As this is going to be a very long post, I’ve just went ahead and put a tl;dr right at the beginning of it, so if you don’t want to read the whole post you can still get the gist of it.
tl;dr: I suspect that Support has banned a player without concrete proof. If my suspicions are correct, this sets a precedence that any legitimate player can get banned if someone else wants them banned enough through the incredibly trivial means detailed in this post. Deca Support should not be accepting this sort of proof to begin with to ban an account, so this is inexcusable.
I’m not going to name any names in this post. I don’t think the names should be the main focus, and I don’t want to paint this as an “us vs them” scenario because this is really not the problem here. I’ll use “Player B” to refer to the individual in question who was banned, for the sake of writing clarity.
If you believe the player in question was guilty, that’s OK. If you believe the player in question wasn’t guilty, that’s also OK. That isn’t the problem.
The problem is that if my suspicions are correct, Deca Support has taken “proof” that should not be seen as concrete by any means and used it to ban someone from the game. Whether or not the person was in fact cheating is irrelevant, because Deca Support should only be banning people on what can be considered concrete proof to avoid falsely banning innocent players. Even if you believe that the person was cheating, the next person to be hit by a ban through a scenario similar to this might not be.
Let’s run through what I’ve observed happening in the past few days.
Someone accused Player B of hacking. They have made accusations in the past against Player B. The proof given to accuse Player B of hacking has not changed since the last time I’ve seen it.
There are a few clips that accuse Player B of autonexusing (Player B nexusing whenever they are in acute danger and will likely die within less than a second), and what looks like Player B taking a screenshot of themselves on a hacked client.
This is not concrete proof. I would not accept this as proof of hacks. Another Discord server also did not accept this as proof of hacks. Why?
It’s very difficult to prove someone is hacking because of an autonexus clip. This is because we can always give the benefit of the doubt on the player who is nexusing. They may have nexused legitimately at just the right time. To ban someone off of an autonexus clip would be rolling the dice on if a legitimate player or a hacker is being banned, because both are possible explanations for what is seen.
The only way I know of to confirm that a suspected autonexus is an actual autonexus is to have ally damage text on. The player is cheating if they take the lethal damage in the same frame that they nexused. There is no other explanation in that case. A nexus without seeing the lethal damage in the same frame can still be an autonexus, but in this case there are still other potential explanations (such as, as I’ve stated earlier, a very lucky nexus). Given that nexusing sees very common use as a gameplay mechanic, very possible to get lucky on, and very rewarding for the player to do if they are in a pinch (it saves their character!), it is not reasonable to base bans off of perceived autonexus unless one can see that lethal damage was taken in the same frame the nexus occurred.
None of the clips I have seen have had ally damage text on, so we do not know if Player B received the damage in the same frame he nexused. Therefore, Player B in those clips could be playing legitimately, and we do not have conclusive proof that he must be cheating. Ways to prove conclusively that someone is cheating range from recordings of autoaim to “/follow” to the Etherite Dagger shots not going back and forth but shooting in a straight line consistently. Autonexus is generally not one of them.
What about the screenshot?
To begin with, Deca Support does not take screenshot evidence, so I don’t believe it was related to the ban that occurred at all (wait, a ban? no worries, I’ll explain that in a bit).
If someone claims that their in-game account is [name1] (either through verification on a Realm-related Discord server or through other means), and they post a screenshot containing hacks in which their in-game name is [name1], we can reasonably assume that [name1] is cheating. Of course, someone could just be pretending to be [name1] on Discord, which I assume would be the reason Deca Support does not accept such evidence when it comes to banning a player.
However, in the situation we have here, someone claims that their in-game account is [name2]. They post a screenshot containing hacks in which their in-game name is [name1], and then claim that [name1] as well as the Discord account associated to [name1] is cheating. This does not logically follow.
Basically, that’s a more convoluted way of saying “if we don’t see that the person being accused of hacking posted that screenshot themselves, how do we know it is not photoshopped or otherwise spoofed? How can we know the individual took the screenshot themselves and thus were cheating?”
