On 21st August, I was false banned. It sucks. And no, this isn’t a rant about how bad Sentinel is. I’ve come to terms with how anti cheats work and that they will make a lot of errors and there’s not too much you can do about it. You can train it and make it as good as you want, but there will always be mistakes made by Sentinel, and that’s something to live with.
This thread is long. It talks about more than just my false ban. Do read it though.
Now I’ll tell you why it really sucks, and what really the topic of this thread is.
After I was false banned, I wrote a lengthy appeal. Very long, 7 paragraphs.
Now I don’t care if you use this appeal to get unbanned or whatever yourself. Let’s address the issue.
It took over 3 days to get unbanned. I brought up the issue with several staff members. The common reply was “Please be patient” or “Loony will be dealing with it soon.” For those of you who don’t know, LoonyRules is the guy who works on Sentinel and deals with valid Sentinel appeals. Yes, the only person who deals with valid Sentinel appeals. Now let’s look into some statistics. Take a look at this screenshot.
What does this screenshot prove? Sentinel bans a lot of players. Now as I’ve mentioned, it’s very, very likely for an anti cheat to false ban or not pick up on blatant hacks. Hence these stats come into the mix. It’s close to a million bans. If these figures are really true, then it also must be true that a lot of these bans are false bans. I don’t know if Sentinel filters them and removes the false bans from that count but I’m pretty sure a lot of the 1 million people have been false bans, many probably not bothering to appeal and shifting to another server since they don’t have time to wait 7 days or even wait 4 days for their appeal to get read. Most people move on.
Now what’s the process of getting unbanned if you were false banned? You get banned, you get an appeal code, and then you write an appeal. Now as I’ve been told after having numerous discussions with staff members, is that moderators have access to these appeals. If they have a false positive from a person, that appeal is forwarded to the anti cheat developer.
See what’s missing? Developer. Just one. And yes, that person is LoonyRules, and he’s the only person who can deal with these kind of appeals since he is the only person who can read logs and understand them well enough.
Now this of course, is a problem. Stay with me for a minute because I’m going to discuss it. Moderators can view these appeals until they are forwarded. Some moderators may be able to understand these logs, correct? In the 3 days I was banned, I was eventually told that there is a problem with the website. I can quote a staff member on the website saying that “it's slow and doesn't load correctly.” Well this sounds like the Discouragement Ban feature on XenForo, but that’s besides the point. When I asked why this hasn’t been fixed, I was told “Andy created the staff website, so he knows it best. Unfortunately, he is gone now, which makes fixing things quite a hassle.” Let me remind you when Andyshcofie left the team in June. It’s August and it seems apparent that there is still nobody to replace him. It’s understandable that they may not know the websites as well as Andy did, however it’s still a problem that there’s no web developer as Tacosbefriends tells us in this image.
So now we’ve established that there’s only one person who understand the logs and even if moderators were able to, they wouldn’t really be able to help out because there’s a website issue that’s still not been figured out. I inquired about how long this slow issue has been going on for but I’m not party to that discussion, but we can conclude that even if the moderators could understand anti cheat logs it would be of no use since the website is not working.
So let’s get back to the fact that there’s one developer who can handle anti cheat appeals. There’s always been one developer. Certainly, there’s always some percent of those Sentinel bans that are false. I’m sure a certain number of those people will be writing lengthy, proper appeals in the hope that they will get unbanned. But they’ve got to wait haven’t they? It’s a 7 day ban if you were punished by Sentinel. If you have to wait 3-4 days which is basically half of your ban time, what is the point of actually appealing? Yes, your record can be cleared by an appeal, but that’s still not good enough because if you’re going to stay banned and serve even half of the ban time, you have been punished for something you did not do, correct?
Now, when it comes to hiring more developers to fix the issue, CubeCraft needs more people who can read and understand anti cheat logs and answer valid appeals as well as a web developer. Why isn’t there one anymore? Due to the player count drop on CubeCraft, they are definitely not making as much profit as they used to before. I was told by StorySays that CubeCraft is not “swimming in finances” or at least as I take it, they aren’t swimming in finances as much as they used to.
