Cheating

alphabeta

So I'm sure this post will get no official response and maybe me banned but at this point who cares.

A well known roster is being played by someone other than the person who's account it is.

This has been reported to CS probably 100 times and is not speculation or guess work or rumour its fact.

And nothing has happened. 

At all - tickets get closed and the cheating carries on.

So my take away from this and the BH scandal is if you can cheat do because D3 / Demi don't seem to care, they actively turn a blind eye if you slip them enough money - funny in other contexts that would be considered accepting a bribe but apparently in MPQ its considered normal course of business.

bbigler

I don't really care if someone is playing someone else's account; but I do care if someone has created an all powerful roster by cheating.  Those players and accounts, should be removed from the game.  It really undermines the hard work that everybody else does. 

What's the point in working hard to improve your roster and gain an advantage, when other people cheat to get the same results and have no consequences.

Fightmastermpq

Why is this a big deal?  Why does this bother you?

broll

Edit: If you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all right?

toddler316

I don't agree with the OPs idea here.  According to that logic, I would be cheating if I let my girlfriend play a few nodes while I'm driving.

Hadronic

Unless the other person playing is a bot then who cares. Are you seriously saying my account should be banned if I let my girlfriend play a match on my phone?

mpqr7

I don't see what the big deal is. To the best of my understanding (and I could be totally wrong), person A has a great account through legitimate purchases (not cheating), and s/he is taking a break. Therefore, s/he gave ownership of her/his account to person B to play while s/he is gone.

MPQ is such an intense game that if you have an amazing account, and then you take time off, you've completely slipped way behind when you return. So I can understand why that would occur. To me, it's not a problem, as long as person A's account was created fully by payments and not by cheating, which I believe it was.

I'm also not crazy about selling and merging of accounts, but I don't think this is happening here.

beyonderbub

This reminds me of another post that mentioned how CEOs who play MPQ, hire executive assistants whose primary function was to grind battles for them. 

broll

I don't know the facts here so here are general thoughts:

If the account was sold I would hope that's againist ToS and would result in punishment.
If the player is hiring out people to play for them same thing.
If a relative/family member has borrowed the account that's more a grey area / not that big of deal.

In general I wish the devs took a harder line on cheating, based on the exploit thread it doesn't seem they do.

alphabeta

Fightmastermpq said:

Why is this a big deal?  Why does this bother you?

Because I don't get to choose which elements of the rules apply to me and which don't so why should anyone else have this privilege?

Demi/D3 didn't have to put the rule in the terms of service making it cheating to have someone else play your account - they could have changed the terms of service tomorrow if they wanted an no one would have any recourse but while its in there and they ignore it I have a legitimate issue that I don't know which items of the terms of service will or won't be enforced therefore the entire ToS become irrelevant. 

And from a demi/d3 perspective in certain legal jurisdictions this game is played the entire thing become unenforceable because they have chosen to vary it unilaterally they can't then revert back at a later stage.

mpqr7

beyonderbub said:

This reminds me of another post that mentioned how CEOs who play MPQ, hire executive assistants whose primary function was to grind battles for them. 

Dude, I would love to have my job be to play mpq, since I play it so much anyway  Although I can't imagine such a job would pay that much or offer benefits... But it would be funny to get in trouble from my boss for NOT playing enough mpq 

BoyWonder1914

I understand the fundamental reason behind why this bothers you, but the game is set up in a way that it ultimately doesn't matter. There's no way to transfer or "gift" rewards to other players, so all gains made by this proxy player still go to the original account. It'd be a different story if this person was using the account to make his own roster better in some kind of way. Other than that, you don't really have much of a case, unless the original account owner had already been cheating to create an all-powerful roster. 

As it stands, the only person that really loses here is the guy temporarily using the account. He's pretty much just helping someone else's roster with nothing to really show for it. If you think about it, this isn't really much different than you letting one of your kids play the game with your roster on a tablet. 

beyonderbub

mpqr7 said:

beyonderbub said:

This reminds me of another post that mentioned how CEOs who play MPQ, hire executive assistants whose primary function was to grind battles for them. 

Dude, I would love to have my job be to play mpq, since I play it so much anyway  Although I can't imagine such a job would pay that much or offer benefits... But it would be funny to get in trouble from my boss for NOT playing enough mpq 

Imagine performance based bonuses or the flip side, getting fired for not hitting 900 in PVP

Stax the Foyer

If this is the case, it would involve a different logon from a different device, possibly from a different part of the world involving playtime at different times.  There would be many factors which could make this type of account sharing apparent that would not be present when I hand my phone to my daughter and let her swipe tiles in the prologue.

In addition, you're assuming that the primary motivation behind playing the account is to earn rewards for the account.  Instead, the primary motivation could be playing in a ... disruptive manner, which would not be done as easily with the primary account.  

Such a disruptive playstyle could be aided, hypothetically, by the fact that MMR makes very strong accounts largely invisible to the vast majority of players.

bbigler

beyonderbub said:

This reminds me of another post that mentioned how CEOs who play MPQ, hire executive assistants whose primary function was to grind battles for them. 

