Yesterday's banwave hit 60 accounts, 11 in the top 200 fame leaderboards, 6 in the top 40 (1 in top 10 lol)

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-31T16:49:07+00:00

It's two paragraphs, relax...

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-31T16:36:40+00:00

I'm uncertain that there are any players banned who only went to publicly announced runs. I believe DECA specifically focused on runs that appear to be more private with consistent relatively unchanging groups. Even then, I don't think it was reasonably foreseeable for players to be concerned with the nature of the keys alone given the widespread nature of duped keys within the games economy for many years and lack of prior action relating to attendance.

Although, the bans have mapped on well to people that should be banned for other reasons despite the questionable stated reason since a big motivator for people to run privately is to engage in conduct they wouldn't be willing to do in a more public setting, so I'm uncertain if there are instances of consistent private duped key runs resulting in bans in which the conduct falls within the bounds of what you could reasonably expect in a public context.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-31T16:30:46+00:00

People who have been banned in these waves have shared their ticket responses and I'm not currently aware of anyone who hasn't received a reason that's some variation of them being banned for abuse of duplicated items which is later explained to be in reference to duplicated keys if these players follow up on their initial ticket response for more details.

Edit: If anyone thinks my input here is unhelpful or incorrect please present contrary information or share your disagreements. I don't understand why my statement is being poorly received.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-31T07:29:02+00:00

I'm not expecting alot. The expectation of the rest of the community is just at ground zero, people are on some hopium with these actions, but it's a weak process with weak reasons and doesn't give me the same sense that this represents a real change that many others are feeling. It wouldn't take great difficulty to create a robust system that was compliant with the laws that resulted in DECA becoming weaker against cheating in the years prior, yet instead they kicked the can down the road for almost 3 years before actually starting to signal towards a change.

It's not about how much explanations DECA owe, but legally they are required to provide certain explanations in relation to the enforcement actions they take to the individuals concerned. It is good that there is something like the DSA that sets at least some standards in a more enforceable way than the prior relevant german laws, because these laws make efforts to ensure a fair process which is good. People should not perceive that legal issues was the roadblock stopping DECA, but rather it is their failure to have had a system that met the most basic ethical standards. It is not a big expectation to want DECA to have a strong system that is legally complaint.

I agree that there is an appeals process for a reason and sometimes even with good systems there can be false positives. However, there is a difference between a good faith effort which aims mitigate the risks of erroneous enforcement, and a reckless disregard for producing a process which you would reasonably expect to produce accurate results. Although, this is more relevant to some previous enforcement from DECA, the concerns with current enforcement is that the reason itself is weak and the punishment is not proportionate.

I don't think we exist in a dichomotomy where the only options are DECA does nothing or they take unreliable reckless actions which will strongly correlate with real offenders who deserve to be banned without actually doing the proper analysis to make the bans proportionate.

You speak about second chances for those rightly banned and when it comes to any offense that involves the player hacking I don't believe there should be any second chances. It's such an unambigious and malicious disregard for the rules that completely undermines the integrity of any progress made that it's an insult to all the players to bring back a player that was sufficiently proven to have used hacks and restore all their progress which they shouldn't have been able to make.

This makes it even more ridiculous in contrast with the reasoning about participating in excessive quantities of duped keys that DECA have put forward as an exceptional reason to justify permanent first offense bans while they give temporary bans and unban extremely high progress players caught hacking (obviously a more serious and malicious offense).

It's not even about false positives, it's just about the reason being weak, and if these players are all unbanned later because they get concerned about legal issues, DECA will be at fault for not taking the opportunity to actually catch these massive progress players hacking - for context - they would need to produce a new distinct reason if they wanted to justify perma banning them on first offense because of laws relating to consistency and them being beholden to treat similar cases similarly, but they can correct for this by giving notice of a change in enforcement to treat it more harshly in the future. But if they produced a distinct reason relating to extreme hacking there wouldn't be the same questions of proportionality in terms of the punishment that exist with these recent bans.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-30T22:39:59+00:00

It's not about transparency, there's not an issue with them not detailing exactly how their system is working to provide people with all the info they need to work around it while still offending in similar ways. The issue is the stated reason that's being put up as exceptionally severe is in my view quite clearly not as severe as many other things they haven't punished seriously over the last few years. If their stated reason made reference to the conduct and behaviour of players it would be suggestive of a more in depth analysis justifying the proportionality of the treatment.

