Ok, this is the dumbest thing I have ever experienced. I am a big gamer and never have I played a game that bans you from playing - especially with no warning or telling people what the ban is for. I still have no idea what I did wrong on my account ( all I do is play the game). I’ve played halo games for years and never even heard of this.
These blogs don’t even really answer my question because I havn’t done any of the things listed.
1.They need a warning to each person if they do something wrong
2.They need to inform people on what it is that they are doing wrong
3.They need to notify people on how long their ban is
4.If people are away from keyboard they need to have an auto exit for the next game. If someone has to go to 9the bathroom or something and exit then they get in trouble for quiting the game. This is a double edge whammy.
5.If people are boosting then warn them not to boost because not a lot of people even know what that means.
6.If it looks like people are deranking then it could be someones kid playing or a friend.
7 People pay money to buy halo games and xbox live and to be banned with no explaintion is absurd.
8.You should get credit for when you do good and no credit if you do bad - that’s how halo 3 was.
9.If there is such an issue with bossting credits then why even have them on the game?
10. I am not crying about this because they have unbanned my account already but I still want to know what I did wrong and to prevent this from happening again. This makes me scared to even play the game because I don’t want to keep getting banned for things that will get me banned. I don’t cheat, I don’t boost and I don’t quit games.
I hope they get this right with Halo 4 or I’m going back to Call of Duty where they don’t ban people for stupid things.
People are writing telling me to go to another thread that explains it but it really didn’t explain anything. This is why I posted this.
You are exactly right. The “official thread” is pointless except for enabling 343i to sweep ban-related issues under the rug and forget about them.
But unfortunately, they have good reason to do so:
343i does not control the banning system. Bungie designed it (poorly) as they were developing Reach, and making changes to it now is difficult (it would likely require a TU). The system works like this:
Suppose somebody wanted to boost by plugging in a second idle controller, then kill that idle player for points or commendations. This would be unsportsmanlike boosting and should be punished. Right?
Right! So how did Bungie design their prevention system? They recognized that an idle player (an “AFK”) will never score any points, since he is idle. So they designed the game to collect the number of kills of a player (and his guests) and ban him if he (or his guests) goes a game or two without getting any kills. Sound like a good system?
No way! You (and anyone with a shred of common sense) can immediately see the problem with this system. Players who cannot score (for whatever legitimate reason) are also banned, while the real boosters just abuse other aspects of the game (custom challenges, Sword Base) and continue to boost. The result is a massive “official thread” full of people who are banned because they…
● played a game with their wife/girlfriend and she scored 0 kills
● played with their little brother and his two friends and one of them scored 0 kills
● allowed their girlfriend/little brother to play on their primary account, and they scored 0 kills
● were playing a game legitimately, then had a single, legitimate, pressing real-world situation come up mid-game (phone call, doorbell, dog pukes on the carpet, etc.)
● Any other situation, including legitimate, honest play, which results in a game with anyone on the console scoring 0 kills
Lame? Yes! But while 343i runs these forums, Bungie designed the ban system. Basically, 343i inherited a dysfunctional, half-assed system and has to figure out how to deal with it. We (and the other 4,500 people in the thread) feel your pain. We are victims of a poorly designed, short-sighted system that bans the innocent. 343i knows this, and their hands are tied because they did not design the system. They cannot do anything about it, as manually un-banning a player is actually technically impossible.
Problem is how 343i has chosen to handle it. Instead of explaining this situation to their players, they create an “official thread” and order the mods to direct everyone there, since there is really nothing that anyone can do about the broken system. This way, at least 343i can ignore the problem (or at least consolidate countless “why ban” topics into a gargantuan “official topic”).
TL;DR: The banning system is broken. 343i cannot fix it, so they create an “official thread” to sweep it all under the rug.
Want credits anyway? Use custom challenges to earn credits, as they are unaffected by bans.
i find this disturbing.
i hope halo 4 gets a better tracking system for just this. i sure know it will.
but in the meantime i’m just afraid of letting anyone at my house play reach, as i will be banned!