That sounds more like a myth than a truth.  People would like to think that someone else is helping them. 

Fightmastermpq

alphabeta said:

Fightmastermpq said:

Why is this a big deal?  Why does this bother you?

Because I don't get to choose which elements of the rules apply to me and which don't so why should anyone else have this privilege?

Demi/D3 didn't have to put the rule in the terms of service making it cheating to have someone else play your account - they could have changed the terms of service tomorrow if they wanted an no one would have any recourse but while its in there and they ignore it I have a legitimate issue that I don't know which items of the terms of service will or won't be enforced therefore the entire ToS become irrelevant. 

And from a demi/d3 perspective in certain legal jurisdictions this game is played the entire thing become unenforceable because they have chosen to vary it unilaterally they can't then revert back at a later stage.

So I believe the reason you can't play another account is to prevent the sale of accounts.  The don't want new users picking up where old users left off, they want new users spending to catch up to where the old users are.  In this particular case, that isn't what is happening at all - one player is on a break and is letting someone else watch over their account until they return.

What if they got special permission from D3 beforehand and D3 said it was OK?  Would you still have a problem with it?

alphabeta

Fightmastermpq said:

alphabeta said:

Fightmastermpq said:

Why is this a big deal?  Why does this bother you?

Because I don't get to choose which elements of the rules apply to me and which don't so why should anyone else have this privilege?

Demi/D3 didn't have to put the rule in the terms of service making it cheating to have someone else play your account - they could have changed the terms of service tomorrow if they wanted an no one would have any recourse but while its in there and they ignore it I have a legitimate issue that I don't know which items of the terms of service will or won't be enforced therefore the entire ToS become irrelevant. 

And from a demi/d3 perspective in certain legal jurisdictions this game is played the entire thing become unenforceable because they have chosen to vary it unilaterally they can't then revert back at a later stage.

So I believe the reason you can't play another account is to prevent the sale of accounts.  The don't want new users picking up where old users left off, they want new users spending to catch up to where the old users are.  In this particular case, that isn't what is happening at all - one player is on a break and is letting someone else watch over their account until they return.

What if they got special permission from D3 beforehand and D3 said it was OK?  Would you still have a problem with it?

You believe and special permission are irrelevant from a legal perspective so yes I have a problem with it and frankly d3/demi should to because I don't think they understand the can of worms they've opened for themselves.

Contract law is very clear and simple - if one party chooses not to enforce elements of the contract they can not ever go back and enforce them at a later stage without the express agreement of the other party - there is not sub clause because it was for a valuable player who had permission - so whether they realise it or not they now have a legally unenforceable terms of service and frankly no route back to being able to enforce it in future.

This is also a high profile example but there are countless accounts being played that have been sold - I accept that this is not the case in the example I cited above but  the clause can't be said to be stopping that .... I wonder if enforcement on sales have slowed since the special permission for a loan was given?  Even if it hasn't this is the sort of problem a special permission gives because its now a legitimate question on how many other ToS violations are being overlooked that we don't know about?

Beer40

alphabeta said:

So I'm sure this post will get no official response and maybe me banned but at this point who cares.

A well known roster is being played by someone other than the person who's account it is.

This has been reported to CS probably 100 times and is not speculation or guess work or rumour its fact.

And nothing has happened. 

At all - tickets get closed and the cheating carries on.

So my take away from this and the BH scandal is if you can cheat do because D3 / Demi don't seem to care, they actively turn a blind eye if you slip them enough money - funny in other contexts that would be considered accepting a bribe but apparently in MPQ its considered normal course of business.

Just because now I'm curious, do you have an official response from CS in the matter that you could share with us? I'm speculating here but I assume you think this is cheating because the account is taking rewards other "active" players should get now that the original owner has taken a hiatus? That seems reasonable enough, if its the case. The counter point is the one nearly everyone commenting is mentioning: I should be able to hand my phone to someone to play a few matches if they'd like to, just as I share my xbox with friends/family if they want to play. That seems reasonable too.

It seems like you've found a pretty large gray area that is open to interpretation and those things typically don't get resolved, in games or life.

Basepuzzler

The issue is that the player in question is taking it upon himself to hit as many players as they can and suppress points.  

So it certainly does affect others, and that's why they care.  If the unnamed player didn't insist on trolling with the account that isn't theirs then nobody would care.

Rhycar

The problem is that accounts have been boxed before for doing just this. Choosing to turn a blind eye to one individual instance, for any reason, means we're not all playing by the same rules.

Fightmastermpq

Basepuzzler said:

The issue is that the player in question is taking it upon himself to hit as many players as they can and suppress points.  

So it certainly does affect others, and that's why they care.  If the unnamed player didn't insist on trolling with the account that isn't theirs then nobody would care.

Yeah, but have you seen that player's actual account?  I'm not sure it would really make much of a difference......