Automated Trading Suspensions

[Voltage]

This issue is something that affects a very small amount of players, but it is quite an important one. Endurance is something a subset of players push themselves to do in order to provide their own challenge in this game (especially in recent changes to the game making it objectively less challenging/easier). One of the major annoyances of endurance running is the infamous trade ban. Running endurance for an unknown amount of time acquiring an unknown amount of items and drops will flag you by the [rather poor] anti-cheat system. I am sure there have been very rare cases of this system flagging users in non-endless, but this applies mostly to endless mission types.

There are many theories as to why exactly a player is flagged, but one thing is clear: players are trade banned by a poorly automated system for trying to have a bit of fun and challenge in the game. I used to be the person to just say "just don't play that long and you won't be banned". However, that mindset quickly changed when I started enjoying a few hours in Fissure Survival with a recent loadout that I am enjoying. I would like to do more, but I can't because I enjoy trading. In 2 and a half hours, I still do not feel my weapons being pushed, but I also cannot go further without risking myself with a trade ban. I trade weekly, so ignoring the potential consequences is not an option. Many players experience frequent trade bans as they seek enjoyment from endurance on a regular basis.

This system has been brought up multiple times across the Forums and Reddit over the years, and now is the time to really address this given the state of the game. The existence of a system that flags users for their mission results is one thing, but outright trade banning a user for pretty usual results is horrible. We have Fissure boosters, the Smeeta's Charm, Market boosters, weekend boosters, Thermia Fracture boosters, looting Warframe abilities, and generally just being in missions for long periods of time that all add up to loads of loot at the end of the mission.

It's pretty clear this system is flawed, but I want to shift the focus to another problem: the (mis)handling of players. Below I have evidence from the same player on how a trade banned was handled:

While the ban was annoying, this support agent was quite helpful and manually removed the ban on the same day the ticket was made for the trade ban.

This same player submitted another ticket after another trade ban a bit later:

Two major problems with the way this ticket progressed:

1. "We cannot manually remove your account's suspension." - This is objectively wrong considering the way the first ticket went.
2. "To help avoid encountering this issue again in the future, we suggest not running a mission for an unusually long time." - With recent changes to the game, you need to go a few extra hours compared to before in the same mission to see similar enemy scaling. It is physically impossible to both get enemies tanky enough to challenge min-maxed builds while also not being flagged. 

The inconsistency on how players are handled needs to be addressed as well as how this system flags players in the first place.

If the automated system is to stay, atleast create a system where someone manually reviews the results 100% of the time immediately and has the authority to revert such a trade ban quickly. This automated system is not only frustrating for the victim, but it urges players to stay away from pushing themselves as they will be punished often for doing so. There just needs to be a more acceptable system that still catches real cheaters, but doesn't consistently punish exceptional players who are playing the game in a legit manner.

[-NICHE-]

Agreed. While the furthest I usually go in normal/Fissure missions is about an hour or an hour and a half before I get bored, I have a lot of friends who want to push their gear to the limit. One of my friends just did a 7 hour Titania solo Fissure Mot, which is an insane achievement, only to be met with a tradeban. I have huge respect for him and have showed my friends some of his runs to show that a non-meta Warframe can handle extreme endless content. However, at the end of his run, he was already expecting and joking about the tradeban just because he is so used to it by now. It rubs me the wrong way that he is being punished for his achievement and for playing the way he wants to with his favorite frame.

I've also become a fan of Arbitrations myself, and find myself leaving about an hour or hour and a half in because even though I want to keep going, I don't want to risk getting a tradeban. I have had a friend who got exceptionally lucky, getting a triple Smeeta buff with a Resource Booster on Double Resource Weekends on the Exploiter Orb, only to be met with a tradeban due to extracting with 32 Lazulite Toroids. As a software engineer, I know this system can be made better. While I understand that it is important to catch cheaters on extraction due to the P2P nature of the game, I also know that there is a way to do so without punishing legitimate players who are looking for a challenge.

I also understand that DE has a lot on their plate, and this may not be a high-priority item on their radar, but I hope it can be resolved so players aren't punished for staying too long. If DE needs data from players to know what legitimate extraction rewards look like 3, 5, 10, or more hours into a mission, I'm sure that there are many players who would be happy to volunteer and collect that data through playtesting for them. I know of plenty in my own clan and the clans of my friends who would help out if DE asked them.

Thanks for bringing this issue up, Voltage.

[Above]

Honestly yes, remove this System, it doesn't make any sense. All it does is punishing your more invested players.

Contacting the support is also a waste of time because the we'll get the same automated response every time.


 

[Drachnyn]

"we suggest not running missions for an unusually long time" They know it's broken, yet nothing is done about it.