Same here, we are afraid to let kids play it now. My girlfriend finally got into it and now she’s scared to play it if she don’t get a kill for 2 games. Now we have to find another game we can play together. Sigh
@ tsiao91 -Very good post - Thank you for the info - this helped me more than going through the whole Halo Waypoint Forum. I’ve never even used or posted on a forum before - this shows me how irritating this is. Do you think this will be fixed in Halo 4?
> @ tsiao91 -Very good post - Thank you for the info - this helped me more than going through the whole Halo Waypoint Forum. I’ve never even used or posted on a forum before - this shows me how irritating this is. Do you think this will be fixed in Halo 4?
Thanks. Forum usage can be an intimidating process at times - especially when discussing issues like bans.
I am quite certain that it will be fixed in Halo 4. For one, Halo 4 uses EXP, not credits.
And again, we cannot forget that 343i is, in fact, painfully aware of the broken system. It just often appears that they are not because of how they have handled the situation.
Actually, the ban system in place doesn’t need a TU. It’s code that runs on THEIR END not yours.
They could change it easily, but Halo 4 is the priority.
A quit ban only lasts 10 minutes, it’s no biggie. If you have to go make potty during a game then quit the game you’re in, don’t sit AFC. Unless you’re ill and need a doctor, there’s no way you’ll quit enough games in a short enough time span to get quit banned for potty trips. You should be able to tell BETWEEN games whether you need to go or not.
Just play legit, don’t sit AFC, and you’ll be fine.
> Same here, we are afraid to let kids play it now. My girlfriend finally got into it and now she’s scared to play it if she don’t get a kill for 2 games. Now we have to find another game we can play together. Sigh
I have a .52 KD, I have had several games of no kills. You don’t get banned if you’re trying, only if you are habitually sitting AFC.
my girlfriend was trying, she just can’t get kills. She did have to go to the bathroom for a couple games cause she threw up but I didn’t know you got credit banned for it. You get a ban for afk for a couple games or you get banned for quiting. Should she take the controller in the bathroom with her and press buttons while she’s puking? This system is really dumb. I play call of duty all the time as well as Halo and we have never had to deal with this crap.
> my girlfriend was trying, she just can’t get kills. She did have to go to the bathroom for a couple games cause she threw up but I didn’t know you got credit banned for it. You get a ban for afk for a couple games or you get banned for quiting. Should she take the controller in the bathroom with her and press buttons while she’s puking? This system is really dumb. I play call of duty all the time as well as Halo and we have never had to deal with this crap.
No, you take her controller and make her player quit.
Read carefully. A quit ban only lasts ten minutes. And then it’s over.
If you sit AFC too much you will get credit and rank reset. And guess what? They DO NOT reset your commendations. So it’s even harder to rank back up.
If you have to leave, quit the game. If you’re really running to the bathroom to puke, the quit ban will have come and gone without you even knowing about it.
Play legit, or quit. Sit AFC and get the ban you deserve.
> No, you take her controller and make her player quit.
>
> Read carefully. A quit ban only lasts ten minutes. And then it’s over.
>
> If you sit AFC too much you will get <mark>credit and rank reset</mark>. And guess what? They DO NOT reset your commendations. So it’s even harder to rank back up.
>
> If you have to leave, quit the game. If you’re really running to the bathroom to puke, the quit ban will have come and gone without you even knowing about it.
>
> <mark>Play legit, or quit.</mark> Sit AFC and get the ban you deserve.
This is entirely false.
After 343i took over from Bungie, they stopped this practice completely. Any action that would’ve resulted in a reset now results in an arbitrarily long credit ban without a reset.
And in fact, you should read carefully. His girlfriend was playing legit:
> my girlfriend was trying, she just can’t get kills.
This is exactly the problem that we have been talking about here.
@tsiao91:
I think it might be a good idea to assume good faith. 343i isn’t sweeping anything under the rug by trying to consolidate threads like these.
This is a forum for Reach, and Reach is a big game. Forge, Custom Games, Matchmaking, Campaign – there’s a lot to discuss. All we’re trying to do when we redirect to the ban megathread, is give people room to discuss other things without their threads instantly being buried. :\
> Actually, the ban system in place doesn’t need a TU. It’s code that runs on THEIR END not yours.
>
> They could change it easily,
And then replace it with…?
