[2022] Information about bans

Hi everyone,

Unfortunately, there was a bug causing players to be banned.

We had a couple of developers, Nimhain (Producer, Head of CX) and Sirrian (Creative Director) working on the issue and resolving this for as many players as possible on Christmas day and Boxing Day.

This bug was fixed on Boxing Day (26th Dec), and all affected players should now be unbanned.
One part of the fix involved turning off Kris Kringle’s Treasure Map awarding ability temporarily so you will notice that.

We know that event scores were affected by this issue as well.

We will be working out compensation as soon as we can.
I’ve published a known issues article, if you follow it you’ll be notified when we update it with compensation information:

We’re incredibly sorry for this unintended TERRIBLE christmas gift.

We hope you’re all enjoying your holidays despite this while we work really hard to make this right.

^ Just updated my post.

Updated again with a bit more info regarding part of the fix

Yeah it’s definitely going to be complicated to compensate.
I will see what is possible and suggest the Vault event in addition to whatever we end up doing.

Right now I’m just catching up on all the information and making sure all the players who wrote to us have a response, then I will coordinate with the team about what is possible for compensation.

I’ve published a known issues article, if you follow it you’ll be notified when we update it with compensation information:

Hi folks, I’ve updated this article here with the work that we did today regarding these issues:

That is: We’ve corrected Guild Trophies, Campaign Stars and Holiday Event scores completely on all platforms except Playstation who only got a small partial roll out today and requires further work.

Please bear with me while we continue to solve things for Playstation.

If you’re on one of the other platforms and are directly affected by this issue and you notice something we’ve missed on your account - please let me know so I can make sure the team are aware.

Compensation will still be worked out after we’ve solved the whole issue - so not yet.

This has now also been rolled out for Playstation.

Just popping in to let you all know I’ve given you as much information as I have here, in the known issue article and in my support replies for now.

We will post another update sometime next week.

Hey everyone,

Thanks for your patience over the holidays.

Straight into it with the details:

Over the weekend of Christmas, incorrect bans were placed on roughly 0.37% of the active user base.

The development team noticed the issue at just after midnight on Christmas morning and we had 3 team members dropping in as they could to assist with solving the problem from that time right up until almost 11 pm the same day.

By the end of the 26th the issue was solved and all the affected players were unbanned.

When bans are placed, the game automatically removes all the banned player’s event progress and half their guild trophies to ensure they don’t keep their leaderboard positions or rewards they may have earned by cheating.

Obviously, in this case it added another layer of complexity to the issue, but by the end of the 28th everyone’s Trophies, event and Campaign progress were restored.

So that’s what happened, WHY did it happen though?

Gems of War has automatic cheat detection.
Due to a bug, players who shouldn’t have been, were detected as cheating and banned.
This happened because the tool can both detect and ban.

We’ve been developing the automatic cheat detection tool for years now.
The first step was just detection so we could ensure accuracy over the entire player base and over an extended period of time.
With that being the case, we have been slowly rolling out automatic bans in small steps to continue ensuring the tool was working appropriately.

This roll out has gone perfectly smoothly throughout all stages up until Christmas, when due to a number of unexpected interactions, the tool banned these players incorrectly.

Originally it did look like this issue was caused by Kris Kringle’s map giving ability and the way those rewards are logged on the server, however, a key factor ended up being Maps earned over not just one battle but over a number of battles - which made the problem grow exponentially as time went on regardless of whether you were using Kris Kringle or not. Kris Kringle basically exacerbated the issue but didn’t cause the issue. This is also why the issue wasn’t picked up when we were testing Kris Kringle.

We owe our community an apology

First and foremost we apologize to the affected players who were prevented from playing over the holiday weekend. We also acknowledge the stress this put on their Guilds as we know how horrible it was seeing your Guild’s progress and Leaderboard ranks drop because of this.

We also want to acknowledge that we can and should have been more transparent about the rollout of the cheat detection tool. We’re usually quite reserved in discussing anything to do with cheat detection as we’re always trying to stay ahead of people creating cheat tools and bots. While we do feel that the tool is a very positive addition to our toolkit in assisting us with managing such a large community, in retrospect we should have let everyone know that we were taking the next steps from detection to testing actual automatic bans.

With that said, for full transparency, we will be using automatic bans moving forward.
In light of what happened over Christmas we are obviously keeping an extra close eye on all bans.

