really unless the problem was this: you're banning your "whales" too. You know, the small percentage of crazy players like me that buy in-game merchandise in large amounts and support the game. Since these automated sweeps are going to keep running and noobs are probably going to keep reporting us (because, you know, noobs) eventually we are all going to level up and get banned and run into this process lacking both timeliness and fairness.

Driving away your most lucrative, hardcore customers is a serious, serious problem. It's the only reason I think anyone at Rockstar will care enough to read this. If there had been at least a MINIMAL audit of the automated sweep that looked at this ratio, I'm willing to speculate further that you could have discarded the lowest 80% in terms of RP per hour and ended up with the same number of actual cheaters you captured.

This is endemic of a deeper problem though, more than just customer service and un-banning my account. There are serious disadvantages to having a high level. GTA Online's constant problems with cheaters have created a prejudicial atmosphere towards high level players. In short, there is simply no reason to be a hardcore player if it's just going to end up with people being dicks to you. Your game scales badly at the highest levels of time played to "delight" obtained.

I'll be the first one to say that people who ban and kick out suspiciously high level cheaters WERE probably doing the right thing at first. As I mentioned, DNS hackers were generally the very worst players, and a good number of them were in fact straightforward griefers. Before the first automated level resets, in fact, I myself routinely kicked people out of lobbies, reported them and, more often, simply killed them repeatedly because that's how in-game policing works. It was actually a lot of fun - again, because, noobs.

Those automated sweeps were apparently very widespread and very effective - I haven't seen a statistically hacked-looking character since 1.13. In fact, the new signature of a hacked character is now a low-level player with access to more hardware (boat, helo, plane) than they should have - the opposite of what it used to be.

Unfortunately for GTA Online and its revenue model, what Rockstar's PR and the community efforts at reporting have inadvertently turned into is essentially a very juvenile kind of hysteria. On average, I get kicked from 3 out of every 5 contact missions I enter through the Quick Job menu - because of my level. I'm so used to high-pitched squeakers saying "Aww, level 500? He must be a hacker!" that I've actually started pre-emptively muting everyone and avoiding the most popular contact missions. If I ever do well at anything - killing people in free roam, having a high KDR in a deathmatch or winning a race - generally it's accompanied by at least a few people reporting me for cheating. Prior to getting actually banned, I was mute-banned for better than a month - again, because of level (since I never talk to anyone in free roam, again, because noobs), again without appeal or explanation.

There is such a strong association of cheating with high level that it's basically not a good idea to have a high level character anymore. This is a completely asinine way to run a multiplayer game. Think about it: Imagine if Call of Duty started banning people based on performance - or if World of Warcraft started banning its highest-leveled hardcore players. What do you think would happen to their playerbases? That's exactly what's happening to GTA Online. When you disincent leveling, you drive away your players - the exact players you need to keep your game running, in fact. The early issues with character permanence (I myself lost a level 26 character in the first week), combined with these issues basically create the impression, at least to me, that GTA Online does not get the basic, central revenue-generating aspect of these games - your character and what happens to it.

If all you do is un-ban me without making any kind of changes to the way the game is running, I'm probably going to end up getting reported by noobs who don't know any better - again - and getting banned again. And the same thing will happen to other players as they reach my level.

Let me suggest a few solutions that can fix this situation:

•Run sweeps better. You need to start looking at three different stat profiles - first, people with excessively high RP/hour ratios, second, people with low-leveled characters and access to helos, planes and boats; third, people with excessively high (10+) kill to death ratios and aggregate number of kills, indicative of either jet griefing in free roam (most commonly) or cheating. Since the first waves of automated sweeps have been fairly effective and judging by my case, fairly paranoid and extensive, there will not be that many accounts to examine on this basis. This far into the game (9+ months) it's reasonable to expect level 500 - 600 legit players at the very highest percentiles - you're not going to find very many cheaters that way anymore.


•Make ban appeals faster and better. Why can't tech support (hi guys!) connect me to the ban appeals department? Why can't I just call or write them to make my case? It would be simple to just re-write the ban email you sent me and give an email address specifically appeal the ban. Remember - a determinate percentage of the people you ban are going to be whales, so this is front-line customer service! I suspect there's at least a few of the guys in Tech Support I talked to this week who would do great at this job.


•Provide some advantage to others for having a "hardcore" player along. You can't erase the association of high level with cheating - that damage has been done. What you can do to fix the situation, however, is to create new associations with high-levels. Provide some reason to go beyond level 120 - it can be heists-related, but another idea would be to provide some group benefit for missions and survivals. You could provide a stipend or incentive for helping lower-level players - for instance, increased health regeneration rate, bonus RP or cash (over and above the current crew and group bonuses to RP) for missions with very high level and very low level players, RP or cash bonuses for keeping low leveled players alive during a mission, the ability to share Pegasus-delivered vehicles at level 200... I'm sure there's a lot of great community suggestions on these type of bonuses so I don't have to go into them, but they need to happen. Why would you bother getting involved in this game to the level that I have if you're just going to get banned - and if there's no gameplay benefit either?


Since the level problem is an endemic, ongoing problem that cuts to the core of GTA Online's fundamental business model, I strongly suggest - indeed, since I like this game, I ask, indeed, I importune you - that you address this problem in the next major content patch. Also, please unban me - I should be playing for the Hipster Weekend Event right now but because I can't, I'm writing this instead and also posting it to Reddit and mailing it to you guys. I hope you guys see what's going on here and address this situation soon.

Thanks for the great game,

xxxxxxxx (social club: **********, platform: xbox 360, date of ban 5/16/2014)


On his stats page it shows 1987 wins, 3810 losses and over 8 days racing...not to mention all the other stats. They first banned him...and then unbanned him but knocked him down to level 23. How is that even logical?
His social Club stats