If they want to punish players for AFKing, they would need to Title Update Reach so that the game actually transmitted information about player’s in-game movements.
> > Same here, we are afraid to let kids play it now. My girlfriend finally got into it and now she’s scared to play it if she don’t get a kill for 2 games. Now we have to find another game we can play together. Sigh
>
> I have a .52 KD, I have had several games of no kills. You don’t get banned if you’re trying, only if you are habitually sitting AFC.
You do, actually.
Someone on BNet tested it out a long while back, making a dummy gamertag called “Banosaurus” and playing in matches. They ran around, fired their weapon, drove vehicles, and even got an assist or two – but no kills. They were credit banned in short order.
After 9000+ games I have never been credit banned and its most likely because when I come to play Reach, I play Reach.
I got credit banned for the first time yesterday. I signed in a guest on a spare controller to help get the DLC achievments.
Not that I cared, I was only after achievements and don’t really care about the credits. Still, it was a surprise to get the messege as I’ve never seen it before.
I participated in the Halo reach beta, so I know for a fact that Reach is already coded to send data of game play. So if 343 I isn’t getting it, it’s because they won’t code to use it (just like they didn’t support the Reach API Bungie made).
Reach does send back a multitude of data.
“…we’re still digesting the tidal wave of data you sent ashore…”
http://www.bungie.net/news/content.aspx?type=topnews&link=BWU_052110
“…We’re already getting great data…”
http://www.bungie.net/news/content.aspx?link=BWU_051410&type=topnews
And that’s just the first two examples I came across.
First off, Plunderfull you think anyone that gets banned obviously means they were trying to cheat. You think in your head that if they got banned it was 100% legit and in no way was bungie wrong. Well hate to break reality in for you but you are wrong. They tested it and if you don’t get kills but you get assists, capture the flag, plant the bomb etc. you can get banned. I had a friend get banned in for trying to win in grifball, Challenge 5 time winner, he was just going for the score not for kills. Got his first ban because of it. He was trying to do it before the challenges reset. You still think what you say is correct or you taking it back now?
Hopefully nothing bad happens to my account. I went 1 game with 0 kills and 1 death. Was trying to score and afterwards when I looked at the score I was surprised because I realized I had a 0 next to kills. I played it safe that match moving.
And kegler73, what you say reminds me why I never like to discuss issues like this of forums. People like you don’t think first and are very rude. Telling someone to “take away their controller for being bad” is one of the meanest and most insulting things I have heard on here. Halo use to be about fun and games and it people like you on the forums telling the devs to punish those for having fun and not caring about playing competitively. You kind try to force other to have to play one way and that’s what makes casual gamers really mad. People like you telling them “play serious, or get banned”
I can’t have family members play halo reach with me. You know how that sounds. It makes you sound like a Yoink! Telling them “Hey sorry you can’t play halo reach because you’re bad at the game and the system will ban me if you play” Ya, that’s real motivating to get people to buy this game.
I have played halo games for a while. I remember back in halo 2 I got banned, called bungie up, they took a look, found something went wrong and I was banned for no reason. So they unban be because they had a manual ban system that could unban players. Now its like “You were banned for the wrong reasons. You’re Yoink! now” when I first played halo on like I use to let my father play. Now that I am an adult and I have visit him very few times, we like to sometimes still play halo games. He loves halo Matchmaking, his favorite is SWAT, sometimes he has a bad couple of games. His most enjoying series is screwed over because a game punishes him for having a couple bad games? People like you are the people that don’t think when they talk. Without thinking about situation you just assume everyone’s a cheater and you don’t think that what you are saying is wrong and think you dictate how a game is played.
I use to love halo. Its what made me get a xbox and be my #1 game to play. Then you try hards tell people if they aren’t playing serious then they should be banned. You should be ashamed. I really hope you think long and hard about what you are saying and know next time you not to just judge everyone when you don’t know their story. Please be more considerate to who you are talking about. I don’t come on the forums and tell bungie, now 343i, that try hard competitive players should be banned so you shouldn’t saying casual players having fun should be banned either. Thanks for reading and I hope I changed your mind about how you think of people.
