How I was banned / The State of the Staff Team

@SoCool21 if I'm being honest, the whole "staff aren't allowed to talk to perm banned players" thing is such a generalization of perm banned players as a whole and it hurts more than it helps. For players who were perm banned based off of using a ghost client, communication should be used as MUCH AS POSSIBLE to ensure that it wasn't a false ban, because a lot of cases the bans are, as you said, you guys "winging it". There shouldn't be ANY hidden reasoning behind it, all proof should be provided in those cases. If needed, the staff member who banned them could and should be kept anonymous, but the whole "not providing evidence" thing to banned players is and always has been completely ridiculous. For example, a few years ago a group of players got on an alt, nametag switched their username to "tallscot", and then proceeded to cheat on that account on video, getting me banned. I wasn't even online at the time, I appealed and it was denied and when I was asking for evidence I was not given it. The ONLY reason I got unbanned was because the player "tallscot" in the video was wearing an Optifine cape when I did not own an Optifine cape on my account. If I did own an optifine cape, I would still be banned today because I would not have been able to explain my point of view or even see what I did that got me banned. Even then, there was obviously the possibility of them not noticing that I didn't own a cape in general, which I would have been able to point out within the first 10 seconds of me seeing the video. I was banned for 2 days before it got resolved if I remember correctly.

The "not talking to banned players" rule/guideline should ONLY be applicable to banned players who had malicious background, such as major toxicity, CRV bans, bans for DDoS/DoX, etc. If it's a normal player like Cow who has no background of that, as you've said, then there should have been as much communication as possible.

 

Personally from this thread, i can see how unicow has been quite aggressive at times as well as the fact that he was non stop asking SoCool about his ban. I believe that this is a form of harassment and I don’t see why SoCool should be blamed for blocking someone who he does not want to be harassed by.

*Note: this is what it looks like from an outsiders perspective of the conversations and screenshoots.

 

I’d probably accept it as a blessing so that I could focus on real life stuff therefore I really don’t think I would have done the same thing you have.

 

For me, I see this thread as nothing more than someone saying, “Hey guys I was banned and want to be unbanned. Lets make enough noise so staff can unban me!” This thread is doing nothing besides bringing to light issues about Brawl in which 95% of the community is already aware of.

 

Wow i heard that they also wing it at murder trials too usually gets convictions. Oh wait how does evidence go again???

L M A O

no stfu Lnformative go make me some more sicc toons

I mean, I have a mod that checks the average players ping and displays it while I'm looking at them. Depending on how your lag was and how the fight went I'd make that determination. Sometimes I think you're cheating, other times I realize how bad I am at a block game. It really depends on the situation. There are some hits where I watch my recordings over again and realize how retarded I was for thinking you or other people were cheating and there are cases where I watch it over and realize that some things really are sketch. Even a regular experienced PVP'er knows better to make a determination on someone after a fight, unless they are obviously blatant.

I think there is an existential problem going on here. The community is ****ing tired of cheaters, they are tired of the BS and they are tired of brawls supposed anti-cheat. They want results and they want blood. I recently had a manager at my workplace that I've known for 10+ years get fired. The actual reason he got fired is generally retarded, but it wasn't just that. It was accumulation of things that led up to this. Things that piled up over the years that were dumb, inappropriate and wrong. So while you're ban may not be justified, it's being justified by past activities and experiences. You cheat once in this community? You might as well be marked for death if you are even sketchy once. Unfortunately, your blood is being sacrificed. Again, it's hard to look at the evidence and take it convincingly. Some of it is sketch, but some of it is NOT sketch. On my MCPVP days I used to play with 100+ ping. It is so ****ing easy to look blatant with ****ty ping. I intentionally used to go on EU servers, get 150MS and win fights as an average player against decent EU's because I would 9 block them into a corner and take so little KB it could be considered a war crime. Being laggy sucks, it's even worse if there's nothing you can do about it. Its ****ing sucks when you get punished for it.

Here's an example of 2800DPI/90 in game for chemist. TBH, this is a lucky video, but I've done this multiple times on other people with ease, I got pretty lucky with link because they are a decent player.

yeah nobody wants to spend more than 5 seconds with a skype manager

Wrong. Apparently, according to the community, you're doing a **** job. I get it. It's staff on a block game server. You're not paid for the work you do. So I get it. I ran a server for 2 years I know the complexities of maintaining a playerbase, maintaining an educated and trustful staff team of people who generally do this with their free time. But bans on brawl have been problematic from the start. I can pull any number of complaint threads over the years on this topic and I'm pretty sure most of the community would agree. There have been multiple, fantastic, but (reasonably complex) solutions offered over the years. Screensharing, better anticheat, client based assessment (think lunar). I know putty hates screensharing, but y'all need to have @Miskey (and other qualified individuals) to put together a tutorial for the staff so you can be educated on how to do this. Everyone keeps complaining because nothings changing. I get that some of the other solutions require monetary supplements to implement the changes. But if you refuse the one free method of examining and evaluating players, the **** do you expect us to do? According to a lot of the memes as of late, and all the chatter, I would say that we are still in the same **** storm.