However, due to what happened we’re currently discussing taking a step back from full automation to still requiring a staff member to approve ban batches, so that if the number of players in the ban queue spikes like it did over Christmas, a staff member will see that and be able to reject the batch before the bans are actually placed. This is an ongoing discussion after having this issue so that we can prevent anything like this happening for any reason again.

With that said, anyone who writes a ban appeal for their account still has their ban checked manually by staff.

Now that the bugs have been fixed and everyone’s progress corrected and we have more staff back from holidays, we will be organizing compensation for the banned players. If you’d like to be notified once compensation has been sent out please follow the help center article here.

First up, there will be global compensation as well, sorry I didn’t mention that earlier. The players who were banned will get additional compensation though.

Fair comments about Ban Appeal tickets, we’ll have to treat Ban Appeals just like any other ticket.

It will increase waiting times for other ticket types during busy periods but it’s fair to say it’s better to improve the wait times for Ban appeals with autobans happening.

Regarding autobans happening based on metrics and thresholds, that’s what I’m doing currently manually anyway. The thresholds are intended to be as such that they can only be achieved through editing game data. There are cases we haven’t given the autoban detection for which more context is required, in those cases manual bans are still done after we look at more of the big picture with the account.

Prior to this bug I’d say there’s been less than 10 incorrect cheating bans placed in the 5 years I’ve worked here that I’m aware of. I don’t think any of them were incorrect in the autoban rollout, it was all human error.

I know right now we’re talking about ensuring people don’t get autobanned incorrectly in the first place but I also think it’s worthwhile to talk about what happens after a ban:

I want to make sure you folks have the info to differentiate between a mistaken ban and an intentional one where the player was given a 2nd chance:

If a mistake is made, the account is unbanned and everything that was taken away is restored: Trophies, Campaign progress, event progress, I don’t believe Honor is taken. We apologise unreservedly to the player and give them compensation.

If a ban was correct but the player is given a second chance, the account will be unbanned, the campaign progress will be restored and the player will be dishonored 99% of the time. Trophies won’t be returned and event progress won’t be returned. So if you’re in a guild and someone says they were unbanned because of a mistake but their Trophies etc aren’t given back, staff have checked the ban and determined it was correct but think the player won’t do it again.

The only exception to this is if the guild reported their own member - in that case we will give you the Trophies back because we don’t want to punish the guild for trying to do the right thing and keep cheaters out of the game and their guild. However, even in this case, the player’s event progress won’t be restored.

Hopefully that info helps if there’s uncertainty about someone’s unbanning.

Also it’s worth noting, that most people don’t cheat to be malicious, it doesn’t usually say much if anything about their character or personality. You can still be a great person, a great guild member, friend and fun to hang out with if you cheated. Most people cheat to save time or effort, not to screw other people over (although those people exist too). So if your mate is banned then unbanned and says “hey I didn’t cheat” - and you trust them, most the time it’s probably going to be one of these reasons they’re saying that:

1. They don’t understand the rules around playing the game unmodified as designed and are using an auto clicker, setup their own hot keys, macros, using an emulator with extra features to help with the game or they share their device/console/steam account/GoW login with someone else who has cheated on the account - stuff people may not think of.

2. They know they cheated but they don’t want to be kicked out of their Guild

3. They know they cheated but they don’t want their mates to feel differently about them

I would say that unless they’re laughing that they got away with it, if you think they’re a great guild mate or fun to play with don’t be super harsh on them, they got caught and probably got the pants scared off them that they were going to lose everything and won’t be silly enough to do it again.

I’ll talk to the team about letting players know when they were banned for reason no.1 up there.
The reason we don’t get into specifics currently is because we don’t want the case to be they were cheating 5 different ways but we tell them “you were banned for this one reason” because it sends the message that “ok here is why I got caught so from now on I’ll just stick to the other 4 cheats I’m using” or, they go complain to the person who made the cheat to get it changed to be harder to detect. Also generally, if you did break the rules and you really sit and think about how it happened, we think that most people will work it out when we list off a bunch of examples in the help center (and we link that article when we reply to ban appeals).

I was hoping it would be today but I think it’s gotten late for that now so I will talk to the team about whether we can get it out before the weekend at least.

If there’s any issues with rolling it out tomorrow before the weekend I’ll post to let you know.

I’m still waiting to hear about it.

They don’t interfere with gameplay or the game data.
Kudos to anyone running external tools to optimise their guild performance that DON’T touch the game. I also use calculators and spreadsheets and external communication tools like discord to play some of my games - if it doesn’t touch the game it’s all fine.

The issue is with any tools that modify the actual game itself to gain an advantage.