[(PSN)Hikuro-93]

Unless there's a huge impact from it I doubt they'll ever fix it. They can, provided the effort, but won't. Not as long as they can swipe it under the rug for as long as they can.

[(PSN)IndianChiefJeff]

If DE were aware of this problem, and they undeniably are at this point, why haven't they either set a definitive time for players to stop at or just directly fix the problem? It's issues like this that really show off the cracks in DE's design philosophy.

[-AncientWarrior-]

Thanks Voltage, this actually needs to be addressed by DE.  My oldies squad of 3 used to do 2-3 hr void defense and survival prior to relics, then we started to do 2-4 hr runs farming but with the recent system from DE "if you play our mission too long you get slapped" we now only go to 2 hrs max.  Which is a bloody pain as we arent doing anything wrong and we can enjoy the solitude and get into a synergy of working as a great squad.. which is what DE try to create with developing a game that is squad based.. but lol dont want us to do long runs anymore.. why would they restrict us to short games? I'd rather do a long uninterrupted mission than lots of 5 wave crap.  Once we are setup in a long run we can just have fun, no host migrations, or other issues, and then we get to push our frames and weapons setup further.. whats the problem that DE doesnt want us to do 5 hr run.. If DE really doesnt want us to farm for long mission times without getting a trade ban, at least they should do us the courtesy of telling us what the restrictions actually are, times in a mission 3hrs 5hrs ? This system of not telling the player base that "if you do more than X hrs you get trade banned" .... << jeez even typing that it seems such a hypocritical joke. 

[(PSN)ForNoPurpose]

DE has not finished implementing the keyboard and mouse support on console, in the time since ps4 first added native support in 2017.

Still no access to keybinds on ps4 at all despite other games with K&M support having them. Xbox has the bindings menu but its hidden and only shows up if you open the options menu using the mouse.

 

So given that DE seems unable, or perhaps unwilling to support the most basic of functionality of a video game, the input devices, i find it unlikely DE wi address an anticheat system punishing players for simplying playing longer than other players.

[MithrasWarsong]

Yes this is really a matter that should get looked into. I was hit with those Trade Bans 4 times in 5 months, almost 50% of my playtime under ban. And I don't know what I can do about it. It's a very frustrating experience. Stopped playing Arbitrations and Survival completely now, but I'm kinda expecting to get banned for something else instead...

In a way I'm happy that DE is trying to keep the game clean of cheaters and it is working too. But the way they handle false positives is just terrible. On every ban I contacted support for any help, but all they do is tell me to wait it out. And what's making this extra annoying is that at the same time I see other players who get banned (with an Account Ban) will get their account checked and are unbanned within a day (if it was a false positive). Yet for Trade Bans the response is that it's a "14-day auditing period" and if everything is okay the Trade Ban will be lifted after those 14 days. Like a Trade Ban is not a massive punishment on its own. And what is taking 14 days when they can check other accounts in 1 day? I don't get it.

What I would wish for is 2 simple things:

- when someone is contacting support because they believe they got banned for no reason the account should get checked and if everything is okay the ban should be lifted.

- if the ban is not lifted the player should at least be given an actual reason as to why they are getting banned.

"Abnormal mission results" is just no acceptable reason for a ban. Because abnormal means not cheating, it just means better than average. And seeing how many people play Warframe very casually it is certainly not my intention to ever play "normal". Not that casual play is bad or something, it's just not the way I like to play.

And with systems in place that reward longer play it is quite absurd to ban poeple for exactly that. The Endless Bonus in a Survival Fissure for example requires you to stay 100 minutes to even unlock the final rank but such a 100 minutes mission is already enough to be flagged as "abnormal" and given a Trade Ban for.

[Boll]

Remove this system, there is no reason to keep a system that bad. And why would you even trade ban, it's not like there is valuable items anymore.

[Hobie-wan]

Hopefully they will actually look at the long runs, even if it were just the occasional 'have a person look at it and what boosters happened' sort of thing. It's not like there will be thousands of these happening daily.

Though the upcoming hard mode options will hopefully mean that that players that want it can be pushed a bit more without insane long runs, that they're actually working on some improvement to these situations, or that it will increase in the number of big payouts to the point it forces them to fix it.

[Els236]

Completely agree OP and I want to make a point, that I'm sure is obvious to most people.

 

I'm almost 100% sure that in most of these trade-ban cases, the underlying issue is Smeeta's Charm buff. Because it's RNG-based, DE's spaghetti code probably doesn't register it, or at least the anti-cheat-bot doesn't distinguish it from actual cheating, because of how rare getting a double or triple Drop-Bonus Charm buff is.