 

As much as I respect the effort you're putting into getting unbanned, talking about bans on the forums isn't the place. I get this is about your appeals but it should be taken directly to appeals or like I said, Ritzy if you don't want to talk to SoCool.

Someone should seriously lock this thread. https://www.brawl.com/appeal and if you have something against how a staff member is acting, you can PM Minesheep.

 

The staff gave a 2-sentence reply to an honest and open appeal that was several dozen pages long, with good explanation of hits that only partly needed to be explained in the first place. I can understand his frustration and I *can* see if he does stay banned for a few months until he may re-appeal but the way this was handled must absolutely be adressed.

Oh come on man, you wouldn't have. You fought like absolute hell when you were banned last time.

 

When was that? I’ve never been banned so I don’t know what you are on about? Plus I’m not sad enough to go around writing 7k word essays and massive forum posts like this.

 

I am deeply concerned with several revelations made on this thread. Yes, ghost clients are difficult to detect. However, there are proven methods of dealing with them. First and foremost, screen sharing. If memory recalls, Putty is dead-set against implementing any such policies. However, just because Putty refuses to allow it, doesn't mean that screen sharing isn't an option available to Brawl. There's a difference between having choosing not to do something and genuinely having no other options.

Second, BAC is a legitimate option for Ghost Client detection. It appears like Brawl is in a hybrid state where BAC hardware is active but not required to join. I'm not really sure what the story is here. I imagine the upper-staff team is trying to balance healthy player counts with the benefits of requiring BAC. However, it may be possible to circumvent both of these issues by developing a command that forces specified users to join with BAC. While hardware bans would be difficult to enforce, this would drastically decrease the number of cheaters.

I'm sorry but not sorry to say; there are methods to detect ghost clients far more technical than reviewing video evidence. Frankly, the fact that these videos were accepted is alarming.
also, sure, even these methods won't completely stop ghost clients. But they're much more effective than video evidence - which is basically nothing.

SoCool, I have tremendous respect for you. However, this method of reviewing evidence is deeply problematic. If you are spending this much time reviewing video, you can convince yourself of just about anything. Do you ever wonder why teachers recommend skipping problems when you're stuck? It's too easy to get in your head and overthink problems. While it might sound like a good idea to carefully review evidence, it does more harm than good when taken to this extent.

I'll admit; I'm biased. Speaking in IRL terms, I believe that it's better to let 100 go unpunished when they have committed a crime, then punish 1 innocent person. I don't believe in banning people without 100% proof that they cheated. That's what I always understood to be the policy at MCPVP, Brawl, and any other server I've worked on. Based on this statement, this is no longer the case at Brawl:

I recommend Brawl reevaluates the standards of their evidence, or reevaluates their detection methods.

 

First off BAC isn't perfect - for instance I was BAC hardware banned after having Cheat Engine running to get a DLC for Far Cry 3 (before some screams "PIRACY YOU HERETIC", you can't get the DLC anymore anyways and the guys who developed it said it's fine if people pirate it) and opening BAC for an update. This screwed me over for a few weeks, until the banlist was changed again and I haven't touched BAC since.
Second, some people can't install BAC because of parents/guardian software or whatever. Rare, but does happen.

As to video evidence, yes. Clearly. This is a perfect case of why you can't just go ahead and use video evidence against someone when said evidence is extremely difficult to analyse in the first place thanks to lag and Brawl's godawful hit detection AND Brawl being a 1.8 server.

 

As I probably stated quite some times before and pretty much everyone is probably already aware of, I have nowhere near the expertise to determine ghost-client hacks and generally not really any expertise on that matter. So I'm totally ready to be publicly shamed for what I'm about to write.
So obviously I won't go into great detail and would just like to state a few things and ask some questions (not to any specific people, just people who know more about ghost-clients and screen-sharing than me)

The evidence: obviously not my field of expertise, but a good portion of the evidence shows stuff which... honestly seems a lot like I what I'd look from a second POV in some moments. My ping is also not always that constant, me hitting players on my screen in one direction and then seeing their "shape" die in another direction or the other way around: me seeing people trying to hit me and missing on my screen because I'm already at another point but then me dying two blocks from the block I myself thought to be on. (or as an example Wulfi getting like two/three hits on me in a PPM and me not even taking the slightest bit of knockback although gameplay for me and him didn't seem laggy at this time). This is not me dismissing all evidence, I find other stuff pretty sketchy too but as said have no expertise for that and it's definitely difficult to make up one's mind.