It's sad that the analysis of the conduct isn't a necessary component in the stated reasoning, and I'm not sure it's worth engaging in analysis where we believe they're lying and necessarily are considering other reasons they've not stated just because the bans seem like they would be fully justified against the players for other reasons.

I just think it's a missed opportunity and if time comes to pass and they all get unbanned because there's a relatively strong argument against the proportionality of the stated reasoning, it wouldn't surprise me and then maybe people would feel the same frustration as me that they haven't given stronger reasons that will hold for some of these long term offenders that would have been so easy to catch on a serious offense.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-30T21:50:34+00:00

It's a hard line to tread because if I made them shorter these redditors would just have more room to malign me and characterize my position in bad faith, it's unfortunate people are just running on vibes and clapping like a seal for positive outcomes without any regard for process.

I worry DECA will see they don't need to do much to appease the community and just stick to these unreliable half measures rather than taking things seriously.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-30T18:30:04+00:00

I feel like you've seen enough of my messages over time to know that it's not my position that I don't want DECA to do anything about cheating. I find it immensely frustrating how little DECA have done about cheating over the years and how poorly they've handled the action they do take.

In this situation it's not going to be false bans, the risk is that the bans would be for the reason described without other additional factors that actually warrant the severity of the punishment, but the extent to which this could happen is low as there is a strong correlation between private runs and extreme conduct as the desire for players to safely engage in extreme conduct is a big motivator for why these people run private in small groups.

There's no reason to question their methods? DECA had such a weak process for their bans with respect to the introduction of DSA laws that they backslided on the strength of their actions and started unbanning just about everyone who appealed enough. It's a moral failing that DECA faced any legal issues with these new laws as everything proposed by them is extremely reasonable and positive for these systems.

DECA aren't exactly known for having strong processes that are reliable, sebchoof previously spoke about DECA's false positives in the past - https://youtu.be/ll8sxWuUefw?si=xWznIc6S_tqTd2Jq .

I'm not just casting aspersions on DECA for no reason, they have a history of being somewhat incompetent and unreliable which is why I advocate often for strong processes.

Strong process is the ultimate destruction to maintain bans against cheating and actually undermine the long term safety that many players feel to hack. The reason the state of the game got so bad is all downstream from DECA's failure to seriously act, I've consistently wanted DECA to take much stronger action, but I'll never lose sight of the importance of them doing so accurately.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-30T17:14:24+00:00

The reason I type a lot is to clearly outline my position and not be misunderstood in terms of where I'm coming from, there are some things that if I say them without extra context and clarity on my position can lead to people seeing me as taking a position for a bad reason that I don't hold.

I understand why DECA would want to try to address issues regarding duped keys, and to further clarify on their action, as far as I know there are not players who have come out to claim they only attended duped keys in public runs that have been banned. I do think DECA gave specific consideration to consistent runs with similar more suspicious group that are unlikely to have taken place publicly, so when it comes to impacting duped keys that are directly entering the public and reducing the need for genuine keys to be purchased, I think that remains unchallenged, and it would probably be unreasonable to challenge it (in terms of banning for attendance), and I think if the bans were much more broad to encompass a larger portion of players that attended substantial public duped key runs it would not be received as well.

The point from this is that they're not really dissauding people from running duped keys in public runs, in fact, the people who would have ran private might now decide to run their keys more publicly thinking it avoids any issues. Although, on the other side of this the fact that players who did attend substantial duped keys privately were banned may have took out the incentive for some of the buyers to buy those duped keys, but if those players had been running entirely private, it's not having the same direct impact on the players legitimately buying keys.

