Explorers!
Every game has its fair share of cheaters. Geolocation games particularly have issues with spoofers (people who modify their location to cheat the system) and the usual route to fixing the problem is to silently work behind the scenes to ban them all.
It's a fair system for a few reasons. For one, talking about cheating in a game can indeed lead to -- you guessed it -- more people being aware that cheating exists and deciding to try it out themselves. So usually companies deal with people who try to modify their user data or convince the servers they are where they aren't by silently and quietly banning them.
In Jurassic World Alive, we receive little more notification than the errant spoofer posting a screenshot of a ban on Facebook or on the forums and asking "What dis? I'm innocent! I swear it!"
Most of the time, this is just the last gasp of air from someone who has been cheating for a while without getting caught. As the systems for catching cheaters improve, all of them fall eventually.
Recent Ban Wave
A few things caught our attention with this most recent ban wave. First, you have the following tweet by Ludia:
Second, we have this message in the forums from an official source in the office -
Third, we have an inordinate amount of people claiming on the forums that they were banned for no reason or temp banned.
While it's unclear at the moment whether this was just an extremely large ban wave with lots of accounts that felt they were getting away with it, or if there was some mistake, it does appear as if at least some accounts were banned inadvertently based on the tweet above. And it sounds like Ludia is looking into it.
UPDATE: The issue was fixed at 10:20 AM EDT.
Closing Thoughts
We applaud ban waves, but we also want them to be correct. And if a ban wave like this one does indeed have people banned who were innocent, posts like this may become more common on the forum as well from legitimate cheaters claiming innocence. This is why we tend to stay more silent on the issues that crop up with cheaters in Jurassic World Alive (and other games for that matter). Because talking about it, sadly, leads to people doing it -- even though they almost always get banned anyways.
Still, we wanted to make sure those legitimate players who are playing and currently experiencing this screen are aware of what's going on. So we'll continue to update this article if anything else comes up.
