Saturday, May 12, 2012

End of the reporting tool

I can no longer guarantee that your reports are read or even looked at, so I've decided to stop handling reports from the tool.

Hello reporters and other MW3 players,
I've decided to stop the reporting tool. This isn't an easy decision for me, but I have to be honest and tell you that I can no longer guarantee that Infinity Ward will handle your reports. Any reports that were submitted in the past two weeks have not been viewed by Infinity Ward and probably won't be. The tool started as a nice little experiment for MW3sa, the server admin, where a centralized ban list would be used to ban known hackers and cheaters. I did some research and found out a way to handle these reports by getting them from the theater, and wrote some code for it. A few days later I saw a post on the Steam forums about a certain Ban Candy, and I decided to mail her about working together against cheaters. She loved the idea and a first version of the tool was released. A lot of players started to send reports, Candice would view all of them and ban those who were cheating or hacking. We saw a nice drop in the amount of cheaters, we improved the tool's workflow even more and even more cheaters were banned. However, things change rapidly at Infinity Ward. Because of all the reports, BanStache joined the team and we had two people handling the reports. At that point I got the feeling that Infinity Ward wasn't reading the reports anymore. But I kept sending them, hoping that I was wrong. A third IW employee was added to the team, BanWarden, but the reports kept queueing until at some point no report was received by them anymore. Right now, not a single report has been received by IW in 16 days. Because of all the rapid changes in IW's team (oh, and Candice got promoted to another team), I gave them some extra time to start receiving them again, but that was a week ago and I haven't heard anything from them yet. I decided to tell the community they should stop sending reports, as Infinity Ward isn't going to look at them anyway. The last report that IW received was on April 26th. Since then, more than 12500 reports have been sent. All of those are still in a queue, waiting for IW to receive them, but it's unlikely that IW will be doing that.

People, stop sending reports. We did a great job at the start, many cheaters have been banned, but it's over.

Thanks for reading,
Tom / Xifon