Now, some questions:
Am I right that you could theoretically configure a ghostclient in a way that it'd help you increase your performance only by like 5-10%?
Maybe that was worded badly, so I'll word it even worse but in a 'real' scenario: can someone answer me if I could theoretically be using a ghost-client despite me not even being close to belonging to the top 30% of ctf pvpers? Could I theoretically be a bit worse than I appear to be and just be using a very very very low ghost-client setting and never actually astonish anyone since I'm not part of CTF's pvp elite anyway?
Now, as said, I don't know if that's possible, but everything I read on ghost-clients so far suggests that.

IF someone more experienced in the matter confirms that, then theoretically there should very little difference between someone playing legit or with very low settings, meaning you have to watch for it very closely. And the player in question could effortlessly switch between legit/GC with almost noone noticing because the difference is so minimal.
What does that leave us with then? If a (legit) POV of the accused is being investigated, the player still performs almost as well as with a GC. Not to mention we all have our good and bad days, so having a somewhat noticeably worse POV performance from the accused might be brushed off as a completely normal fluctuation.

So on to the topic of screensharing which I'm probably even less familiar with than GC (and that's really something lol).
So I have absolutely no idea how exactly screenshares would attempt to prove/disprove one's legitimacy, but even then there... I think an absolutely foolproof method is just having two computers (don't know if two separate user accounts would already be sufficient) and thus just using a legitimate computer on which you do the screenshare on etc.
If someone could educate me on why so many cry out for screenshares and what people would even be looking for (logs etc.)... I'd greatly appreciate that since so many here in this community apparently see it as the "closest to perfect as we get" thing.

much assumptions by me, granted. Also much pessimism obviously.


Also really trying to not let myself go here but could y'all like maybe, just MAYBE for once not go around saying others are retarded, clowns, idiots, have sub-room temperature IQ's, only do hack to impress e-girls or whatever. Thanks.

 

Yes, absolutely. You can set things such as velocity to be 90% of your normal velocity (i.e. you take 90% of the KB you'd normally take) which you can set vertically and horizontally. You can set your reach to be 0.2-0-4 blocks more than your normal reach which is relatively easy to detect, but you can set it down even further on most clients. You can set your triggerbot to aim if your cursor/crosshair is within a few, erm, milliblocks (xd? centimetres? %? whatever) of a player's hitbox anyways.

 

Okay so first off it's pretty easy to play dumb about things, so saying you know nothing about gc's etc. doesn't really do much.

Harassing people about it isn't exactly the way to go. I get that you're upset. Messaging them every 5 seconds isn't going to force them to make a decision faster.

Personally I'm not sure if you hack or not. I haven't fought you enough to decide that for myself. However, there are several clips in here that are sketchy af. Some I would discard i.e. the one when you're playing heavy and start taking on a 2v1 when I think iceman comes in as ninja on lowrise. That didn't really show anything imo, hearing/seeing the pearl would have been easy and as soon as he comes out of invis that's #1 priority target especially when low.

The thing that worries me the most about you is your pov clips. Your aim is wild, your aim is wild, and then all of the sudden you can perfectly track a soldier climbing into the air or something like that. It goes from being all over the place to being as smooth as can be. Aim assist doesn't have to lock onto teammates, nor does it have to lock onto a certain y position on a player. It's more of a guide for your crosshair. It'll give you nudges in the right direction. The ones I've seen also lock on with an angle measurement, not a distance measurement. Meaning how far the player is from your crosshair, and not the distance between you and the enemy player. The fact that your aim is wild quite often until you finally aim at a player is pretty sketchy in my book.

Maybe you hack, maybe you don't. Either way, brawl has an issue with their anti-cheating policy. It's not great. At all. I tried to bring this up, people (other than the mods and smods, honestly) didn't take it seriously. If they're looking into something like BAC, awesome. It ain't perfect but it'll make it harder for people in general. I would honestly just make it for the match server, since that's where it generally has the most important impact. Casual is fun and all, but generally most of the hacking going on there is blatant blatant and pretty easy to pick up.