Post de los devs sobre los baneos del juego (la purga)

On bans and ban appeals: some insight
We felt like some explanations were in order regarding the current situation. I'll do my best to shed a little light on some of the most asked questions, and also give a bit of insight on the way we handle bans and its appeals. This might be a bit long, as I feel the situation calls for it, so I ask you to please bear with me.

First of all, the ever so mentioned system: the unbelievable success and attention Temtem has been receiving brought with it a surprising amount of malicious intent. Not long ago, most of our player-base was annoyed at the amount of bots there were in the game. This is a major issue for us, as it is for you tamers, and one we invest a lot of resources into.

We try to stay on top of things, and our anti-cheat system evolves daily, and I mean daily. The system detects multiple flags, and only bans when there are enough flags, or when the flags are very obvious cheating attempts. We are constantly monitoring the new bans we get to detect and prevent possible flaws in the anti-cheat system as fast as possible. That's also part of why our methods might seem strict, because to get banned you have to either take the easy road and do it in a very blatant way, or accumulate enough flags that we know you're not an innocent player. If people are willing to cheat in an Early Access game, we need to polish our system now to get them ASAP when they come to cheat in a fully released game.

Banning players does not benefit us at all, regardless of what some think: on the contrary, losing user base and having to deal with the defamation campaigns against us is putting a lot of strain on us, as a team and individually. The whole situation is taking precious development time away from key members of the team who could be placing their efforts fully on the game. That's why we try to always make sure we're on the right before we do ban someone.

Currently, banned accounts represent a 0.6% of the total count, the total amount of accounts who've ever played Temtem. Now, this does NOT mean 0.6% of players are banned: keep in mind that a huge chunk of this number is composed of multi-accounts of the same players. We've seen cases of people with over 50 accounts cheating on each one of them. Sadly, we know there are some bots out there we haven't caught yet, but we are confident that we will eventually get those too.

So, if the number is actually so small, why does it feel like there are so many banned players? Why is there a growing belief that we are banning users left and right? Usually, the next step for a cheating player after being banned, and having their appeal rejected, is to cause fear among the legit player-base, and to discredit Crema. They've lost, so now we must lose too. We've seen fraudulent players coordinate in cheating communities to raid the Discord, Reddit, or Steam reviews of a game claiming false bans. This must sound familiar to some of you by now. Now, let's say X notorious community member has claimed a false ban. How could they? But we've seen those cases happen, too, and we've seen them confess after manually and extensively reviewing their cases. We treat all situations equally, and being a big name does not grant anyone any kind of immunity.

But of course, there is another possible outcome, and I'm guessing you might even have a name in mind: a player has triggered a false positive and has gotten banned unfairly. Most of these situations are solved in less than a week, because when someone has been flagged down incorrectly it shows in the ban appeal. Happens to regular users as well. We reach out to all of these players when they appeal their ban and apologize to each of them, but we apologize here, again: we're very, very sorry to those players who have been incorrectly banned. It's never our intention to inconvenience anyone, but sometimes, in our effort to keep cheating to a minimum, mistakes happen. We're a small team, and we're all human (mostly). As the game develops, so do we, and the system. We hear you, and we are working to completely eradicate false positives.

Does that mean everyone who claims their ban to be false is telling the truth? Not at all, which takes us to the next point: do we review all the ban appeals we get? Yes, yes we do. All of them. It doesn't matter if you're not a streamer, or if you have 0 lumas or a playtime of 0.2 hours. We review, and answer, all of the appeals. With human eyes. The support team's job consists mostly on answering these sort of inquiries. That's why it might take some time to get to your case.

So why are all the responses to rejected ban appeals a canned response? Now, as much as we'd love to get creative with our answers, typing up a reply to every single mail we get would take an amount of time we simply don't have. We get over 400 e-mails some weekends. And, as you all know by now, we don't give much info on ban reasons to avoid leaking information that could be useful to those who want to play dishonestly. If we answered every ban appeal giving the specific reason that caused the ban, our anti-cheat system would be rendered obsolete in a week.

But we also know many of you legit players are starting to develop a fear of getting unfairly banned, and are refraining from doing certain actions in-game, so we'd like to make some points clear: no, your account is not at risk for playing an ungodly amount of hours (although your health might be), nor is it at risk for playing with a gamepad, trading with your friends, or earning a special tem on a giveaway or a contest.

Having multiple accounts and playing in a legit way in every one of them is OK as well.

Are you afraid of having unknowingly traded with someone who was a cheater, and getting banned because of that? Please fear not: if that was the case the whole player-base would be banned. From our point of view it's fairly easy to tell whether something was an accident or intentional. We can see through many tricks, and we are still trying to improve, and to make the system as flawless as possible, so please, please don't worry about playing normally and enjoying Temtem.

We know trust is a delicate thing, and us having to keep quiet about many things, even if for the sake of the game's health, does not help. We hope this announcement clears the air a bit regarding the banning fears, and also eases the feeling some of you have gotten of Crema not being communicative enough. We ask you to refer to this in the future, and to try and question further malicious attempts to discredit us.

We will gladly answer any question you might still have if they're under the range of what can be safely disclosed <3

Love, the Crema team