A side effect of having an autoplay feature is that players who are just wanting to save some time/effort but still achieve things in game can now use the game as designed to do that in a balanced way that won’t negatively impact other players or put them at an unfair advantage. It’s not the reason we implemented the feature but I’m personally glad it means less players who would be looking for a GoW playing bot/auto-clicker will be doing so because we give them a game feature to achieve what they were trying to do.

If hot seating became an issue then it would probably be problematic, but it’s not an issue as it stands. Players sharing accounts are usually just friends or family members covering for each other when they’re sick or playing together for fun - at the end of the day there’s still a human manually clicking around the game playing the game as it’s intended.

I’m looking into this now.

@ToeKnee0 the bans aren’t instant, we’ve found you were detected 7 minutes after we ran the code to unban all the affected players.

The devs are going through now and extending the timeframe to make sure anyone who was detected due to the bug is unbanned or doesn’t get banned if their ban hasn’t already been actioned.

We’ll return all your Trophies, Campaign and event progress as soon as we can.

Update:

We’ve found 3 players who were missed in the original bug so we’re fixing them up now.

I’m passing the feedback about the compensation on.

I have no motivating factors to want to short you, I’m not happy this happened, no one is.
I don’t care if you get given 10,000 Gems and a month long Vault event as long as I have a full time job still at the end of it employment is my motivation to assist you folks (I mean apart from the fact I care too).

It sometimes is a negotiation - because injecting Gems into the economy can mess up the game health. I know I know what you’re going to say- so does incorrectly autobanning players - but both can be true at the same time.

I’ve told the team and checked a couple of accounts about the amount of free gems per day you folks were talking about.

I do care, so do the team - I willll get back to you all about the feedback you’ve given but because of time differences and such it won’t be until next week I think. Bear with me (like you have been very patiently doing already anyway).

I read everything you said I just want to mention so everyone knows, your Ring of Wonder should have been suspended and restarted when you were unbanned - if you’re missing days ping me your invite code so I can make sure that worked as intended and so we can correct it for everyone with one if not. Thanks!

Also if you earn 18M gold in that period that is not equal to 60K Gems.
Because you wouldn’t have spent those Gems on all that Gold, Gold has different uses to Gems.
You wouldn’t have earned 60K Gems.
You can buy Gold with Gems but in terms of compensation they’re not equally exchangable the way you suggested.

compensating 60K gems to all the banned players or even to one player for this would probably stuff up the leaderboards for 6 months and every now and then for years we’d still have random leaderboard unfairness when anyone with the 60K gems dropped them randomly on an event. You wouldn’t have been able to do that if you’d not been banned.

It’s also why Dragonite won’t be compensated - it makes very little sense to do so - you’re saying Guilds had to spend more Gems to buy more Tiers - giving them Dragonite doesn’t help replace those Gems or help them buy Tiers in a future event. But with Gems - if you wanted to spend the compensation on Dragonite the Gems will help towards that. Same same but different. Same with Books of Deeds, and some of the other left field requests I’ve seen.

It’s a balancing act with compensating what was lost, not hurting the game economy, the bottom line or making the game unfair on other players. 60K Gems per player (even only 0.37%~ of players) would ruin the game for most of the player base.

Gems do tend to be a good general compensation because you can buy a lot of things with it so you have freedom of choice but that doesn’t mean we can just exchange every resource for one another - it doesn’t end up being logical and it ends up hurting the game balance and fairness.

To be 100% clear I’m all for giving fair compensation to affected players but fair means - giving them as close to what was lost as is feasible, plus a little extra as an apology. Not just dumping a huge amount of an arbitrary resource on an account.

I’m not stressed (surprisingly), this is how I always talk =/

No more swearing.

I don’t have any info on that that hasn’t already been shared and it’s off topic for this thread.

I’ve passed the extra feedback about comp on @Cronus but due to not being able to synch with the people I need to now until after the weekend I won’t have any new info til next week.

@icy I’ll set a reminder to go off on Monday to ask about that as I couldn’t find the info I needed to answer. (It’s after 7pm here so I’m the only one still at work).

all good @WishKiller I just can’t let the swearing slide is all so thank you for reposting without it.

Hey folks, Monday here, no further info yet sorry.

There’s been at least a couple of really good posts here, particularly by @Kezef who has done a great job of articulating part of the situation.

@Fourdottwoone and @Cronus were talking about new thresholds implemented for Treasure Maps causing these bans and asked for confirmation.

