[2023] How to reach out as whistleblower?

Hey,

If this is about the Gold cap issue, the team were already investigating it before it was raised in the community forum.

If this is about a ban - we only discuss bans with the banned players, also my manager and the dev team are aware of the banned players who keep being discussed in the tickets and forums - especially the ones related to also having the gold cap issue.

These are 2 completely separate issues. One is a bug, one is cheating, as confirmed by CX and the programmers.

If it’s unrelated to either of these things and you’ve written a ticket about it and if it was a bug previously unknown to us in our bug tracking tools etc, then CX have made an internal bug report and pinged the team about it. If it’s an existing bug report - we update the bug report with new details. However, we don’t respond manually to bug reports in the ticketing system - we send an auto response or macro unless compensation is needed to be sent out, in which case we reply manually.

This saves CX time so that we can address other issues that need to be solved individually (such as account, technical and purchase issues).

This does not mean the bug reports are ignored - it’s just that we prioritise the internal communication of the bug and save the time replying to bug reports individually and privately by sending the auto reply to acknowledge we have received and read the bug report, are investigating it and if we do make a full reply, it will be here in the community forum where everyone can see it so we’re not manually writing individual responses to tickets about the same issue.

Cheating is things like using third party tools to play the game or modifying game files. The only info we give about this is here: https://gemsofwar.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000348076-Hacking-or-cheating-in-Gems-of-War

The reason we don’t get any more specific than that is so that we don’t assist people who come up with tools and cheats for the game to bypass our hack detection. But all of these are based on modifying the game or using third party tools.

These things are being treated as separate issues, I understand it may look like they’re not because the problem is every time the gold cap issue is reported on the forum, a specific game account that is banned keeps coming up and we can’t discuss it. It’s already happened again in this thread. But if we can just not talk about that at all here the thread can stay open.

I mentioned in another thread the reason this gold cap issue exists - the cap is based on the way numbers are stored and is not a Gems of War specific issue per se, as in if you had to store a number in any piece of software there would be a cap imposed by the way the data was stored. Originally the current number was an acceptable threshold and even though it’s highly unlikely anyone not cheating would reach this threshold currently we are going to raise it because we don’t want to risk it being possible for anyone playing legitimately.

Hopefully this helps clear things up?

@Fourdottwoone if you’re saying it’s not about a bug or a ban but you want to make a complaint about staff you can write a support ticket and it will be handled by the person who supervises the staff member you have an issue with.

We would leave the gold cap bug report threads open as long as it doesn’t discuss a player’s ban - we did explain this already. I’ve just repeated myself here but I know a lot gets posted on the forum so it’s easy to miss things and this thread was more bug related than the others so happy to leave it open as long as it doesn’t switch again from being about the bug to being about a ban.

I’ll go back and look over the original threads so we can improve on communication in future.

Here’s the first reply I made on the forum about the issue 9 days ago, I think I may have worded it better this time though?

It’s hard when these threads get busy for dev answers to standout. Maybe we can see at some point if there’s an easier way to make official answers easier to spot.

I’ll ask the team tomorrow but such a tiny amount of accounts have come near the cap and they’ve all been checked so this shouldn’t be a concern for most people.

If you’re personally nearing 2.1 billion gold on your account and need help before a fix is released, reach out and we’ll adjust your account balance, although spending it would probably be the more beneficial way to handle it

GoW has 3 Community Managers - myself, Bramble and Jeto.
The best way to reach one of us is to write a ticket or leave feedback in the forum.

OminousGman is actually Associate Producer for Gems of War now

It’s been great having him as a Producer coming from CX as he’s really in tune with what sort of feedback we receive from the community and he’s always been fantastic with the bug reports and helping prioritise community concerns.

He’s still a part of our daily community meetings but as Associate Producer he’s able to help us make improvements to how we priorotise community.

I know there’s a bunch of outstanding things to improve and it’s a team effort, not just Gman, but he is an asset in that position for sure.

In general, improvements are being made behind the scenes regarding community and communication. It does take time to get these things moving though, especially in a way that’s noticeable to the community itself. I’ve been incredibly happy to see a senior team member personally looking at some longstanding community reported bugs recently as a result of some of these changes and am excited to see things improve over time.

Update:
We’re looking at adding some stuff in 7.3 for this if it fits in the schedule. Not just for Gold but the other resource types as well. It will probably need to be included as part of future updates as well.

I believe less than 0.008% of monthly active players are affected and the ones we’ve seen were all cheating if I recall correctly.

I’ve asked the team for further information so I can follow up on it more to ensure no one close to the cap are playing legitimately - in which case we’ll give them a headsup so they can spend their gold before they hit the cap.

No one is getting banned for hitting the gold cap.

There is an error message that appears if you hit the gold cap it does block you from playing the game. It is not a ban.

I work on Gems of War.

No one is getting banned for hitting the gold cap.

Above I said this issue will be fixed for 7.3.

Players get banned for cheating for reasons such as the following:

• Speed or acceleration software
• Editing game files
• Bot trainers, automatic bots
• Macros, scripts
• Keyboard or mouse hot keys
• Custom controller mappings for special controller buttons outside of the standard controller button functions
• Plus any other modification to the game or gameplay that is not available as part of the default game

These reasons have nothing to do with the gold cap.

Playing all weekend isn’t unusual, it’s hardcore - or possibly someone with a bad case of insomnia and a lot of energy drinks on their hands

I can’t go into details about how we detect tools being used but we have checks in place for all sorts of things just to ensure the smooth running of the game, some of those checks allow us to tell if files have been modified or tools are being used.

Hmmm, I’ve not encountered issues with the Xbox Elite Controller and hack detection.
I’ll ask the team how that fits into the picture and if there’s a risk there I’ll prod for it to be addressed.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to provide more info than that about it.
Bit of a - this is a genuine concern but have to think about how my answer could assist cheat creaters.

Leave it with me.

If you write a ticket and you don’t want one of the CX team to answer it my Manager will answer it.

I really think this will suffice, but if you really want me to open my DMs on here I will, but I’m not sure I’m the person you want to talk to about it either. I’d really much prefer a ticket as it sounds like whatever you want to talk about might be something I discuss with my manager afterwards regardless.

If you feel like it might upset staff or feel insulting, maybe, I don’t know what it is you’re going to write, but we literally have players threatening us IRL on the regular so whatever you’re going to write is probably just par for the course for a Friday. I don’t think you’re going to try to be insulting or to upset anyone, so whatever you’re going to write is probably going to be far less bad to read than whatever else we’ve dealt with this week.

We’re also fully aware of communication issues - I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I will say things aren’t always as simple as they seem from the outside looking in. They should be sure, but that’s just not how things work as I’m sure you know.

Yes for sure!

If you don’t use the auto click feature then you can safely use the controller without worrying about it triggering hack detection.

Just saw this, going to go open my DMs now, just give me like 5 mins

Also sorry, reading back over my post on friday it was a bit dark I guess - let’s blame it on end of week brain. I forget sometimes that it’s not really common knowledge what sort of stuff we deal with all the time and I wasn’t trying to draw attention to it, just being like, out of all the people I hear criticism from Four wouldn’t be a bad one as I know he’s usually pretty respectful and reasonable to talk with