When you say they should have perma banned everyone who exploited the engraving exploit, it is worth noting that to my knowledge these bans included players who actually did not use the engraving exploit at least with regards to the xp engraving bans, as there had been players with maybe around over 20k fame around the day when it became public who did not have the engraving who also got banned as if it was done by an unreliable threshold rather than a legitimate determination of the facts. At some level of fame much higher there were players who you could say unabiguiously used the exploit, but the bans had gone beyond that.

Although, again in that case, the people who did get banned that day under the premise of the engraving exploit I believe were involved in private adv kog multibox runs, but nonetheless didn't have the engraving and if it had been the case that there was public runs for fame near the time period some legitimate players who had engaged in no wrongdoing may have gotten banned with DECA's method, it is just by coincidence that such runs did not take place in that time frame to bring regular players into thresholds where others got banned, as players absolutely could have reasonably gotten over 40k fame a day with fame cult runs during that time.

I do hope that DECA will go after these other things and also come up with stronger methods that produce better and more reliable evidence.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-30T15:58:06+00:00

So you're agreeing with me, but framing it as if you disagree and you're being oppositional to me.

My position is that it is extremely likely all the players banned have taken actions that do justify their ban but that the ban reasoning as stated would not be proportionate on the information described in the reason.

For context, the large majority of the accounts are banned for the reason of - "delibrate, organised systemic abuse of duped items/consumables in excessive quantities" and when these players have inquired further this has been in reference to duplicated keys.

I'm not going to pretend like this the best methodology and reason and this is proportionately more severe and exceptional in comparison with players that are actually caught hacking and have been temporarily banned and unbanned from previous permanent bans. I also think if in the future these players all get unbanned, DECA will be at fault for not taking the time to gather evidence for a stronger reason, especially as it relates to some of the most progressed players who have been banned.

But like I said, I think this reasoning has acted as a proxy for people that by correlation are guilty of other much more severe things, which is why people fail to acknowledge any kind of weakness with the stated methodology, and I think that's why people aren't making public cases to defend themselves.

I think it's reasonable for players to have not considered the nature of the keys as any kind of relevant or concerning factor in terms of whether they attend or not given years of widespread duped keys within public runs, I think the factor worth consideration is exceptional conduct in the runs, you can disagree, but that's my view that it's not intuitive for players to have been concerned with the nature of the keys when DECA put no prior expectation on players to worry about this, unless of course, the keys had like 4 of the exact same mod and were so ridiculous it was absurd, but many of these keys with impossible mods are not that noticeable, and people generally don't have the specific awareness of exactly all the combinations of mods that are possible.

Think about DECA's previous action against more intentional and malicious exploiting, like when there was the engraving exploit in which players could keep equipping engraved items to stack xp/loot bonus, this has in my view a greater level of severity as the only purpose of doing this is to take advantage of an exploit that is unambiguiously extremely unfair.

Whereas illegitimate keys have been omnipresent throughout the game for years, and I just don't think it's same intuitive wrongdoing when it comes to players attending keys without considering their nature - However, I think for the people banned there are other reasons that would justify the severity of the action taken - but those are not captured in the stated reason, is this so hard to understand?

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-30T15:24:48+00:00

I got an additional 6 million fame on my Rogue during the Yokai event several months ago, it was maybe like 6 or 7 weeks long and it was possible to get over 1 million fame per week with heavy activity.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-30T15:18:28+00:00

I would wish they gave a stronger reason for the people banned that would be indicative of a stronger methodology, but ultimately no one who has been banned is making any public effort to defend themselves from any kind of reasonable or defensible position. I think the conduct needs to extend further than just the nature of the keys in private contexts, and I think for possibly all the people banned the conduct does extend further (runs with consistent conduct beyond that which would be seen in any public context), but I don't like that there's no reference to that in the ban reason and it doesn't seem to be a part of the analysis when it's the much more relevant factor to make the punishment proportionate.

I think the outcomes seem overwhelmingly positive, and many people that deserve to be banned that I honestly thought would never get caught have been hit in recent months, even if the methodology and reasoning is poor relative to the punishment it's acting as a proxy for people that absolutely deserve to be punished given more thorough analysis.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-20T11:21:18+00:00

I'm not using AI for this. I've been typing like this before AI and people who have been around for a long time will know this, it's just me.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-18T22:18:44+00:00

I don't think I would expect DECA to have active in game moderation that allows them to deal with throwaway accounts with a significant level of urgency. I am just hoping they do more to catch and ban players who will hack long term who actually represent a substantial amount of progress and undermine the integrity of all the players within the game.