We can link this drop in profit with simple economic concepts. When there’s a fall in demand for a product, the product will lose out on it’s sales. A key factor influencing demand is fashion and/or trends. 1.9 PvP is not something fashionable when it comes to Minecraft, and CubeCraft also has made a lot of mistakes in their running in the last year and a half, so they’ve got to blame themselves when it comes to the drop in demand, which in this case means player count. When something goes out of fashion, the demand falls, the profit drops, and similarly for CubeCraft, they are no longer “swimming in finances.”
I will address the moderator shortage now, but from the fact that Cube does not have the same resources it used to, we can establish that Cube is likely to be understaffed in most departments, particularly in development and moderation. Now this is a problem for the reasons we have addressed above. CubeCraft is not able to hire as many Developers anymore with ease and we can gather that with this screenshot.
This screenshot can also prove the fact that Cube is not swimming in finance and well, as I’ve said, that’s due to their own wrongdoing. What did they do wrong? I think @CommunistCactus has a good thread for you to read to find out, read it here. This screenshot also shows that Cube is not as successful anymore and those of us who provide suggestions, Cube isn’t really going to put as much time into these kind of things anymore, since there aren’t as many people playing. I generally see 4,000 players online during evenings and around 1,000 during the morning (or around 6AM in most European countries such as The Netherlands and Spain)
Now moderators are also important and Story tells us that they don’t have enough moderation through this screenshot.
I asked why, and the answer is quite thrilling
So there’s a lack of good applicants. Who’s to blame that they lost the good applicants? I can show you quite a few forum profiles from late 2016 and early 2017 who were quality applicants that did apply, met all requirements etc and were denied. Then of course, Cube messed up on several things, and all of those people are gone. And this once again, links to the problem that they are understaffed. Not just one department anymore, it’s 2. Let me remind you, according to this thread, the last Helper recruited was on April 28h. According to what we can see from the screenshots, this means that in the last 4 months they’ve not had a single good enough applicant, and they have a moderator shortage.
[EDIT: Two Helpes were recruited as of August 25, 2018 but that’s still a huge enough gap to prove my point]
So CubeCraft is understaffed yet they boast about the number of people their anti cheat bans, irrespective of them being false or proper bans and then when it comes to dealing with false bans, they are really lacking the resources and quality.
"Over the last few years we have grown not just our team but also our community. We try to keep our players at the centre of everything we do providing them with new games and content."
This is what's written on https://jobs.cubecraft.net/ and if the team has grown so much then why just one anti cheat developer? They’re keeping the players at the centre of everything they do by false bans, taking time to answer an appeal because they're understaffed when I'm sure they've got the finance to have at least a couple more people who are skilled enough to answer appeals for the anti cheat. All of them don't have to code Sentinel, but more of them can read the appeals and know how to deal with them? They've got 8 developers and just one to answer the thousands of appeals they get, yet they continue boasting about how many people Sentinel bans. If they want to boast, they should have a good number of people to also deal with the huge number of people Sentinel probably false bans.
Once any appeal is marked as a false positive, moderators do not have access to it. I’m sure there are quite a number of appeals that are marked as such, but these get forwarded to one developer. It’s completely understandable that only one developer is used to code the anti cheat as a whole but it’s certainly not crazy to think that more than one person can handle the appeals and read the anti cheat logs.
Okay, we’ve addressed the big issue here with how long it takes for appeals to be answered. What’s one solution I came up with?
If you’ve taken a look at the “How Does Recruitment Work” thread then you should know how they mark the applications as red, green and orange depending on the requirements met by the applicant and some other stuff that you should check the thread to find out since I’m not going to delve into the Helper recruitment system, at least for now…
Now, a similar concept could be applied to the anti cheat appeals. Yes, it would require a web developer to do so, but I think if Cube wants to run another few (insert time period here) then they will have to invest into a web developer. So the basic idea is to mark poor quality appeals such as “unban me dude i dont hak on ur server ur anticheat suk im just a pvp god”, even if they are for false bans in red and such appeals won’t get that far to the anti cheat developer. On the other hand, an appeal which is detailed and has a point can be marked in green and forwarded to the anti cheat developer. See what I mean? This idea of course needs some more development but I’ve provided a basic idea that I think you should be able to understand. This will make sure that the anti cheat developer, at least for the time being, with Cube having just one, will deal with the good appeals first that actually require attention rather than the really bad ones which can be dealt with last since even if it’s a false ban, they won’t really be able to prove it through their appeal.
