XX Sulla XX, on 09 May 2015 - 12:48 PM, said:
Well since a certain high profile competitive player was banned yesterday its got me thinking. It is best for the banned players and game for people to know why. When PGI does not say why they are banned most people assume cheating. If them or their friends say it was for being a jerk in email or trolling etc many people will assume they are covering up for their friend.
Also for PGI I think it would be good for the community to know why PGI is banning people. Also would be good for the community to know if PGI are finding and banning cheaters.
Main reasons not to
1 - it can cause arguments if someone popular is banned, as lots of their chums (for either honest or cynical reasons) will go "Show us the proof or it's a fix!". PGI can't show the proof, because the proof is the detection system and if you show that to people it helps the cheaters get around it by about one metric-****-ton. You also get people quitting in disgust at perfectly valid busts, which impacts your bottom line.
2 - it can cause complaints if someone unknown is banned,.because people go "oooh, so you banned asd123iop but what about (insert name here? Why do you let them go free?"
3 - It can cause problems on the forums as people argue 1 & 2, resulting in forum bans. You also get a massive increase in name and shame because "the forum rules are X but PGI broke them and so can I because I'm doing it for good reasons"
4 - you can get a million and one "why you say I cheat, I never did that!!" posts from the banned person. Occasionally they go "I SEW U FOR DEFARMATION!!" and do a whole bunch of annoying legalese yelling. That takes up time and fuels 1, 2, and 3.
5 - You can get an outcry of 'bwahahaha, I got away with it' from people trying to act tough. Suddenly 150 banned isn't an impressive improvement in the removal of cheating, it's only 10% of those cheating and PGI are doing nothing to stop it because some guy that can't tell a macro from Swiss cheese just claimed to have a billion bots running all the time!!!". You also get loons that go 'oooh, I want to be on that list' or that jack other peoples accounts to then get them added to the list.
Basically I totally get why you want to know and why you have identified the potential positive elements from doing what you described, but it often causes a lot of knock on problems that take up a lot of staff time (most likely when they are already dealing with a ton of email complaints about the bans as it is) which has to be found somewhere (your big three are customer support, cheat detection, and development time). Some games do it, but generally it's more effective and efficient to just have people disappear so it's why a lot just ship out the cheating swine.
Edited by Raggedyman, 11 May 2015 - 09:49 PM.