Hijacked & Banned Acc Reviews - from rsof

[Bobby]

Any input on this? I found it on reddit and the rsof. Wanted to pass it along

 

PLEASE NOTE - THIS IS NOT A THREAD TO POST ACCOUNTS FOR REVIEW. THANK YOU

As we have stated before, we want to provide an avenue for genuine players hijacked at the time an offence was placed on their account to be able to have their account reviewed.

Whilst the volume of players affected in this way is extremely low, we’re committed to trying to provide the best player experience possible when they have an issue or something goes wrong.

Last Fall/Autumn, we experimented with hijacked and banned account review threads – allowing players to post an account name for review via a google form. This demonstrated that only 0.027% of all macro bans issued were hijacked at the time of the offence. Unfortunately, these threads were spammed with false claimants and time wasters, and this meant that it took an incredibly large amount of time to sift through them in order to identify the 0.027% (around 200 accounts) hijacked at the time of the offence.

We need to use Customer Support Jmod time effectively, and unfortunately we cannot justify spending over 400 hours to identify 200 hijacked and banned accounts – to put that into perspective, we could use that time to help vastly more players by responding to 4,000 tickets, banning more bots or 24,000 Manual password resets!

However, we want to create a solution that works for us all – where players can get in touch with us if they are genuinely hijacked when an offence occurred, as well as an efficient use of Jmod time.

Ultimately, we want to trial the re-introduction of Ban Appeals for members & ex members. We want to test this for periods of a week or so at a time over a 3-4 month period, and then we will see if we are able to resource this sensibly. We cannot return to how things were back in 2008-2010 when we had over 10,000 ban appeals a week, mostly cheaters trying it on, so we will need to tread carefully.

Due to development time commitments, we’re not in a position to be able to schedule this work as yet, but we will aim to have this trial up and running at some point.

So…what will we do in the meantime?

Our Anti-Hijacking Jmods are working with our Data Science team to continually improve hijack detection. Every day, we identify hijacked accounts, safeguard them through this system, and remove bans which occurred whilst accounts were hijacked. The ICU Anti-Cheating Team are also looking at ways to improve their hijack detection, to avoid banning those hijacked at the time of the offence – neither of these are straightforward, but we are committed to improving them.

Due to the above reasons, we won’t be opening hijacked ban account review threads again, however, we will trial an alternative proactive approach:

- Working with our Data Science Team, we will review all bans in the previous month for evidence of hijacking on member and ex-member accounts
- Anyone found to be hijacked at the time of the offence will have the offence removed, and the account secured ready for recovery by the original owner, and we will also send them a message to their in game message centre
- Each month, starting from May, along with our usual publication of Customer Support Stats, we will publish the volumes of accounts reviewed which were banned, over which time period, and also the volume of hijacked accounts
- Where time allows, we will also review accounts banned in previous months to identify those hijacked, and also publish these results

By changing the way we perform hijacked ban account reviews we will eliminate time wasters and spam, freeing up time to focus on the reviews, and identifying genuine players hijacked when the offence occurred.

As a result of this, there is no need to send in tickets, or post names on forums, Twitter, Reddit or anywhere else asking for us to review banned accounts, as we will be checking them ourselves, and communicating with you.

As soon as we have more info on ban appeals, we will, of course, inform you on the forums.

I should also add that our ICU Anti-Cheating team only ban when they’re 100% certain of botting activity on an account, and there are continual checks performed on these bans – both for RS3 and OSRS. Those hijacked when the offence occurs are a very small amount of players, but we’re committed to identifying these – hence putting the above measures in place.

Finally, prevention is better than cure – I urge all of you to read our account security guides here andhere, and take steps to protect your account with 2 step authentication on your email accounts, as well as using the RS Authenticator , and taking advantage of the added security a bank PIN gives to accounts.

To reiterate, this is just a trial, but we are hoping for some promising results.

Thanks for reading, and for your patience!

Mod Kelvin
Head of RuneScape Customer Support

Mod Kelvin

 | Head of RuneScape Customer Support | Need Help: Visit the Support Centre