In an ideal world though, Cube would just assign more people to read anti cheat appeals and speed up the process since they really lack productivity in that area, and while it’s a concern, it should be addressed.
I would like to say that Cube really has to being prioritising on what the actually want. Currently, from the outside at least, though I wouldn’t like to go too far with this, it does seem like they aren’t focusing on the things that actually need attention. If those Sentinel stats are true then I’m definitely not the only person who’s complained about a false ban and written a proper appeal, CubeCraft as a network has to prioritise, and that’s the bottomline. They’ve lost a bunch of players and popularity and if they want to keep their current player base, these things have to be fixed.
That’s all I wanted to say. It is a long thread and I know that, but it’s stuff that had to be said.
Make this thread big. Comment and tag and stuff.
@iConfueZ @DidntKnowThat @HackersDontWin @Dkamps18 @larswijn @Chum Chum
This thread is long. It talks about more than just my false ban. Do read it though.
Now I’ll tell you why it really sucks, and what really the topic of this thread is.
After I was false banned, I wrote a lengthy appeal. Very long, 7 paragraphs.
Hey there. I was playing an EggWars game on the map Under Da Sea. I was playing on the red team and there was one purple player left. My teammates and I were chasing him and critting him and strafe hitting him of course and then we eventually managed to push him off the void. He had no egg of course, hence he was eliminated and the game was won. Whilst falling in the void I was holding my space bar anyway since we were critical hitting the opponent and just a few seconds later I was banned.
I was using the 5zig mod with Optifine on the 1.9.4 client of Minecraft. My texture packs include 'A Simple PvP Experience' and 'PeteZahHutt BS BLACK EDIT.' As per the allowed modifications on CubeCraft, the 5zig mod is allowed and as far as I am aware, it does not have toggle sneak or toggle sprint so I could not have used that either.
I am aware of all of the CubeCraft rules being a forum member for over 2 years now and have been an active participant on forum conversations etc. If I were foolish enough to break any rules on CubeCraft, I would not write this appeal today and would accept my ban as an honest person rather than lying to you saying "I did not use any hacks" or whatever it is most hackers say in their pointless appeals these days.
While I understand Sentinel makes errors, this is quite a big one and I am 100% certain that I was not using any unapproved modifications or butterfly clicking which I am aware of can be something that Sentinel can tend to pick up on.
If I did indeed break any rules, then I would like for you to point them out to me and I will rectify my mistake and never repeat it again as I learn from my mistakes and it's something I want to do to be a better person. Breaking rules on a block game server does not make me a better person however if I was in fact, for some reason unaware of any of the rules (which is not a valid excuse for breaking one), then I am deeply apologetic of what I have done. As far as I'm concerned however, this is a false Sentinel Ban which is quite a likely event and is more than understandable.
I believe I have fully explained my situation and justified exactly why this has been a false ban on my Minecraft account on the CubeCraft Games Network. I leave with you a screenshot of me clicking F3 on a single player world mere minutes after being banned from your server.
I strongly feel that I have provided enough evidence and detail for my ban to be withheld and I should be allowed to play on CubeCraft once again. Please do contact me if you require anything else, however as I said, I believe I've provided everything necessary.
I'd also like to thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this appeal. I understand you do receive quite a few Sentinel Appeals every day and it is crucial for you to recognise which ones are false and which ones are correct bans, hopefully I've justified why mine is false.
Thank you.
TheFastBowler
Discord - TheFastBowler#7233
I was using the 5zig mod with Optifine on the 1.9.4 client of Minecraft. My texture packs include 'A Simple PvP Experience' and 'PeteZahHutt BS BLACK EDIT.' As per the allowed modifications on CubeCraft, the 5zig mod is allowed and as far as I am aware, it does not have toggle sneak or toggle sprint so I could not have used that either.