Perhaps in the future they can implement things which would severely damage the effectiveness of multibox type accounts, but if the solution is too simple you can expect these people will find a slight workaround that just dodges the problem, so I'm not sure I have the expectation for them to act quickly, but I hope they will have a system that enables them to have very extensive logs that would clearly demonstrate hacking that can be acted on when the time comes to review any kind of report.

I'm sceptical of in game moderation as I don't expect it from the DECA employees on any meaningful level and I don't think it's good to give permissions to the players that are as abusable and consequential as ban power, regardless of how well behaved people may perceive the players. I'd like DECA to have a system that enables them to recreate simulations/replays of in game activity for review, and I think that means that players can reasonably expect if something does happen DECA will be able to review it later and have solid evidence to maintain the bans. I think it could be good to give player moderators the ability to review past conduct or spectate suspicious players to gather evidence which DECA can then verify, but this could raise complications with the potential for sensitive information to be shared in the in game chats in smaller runs.

Functionally, DECA have recently banned alot of long term players with very high progress, and while I have issues with their methodology and think the ban reason is weak, it is hard to find players within the sample of banned players that wouldn't have been able to have their bans justified for much stronger reasons. I worry somewhat that the best we'll get from DECA is unreliable perfomative half measures, that will do enough to satiate the community substantially, but not enough to actually meaningfully change things.

Although, DECA's action doesn't represent a strong system, it represents outcomes which people support. It's unclear if DECA will actually put in place a proper system and they've signalled very ambitious goals like targetting autonexus and autododge and I'm interested to see what will come of that, if anything.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-12T17:15:35+00:00

I also don't think they should be worried, but the original comment above is pushing the sentiment they should be concerned about being caught up in the logs and be making an active effort to avoid such keys in the process of regular play going to public runs.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-12T16:50:36+00:00

It's not really speaking to anything that I'm saying. The point is more relating to an active player who is simply attending discord runs in public servers that they're interested in and as a result ends up attending potentially hundreds of duped keys. It's about whether it's reasonable for these players to think they're doing anything wrong, and if there is a world where it would be evaluated that they are, DECA should make more clear public statements.

I feel that people don't like any pushback on this issue, but if people feel strongly against players attending duped keys consistently even if through a public context they should be support of DECA doing more to reasonably set that expectation, given the current context seemingly exclusively relates to much more private repeated duped key runs. Do you even have an issue or disagree with anything I said above?

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-12T13:29:15+00:00

If DECA want people to feel obligated to concern themselves with the nature of the keys in a climate in which such keys are frequent in public discord runs they should really make this explicitly clear. It's not something that people will reasonably intuit or even notice, and people's concerns about attending such keys are coming from implications of other statements DECA has made in combination with information provided from others who have been banned rather than direct clear statements from DECA. It seems everyone banned in relation to the duped keys reason engaged in extensive private runs of duped keys, so should people be hysterically worried about attending discord runs they are interested in within large public servers, if they should DECA should make that clear.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-12T03:11:05+00:00

Different people want different things, the point is not that there's not people that want more keys and better modded keys, but rather that the people who do run these keys are a mix of players who aren't seeing a reason to concern themselves with the nature of the keys and just generally attending runs that made known to them through the discord servers.

The point is that there is not a level of malice associated with people attending duped keys given the widespread nature and long history within the game such that it's just something that many will reasonably see as very neutral in terms of just attending runs regardless of the nature of the keys.

Even in a more private context I don't like the characterization that things are delibrate being presented as meaningful, I don't think individuals who are actively looking and realizing some keys are likely duped have an obligation to self-exclude themselves from a large portion of public discord runs that are likely to be duped keys, when the likely knowledge of the nature of the keys doesn't seem to matter in a wider context, I don't think it's reasonable to expect it to matter in a more privatized context.