It sees a player get 6/12/18 of a certain drop, when they'd normally only get 2, or 3 and it flags it as an outside input, instead of it seeing a triple-stacked Smeeta buff.

Add that to a Nekros Desecrate and Plat Boosters and any other boosters running and yeah, the bot just doesn't realise that getting 30, instead of 5, of an item is actually perfectly legit, rather than someone hacking into the game.

 

It most certainly needs looking into.

[(PSN)Midcall]

Hello,

 

i keep it very short. Im a maxed out MR28, i would call myself "vet", since i have done everything in game i could imagine. 4500 hours, 1000hydro caps, 999.999.999 credits, all weapons with great riven, enough plat and so on and so on. 

 

The situation, that there is no "endgame", was ok for me since i set my own challenges because the "challenges" DE wants, are a joke.  "jump 150 times" and so on ... damn boring, like most stuff, since this game is clearly  not made for maxed out people. I really wish  they would do stuff where high lvl player can have "fear" again. Like they did with arbitrations and no revives at the beginning. 

Or the 60 min kuva survival in first nightwave was a good start but a lot of  ppl are crybabys "too hard" "too long" "cant jump 150 bullet jumgs"  ... so they nerfed all stuff that even blind ppl get loot and even that was too hard for some ppl. They want all stuff for free with nothing to work for and then say: That was so hard, look at me lol. 

The one thing what warframe should copy from destiny is the endgame stuff, where u have to be maxed out and good gear and so on to play it. The grand master nightfalls in destiny is the one thing, i like this season and i wish i had something similiar here where i would fail a lot, but after some time and tuning u may beat it and the feeling is the reward. 

I did it here, after i was told there is a limit on enemy level, i tried in arbitrations for couple weeks diff. stats and modes and finally i did it  1-2 weeks ago. I saw enemy level  9999 in infested  arbitration survival. I used revenant and bramma. I played solo, total time 14h, but playtime only 8h since i did always a break after 1h to keep my brain fresh. (u can pause in solo mode)

1 day after this i got a message:

A recent mission that you completed was flagged for having abnormal results and this has resulted in a two week moratorium on trades being placed on your account. 

I tried to contact support twice, the only response i got was basically copy paste the message above. No why, no because  no reason at all. Until today i still do not know why this was like that. I mean i could still play , but i could not trade and i felt slapt in face 1000 times. I mean wtf i just played the game and got punished with no  reason to see, it killed every motivation i had left for that game. I was planning a defence run too, but not any more. 

The only thing i could enjoy and i would call a "challenge" got marked as "abnormal". I dont know why this hits me so hart, but i realised maybe now , that wf is not made for endurance or endgame ppl. I got marked as abnormal after 8h, tbh this may sound long for some ppl, but i had sessions with 24h+, there starts my personal "long session" thing. 

I wish everyone a good time and i hope u enjoy  your time. 

[-Krism-]

1 minute ago, (PS4)Midcall said:

i keep it very short. Im a maxed out MR28, i would call myself "vet", since i have done everything in game i could imagine. 4500 hours, 1000hydro caps, 999.999.999 credits, all weapons with great riven, enough plat and so on and so on.

Weird flex but ok

[Genitive]

The game sometimes flags people who do very long endurance runs as "abnormal" and trade bans them. It's already been reported on the forums a few times, but there has been no fix for it yet.

[Firetempest]

Because It is abnormal. Game auto flags mass rare drops in 1 mission session. It doesn't so much care you put a day into it.

Using cheese for hours and hours sure is persistent I'll give you that. 

 

[(XBOX)Shodian]

2 hours ago, Jokie155 said:

Yes, such a mature and contributing reply. Classic Warframe community.

Weird flex but okay

[(PSN)Midcall]

vor 6 Stunden schrieb Ailia_Grimm:

Weird flex but ok

it should not come over as "flex",  it should give an picture as what i consider endgame stuff and so on. other ppl consider oder things. however it somehow feels good to know that im  not alone with this  problem  to see those 2 different reactions from support is bad.  looks like they havent a clue  how to react.

very sad that for those couple people where enjoy this stuff, have to accept that they wont trade any more or they ll stop doing their favorite misssion.

[-AncientWarrior-]

17 hours ago, Genitive said:

The game sometimes flags people who do very long endurance runs as "abnormal" and trade bans them. It's already been reported on the forums a few times, but there has been no fix for it yet.

The funny thing is DE have never even said a word about it.. why.. because they run a game system that slaps the players that push it.  Anyone who pushes the game to where DE thinks its not wanting it to go, even though they give conflicting signals.. e.g. 

