The fact that the game has no internal system to review player conduct or actions it makes it impossible to get rid of anybody that is ruining the game. If you rely on players to report and submit VIDEO EVIDENCE you will never be able to ban anyone unless they are ready and willing to go through the trouble. Please do something. Put a dev on every server so you can report player behavior and actions to them and they can see for themselves, or add a system that detects people being toxic, cheating, or abusing glitches. It is absolutely out of control I haven't gone a single night playing hourglass without running into 1 of 3 above or all 3 in the same night. PLEASE DO SOMETHING THIS GAME HAS BEEN LIKE THIS FOR YEARS AND NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE I WILL NOT PLAY UNTIL THIS ADDRESSED .
DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE TOXIC BEHAVIOR AND CHEATING
@perkaholiczm Ahoy matey!
Sadly there is and will never be enough staff to be on every server - And as always those staff would also then need to react to evidence based reports. So it's a catch 22 situation...
Easy Anti Cheat has been implimented and while it's not foolproof it has gone a long way to get on top of a large subection of exploiters/cheaters. If you look in the gaming news even with an anti cheat implimented it's not the golden bullet - many large studios are having to waste time and money taking the larger cheat providers to court.
There are systems that run along side this to track/monitor exploits, which has proven positive as those that saw the teleporting and keg dropping issues get squashed.
As the team always say... it's an arms race. One that has effort that continues on both sides.
In the meantime while these platforms and systems mature players can help keep the seas clean(er) by manually reporting players they come accross to the Player Support team.
As said before, putting one dev onto every server is not possible, as it would cost a fortune.
But i have to add, exploiting glitches ingame, that can be used without 3rd party software, is not bannable.
Drew Stevens said it like this:
While exploits arent bannable, we shouldn't get used to them, as they are going to be fixed someday.@dermasterbob Sure... Yet when they introduced the burning blade they didn't put a cap on how high you could level up the sword and crews found out if each crew member voted to complete the ritual at the same second they could get 4 stacks at once. So people exploited this to get their burning blade into the 100s for massive reputation pay outs. They decided to punish these players. But they didn't have a way of tracking in game the level of the sword hand ins. So the only way they could determine who was exploiting and who wasn't was to look at the emissary board. They looked for a large gap between positions and drew a line there as to who to punish and remove levels from. But they know nothing about their own game so they chose the wrong gap. They looked at the very bottom of the emissary list for a gap rather than looking for a gap between large numbers and insanely large numbers. My guild with like 8 people has me, my brother, a friend who doesn't play. I was the only one active during the burning blade. I did a 30 hour session to get the handing in the burning blade at lvl 8, 10 times, or whatever that commendation was. I lost guild levels. I lost reapers rep. Others on here reported being in max level guilds before the burning blade was even added and their guilds lost levels.
So in MOST instances they wouldn't punish people for exploiting something they let slip by in testing. But for some reason in a game where reputation and gold means very little they decided to punish people but issued a blanket punishment based of misinterpretation of data. I later joined a higher level guild and helped them push to 1000 just so I could complete all the commendations then quit because the guild limitation in this game is setup to make guilds an anti-social experience. So I didn't care about the levels as much as the matter of principal. Being punished for actually playing the game properly and not exploiting lead to being punished because they didn't know what was a properly obtainable reputation level for an update being out for 2 weeks.
When they introduced burying treasure to the game people could bury their emissary flags and it would remove the "yours" ID from it so you could trade it in for boosted rep and "worse" to get the commendations for selling an enemy flag. This is hearsay on my part so I don't know if it was factual but I thought I read something that people were getting banned for this because the commendations (which I think came with titles?) Were one of the few things in the game that carried any significance to it. Like you had to be actively hunting down emissaries to acquire it. So Rare banned people who cheesed it.
But yea... Hourglass is the biggest problem with cheaters. I say just remove hourglass and most of the cheaters will get bored. Sailing around for hours trying to chase people gets old fast. Most of the people who craved PvP early on just quit because the chasing bit literally took the wind out of their sails.
It boggles my mind that this game doesn't even have a way to report text chats that happen in their own game on their own servers. Nevermind a way to report cheaters that would actually make sense, you can't even report someone for using slurs without going to a website outside the game where you have to share a screenshot of what they said. It happened IN THE GAME, there is no reason you should have to LEAVE THE GAME to report it. Until they can at least do that, I straight up do not report anyone for any reason. The report system is too annoying. I come across many VERY hateful people on the seas, who yell slurs and hate comments, abuse spelling words wrong to get around text filters, and who have even spawn camped with no intention to sink me, and I just don't care to take the time to report. There is no reason to report until I can do it without having to record a video, upload it to youtube, then chare the link to a 3rd party site where I have to wait to be told that there isn't enough proof that the guy who instantly teleported to my crows nest is cheating.
