The false bans problem
This has been happening for like 2 month now, popular and small content creators on twitch, YouTube and Twitter have been getting randomly banned out of nowhere. AbnormalRamen, Altair, Griff, Angelolo. The amount of people getting banned out of nowhere is starting to freak me out. Choy says there are hackers impersonating these popular accounts and getting them falsely banned, they're also apprently going for random players what's really a HUGE problem. Every time I play DBD now I'm absolutely terrified of waking up and having my account taken down out of nowhere. This cannot keep on going, how can we protect ourselves from getting randomly banned and if we do how can we recover our accounts if every ticket is getting immediately closed without any investigations unless the community makes a huge fuss about it.
Comments
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Yeah I saw the Choy vid regarding this, makes me not want to play as I have a lot of money in my Steam account and having a filthy red ban mark on it would be deeply shameful and a stain on my account! Not good at all
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This seriously worries me.
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This stuff makes me worried about cross-progression and connecting my Switch account to a PC account if/when that becomes an option. Playing on Switch sucks, but losing all the time and money I've put into it is the one thing I don't want and it's why I haven't just switched to PC. Losing it because I connected it to a PC account would be devastating.
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I've spend so much money and time on my account, I letrally cannot afford to get banned I'll never be able to recover all of that. It's actually scaring me this needs to be address asap
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"Associated with accounts or sources of activity which break the game's EULA" is pretty vague.
What does that even mean?
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Pretty horrifying trend. Very bad time to be a streamer - but at least the larger ones have enough of a voice to get attention for it. This hitting the people without fanbases and mountains of community credentials is significantly scarier. Smaller TTVs may want to stop streaming for the time being.
I do pity BHVR, though. Obviously they need to stop banning via live feeds immediately, but it's a no-win scenario and makes verifying video evidence significantly more difficult. I have to roll my eyes at cheaters announcing they're deliberately targeting vulnerable streamers to show off how scummy BHVR is being, because… yes. I agree that they're exposing a gaping flaw in the ban process. But the scummy part was scapegoating the vulnerable streamers and getting them permabanned in the first place.
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The hackers are apparently now also targeting just random players. And if that's true we're all screwed. At lest that's what Choy says and I think he's a trustworthy source
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I'm not so sure about that part, because the video detailed impersonation as the lynchpin to all of the examples it provided. It stated as fact that EAC can't ban you by accident, and that all of the bans bypassed it via cheaters pretending to be a specific streamer, small or large. You can't impersonate someone without any online presence.
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Extremely concerning. Some clarification is absolutely required for people who have given this game so much of themselves.
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That is very scary I do sometimes fear I get banned because well some people just false report you from playing well. Hackers doing this definetely need to be addressed.
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PLEASE EXTEND THE ANNIVERSARY WHILE YOU FIX THIS BHVR
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I am very very scared. I have a small Youtube Channel myself where I post DBD content, my usernames for all my characters are OUT THERE and I'm afraid I could get hit with this. If these guys are targeting randos, we're all screwed.
BHVR has GOT TO FIX THIS. It's not okay.
And they need to ban these hackers too. I don't care why or how they think it's ethical, it's not. This ######### is not ethical or OK.
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I dont think impersonating accounts is possible, each account have an unique id.
So unless hackers can get your unique id and some how spoof it, then i cant see this as possible.
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That people claim that they did nothing does not mean that they really did nothing.
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You hit the nail on the head. If you don’t have a popular platform and this happens to you then you’re SOL. The only reason these folks got their accounts back is because they had enough of a following to get on the radar and make BHVR actually got back and investigate after initially just closing it and saying “too bad we aren’t reinstating you.”
I’m glad they got it fixed but for those of us who are just randoms and not content creators, if we get randomly taken down out of nowhere without being told why, we are just screwed. It shouldn’t be this way and BHVR does need to take responsibility for how these actions are handled.
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I had a game where i think cheaters (this has nothing to do with hacking) buffed me, to make it look like i was cheating. I made a thread and a ticket about it, and i was assured that if i did not cheat on my own, then tere would be no need to worry. (but im happy i have video recording software running when i play)
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Choy has been wrong before. Whether intentional or not, some of his claims have been rather exaggerated. Besides, I don't know what his source is, but if it's indeed a hacker, I'm not sure we can completely trust their word.
That said, I do find it disappointing Support isn't willing to tell them what they supposedly did. (Although they really should have hidden their names.)
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Very concerning indeed. They need to address this ASAP.
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I think I'm gonna play with bots until they solve that issue
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In the video released by Choy, a player changed their name to impersonate a streamer, and BHVR banned the streamer instead of the account impersonating them. At the end of a video he talks about a cheater that stole a streamer's overlay to impersonate them. That person is currently still banned.
Even if a minority of people complaining are actually victims, the fact that BHVR would issue bans like that without doing any checks is terrifying. A social media campaign saved the first dude's account, but anyone without a social media following would be completely screwed.
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BHVR has apparently been banning hackers that stream, one hacker after noticing he's being spide on started playing a random streamers stream (AbnormalRamens) and got him banned. He is still banned because some employee on BHVR side didn't realize the hacker started streaming another person
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A name change isnt enough for that, each account have an unique id.
So unless hackers can get your unique id and some how spoof it, then i cant see this as possible.