Treasure Hunt and Treasure Map detections are actually the oldest detection types and thresholds in the game - these have been in since before we worked on the newer cheat detection tool in the past few years. They’ve been in for over 5 years (because I started working here 5 years ago and these detections already existed).

From what I understand of the information, the issue occurred because the threshold specifically wasn’t updated successfully to account for Kris Kringle’s spell under all conditions. Kris gives guaranteed Treasure Maps and you can have more than one on a Team. If you blitz through Treasure Maps in a single battle - no problem - you blitz through every single one of let’s say 100 battles - you got banned. It was the literal definition of a bug, the system didn’t operate the way we all expected it to under a specific set of conditions, exacerbated by Kris.

Kris Kringle didn’t cause the issue - but he sped it up. I think the whole situation is a double edged sword. Kris Kringle sped the issue up meaning it hit enough players in a short amount of time that we all noticed - because it was a huge issue. But regardless, this probably would have become an issue at some point, albeit maybe a less noticeable one - which would have been far more insidious.

I’ve done a bunch of checks to make sure no one was banned before or after this incident for the same reason as the “Kris Kringle” Christmas bug. So far everything I’ve seen looks ok. I haven’t called it on my checks yet because well, I guess I’m a worry wort, I want to be 300% sure everything is ok before I call it done for myself. The devs have also done their checks obviously and they are satisfied it was fixed over Xmas except for the 3 players they found that had queued bans that we missed from 7 minutes outside the fix window. These players have now also been sorted out.

I handle all the cheating ban appeals myself and I haven’t seen anyone come through ban appeals prior to this for the reasons that caused the bug - definitely especially keeping a closer eye out for this moving forward for awhile. But I’m 99.9999999% sure no one has appealed a ban relating to this prior to Christmas time.

I also checked the currently banned list for players who are banned for reasons relating to Treasure Maps and who haven’t writeen ban appeals and haven’t spotted anything unexpected yet - but I’m still going through it to be as sure as possible.

I plan to talk to the programmers again on Wednesday (when I have my next call with them) to ask for more info to assist me with my checks, although again, everything should be fine by this stage, I’m just continuining to dig into it for my own sanity.

Someone also asked why the autobans weren’t turned off as soon as Nimhain replied on the forums here - it was because she noticed it at midnight - 1am on Christmas morning and turning the autoban off required a senior engineer, as soon as a senior engineer was reached they began working on shutting it down.

Basically we planned the holiday weekend in a way to minimise any potential issues popping up - nothing new or spicy was deployed close to Christmas. Unfortunately, despite that, this one got by us and we weren’t expecting Christmas morning to go like that, we had no reason to suspect anything could happen that day, we wrapped Christmas weekend up in bubblewrap and made the thing fool proof- jokes on us, Murphy’s Law and all that.

I should probably also personally apologise although there’s nothing I could have really done about it, I was the CX Agent down for holiday coverage and emergencies that week, but I ended up being out of action for the whole week as I caught covid (I had a good run, almost 3 years without catching it), so it took me a long time to realise things were blowing up in Gems of War and then I only managed to work for 3.5 hours that week due to being laid out in bed with the rona. I’m very grateful Nimhain was so on the ball despite her being on vacation herself and able to get in contact with the senior engineers on call. The team worked really hard, long and odd hours to get this resolved as quickly as they could. We are sorry it happened and that we couldn’t fix it faster than we did. I will be incredibly surprised if this happened again - we’re all on high alert now after having that bonfire lit under us.

Update:

We’ll be running an extra Vault Event weekend once the Kingdom Pass has finished.

This way everyone can play with their usual play time but get the extra Rewards during the event that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

It also means you’ll get an assortment of rewards from the Gnomes in amounts more respective of your individual play time rather than us sending out just the compensation based on average free Gems earnt per day, which is much lower for some players and much higher for others.

So it’s 200 Gems for banned players, 50 Gems global comp, and an extra Vault weekend.

Date is still to be advised, we will announce it through the blog like the regularly scheduled events.

Also, we hear your feedback about our global compensation not just for this issue but for previous issues as well and we will be reviewing our compensation policy for more widespread issues and updating them following this.

There wasn’t going to be a Vault event in January.

Now there is, so yes, this is an extra Vault Event.

If you’ve gone and pulled unannounced information from unfinalised game data you’re basically asking me to address something that isn’t going to happen, it may as well not exist.

I could write anything in the schedule and it won’t mean anything until we announce it as finished. I could write absolutely ridiculous stuff in there and it would mean nothing.

It’s exactly like complaining unannounced Troops aren’t balanced or they’re using the same Troop art as an existing Troop - because they’re not finished or announced.