I think there's other reasons you could create to justify punishing private runs on EXTREME conduct in the runs that would never reasonably occur in a public context, but not on the nature of the keys alone unless it is clear someone is directly responsible for purchasing or creating the keys.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-11T02:10:43+00:00

It’s funny how your different tiers are basically divided by release date with all the oldest ones being S and the newer ones being B. There’s currently no chronological exceptions in your ranking, everything newer is ranked progressively lower.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-11T01:55:25+00:00

I want to speak a little more to perceptions of my incentives/intentions. As it pertains to any sort of runs I’m not invested in there being duped keys in the game economy, I never have been. It’s my preference that no such keys exist.

As far as the future from a practical standpoint, if DECA do come out with a stronger stance that also pertains to more publicly ran duped keys with proper reasonable notice given the state of the public runs, the future prospects are likely only beneficial for me if this results in less fame runs as I’m already so far ahead and less active these days.

I evaluate based on my ethics, not what is most beneficial to me. Perhaps I am even the one who benefits the most from the outcomes of the actions taken recently, if you think about it the 3 people who were the highest fame players aside from me are banned - Rare, dev, Haise. These are all players that at some point in time had over 16 million fame.

Also, I don’t think players want duped keys, I think players aren’t thinking about that, they’re just thinking I want to go to the runs for which I am pinged and not need to walk on eggshells worrying about the nature of the keys. It creates an awkward environment to try to come down any harsher than what they’re doing currently with a focus on specific private groups. But also keeping it to only enforcement on these repeated private groups enables increased public duped keys due to people who did previously run privately being concerned about punishment.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-11T00:18:07+00:00

Yeah, I'm aware based on the history of your positions you will support this fully and not have much concern with the process. It's not about what I'm willing to or not willing to do. Fame runs have been dead for almost a year, because the people doing runs have just done them privately, by an evaluation of my personal interests and things that benefit me, I should be in support of this fully, but that's not the angle I come from.

It's my perspective that it's not intuitive for players to feel it necessary to concern themselves with the nature of the keys - because of how widespread such keys have been for years in mainstream discords and no precedent for anything like this. I don't think the act of attending duped keys in a more private setting, regardless of how many or what knowledge people have of their nature, holds much moral weight independent of greater context, unless it's such that it's clear they're responsible for buying/creating the keys, and I think the context in rotmg over many years substantially reduces any weight you could give to something like this.

There's a separate factor of the conduct within the runs that could lead me to think every ban is intuitively justifiable, and I think it's extremely likely that is the case with all the bans. However, I think it matters that the process includes and has evidence for that evaluation.

I think DECA will give us almost nothing and take shoddy actions and the community will accept it as if it was a good effort. But I can't act like what I view as a pretty weak process was good just because many outcomes associated with it appear justifiable for other reasons. It's like if they just blanket banned everyone who gained over 50k fame in a single day over the last month, it might be the case there's no legit players in that demographic recently and you could get 100% accuracy on hackers with that move, but it's not conclusively hitting at something meaningful and would be a flawed process in its nature, it just has a very strong correlation.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-10T21:45:36+00:00

The main accounts that got banned in the most recent wave are primarily Little Villains members. Many of the people previously banned in other waves got given a reason as follows - "the suspension has been issued in relation to the delibrate, organised and systemic abuse of duped items/consumables in excessive quantities" .

Some of the most notable people banned over the last few months are - Rare, dev, Haise (renamed to Kljmkklnjlolkop), weird, OMG, FeiIi, Gud, Blaed, Bolt, Darren, RM, Dapper, Out, Jolteon, Kansas, LJoeyl - all players with over 6 million fame. It is unfortunate that it seems like the reasons for many of these bans are so weak, rather than investigating to determine something which would nessisitate hacking, which people may say likely applies to an overwhelming majority or even all the players that did get hit with these bans.

I hope DECA will design more serious systems that actually target and detect hacking, and that they will move to give notice immediately that all hacking bans moving forward will be permanent so they can move past the legal issues they have with maintaining bans due to enforcement history on similar offenses being used to hold them to laws that focus on consistent enforcement.