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Considering how much money people sink into this game, this should absolutely be a top concern.
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It's really time (after 7 years) that something is done here. A server-side validation would be a start, a NEEDED one.
And after that an automatic, useful cheat protection.
It can't be that hackers (especially the increasing subtle ones) have it that easy to cheat in this game and can only be caught with clear video material. In addition, not everyone records their matches constantly using software.Competitive game modes and ranking lists can only “sensibly” go online / be released when this protection is available.
BHVR should really finally prioritize this.3 -
Maybe it was a mistake on BHVR's part? I could not comment on how far hacks go. But Choy doesn't tend to give out bad information, so I'm inclined to believe what he reports, as he tends to do his due diligence.
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I wonder why server side validation havent been implemented ages ago, i mean we all buy the DLC every 3 months, so the money should be there to make it happen.
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Oh.. so he was in an SWF with the cheater?
- that would make sense.
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I think it's simply because no revenue/profit is generated.
As you have already rightly mentioned, the DLC's and skins are bought regularly and they pay off well.
So the majority of players seems to be happy and a "health patch" (as released in some other games) is not a priority... unfortunately
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No, the hack totally spoofed his account, overlay, DBD name, everything. So while the hacker was still streaming and still playing, allegedly the BHVR employee that did the ban didn't' make sure they were getting the hacker, and instead hit the actual innocent streamer because the names were the same (and yes they apparently didn't look at the unique player ID, which couldn't be spoofed, but it doesn't need to be, that's the entire issue at hand here.)
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No no he wasn't, the steamer was just playing normally and the hacker playing a completely different match spoofed his overlay, dbd name everything. The BHVR employee didn't check who they're banning carefully enough and banned the innocent steamer while the hacker is still running wild. He's a small steamer and he still isn't unbanned because BHVR refuses to do an actual investigation into the case. If a steamer, yes small but streamer non the less cannot get unbanned imagine how much trouble a normal player will have. We're absolutely screwd if this isn't addressed, hackers will start pretending to be random people and there will be hundreds of false bans
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If BHVR did not use that in the ban proccess but manually banned the wrong account from, by watching the Stream and then with out getting the ID from the game it self, just went to ban the Streamer from their name. - > In that case, i think BHVR made a big mistake and should own up to it.
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Right, that's what is being alleged, that whoever banned the streamer didn't do their due diligence and just banned by name displayed on the stream, not taking the time to research to make sure they got the right person.
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I once tried to speak up against it, and suggesting that people wrote about it in their reviews, that gave me a ban from the Steam forums, so i really dont know what we can do.
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That is not ok!!
I will not say what i think because i dont want a ban.
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Well, right. Also, keep in mind i am saying "Allegedly" because at this time we don't really know what happened, we just have the video and what it says. Until BHVR has time to prepare a statement (and I hope they will start working on one first thing Monday morning) there is sadly not much we can do as non-content creators at this time.
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Yeah i just saw some at the video, and if i get this right, its "only" streamers that can get banned from this. → this is bad enough, but i dont think common people should worry. I do hope that BHVR do update their proccess on how to handle this correctly in the furture.
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I would recommend everyone use background recording software that records the last X hours of play in case such a ban may occur. Steam currently has a recording tool which saves all your recent gameplay by as long as you set it to. I think setting it to 4+ hours on high video quality should be able to serve as a good receipt to show to support alongside the fact that this issue has become as public as it is. Another piece of advice I saw was that leaving lobbies the moment you identify cheaters may help as well.
I hope this helps people play more safely and that the banning process gets some more oversight because from this information it seems completely unprofessional and doomed to begin with. Given they have dedicated servers, I really hope they enforce some clear security policies and guidelines to make sure false bans can't happen and they make sure safeguards against hackers falsely incriminating normal players are in place.
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We are living in the day even video evidence barely prove anything, scary
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Thank you for the tip with the steam game recording software. works like a charm and totally hassle free!
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They need to overhaul how they inspect reported matches at this rate, this is unacceptable.
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I doubt they're getting banned because of cheaters spoofing them when they are very specific with how this stuff has to be reported. This happened last year or maybe the year before as well with cheaters impersonating people and everyone was freaking out.
If they can change their player ID to match others then sure, that's a problem but if not then I think the bans have to do with something else or they're outlier cases.Edit: Also just realized this was a bit of a necro. 😕 Are cheaters making the rounds again or something?
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The fact that it is on the players to police the game AND submit evidence is not really a good look at all.
There should be checks/mechanisms in game that do all of this automatically.
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Damn that looks like a scary idea, being banned for no reason with no way to recover.
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Yeah, there's one YouTuber in particular who actively cheats to get someone banned as a form of "revenge" for Behavior banning someone that they got falsely banned. 😆
It's crazy how prevalent cheaters are in the game and how they can just create new accounts to avoid a ban.
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Doubtful, they probably did something offstream and arent fessing up to it.
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might’ve seen who you’re talking about, I remember the guy I watched was also pretty homophobic and did an entire video where he tunneled anyone with a pride charm, it’s how I saw his channel when I was watching videos of subtle cheaters.
I usually don’t call people this but he is really a pathetic person. (He even put trump on the thumbnail of that video)
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Please avoid posting the following:
- About a specific person’s ban
- If you need to appeal a game ban, please contact Player Support
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