Players are being given 72 hours bans for unlocking waypoints for another player/account with turtle.

[Neo K.9145]

Reddit thread about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/18996r1/psa_using_turtle_to_unlock_waypoints_with_two/

I'm a mod at the subreddit and I had a couple posts reported about this this week and ban complaints are pretty normal but then reading the comments other people were confirming it happening to them. Now when the tea time chair was released people figured out you could waypoint with it and ANet responded saying have fun. Turtle had the same mechanic since chairs are considered mounts.

For over a year players have been using turtle to waypoint other players and some using multiple instances to unlock waypoints for other characters/accounts with no issue.

But now it seems that ANet is throwing out 72 hour bans for violation of using automation software when unlocking waypoints on turtle. Now some people have openly admitted to using two accounts on the same machine, but others are getting bans for helping other players even in different countries.

Now if ANet has decided that unlocking waypoints for another person with turtle is against the rules, than so be it, it's their game and they have that right. But they have made no announcement of this nor changed any mechanics in game so players are completely free to continue doing this and are now risking a ban. I am of the opinion that this is a mistake and players are being caught up in automated systems but this is serious and ANet needs to either let us know that this is illegal now or figure out what is going on with these false bans. I love the turtle mount but it is basically useless outside of a taxi for 99% of the content in the game and killing its ability to be a taxi because you could get banned for it, just makes it not worth using at all. 

[Pirogen.9561]

I worked in tech support and I can tell you, that people don't do that "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". People like to "skip" important details.

[Neo K.9145]

Just now, Pirogen.9561 said:

I worked in tech support and I can tell you, that people don't do that "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". People like to "skip" important details.

Absolutely but given the large amounts of reports all saying the same thing and all just in the last week really gives a lot of evidence to the claims. 

[Surelia.2651]

I mean there could be more it? but I agree that it's obvious Anet should address this asap if it's that many reports as you say.  They should be giving actual information of what is the rule so that players are not unwittingly doing this if now their position is that you are not supposed to do it. 

[Cuks.8241]

I guess friend helping you in a mmo is not intended use of mechanic. You're suppose to buy item from gem shop that does it for you.

[Neferpitouh.4356]

I get that they are more likely to be false positives, but the fact that they are not getting unbanned even after submitting an appeal is highly concerning. Not to mention unwarranted permanent flags on accounts due to unfair suspension. Would like to have some responses from devs on the topic.

Edited December 2, 2023 by Neferpitouh.4356

[DanAlcedo.3281]

Like always, 100000% there are important information missing and context.

I bet my left butt cheek that people used bots/programms/hacks/exploits whatever to abuse the duck out of the system and got a slap on the hand for it.

I bet my right butt cheek that nobody will get banned for using the turle to give people some WPs on a map.

Edited December 2, 2023 by DanAlcedo.3281

[kharmin.7683]

11 minutes ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

I get that they are more likely to be false positives, but the fact that they are not getting unbanned even after submitting an appeal is highly concerning. Not to mention unwarranted permanent flags on accounts due to unfair suspension. Would like to have some responses from devs on the topic.

Support tends to be slower on the weekends.

Players tend to do more exploits on the weekends.

 

[Ashen.2907]

People complaining about bans almost always seem to leave out important details, such as the real reason they were banned.

"I was just standing around doing nothing at all and then whammo! account ban!!!! No fair!!!"

-company reviews chat log and finds person advertising RMT sites and making threats against other players.

 

If this situation is valid, submit tickets.

Edited December 2, 2023 by Ashen.2907

[Vayne.8563]

32 minutes ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

I get that they are more likely to be false positives, but the fact that they are not getting unbanned even after submitting an appeal is highly concerning. Not to mention unwarranted permanent flags on accounts due to unfair suspension. Would like to have some responses from devs on the topic.

The people that get tickets are likely not authorized to unban people and by the time tickets are escalated and gotten to the ban would likely be over.  We're talking 72 hour bans, not permanent bans. Investigation takes time.

[Luna.8941]

Not that this is something that I care about one way or the other. However, assuming anet monitors the forum there should eventually be an official stance for those that do. Until then there's really no way to tell and it's all just rumors.

[Neferpitouh.4356]

2 minutes ago, Vayne.8563 said:

The people that get tickets are likely not authorized to unban people and by the time tickets are escalated and gotten to the ban would likely be over.  We're talking 72 hour bans, not permanent bans. Investigation takes time.

According to the Reddit links given by OP, the investigation already took place and some senior GM reached upon escalation confirmed the suspension.