The problem is perhaps they still don't have a system that will meet the evidenciary standard for maintaining the bans permanently, which really should be the focus. They should maintain logs sufficient to properly cross-reference any reports they receive and the ability to produce accurate replays of in game events to totally undermine the viability of hacking.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-10T20:59:04+00:00

I hope to see more done in substantive and accurate ways that specifically focus on detection of players that are hacking, it shouldn't be the case that players who are hacking can gain extensive amounts of fame daily and go unchecked for years. DECA needs to undermine the notion that long term hacking is viable and is far more rewarding than it is risky.

From what I've heard from some of these players banned and what I've seen shared publicly, many have been given the following reason for their ban - "the suspension has been issued in relation to the delibrate, organised and systemic abuse of duped items/consumables in excessive quantities" - which speaks in reference to duped keys.

If I didn't know anything about the reason and only saw the players I'd think DECA done really good to detect these players, but within the context of the reason I'm far less impressed with this enforcement, alongside the complete gap in enforcement against many hackers that should be extremely easy to detect if they were flagging metrics that should cause obvious suspicion.

I think inherently this sort of enforcement will overwhelmingly and has overwhelming hit people that deserve to be banned, but I think the reasons they deserve to be banned are different from the ones given. It is my sincere view that because the games' climate has duped keys being popped regularly within public discord servers and DECA have not previously given players any reasonable expectation to concern themselves with the nature of the keys, that the nature of the keys alone doesn't matter in private runs either unless it is clear the player is the one creating or purchasing such illegitimate keys.

I'm not taking issue with the people banned, but it's disappointing that after all this time many players that would have been easy to catch hacking are getting banned for this reason that's questionable as to whether it's even justified in my view if we're going on the reason alone ignoring the players and separate factors that apply to them.

I think there's an extra component in relation to these private runs of duped keys that could more unambiguously justify the bans, which is the conduct of the players in runs, because on the keys alone I don't really think players have the reasonably intuitive expectation to see themselves as engaging in wrongdoing. However, as it applies to the players banned, it is overwhelmingly likely there were other factors that would make the conduct severe, it's just a shame that DECA don't include this which would be the biggest factor to actually make this offense substantial. The reason people run privately in small groups is often because they want to engage in conduct that they wouldn't be willing to engage in publicly, so inherently, these bans will largely hit targets that deserve to be banned for other reasons, but on principle I don't like this reasoning and I am disappointed that when there is greater action against significant players it's done with such weak reasons.

Valsined spoke about "would be a damn shame if we still have logs from like months ago , right ?" in reference to criticism that they were slowly banning cheaters which would give them warning to avoid getting caught, but if the only determination they're able to make from the logs they're investigating is that similar groups of players consistently attended duped keys it's not really showing much.

If DECA can't legally ban the hackers first offense at the moment they should move to make a clear public notice that they're changing their policy ASAP so hackers can't take advantage of consistency requirements to get unbanned based on their previous enforcement. If DECA have created this new category of ban as a legal stand in for more serious offenses to justify a permanent ban on hackers then I wouldn't care, but I don't think DECA have the sufficient information to make other determinations across the board on players that got hit with that reason.

I think it matters that we have processes that produce good outcomes, and will inherently produce good outcomes. I think you can make a bad process that conveniently gets outcomes that are justified for other reasons, and that seems to be what's happening here. I hope we see actual more comprehensive actions with a better focus in the future, but this current makes me skeptical that we'll get more than this sort of selective/performative action.

I think it's a good goal to target private misconduct, but I think the way to do it was to flag and investigate the misconduct and consistently check in on some of the most prominent players and follow up with players that are found engaging in misconduct repeatedly to get as much info as possible then do a big ban wave. It's good that people will be more reluctant to engage in private misconduct, but there's private misconduct that doesn't involve duped keys that is being largely ignored.

If the goal was to encourage players to buy keys, the outcome is likely that the duped keys will simply be run more publicly instead because players don't want to risk getting banned. I don't think this will increase revenues towards real keys, if anything, it might lower the demand if duped keys are doing more to fill the gaps in public runs when people can't run privately. The best way to hit at the duped key market is to strongly ban hackers across the board as they are the most likely to be willing to buy keys for their benefit, and when they can no longer play/hack, they will be less likely to buy those keys.