I am aware of all of the CubeCraft rules being a forum member for over 2 years now and have been an active participant on forum conversations etc. If I were foolish enough to break any rules on CubeCraft, I would not write this appeal today and would accept my ban as an honest person rather than lying to you saying "I did not use any hacks" or whatever it is most hackers say in their pointless appeals these days.
While I understand Sentinel makes errors, this is quite a big one and I am 100% certain that I was not using any unapproved modifications or butterfly clicking which I am aware of can be something that Sentinel can tend to pick up on.
If I did indeed break any rules, then I would like for you to point them out to me and I will rectify my mistake and never repeat it again as I learn from my mistakes and it's something I want to do to be a better person. Breaking rules on a block game server does not make me a better person however if I was in fact, for some reason unaware of any of the rules (which is not a valid excuse for breaking one), then I am deeply apologetic of what I have done. As far as I'm concerned however, this is a false Sentinel Ban which is quite a likely event and is more than understandable.
I believe I have fully explained my situation and justified exactly why this has been a false ban on my Minecraft account on the CubeCraft Games Network. I leave with you a screenshot of me clicking F3 on a single player world mere minutes after being banned from your server.
I strongly feel that I have provided enough evidence and detail for my ban to be withheld and I should be allowed to play on CubeCraft once again. Please do contact me if you require anything else, however as I said, I believe I've provided everything necessary.
I'd also like to thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this appeal. I understand you do receive quite a few Sentinel Appeals every day and it is crucial for you to recognise which ones are false and which ones are correct bans, hopefully I've justified why mine is false.
Thank you.
TheFastBowler
Discord - TheFastBowler#7233
Now I don’t care if you use this appeal to get unbanned or whatever yourself. Let’s address the issue.
It took over 3 days to get unbanned. I brought up the issue with several staff members. The common reply was “Please be patient” or “Loony will be dealing with it soon.” For those of you who don’t know, LoonyRules is the guy who works on Sentinel and deals with valid Sentinel appeals. Yes, the only person who deals with valid Sentinel appeals. Now let’s look into some statistics. Take a look at this screenshot.
What does this screenshot prove? Sentinel bans a lot of players. Now as I’ve mentioned, it’s very, very likely for an anti cheat to false ban or not pick up on blatant hacks. Hence these stats come into the mix. It’s close to a million bans. If these figures are really true, then it also must be true that a lot of these bans are false bans. I don’t know if Sentinel filters them and removes the false bans from that count but I’m pretty sure a lot of the 1 million people have been false bans, many probably not bothering to appeal and shifting to another server since they don’t have time to wait 7 days or even wait 4 days for their appeal to get read. Most people move on.
Now what’s the process of getting unbanned if you were false banned? You get banned, you get an appeal code, and then you write an appeal. Now as I’ve been told after having numerous discussions with staff members, is that moderators have access to these appeals. If they have a false positive from a person, that appeal is forwarded to the anti cheat developer.
See what’s missing? Developer. Just one. And yes, that person is LoonyRules, and he’s the only person who can deal with these kind of appeals since he is the only person who can read logs and understand them well enough.
Now this of course, is a problem. Stay with me for a minute because I’m going to discuss it. Moderators can view these appeals until they are forwarded. Some moderators may be able to understand these logs, correct? In the 3 days I was banned, I was eventually told that there is a problem with the website. I can quote a staff member on the website saying that “it's slow and doesn't load correctly.” Well this sounds like the Discouragement Ban feature on XenForo, but that’s besides the point. When I asked why this hasn’t been fixed, I was told “Andy created the staff website, so he knows it best. Unfortunately, he is gone now, which makes fixing things quite a hassle.” Let me remind you when Andyshcofie left the team in June. It’s August and it seems apparent that there is still nobody to replace him. It’s understandable that they may not know the websites as well as Andy did, however it’s still a problem that there’s no web developer as Tacosbefriends tells us in this image.
