Cheater reports & Ban Appeals in 2023

[Dutchman101]

Hello,

Effective immediately it's no longer possible to:

- Report players to AC team

- Appeal any global bans

Do not attempt to report players to MTA staff team, or appeal any bans. It doesn't matter what you think or believe in, they will no longer be processed.

 

A) If you need to report a player, please contact admins on the server they are playing on. Server admins should pay the amount of attention that staff in other multiplayer games (with hosted servers) typically pay, and owners should be mindful of script security and scripted anti-cheat solutions to fill in some cracks that started to be created over the past few years, and continue to do so as a result of lowered manpower within the MTA AC team.

B) Appealing bans is no longer needed as permanent bans have been removed last month, and any of the handful of cases not covered aren't meant to ever be appealed, without exception. Temporary bans were never meant to be appealed, although some staff member's intepretation of that (while redirecting users) has varied - if you got a temporary ban, wait for it to expire and surely you got a feeling of what not to do/not to run next time while MTA is opened, to avoid getting banned again.

AC team is actively monitoring the reliability & integrity of standard detections that may lead to temporary bans, that's one of the things its manpower still allows it to do, so you can see why we're confident to go this route - any leakage of appeals in places they don't belong/users contacting MTA about their bans anyways, our experience has learned is 99.9% users that know why they got banned but won't accept it and are persistent.. as before, all such inquiries won't lead anywhere, but especially now we said "No appeals anymore" there will be zero interaction and certain behaviors may also lead to removal from the respective platforms where inquiries are made in a persistent or disruptive fashion.

 

Finally, regarding cheaters - the level of sophistication that our AC has reached due to years of playing a cat mouse game with cheaters, is a hugely raised border for cheats to be made and will continue to do so (as methods that were used in the past were patched as per the spoilered text in this topic, so they can't be re-used). However, with the loss of dedicated AC developers within AC team, comes that we can no longer keep up as before, this situation has existed for the past 2 years so as of this post nothing is abruptly changing, it's just the point of admitting we won't be tryharding as much as in the past to be known as totally cheater-free game, a reputation we held for long. If you look around in the gaming industry, you'll see that we held up pretty well in comparison, but the cheating industry (due to toxicity demand) has also hardened, and after 20 years we are low on manpower which is fully understandable.

We will continue to bring AC improvements and get rid of emerging cheats and cheaters, but at our own pace, without external pressure or too high community expectations, from now on everything is on a best-effort basis and the point is that there may be periods during which we can't make any waves due to manpower constricts. You can see that this topic intends to lower your expectations and respect the amount of free time we (as volunteers) are able to invest, and get off our backs for things being different compared to some years ago. We're also OK to restrict ban appeals and player reports so we can delegate all of the manpower that's left on our new strategy, breaking cheats (patching them) and just preventing them from working to begin with, instead of permanently banning cheat users and having to deal with them "regretting" in ban appeals. We are also OK to restrict reporting cheaters as our focus shifts to breaking the cheats, and to get the required information to break one, we have our own methods and channels so much that we don't need any sort of reports. Due to the state of anticheat and heuristics, we always have a good picture of abnormalities and what cheats are doing, so the main limiting factor is manpower to get to work with what we have & know.

Enjoy the game, and remember that player desires make the market for servers - so if you see too many cheaters, ask server owners to invest their time in training server admins to be on the lookout for cheaters and ban them, script protection/alert systems, and after all, have some peace of mind because cheating in MTA will always be a raised border and still won't be as common as in directly competing projects.

 

// Note: using the bug bounty program for security bugs remains possible, end user security will always be among MTA team's top priorities. The program has been frozen for cheats, though, and documentation will soon reflect that.

[Dutchman101]

To take away some confusion, understand that the changes being announced here are mostly focussed on cutting out the 'community front' of AC team operations, so that we can optimize limited manpower and rebalance expectations for our users to accept there will be periods we can't make waves, if you were able to move yourself into our perspective on how people always want everything solved, fixed, sorted out immediately on their whim, and how persistent they are in that (and in most cases bring something misconceived/invalid, after which they can't even be convinced otherwise or that would take from our time disproportionally), you'd be straight out scared and quickly stressed out.

 

OP was clarified by adding in this segment 1 day after the topic was made:

We will continue to bring AC improvements and get rid of emerging cheats and cheaters, but at our own pace, without external pressure or too high community expectations, from now on everything is on a best-effort basis and the point is that there may be periods during which we can't make any waves due to manpower constricts. You can see that this topic intends to lower your expectations and respect the amount of free time we (as volunteers) are able to invest, and get off our backs for things being different compared to some years ago. We're also OK to restrict ban appeals and player reports so we can delegate all of the manpower that's left on our new strategy, breaking cheats (patching them) and just preventing them from working to begin with, instead of permanently banning cheat users and having to deal with them "regretting" in ban appeals. We are also OK to restrict reporting cheaters as our focus shifts to breaking the cheats, and to get the required information to break one, we have our own methods and channels so much that we don't need any sort of reports. Due to the state of anticheat and heuristics, we always have a good picture of abnormalities and what cheats are doing, so the main limiting factor is manpower to get to work with what we have & know.

After all, cheating on MTA will not be left alone, and AC team will disrupt it and raise the border even more whenever manpower allows it to do so. Cheaters should realize that their fun may come to an end at any unexpected moment, and that if they're too used to being able to cheat, they will be very upset to have to adapt to playing normally for as long it takes the cheat devs to catch back up to us again.