[2019] Why shouldn’t EVScape get a faster recovery than most accounts?

It's human error that acts as a double edged sword - even though we use very few of them, automated bans are actually very accurate (much more so than human) but they are fed from human learning to help improve and make them effective, otherwise they would be wildly inaccurate and flag entire swaths of innocent users, or be very niche and therefore not effective in aiding to take out mass amount of bots (contrary to popular belief, we do ban over 15,000 bots per day in OSRS - mostly made up of 'suicide bots' created to generate a small amount of wealth and trade it off as quickly as possible). Whilst the automated system does ban a number of accounts, these are from heuristics built by the team and are only made live after vigorous checks. When they do eventually get made live, they are very restrictive on what type of account they look for and are reviewed frequently. The vast majority of accounts are all checked by members of staff - hence where human error unfortunately comes in to play.

When assessing if an account is a bot or not, we do not examine if they belong to any noteworthy players in the community, members of staff or anything else of the sort - they are all assessed on the same basis, hence the ban on the account aforementioned. It just so happened I was watching a stream at the time, and therefore was made aware of a false-positive ban and could remove it in real time, rather than it being picked up in our daily quality and sampling checks - something we do to audit ourselves as a team to ensure we remain consistent and as accurate as possible. These are additional checks we do on top of verifying if a flagged account is a bot or not. I would have, and have unbanned players where the ban is incorrect as and when I see it, just players who are in the public eye are much more obvious.

I know this doesn't provide a clear answer on "why not just allow all bans to be appealable?" which has been addressed elsewhere in the past, but I hope it gives a little bit of information on how our team works when looking for and applying punishments to accounts.

• The system bans very blatant (to how a system can determine) bots (mass created gold farmers etc)
• The system flags other more bespoke/intelligent bots for manual review
• Flagged accounts are checked by an Anti Cheating Specialist
• Accounts are reviewed daily by Team Leads for accuracy
• Accounts can be appealed if compromised by third-parties via this link

Getting tagged manually as a bot by mistake could be a number of things including incorrect labeling by a member of the team etc, unfortunately as much as I'd love to talk about botting and what flags accounts in the first place, that's something we won't do I'm afraid.