So now we’ve established that there’s only one person who understand the logs and even if moderators were able to, they wouldn’t really be able to help out because there’s a website issue that’s still not been figured out. I inquired about how long this slow issue has been going on for but I’m not party to that discussion, but we can conclude that even if the moderators could understand anti cheat logs it would be of no use since the website is not working.
So let’s get back to the fact that there’s one developer who can handle anti cheat appeals. There’s always been one developer. Certainly, there’s always some percent of those Sentinel bans that are false. I’m sure a certain number of those people will be writing lengthy, proper appeals in the hope that they will get unbanned. But they’ve got to wait haven’t they? It’s a 7 day ban if you were punished by Sentinel. If you have to wait 3-4 days which is basically half of your ban time, what is the point of actually appealing? Yes, your record can be cleared by an appeal, but that’s still not good enough because if you’re going to stay banned and serve even half of the ban time, you have been punished for something you did not do, correct?
Now, when it comes to hiring more developers to fix the issue, CubeCraft needs more people who can read and understand anti cheat logs and answer valid appeals as well as a web developer. Why isn’t there one anymore? Due to the player count drop on CubeCraft, they are definitely not making as much profit as they used to before. I was told by StorySays that CubeCraft is not “swimming in finances” or at least as I take it, they aren’t swimming in finances as much as they used to.
We can link this drop in profit with simple economic concepts. When there’s a fall in demand for a product, the product will lose out on it’s sales. A key factor influencing demand is fashion and/or trends. 1.9 PvP is not something fashionable when it comes to Minecraft, and CubeCraft also has made a lot of mistakes in their running in the last year and a half, so they’ve got to blame themselves when it comes to the drop in demand, which in this case means player count. When something goes out of fashion, the demand falls, the profit drops, and similarly for CubeCraft, they are no longer “swimming in finances.”
I will address the moderator shortage now, but from the fact that Cube does not have the same resources it used to, we can establish that Cube is likely to be understaffed in most departments, particularly in development and moderation. Now this is a problem for the reasons we have addressed above. CubeCraft is not able to hire as many Developers anymore with ease and we can gather that with this screenshot.
This screenshot can also prove the fact that Cube is not swimming in finance and well, as I’ve said, that’s due to their own wrongdoing. What did they do wrong? I think @CommunistCactus has a good thread for you to read to find out, read it here. This screenshot also shows that Cube is not as successful anymore and those of us who provide suggestions, Cube isn’t really going to put as much time into these kind of things anymore, since there aren’t as many people playing. I generally see 4,000 players online during evenings and around 1,000 during the morning (or around 6AM in most European countries such as The Netherlands and Spain)
Now moderators are also important and Story tells us that they don’t have enough moderation through this screenshot.
I asked why, and the answer is quite thrilling
So there’s a lack of good applicants. Who’s to blame that they lost the good applicants? I can show you quite a few forum profiles from late 2016 and early 2017 who were quality applicants that did apply, met all requirements etc and were denied. Then of course, Cube messed up on several things, and all of those people are gone. And this once again, links to the problem that they are understaffed. Not just one department anymore, it’s 2. Let me remind you, according to this thread, the last Helper recruited was on April 28h. According to what we can see from the screenshots, this means that in the last 4 months they’ve not had a single good enough applicant, and they have a moderator shortage.
[EDIT: Two Helpes were recruited as of August 25, 2018 but that’s still a huge enough gap to prove my point]
So CubeCraft is understaffed yet they boast about the number of people their anti cheat bans, irrespective of them being false or proper bans and then when it comes to dealing with false bans, they are really lacking the resources and quality.
"Over the last few years we have grown not just our team but also our community. We try to keep our players at the centre of everything we do providing them with new games and content."
This is what's written on https://jobs.cubecraft.net/ and if the team has grown so much then why just one anti cheat developer? They’re keeping the players at the centre of everything they do by false bans, taking time to answer an appeal because they're understaffed when I'm sure they've got the finance to have at least a couple more people who are skilled enough to answer appeals for the anti cheat. All of them don't have to code Sentinel, but more of them can read the appeals and know how to deal with them? They've got 8 developers and just one to answer the thousands of appeals they get, yet they continue boasting about how many people Sentinel bans. If they want to boast, they should have a good number of people to also deal with the huge number of people Sentinel probably false bans.