 

On 2020-06-02 at 6:21 AM, MithrasWarsong said:

And with systems in place that reward longer play it is quite absurd to ban poeple for exactly that. The Endless Bonus in a Survival Fissure for example requires you to stay 100 minutes to even unlock the final rank but such a 100 minutes mission is already enough to be flagged as "abnormal" and given a Trade Ban for.

The bonus systems for ENDLESS missions.. endless DE endless! Someone from DE surely must have read this post by now.. hows about a response of some kind... the players here all have 1 thing in common, they put ALOT of time and effort into pushing themselves in WF.. why do you punish us for doing so!

[Berzerkules]

I've been trying to play frames I have previously ignored in solo survivals and I get rewarded with a trade ban. Not much else to do. Run random mission and one shot everything. Actually try and push yourself and you get punished. 

Funny how there are leader boards that mean nothing except you can see who currently has a trade ban on their account. 

Spoiler

 

[IenzoAin]

On 2020-06-03 at 1:17 AM, -AncientWarrior- said:

The bonus systems for ENDLESS missions.. endless DE endless! Someone from DE surely must have read this post by now.. hows about a response of some kind... the players here all have 1 thing in common, they put ALOT of time and effort into pushing themselves in WF.. why do you punish us for doing so!

This is DE you're talking about who apparently A) lack common sense or B) clearly do not understand the context of why people do xyz game modes. Exhibit A) arbitrations: Hmm... +300% strength Khora +300% dmg Dual Raza with a Riven on Infested survival. Yeah no... Is it really a surprise that, I'll stay there for a good couple of hours because of the juicy buffs and the right mission type. Exhibit B) Kuva Survival Requiems: Again staying for a couple of hours because Kuva farming with Khora/Nekros enjoying the bonuses from the Endless mission bonuses. Exhibit C) ESO: what's the point of having a leaderboard if you're just going to be trade banned for performing well?

On that note of DE not understanding why people use xyz take a look at the Paracesis riven dispo nerf. The Paracesis is fine don't get me wrong but the reason for why people used the bloody thing was because back then we didn't have the free handout of the Shedu blueprint. We had to build and use the Paracesis to crack the red crystal letting us get the cutscene for the Shedu. Really high demonstration of IQ from DE.

[DrivaMain]

This automated trade ban system accomplishes nothing. This only serve as a nuisance to players and only floods support tickets. At the very least up the flag time to 24 hours because almost no one wastes their time that long.

[(XBOX)IIIIGAZMANIIII]

On 2020-06-03 at 1:10 AM, Firetempest said:

Using cheese for hours and hours sure is persistent I'll give you that. 

 

Firetempest you stated in your reply “Using cheese for hours and hours sure is persistent I’ll give you that” 

it sounds like you could not do more than an hour in any mission before it got too hard for you, so you think everyone else is cheesing missions to do extended times.

That is the most ridiculous comment I have ever heard. I have had 4 Trade moratoriums places on my account in the past 6 weeks 3 for extended times in survivals and 1 from Orb Vallis (Torid farming) after 1.5 hours.
 

The thing is every time you reply to tech support they will not advise why you received this Trade ban and all you get from them “We cannot discuss this subject any further due to Security Reasons”.
In fact it goes further than that. I help a lot of new players with requests from Squad chat and someone the other day wanted to gift me something to show there appreciation after a couple of weeks of helping them only to find that because I was Trade Banned they could not gift me something. They asked why I was Trade Banned and I had to explain to them why. 
 

The Moratorium on Trading is a joke and you don’t have a clue!

[Bademeister44]

I don't usually write on the forum, but the Autoban system got out of control.

I can't believe that we get banned again and again just because we play the game.

the 2nd ban within a month


I can understand that the game economy needs to be protected, but a way has to be found to protect innocent people.

The task is up to you, to make it possible, we are endless players and part of warframe.

[---Swaggi---]

Tbh im wondering what would have been happened if the person has written to the same DE member again?

But basically you are right. This is getting totally out of control.

When people get continuously trade banned for a just 2h survival that's ridiculous...

I mean it's OUR Choice to be in a mission for a certain time. Some people wanna push their builds to its limit (sometimes that means doing a mission for 3-4h+). But that shouldn't be one of their business! 

DE already mentioned in devstreams that they don't want people to be in a mission for a longer timer but guess what it's a freaking grind game. Spending much time in order to get one single time is a daily basis imo!

Also why does DE even concern about those people??? I mean first it's a pve game so no harm is occurring to other people directly. Secondly only a handful people actually do longer missions. And thirdly as mentioned above it's  our choice to stay in a mission for a decent time. If that means we won't have that much sleep then that's how it is. DE shouldn't feel responsible for our health care in this case. It's our own choice!

But anyways they need to do something about that. That system is broken at. Completely inconsistent and intransparent!