There was not going to be a Vault event in january at all, now there is going to be one between now and when the next one IS actually scheduled so it is an extra Vault event.

If you’re someone who goes looking for unfinished spoilers you need to take it with a grain of salt because nothing you find in the unannounced game data is set in stone until we announce it is. So it’s a bit weird to complain about it.

Of course, if you want to complain about the compensation or about the fact that there was such a long time planned between Vault events, THAT makes sense. But complaining about something that literally wasn’t going to happen because you pulled a Work In Progress event schedule that wasn’t completed or announced anywhere doesn’t make any sense.

I can’t work with feedback about something that we never mentioned, promised or displayed in game at all.

Just following up as it’s been awhile since I replied.

I’m sorry my messages came across in a “hostile” way, it really wasn’t my intention. Text can be difficult to convey tone and intention and with stress levels already running high in this thread due to the issue at hand can make communication a bit more difficult.

I asked for an update on the Vault event today and I’m hoping to have one before the weekend - I will keep poking!

Please keep the thread civil, unfortunately there had to be a couple of bans and several posts deleted due to swearing and insults. Also just a reminder that constructive criticism of anything is ok but targetting individuals whether they be players or staff (we’re all people right?) isn’t ok. Not only is it not pleasant to be on the receiving end, it gives the idea that it’s ok to behave like that towards anyone at any time they post and makes the forum a hostile environment for anyone who was thinking about joining. We want anyone to be able to post here whenever they want, what they think without worrying about being targetted. So please do keep helping us maintain that environment, and we appreciate everyone who has been doing that so far, it’s really appreciated and it helps the community be maintained and grow as well.

No new info about the Vault event sorry, just flying by at 7:50pm to check on things again before heading off for the day.

Nope! You’re still stuck with us sorry! Due to the new years holidays and sick leave and such we went from taking turns spending a week each on the forums to finding it easier for Gman to stay on Gems of War for CX, with me doing my usual thing and being across everything all the time (what’s that movie? Everything, Everywhere all at once?).

We’ve continued passing your feedback on but we haven’t had any updates regarding this for you yet so had nothing new to add.

Sorry I was awol last week, I had some super important secret squirrel stuff I have been working on for CX.

We should be going back to our regular CX human juggling onto the GoW forum so you all get a fresh face every week Soon TM

Thank you for waiting for me to pop back in this week

Sorry for how long it took to get confirmation on this:

The Vault event will be held next weekend (weekend of the 11th)

Hey all,

We will be having the Vault Event this weekend on all platforms, including Switch.

We will be moving the Vault event that was originally scheduled for Feb 17th so we don’t have 2 Vault event weekends in a row.

The weekend of Feb 17th will become an Arena weekend instead.

That 2nd Vault event will be moved to late Feb/early March (we will post the exact date as soon as it’s 100% confirmed).

The events will be announced per usual in the blog and in game, so everyone has access to the information.

From there the Vault events will be spread out as per their usual schedule which is every 6 weeks UNLESS:

1. A new Kingdom releases - as we have Class Trials, Raid Boss and Bounty events for new Kingdom releases

2. When a Kingdom Pass is running - due to previous issues when Kingdom Pass and Vault events are run at the same time. This issue was fixed but honestly, we’re trying to just avoid that combination of events so we can all not worry about it.

In these cases, it may be longer between Vault Events.

It is extra, we’re going to have 3 Vault events over a period of time where we’d normally only have 2.

I understand the frustration, we’re just out here trying to get you what you asked for regarding the Vault event, and this is the best way we were able to make it happen with all things being taken into account.

It’s not perfect, but it’s the solution we’ve got

We’ve tested the Kingdom Pass + Vault event fix, it should be fine but we get complaints about Kingdom battlecrashers not appearing every time we run both whether it’s working or not.

So to avoid the frustration we all collectively encounter when running the 2 events side by side, we decided to avoid it where possible to prevent that.

If we had run the Vault event in January with a Kingdom Pass, Journey Event and an update all coming out in the same week while most the team were still on holiday leave everyone would have been really unhappy.

Regarding Kingdom Pass length that is feedback that has been passed on and that is being considered.

3 Vault events in the span where only 2 were planned is extra. This isn’t personal, I don’t think anyone is stupid, I understand why you’re mad, it’s far less work for me to just tell you “no you don’t get anything” than it is to lie to you about any of this. I’m not doing either of those things, I’m trying to get you the vault event that otherwise wouldn’t be happening with only 2-3 weeks between each (as I said we’re aiming for end of feb/start of march), the vault event in january wasn’t going to happen, even though I understand it feels like you were owed one then. Hopefully my explanation of Vault timing helps set expectations for the future.