So, there was some drama within the specific Discord server this occurred on. That’s fine. I wouldn’t be too concerned if all that was being thrown around was just very rude and immature words. Even though the people claiming that Player B was cheating kind of bought a decently-sized Realm-related Discord server from its owner then absolutely trashed it with NSFW and everyone pings while using it as a platform to claim that Player B hacks.
Just saying, acting like children is not a great way to logically convince people of your position. But while it may be annoying, that’s still besides the point. Player B knows whether or not they themselves are hacking, and for everyone else, unless concrete proof comes out to prove Player B truly was hacking, nothing can be done and life moves on.
Except Player B got banned from the game. This is figuratively where I put down my newspaper and the laughter in the room stops. Something doesn’t seem right here.
The facts are that unless there was concrete proof that I have not seen posted that was submitted to Deca, Deca must have taken one of the autonexus clips as sufficient proof to ban a player.
It’s possible that actual concrete proof was submitted.
However, I suspect this is not the case. I admit that I could be wrong with my suspicions, in which case Deca Support has not done anything wrong and I now have egg on my face. Why I suspect this is not the case is that the players who have accused Player B of hacking have every reason to post the most convincing evidence they have against Player B. They have reposted the autonexus clips and the screenshot (there’s another screenshot too, but that one holds up even worse to scrutiny given there’s an Attack Far shot from a pet in the screenshot, Player B does not use a pet with Attack Far, and no other player in the screenshot is firing which implies ally projectiles are turned off so it isn’t likely to be another player’s pet) multiple times. They are adamant that Player B is cheating and want to convince everyone that this is the case, to the point where an entire Realm-related Discord was bought out and trashed for this purpose.
But then, where is the concrete proof? If they had the proof and they posted it, they would convince even more players that Player B is actually cheating. There is no reason the people claiming Player B hacks would be hiding the proof if it exists. They are even using the fact that Player B was banned by Deca to support their argument, so why would they not share the stronger proof they would have used to get Player B banned as the icing on the cake?
I hope you can understand why I suspect Deca has done something wrong here, even if my suspicions turn out to be incorrect.
My suspicion is that Deca used one of the autonexus clips as proof that Player B was hacking. This sets an absolutely terrible precedence. It means that anyone can record anyone else pulling off a lucky nexus and get them banned, even if the person being recorded is a legitimate player.
Deca should only be accepting concrete proof when it comes to banning players. I understand that Deca wants to crack down on cheaters. This is doable without potentially banning innocents. There are more conclusive forms of proof, the ones I have detailed earlier on in the post, that I know Deca is aware of.
If you are banning innocents in the crossfire, you are only undermining your goal of cracking down on cheaters, because you are sending the message that it doesn’t matter whether you hack or not because you could get banned either way. Cheaters who thrive on trolling or hurting others will get a kick out of this as well, because now it’s a “if I burn, you burn with us” scenario.
It also seems like it’s jumping from one extreme to the other (going from the situations described in Sebchoof’s video on hackers where notorious cheaters with ample proof were not banned, to banning people on very flimsy evidence), and that’s a slap in the face to the community as a whole.
I really want to hope that I am just mistaken and Deca did go through all the proper procedures before banning this player. However, my suspicions are convincing me that this was not the case. I don’t really expect an official answer, I’m not even the person who got banned!
I just tend to express my grievances when I am upset and I hope that in the case that a mistake did happen, that it is corrected and that it will not happen again in the future.
I don’t mean any harm; I just want to call out what I perceive as injustice rather than staying silent.
In the case that I am mistaken, I hope that it is understandable why I came to the conclusions I did.
In the case that I am not mistaken, I personally don’t want to play a game where I can play completely legitimately and be slapped with a 2 week involuntary vacation from the game just because I made my own heart rate go up because I played stupidly and managed to save myself just in the nick of time, but someone was recording me play.
This last third of the post was written rather in a rush due to time constraints, sorry if it is less understandable or harder to follow.
I’m open to discuss anything I’ve mentioned, if it doesn’t seem to make sense I can try to explain it a bit better.
