💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~leach › gemlog › shadowbans.gmi captured on 2024-08-25 at 00:12:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I purchased the new Call of Duty Modern warfare III after finishing my fall semester. It included the maps I used to play on as a kid, and many of my friends have been playing it consistently, which is very rare now a days.
It's been quite an enjoyable experience despite it's turbulous launch and development. I had been enjoying my time playing it, and ended up racking up about 2D of playtime. This past weekend though while playing I noticed out of the blue that my friends and I could not find any games. The ping would reach 200ms of searching and just sit there for minutes. I knew something was wrong, but with the bugs in that game figured one of us was causing an issue with matchmaking. So we re made the party, but the issue persisted.
I had heard online about "shadow bans" being a thing that can happen to you in call of duty. I decided to look into it and to my surprise my account was placed in a "Limited Matchmaking" state. I could not appeal this, couldn't talk to a human about it or figure out why it was even placed in this state to begin with. What this state actually is and what it does is quite nefarious. You see, your account gets placed in this state if you are a) reported in succession to many times or b) are cheating and the system picks up on it.
I don't have my own gaming PC yet, so I have to use geforce now which actually works quite well on my internet. So the ability to cheat for me is literally non-existant, as I don't have root access to the machine I'm actually playing on, the access is heavily restricted. So I knew cheating was not the reason I was placed in this limbo land. That left massive reporting, which very well could have happened but I simply don't know because activison won't tell me.
The reason I was so annoyed at this entire process is just what the limited matchmaking state actually is. You see, you can still play the game with a "shadow ban" on your account. You just get put in a pool of players who also have shadow bans. So this leaves basically cheaters and anyone unlucky enough to have been flagged by whatever algorithm decides such things. What this looks like for you as a player is it's impossible to actually play the game. In every match I played, I encountered someone blatantly cheating. They literally would stand in place and shoot at the ground and get headshot after headshot. This basically makes the game unplayable, as I can't really fight someone who has such an unfair advantage.
I reached out to support, the only way to by saying my account was hacked, and talked to some people but they basically told me they have nothing to do with security and can't help me or provide a time frame.
Well today, six days after being banned I finally got unbanned. I didn't recieve an email or any explanation, it simply just left that state. I have no bans or anything so like I suspected I didn't actually do anything wrong. So during my winter break when I can play games I couldn't because some algorithm decided I may be cheating and automatically flagged my account. I fear these types of experiences will happen to other accounts online I have in the near future, and not just some inconsequential game account but something like my Apple ID or bank accounts or medical.
I fear some may wake up an not be able to text or call people because their account was deemed suspicious, or their tesla won't start because of the same reasons. It already happens to people with their bank accounts, can happen to people with thier google accounts et cetera.
Also a side note is how devious these types of bans are. Especially the ones where technically you aren't banned. I couldn't get refund for cod because technically I could still play the product I purchased. I got let back into my account but what about the next time?
Oh well, memento mori, amor fati.