It’s a game, stop punishing us for having fun and saying “screw the rules, I like to play like this”. Stop saying people need to be banned because they get 0 in their games. If 343i keeps up ban hammers like that and make more things punishable, like bad connection and bad k/d like how some topics have mentioned. Eventually, you will have killed off your fan base almost entirely and cause consumers to not want to buy your game to pay $60 to get banned a month later. Eventually that will lead to Microsoft saying “no more future Halo games since it won’t sell big anymore”. Halo is banning people left and right while other games, sorry to say this but, like COD welcome all players. Even if COD gets horrible reputation for what it does, it sells still. And at the end of the day that’s what they look at. “Halo isn’t selling but COD is so we are going to stick with cod over halo. We are going to cut the series. Sorry halo” Seriously, it’s time for a wakeup call. It’s a game, stop punishing players. You don’t know why he is AFC. With JIP, join in progress, there should be no problem with kicking idle players with no punishment and replacing them with someone who is.
BTW, thank you to tsiao91 and DANNYBOY3600 for your input. Wish more people were like you and would keep open minds rather than judge and assume. I’m sorry Danny that you and your girl can’t play and amazing game series because this one game is so strict it is punishing you so much it makes you afraid to play a “game”. Hope this changes in Halo 4.
First off, Plunderfull you think anyone that gets banned obviously means they were trying to cheat. You think in your head that if they got banned it was 100% legit and in no way was bungie wrong. Well hate to break reality in for you but you are wrong. They tested it and if you don’t get kills but you get assists, capture the flag, plant the bomb etc. you can get banned. I had a friend get banned in for trying to win in grifball, Challenge 5 time winner, he was just going for the score not for kills. Got his first ban because of it. He was trying to do it before the challenges reset. You still think what you say is correct or you taking it back now?
Hopefully nothing bad happens to my account. I went 1 game with 0 kills and 1 death. Was trying to score and afterwards when I looked at the score I was surprised because I realized I had a 0 next to kills. I played it safe that match moving.
And kegler73, what you say reminds me why I never like to discuss issues like this of forums. People like you don’t think first and are very rude. Telling someone to “take away their controller for being bad” is one of the meanest and most insulting things I have heard on here. Halo use to be about fun and games and it people like you on the forums telling the devs to punish those for having fun and not caring about playing competitively. You kind try to force other to have to play one way and that’s what makes casual gamers really mad. People like you telling them “play serious, or get banned”
I can’t have family members play halo reach with me. You know how that sounds. It makes you sound like a Yoink! Telling them “Hey sorry you can’t play halo reach because you’re bad at the game and the system will ban me if you play” Ya, that’s real motivating to get people to buy this game.
I have played halo games for a while. I remember back in halo 2 I got banned, called bungie up, they took a look, found something went wrong and I was banned for no reason. So they unban be because they had a manual ban system that could unban players. Now its like “You were banned for the wrong reasons. You’re Yoink! now” when I first played halo on like I use to let my father play. Now that I am an adult and I have visit him very few times, we like to sometimes still play halo games. He loves halo Matchmaking, his favorite is SWAT, sometimes he has a bad couple of games. His most enjoying series is screwed over because a game punishes him for having a couple bad games? People like you are the people that don’t think when they talk. Without thinking about situation you just assume everyone’s a cheater and you don’t think that what you are saying is wrong and think you dictate how a game is played.
I use to love halo. Its what made me get a xbox and be my #1 game to play. Then you try hards tell people if they aren’t playing serious then they should be banned. You should be ashamed. I really hope you think long and hard about what you are saying and know next time you not to just judge everyone when you don’t know their story. Please be more considerate to who you are talking about. I don’t come on the forums and tell bungie, now 343i, that try hard competitive players should be banned so you shouldn’t saying casual players having fun should be banned either. Thanks for reading and I hope I changed your mind about how you think of people.