From my understanding anet's automation tools don't have means to differentiate between a turtle enjoyer and speed hacker. They can't figure out whetever the user was mounted or not.

anet should be aware of this issue therefore handing out 72 hours temp bans, instead of straight up permanent -assuming using speedhacks would result in permanent ban- Therefore once you unlock 1 wp every 5 seconds and do this for a while you get autoflagged as a speedhacker. But then again even if you go ahead and unlock all Tyria waypoints on a turtle that still doesn't warrant a suspension because using turtle to unlock WPs is not an exploit therefore not against ToS.

I personally never gone too far to unlock all WPs in a hour or so, but been using turtles to unlock a few WPs I need to reach at that moment. Haven't been banned, but I don't appreciate the possibility of being unfairly banned with no chance to appeal.

[Vayne.8563]

2 minutes ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

According to the Reddit links given by OP, the investigation already took place and some senior GM reached upon escalation confirmed the suspension.

From my understanding anet's automation tools don't have means to differentiate between a turtle enjoyer and speed hacker. They can't figure out whetever the user was mounted or not.

anet should be aware of this issue therefore handing out 72 hours temp bans, instead of straight up permanent -assuming using speedhacks would result in permanent ban- Therefore once you unlock 1 wp every 5 seconds and do this for a while you get autoflagged as a speedhacker. But then again even if you go ahead and unlock all Tyria waypoints on a turtle that still doesn't warrant a suspension because using turtle to unlock WPs is not an exploit therefore not against ToS.

I personally never gone too far to unlock all WPs in a hour or so, but been using turtles to unlock a few WPs I need to reach at that moment. Haven't been banned, but I don't appreciate the possibility of being unfairly banned with no chance to appeal.

The investigation has not taken place. If indeed a false positive is happening, the time that investigation would take would be in weeks, not days. Customer service officials aren't developers. They're customer service reps who don't work on or program the game. They simply do what they can on their end. That's not the investigation that needs to happen.

A piece of software that was written to prevent cheating says this person is cheating. What does a customer service rep due to check this. They can't go back and watch a delayed video of the game from when it happened and the ban was done. They have to use the tools they have. The tool they have is a program that says this person was cheating. They didn't write that program. There's nothing they can say or do to contest it. They can possible see the program reporting that someone got every waypoint in core tyria in record time, but they have no way of seeing of someone saying I didn't do it is legit or not. That takes investigation.

It ends up having to get referred to the devs who themselves would then have to investigate. The devs don't likely work on weekends, and they have other responsibities besides that. That 72 hour ban which is so vastly important to a player is just not something a developer can drop everyhting they're working on to check out right now. They have to dissect what happened. Tell me what do you think a customer service agent can check to see if someone actually did or didn't cheat? Should they just take them at their word. At this point it will get given to a developer to look at and that investigation could take a couple of weeks, not 72 hours. I'm not sure why people think that everything gets dropped for a false positive on a ban, but I assure you that doesn't happen and even if it did, the time it would take to investigate and collate the data from it happening multiple times, would be far more than 72 hours and then you have to make the changes to the system.

[Healix.5819]

They're probably not recognizing the player as being mounted and is thus moving too quickly. A similar problem happened years ago where people were banned for using teleports to unlock waypoints.

[Smurfiness.3714]

How do you unlock WP with turtle?

[Parasite.5389]

Just now, Smurfiness.3714 said:

How do you unlock WP with turtle?

the turtle allows a second player to mount the rear gunners seat, when the pilot used a WP, both players are teleported, providing that the WP is in the same map; if the pilot WPs to another zone, the passenger is ejected

[Artemis.8034]

3 hours ago, Surelia.2651 said:

I mean there could be more it? but I agree that it's obvious Anet should address this asap if it's that many reports as you say.  They should be giving actual information of what is the rule so that players are not unwittingly doing this if now their position is that you are not supposed to do it. 

Yeah they should come out and make a statement, its this kind of thing that i hate in game companies, the whole never say its against the tos or game rules. They just up and  ban without it ever being said its against the rules. And why would it be bannable anyway they allow the mount to do it, same with the noodle cart. Whats next banning port to friend ?

Edited December 3, 2023 by Artemis.8034

[Zebulous.2934]

Hmm, so it is the passenger who is getting the ban.

  I assume that this wouldn't happen at all if the pilot simply manually flew their passenger to each waypoint.

Yeah I could see how a simple program could flag a character who isn't receiving inputs and yet is teleporting all around the map.

I do wonder why the tea chair doesn't trigger the same automatic response though.

[Vegeta.2563]

33 minutes ago, Zebulous.2934 said:

I do wonder why the tea chair doesn't trigger the same automatic response though.