Once any appeal is marked as a false positive, moderators do not have access to it. I’m sure there are quite a number of appeals that are marked as such, but these get forwarded to one developer. It’s completely understandable that only one developer is used to code the anti cheat as a whole but it’s certainly not crazy to think that more than one person can handle the appeals and read the anti cheat logs.
Okay, we’ve addressed the big issue here with how long it takes for appeals to be answered. What’s one solution I came up with?
If you’ve taken a look at the “How Does Recruitment Work” thread then you should know how they mark the applications as red, green and orange depending on the requirements met by the applicant and some other stuff that you should check the thread to find out since I’m not going to delve into the Helper recruitment system, at least for now…
Now, a similar concept could be applied to the anti cheat appeals. Yes, it would require a web developer to do so, but I think if Cube wants to run another few (insert time period here) then they will have to invest into a web developer. So the basic idea is to mark poor quality appeals such as “unban me dude i dont hak on ur server ur anticheat suk im just a pvp god”, even if they are for false bans in red and such appeals won’t get that far to the anti cheat developer. On the other hand, an appeal which is detailed and has a point can be marked in green and forwarded to the anti cheat developer. See what I mean? This idea of course needs some more development but I’ve provided a basic idea that I think you should be able to understand. This will make sure that the anti cheat developer, at least for the time being, with Cube having just one, will deal with the good appeals first that actually require attention rather than the really bad ones which can be dealt with last since even if it’s a false ban, they won’t really be able to prove it through their appeal.
In an ideal world though, Cube would just assign more people to read anti cheat appeals and speed up the process since they really lack productivity in that area, and while it’s a concern, it should be addressed.
I would like to say that Cube really has to being prioritising on what the actually want. Currently, from the outside at least, though I wouldn’t like to go too far with this, it does seem like they aren’t focusing on the things that actually need attention. If those Sentinel stats are true then I’m definitely not the only person who’s complained about a false ban and written a proper appeal, CubeCraft as a network has to prioritise, and that’s the bottomline. They’ve lost a bunch of players and popularity and if they want to keep their current player base, these things have to be fixed.
- Address the slow Sentinel appeals problem. 1 person is not enough. If you want to keep your players, don’t make them wait 3-4 days to get unbanned because they’ve technically served their punishment by then. People move on due to stuff like this.
- Hire more moderators. There are definitely good applicants that will come by, but 4 months is just too large of a gap for me to believe that there wasn’t one single applicant for a 4k player averaging server and a 240k member forum.
- Prioritise the staff members that need to be hired. You may not be swimming with finances but if you want to run for a while longer, you’ll certainly make the investments to keep Cube around for the foreseeable future. There’s no reward without risk and an investment into a web developer and perhaps a few people who understand logs is crucial.
- Change the staff application system. If you don’t want to use Advanced Applications from XenForo, make your own custom system. You are, as you say, one of the“ world's largest Minecraft Networks, “ and you shouldn’t really be using Google Forms for such things as far as I’m concerned. And I’m not that on board with the idea of removing the open ended questions since the only way you really get to know an applicant now is through their threads and forum profile. It should be a testing application where you answer questions with constructive thoughts. “Why do you want to be a Helper on CubeCraft” is a key question in the application and you require to have those open ended questions.
- Start accepting constructive criticism and feedback. If you’re a large network, you’ll receive negative feedback and constructive feedback. If you take it as a rant and throw it in the garbage, you’ve annoyed another set of players that’ll leave. If you look into the criticism and think about what you can do with it, that’s progress and makes players want to stay as you’re actually keeping your “players at the centre of everything” you do by doing this.
That’s all I wanted to say. It is a long thread and I know that, but it’s stuff that had to be said.
Make this thread big. Comment and tag and stuff.
@iConfueZ @DidntKnowThat @HackersDontWin @Dkamps18 @larswijn @Chum Chum
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