It’s a game, stop punishing us for having fun and saying “screw the rules, I like to play like this”. Stop saying people need to be banned because they get 0 in their games. If 343i keeps up ban hammers like that and make more things punishable, like bad connection and bad k/d like how some topics have mentioned. Eventually, you will have killed off your fan base almost entirely and cause consumers to not want to buy your game to pay $60 to get banned a month later. Eventually that will lead to Microsoft saying “no more future Halo games since it won’t sell big anymore”. Halo is banning people left and right while other games, sorry to say this but, like COD welcome all players. Even if COD gets horrible reputation for what it does, it sells still. And at the end of the day that’s what they look at. “Halo isn’t selling but COD is so we are going to stick with cod over halo. We are going to cut the series. Sorry halo” Seriously, it’s time for a wakeup call. It’s a game, stop punishing players. You don’t know why he is AFC. With JIP, join in progress, there should be no problem with kicking idle players with no punishment and replacing them with someone who is.
BTW, thank you to tsiao91 and DANNYBOY3600 for your input. Wish more people were like you and would keep open minds rather than judge and assume. I’m sorry Danny that you and your girl can’t play and amazing game series because this one game is so strict it is punishing you so much it makes you afraid to play a “game”. Hope this changes in Halo 4.
> I participated in the Halo reach beta, so I know for a fact that Reach is already coded to send data of game play. So if 343 I isn’t getting it, it’s because they won’t code to use it (just like they didn’t support the Reach API Bungie made).
>
> Reach does send back a multitude of data.
>
> “…we’re still digesting the tidal wave of data you sent ashore…”
> http://www.bungie.net/news/content.aspx?type=topnews&link=BWU_052110
>
> “…We’re already getting great data…”
> http://www.bungie.net/news/content.aspx?link=BWU_051410&type=topnews
>
> And that’s just the first two examples I came across.
Some data ≠ all data.
If you want to get technical, the game sends periodic “heartbeats” at regular intervals throughout a match. Most of this data is not related to the positions of players on the map, or to their movements. The known exceptions are kill/death data for use in Bungie.net’s Game Viewer, and position data used in ATLAS.
Kill/death location data is not reliable unless used in conjunction with the locations of all spawn points on the map (plus the hidden “emergency spawns” on each canvas), and spawn location data is not sent to the server at any point in the game. In other words, even if the banhammer had access to kill/death location data and therefore knew where you died, it wouldn’t know if those deaths occurred overtop a spawn point (as would be the case when AFKing), so it wouldn’t be able to use that data to detect AFKing.
ATLAS data was added post-release via the Title Update. It might not be possible to modify the banhammer to make use of it, and even if such a thing were possible, it would be quite risky: the smallest of bugs could lead to many (or all) players receiving additional wrongful bans.
So no, the game does not send positional data that is usable by the banhammer. Two vague non-technical sentences in Bungie Weekly Updates, that weren’t even meant to address or comment on the AFK ban system, do not disprove specific, involved, and reproducible tests performed against that system by the community.
> @tsiao91:
> I think it might be a good idea to assume good faith. 343i isn’t sweeping anything under the rug by trying to consolidate threads like these.
>
> This is a forum for Reach, and Reach is a big game. Forge, Custom Games, Matchmaking, Campaign – there’s a lot to discuss. All we’re trying to do when we redirect to the ban megathread, is give people room to discuss other things without their threads instantly being buried. :\
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with making a megathread. I’m saying that they need to make the megathread actually useful. Go ahead and read the OP of the thread.
First of all, I get the impression that they are primarily talking about console/account bans from Xbox LIVE. But I doubt that’s what most people have issue with. If they were banned from LIVE, they probably have a pretty good idea why.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that they are actually talking about credit bans in the OP.
How many people do you think actively manipulate their network conditions (standby, host boot, etc.)?
● I’m guessing, generously, ~5%
How many people do you think hard mod or soft mod their consoles or software?
● Again, no more than 5%
How many people idle through games (according to the system’s definition of “idle”), either intentionally or not?
● Let’s be conservative and say ~80%
How many people do you think impersonate a 343 or Microsoft employee for fraud?
● Maybe 5% of cases
All other “includes but not limited to” cases?
● ~5%
And those are conservative estimates. I think the 5% figure may actually be alot lower. I suppose we could also study the 4,500+ posts in the thread and get a better idea of these numbers.
That means that probably 7 out of 10 people are banned for “idling” (AFKing or actually playing).
My point is, don’t you think the OP should place a higher emphasis on the idling point, instead of just briefly mentioning it in one sentence?
TL;DR - The “official thread” is a good idea, but the information it offers in the OP is completely useless to almost everybody.