Hello, Kmackgames710! Chronically unflagged player here. Well, I’ll keep this short and sweet.
I have zero incentive to flag-- hell, barely to chat or interact at large-- whilst AGS remains so completely mum about the mass reporting rash afflicting the game. Streamers are practically running rackets with it, amidst the other hairy issues it’s caused.
As-is, it kind of seems like people just get to get away with it because ‘eh,’ and apparently all these bans are manually curated and nothing’s automated, it’s just EAC nailing people or something.
So I avoid any chance of punishment by minimizing my involvement in all vectors that would potentially lead there… including waiting out this storm of exploits, bugs and this abuse of their system before I go flagging myself up.
After this point is just me rambling. Short and sweet part is over, now is time for internet soapboxing.
I don’t know. What I do know is it’d be nice to nab that news from them rather than from a bunch of second-hand grapevines, and yet I seem unable or perhaps they just don’t believe the issue is one worth a frontal address-- a move I firmly regard as a mistake. Are they afraid of it resulting in some sort of information leak? Would that leak be worse than players being wrongfully punished for playing the game? More importantly, are they under some kind of delusion that this won’t be the thing that kills their game? Exploits, bugs, all these things can almost get thrown under an umbrella of endearment, ‘personal quirk,’ the kind of thing you ‘get over’ to play a game and experience it. The threat of being even temporarily banned on no reasonable premise, though, is absolutely terrifying. (Well, as far as ‘things that can happen to you in New World’ go. Spiders are much more terrifying. But I digress.)
It’s not exactly shyly documented, either. If we google it we see items addressing this dating back to August, which suggests A) this issue is not new to release and B) they were (made) aware of it well before release. So are they unwilling, or do they believe that this value of this system outweighs the damage it’s causing? I don’t think that’s a good hill to stand upon, because I think word spreads like wildfire and most people I’ve asked who don’t play the game but follow gaming news know, firstly of it, that it’s a buggy mess with people abusing reports. That-- I get my world is a microcosm and not the whole thing, but dang, that isn’t a good rap for your game to have. And it’s over some of the dumbest thing too-- which is ironic, because an automatic ban system should be a really good way to totally nap on bots as it basically does the work for you, but while it seems to be effective in layers for suppressing players, the bot issue seems to be growing by the day. Brings me back to those old side-street MMORPGs you’d find on ‘TOP MMO LIST’ or whatever site, and they’d have anti-bots that would make you do something like answer a quiz question for a modest reward. Fully incentivized for players, but next-to-impossible to bust with a bot.
But this is getting away from me pretty quickly here. I’ll add it never helps when there are known exploits about too. You can call me juvenile, but I’m picky on how I spend my time… incentive and PVP servers would be a huge leap in the right direction. They just have to get themselves into racing form in the first place.