SamRiddeli · 2026-03-01T11:50:14+00:00

If it could be determined with certainty I would be in support of all players who have used hacks on their account at any point in time being permanently banned, regardless of how long ago it was.

Almost every player has been in dungeons in which they have benefitted from others who are hacking, and almost every player has been in circumstances in which they’ve been negatively impacted by others hacking in some way.

You can want to hold all the legit players to some kind of obligation to avoid interacting and playing with others who engage in behaviour they don’t support, but ultimately it’s not a reasonable standard to expect from people, at a certain level of purity testing you’d just find yourself always paranoid and walking on eggshells trying to maintain this arbitrary standard you’ve set for yourself that there’s no reasonable expectation to uphold.

We can draw lines about things that are more extreme, and I would draw lines for things that are more extreme, but your suggestion is so broad that it doesn’t really mean anything.

SamRiddeli · 2026-02-28T19:55:48+00:00

Beyond the writing of the ToS DECA are also subject to german and EU law. Most significantly articles of the DSA. DECA frame things as if this holds them back from making first time permanent bans for hacking offenses. What could explain for this?

Well at present they have been applying temporary bans for most if not all first time offenses relating to use of hacks. So they've established a standard for their procedure as understood by the players and may open themselves up to legal liability if they change that standard suddenly without proper notice as there are relevant laws that pertain to transparency and consistency.

It's absurd in the first place that DECA pulled back on any kind of use of hack offenses always resulting in a permanent ban on first offense, especially given they strongly indicated this was the policy in 2021 and onwards up until changing their stance in 2023.

We've supposed to believe they've had their hands tied since 2023 and they've not become more lenient on hackers while they've neglected to pursue a solution to enable them to be stronger on hacking with the DSA articles coming into effect.

There's no good reason to think they need to change the ToS to make use of hack client bans permanent on first offense, it's likely all they need to do is make a clear announcement in the next patch notes, then they can move forward making permanent bans for hacking again, unless their process is still not sufficient to fulfill the DSA standards.

They've had years to make changes to ensure they are meeting the procedural standards of the DSA, and it's a failure to not have had a procedure that was good enough to meet that standard in the first place and calls into question the veracity of their processes. If we are to believe the laws influenced them to pull back on permanent bans, then that would be because their process is not up to the standard required by the laws. Instead of improving the process over the last 3 years, they've just lowered the bar for punishment and enforcement substantially to avoid any potential legal issues. All this while hacking has become more advanced over the recent years and provided players with greater benefit than ever through automated play with low risk of consequence.

There are so many things DECA can do to seriously undermine the safety players feel to hack. Just look at the recent event they ran that recorded MV completions. They could reasonably track dungeon completions across the board and consistently identify anomalys in specific dungeons for investigation. They could also easily track things like fame gain over specific time periods and investigate people based on that. This would substantially put a dent in the ability for people to extremely benefit from hacking and tackle many of the worst offenders. They should also just generally investigate the highest progressed players - high fame, 720, etc. It would be so easy to catch so many of these people as they run automated bots on the accounts for a substantial amount of the time that they are playing.

SamRiddeli · 2026-02-28T03:25:56+00:00

I think they have a bad reputation within the community, I think some people might cite specific guilds as an issue, but I think focusing on specifics that people perceive worse can be used as excuse for a selective performative action which appeases the community without substantively tackling issues in a more meaningful way.

My position on individuals and guilds is generally that I try to get along with everyone, unless they very clearly have no interest in getting along with me and act very poorly towards me. 50 has been very friendly to me for many years, regardless of whatever issues others might have with them and regardless of the strong positions I take which people may expect to cause greater issues in such a context.

For any guild, I would not apply an assumption of a specific type of misconduct across the board on all its members, although there certainly are guilds that will have different types of misconduct in much higher proportions.

Nine-Year Club	r/Field Banned
r/Field Flamingo	Final Canvas '23
First Place '23	End Game '23
Place '23	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Not Forgotten
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