Suggestion on Detecting Cheaters and Cheater Funded Alliance

Unknown

I don't know what is currently in place to detect cheaters at D3's end, but there should a system that flag out suspicious activity so they can investigate them. Relying on players to spot cheaters is unreliable at best and only spots the most blatant of cheaters. Below are a few suggestions:

1. Flagging Suspicious Players Based on HP spent & Day Count
Players with few days played and a high amount of HP spent is one that should warrant a check. This will prevent cheaters from returning to the game quickly with highly leveled characters. They will have to spend more effort to level up the characters rather than dumping HP buying covers.

2. Dealing with HP spent on alliances
Expensive alliance slots probably means more people are resorting to cheats to buy slots.

For alliances whose slots were bought by players found to be cheating, that slot should be removed. If multiple slots were bought, those slots should be removed and the extra non-commander players should be moved to a new alliance renamed as <OldAllianceName>#1. This way, they can still be found and can still join their old alliance if someone pays HP to expand the roster.

JamieMadrox

Good suggestions, but who is to say that they just didn't buy a big pack of HP from the store? I don't know if they can track that or not (they should be able to), but if they can then they could build some sort of check in to the game to make sure that you actually bought/earned the ISO/HP/Boosts/Covers/Whatever that you're using.

Maybe IceIX can illuminate the situation a bit and comment on the possibility of instituting something like this.

Unknown

I can't find the post right now but IceIX has talked about the measures they take to detect and deal with cheaters. The problem is with such a small staff new ways of cheating can go undetected and that is the primary reason to have the community report suspected cheaters is so the Devs can look into specific examples and deal with that individual case but also see how that individual did manage to get past their detections and improve them accordingly.

As far as what to do with cheater funded alliances. Yeah, these need to be checked out on an individual basis and if not legit either need to be shrunk back down or disbanded entirely. Should be easy enough for the devs to see if any of the members actually purchased HP in those quantities vs. coming out of thin air.

Unknown

They should be able to check if the person actually paid for HP from their store. Otherwise it might be impossible for them to ban cheaters now without having a lot of false positives i.e. sandboxing legit players

If they could do a Sum(HP earned + HP bought) and check that it's more than Sum (HP spent), that might be even more effective.

JamieMadrox

I don't know how easy it would be since the purchase goes through a third party, Apple App store, Steam, Android Market, and those accounts may not be able to be linked to an individual user. For example if your store account was in a spouse's name and used their email, credit card, etc.