Without any evidence to back that up, I find myself quite unable to have faith.
Who has been banned for cheating, besides those who did so in a blatant and visible way on stream?
Someone brought up the 2.X engineering exploit. A lot of folks got their modules removed.
But that exploit had been reported months prior. Who actually got a temp shadowban? The guy who disclosed the exploit to the wider community.
Not exactly. Harry was the one that disclosed the exploit through a bug forum post on an alt as directed by FDev themselves. Harry reached out to FDev directly with PMs and they told him "we can't recreate it, post it on the public bug forums and we'll take a look at it."
The guy that got a temp ban made a video on how to do it and then, on FDev's own forum, said they weren't going to do anything about it and essentially dared them to ban him.
(Thanks to Ryan_m17 for the clarification)
Then, and only then, was that issue fixed, and it took a fair bit more time for the poor underlying design to be remedied.
This is not a new problem. Botters have also been a major issue for some time (for the PvE folks). When you put your game on sale very cheaply as Fdev occasionally has, it is easy to buy up many alts with which to evade bans. That is, of course, when they are actually caught.
So again. These words are cheap.
Show us what you are doing about this. In particular, I suggest:
-
Splurging a little on an actual anti-cheat solution, e.g. Battleye, and telling us about it. That is of course only part of a complete package but would be a good start and would help restore confidence.
-It is not enough to just tell us to use the report tool. Take a note from PUBG and others and
tell us when our reports have resulted in action, and ideally what action has been taken. That will also discourage frivolous reports as it will show that reports actually get attention.
-Compile these into stats and publish them on a regular basis, perhaps quarterly. And don't be afraid to name CMDRs who have been caught cheating. Publish a quarterly-to-monthly list of bans issued and reason categories. (optimally, only name them on the second and third "strike"). You want to discourage ToS violations? This is how you do it, and this is how you show people you mean business when it comes to enforcing your ToS. Right now, that is not the impression we have.
-Disclose to us your procedures and ramifications from report to ban. At the very least, give us some confidence that those who are shadowbanned can have
no effect on the main galaxy... be it BGS, Powerplay, or exploration credit. Right now the only concrete and specific information we have on your procedures comes from secondary sources.
-Don't be afraid to permaban. I somehow suspect that cheaters don't buy a lot of paint jobs. And no, you don't have to refund cheaters if you ban them for ToS violations!
-Finally, don't give us this "only a small amount" stuff when it comes to cheaters. First off, that is only the amount you caught. That may be the case, but in a game where some activities take hours to months (some BGS work and PowerPlay in particular) and that work can be reversed with far less time and effort by some script kiddie with a fleet of untouchable bot-alts, that is a recipe for causing your most dedicated players to ragequit.
I mean... what if a cheater found Raxxla? I imagine that would cause quite a hullabulloo.
TLDR: Be accountable to your community who have to this point been very forgiving. As of right now, you have left us without confidence that this cheat problem is being competently worked on, and without confidence that our reports of players and bugs are being addressed. Show us you are addressing our concerns. And be specific. Canned, empty placation attempts like this are not going to cut it.