It probably does, just no one has went to the lengths of unlocking most of the WPs with it.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I think I've reverse-engineered what is happening.  There's hacks out there that players use for map completion that just teleports them to each POI and WP as needed.  Anet responds to this by creating a program to detect when this is happening via seeing when players are teleporting about without using the waypoint.  This has an unintended side effect because the program cannot tell when someone is injecting code to teleport around vs. when somebody is riding the turtle, because the only thing being checked is if somebody is teleporting.  

[Manpag.6421]

17 hours ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

But then again even if you go ahead and unlock all Tyria waypoints on a turtle that still doesn't warrant a suspension because using turtle to unlock WPs is not an exploit therefore not against ToS.

The tricky thing is, technically it is against ToS if you’re carrying your own alt account. As written, the multi-boxing rules don’t discriminate or provide an exception for using the turtle or chairs to unlock WPs, and one keystroke is moving two accounts. Whether ANet actually cares about that or not, including that information in an appeal could be taken as an admission of a different breach, but lying and saying a friend was carrying you would be disproved by your IP address.

I don’t have multiple accounts so I’m not particularly invested in what ANet’s stance turns out to be on that particular use, but the reports from people using it to legitimately help other players are a concern, and it sounds like a change they’ve made to their anti-cheat detection is being over-sensitive.

I would say people using the turtle totally normally (carrying players in events, or more general map completion including PoIs) have nothing to worry about, even if that includes some WPs. The frequency of teleports is going to be far from the pattern of a hacker, so I wouldn’t want people being wary of helping out or accepting help.

[Obtena.7952]

Imagine being banned for playing the game in unintended ways ... what a concept. I'm sure that when Anet developed the Turtle, they all sat around and said "kitten, such a good idea to let someone else do map completion for you". 

But hey, sure, let people sit around stunned that there was a negative impact on doing something that was questionable in the first place. 

Edited December 3, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Neferpitouh.4356]

13 minutes ago, Manpag.6421 said:

The tricky thing is, technically it is against ToS if you’re carrying your own alt account. As written, the multi-boxing rules don’t discriminate or provide an exception for using the turtle or chairs to unlock WPs, and one keystroke is moving two accounts. Whether ANet actually cares about that or not, including that information in an appeal could be taken as an admission of a different breach, but lying and saying a friend was carrying you would be disproved by your IP address.

I don’t have multiple accounts so I’m not particularly invested in what ANet’s stance turns out to be on that particular use, but the reports from people using it to legitimately help other players are a concern, and it sounds like a change they’ve made to their anti-cheat detection is being over-sensitive.

I would say people using the turtle totally normally (carrying players in events, or more general map completion including PoIs) have nothing to worry about, even if that includes some WPs. The frequency of teleports is going to be far from the pattern of a hacker, so I wouldn’t want people being wary of helping out or accepting help.

That's not what it means. It is not against ToS even when you are multiboxing. One keystroke is still responsible for one action on one account when using turtles. That is teleporting to a waypoint on the account that owns the turtle. The other account teleporting along with the turtle user is just intented game mechanic. By your logic even riding turtles on normal way or using skiff would be against the ToS.

For example,  the last account that accepts the ready check when entering a personal home would also counts as one keystroke = initiates 5 accounts entering the home. But that's not the case. I can give many examples.

Edited December 3, 2023 by Neferpitouh.4356

[Sobx.1758]

6 minutes ago, Obtena.7952 said:

Imagine being banned for playing the game in unintended ways ... what a concept. I'm sure that when Anet developed the Turtle, they all sat around and said "kitten, such a good idea to let someone else do map completion for you". 

Weeeellll.... if they didn't want people to get ported to waypoints while being turtle passengers then perhaps they should make it so the passenger is booted out of the mount when the owner uses wp.

Not that I have any horses in this race, didn't use it, wasn't affect, don't really care. But introducing mount with ability to port people to waypoints and then banning them for using it is weird. I'd say it's more probable that those suspensions are a byproduct of something else anet is targetting.

Edited December 3, 2023 by Sobx.1758

[Obtena.7952]

2 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Weeeellll.... if they didn't want people to get ported to waypoints while being a turtle passengers then perhaps they should make it so the passenger is booted out of the mount when the owner uses wp.

Not that I have any horses in this race, didn't use it, wasn't affect, don't really care. But introducing mount with ability to port people to waypoints and then banning them for using it is weird. I'd say it's more probable that those suspensions are a byproduct of something else anet is targetting.

Could be true, but that doesn't really change the fact that if doing something doesn't feel 'right' in an MMO, even if the mechanics allow it, people shouldn't feign ignorant when something bad happens to them when they do it. Those people will never be on the safe side. 

I'm going to suspect that's why the ban is only 72 hours long. It's a warning that what people did wasn't OK. 

Edited December 3, 2023 by Obtena.7952