Again, I know you’re not happy with this but this is the final outcome:
A vault event this week, a vault event again in 2-4 weeks (hopefully) - then another vault event 6 weeks after that. Under normal circumstances, again to be clear you would have had a vault event on the 17th then another in maybe 6 weeks or more. So that’s why I’m saying “extra”.

I don’t think there’s anything further I can add to this discussion.
I do again however, apologise for the issue over Christmas and how we can’t give heaps more compensation or a week long Vault event back to back etc. I know you wanted more than this, expected more than this (the issue and the compensation) and I’m sorry. I’m also sorry for how my posts keep being read as personal insults - they’re really not intended to be, I’m just trying to share the information I have with you.

I know. This is also feedback we’ve been passing on and is being considered.

I can confirm now that the next Vault event will be on the weekend of March 3rd

So currently we’re scheduled to having 1 per month (1 in Feb, 1 in March & 1 in April) where normally there would have only been 1 per every 6 weeks, so one of those months wouldn’t have had one.

Then from there we’re going back to our regular 6 week schedule (pending the possibility of slight variations due to clashing events).

If you’re still not happy with this, please explain why in more detail so I can properly represent your concerns, otherwise, while I know people still aren’t happy about the whole situation, I think we’ve done what we can to address this at this stage and we do need to close this out at some point and just taking feedback under advisement for any future incidents like this.

^ Text is hard to convey tone, so just a disclaimer, I do genuinely care about conveying your criticism and concerns, but I do need more to continue this discussion at this point, I’m not trying to say this in a mean way, I’m just trying to communicate where we’re at on the status of this.

We have people saying we’re lying about an extra vault weekend - but that’s really not helpful or very descriptive or communicative, if you think we’re having a miscommunication I need more information, because I do want to help address this properly.

I do understand you were expecting a Vault event in January, if that’s what this is about, understood already, but if there’s more to it yeah, more information please!

Ok, totally understood now, thanks for taking the time to explain to me AGAIN (I know you’re fed up with repeating yourselves).

I know Icy just commented my posts are too long sometimes but I guess I want to summarise, so feel free to skip the next bit, you’re not missing much:

For me, at the time, I felt like spacing out the Vault Events more to avoid one in early January was a good idea as we had Kingdom Pass, Legends Reborn, a game update and a Vault weekend scheduled AND half the team was on holidays that week, the team were on the same page about that so we just moved it. It just felt like the perfect concoction of - if something is going to go wrong it will blow up this particular week because that’s Murphy’s Law - so let’s just not create the perfect storm and move something. The Vault event was the easiest thing we could move.

The gap between Vault Events seemed like the lesser evil but in retrospect we should’ve known how not having a Vault Event in January would be more problematic for the community (we knew it would be problematic, I think I had my holiday rose tinted glasses on though about how strongly everyone would feel about it). I think we should have tried harder to postpone the Vault or run it sooner so we could avoid that perfect storm week as well as still have the event.

I think also, because we never announced the Vault Event would be every 6 weeks until recently we just felt we could be much more flexible with the timing.

Meanwhile, everyone has grown used to the unannounced 6 week schedule, so reasonably there is now an expectation the 6 week schedule will be followed.

So that warrants more communication when we plan to deviate from the schedule - and in future we’ll try to do better at that.

TLDR; I see it from both sides now, I feel like I am clear about what the core issues are and misteps that were made and I feel equipped to handle this better in future - I am sorry that I didn’t do a good job of communicating at the start and during these issues, I will do my best to improve on that.

We’re also still very sorry about the ban issue that happened and the Vault Event scheduling.

Regarding the Vault events, they’ll be announced in the blogs as usual.

This is off topic for this thread so I’ll just say this. I don’t know where you got the idea we’re just searching for words to ban for without any context because that’s not the case. No one is getting banned for talking about loofahs, they’re getting banned for using slurs in context. Or spamming slurs then claiming it’s a loofah to troll people. If it were actually a conversation about hygeine products no one would bat an eye. But that’s not what anyone banned for using those slurs was talking about.

If you want to discuss the fact you want homophobic slurs and swearing to be allowed in game make a new thread for it but I can tell you now, that’s a “no”.

We don’t ban without context. If someone feels they have been banned out of context they can submit a ban appeal for it to be reviewed.