Asphalt 9 Dev Chat (April 2021 - Hacking Measures & Fair Play Rules)

The April 2021 Dev Chat was the 8th Dev-Chat and was done on April 30, 2021, This time it was cetered around responding question and doubts about Hacking Measures that the team takes to fight against hackers.
== Full #Dev-Chat-Answer ==
Chris718:
Welcome 
Welcome to the DevChat for this month everyone. This 1 is a little bit different as you won’t be seeing me answering most questions instead we have invited @Charlie here to answer questions on the topic. @Charlie is directly involved with all hacking, ban, cheating matters, so he’ll be able to discuss these topics in more detail. So please be nice to him so that he comes back (and so I can slack off in a future Friday again). So without further ado please give a virtual round of applause for @Charlie.
==== Charlie Part ====
Charlie:
Hi everyone! I’m happy to be here today in my first dev chat. Thanks @Chris781 @⚡ Mina and @Clauwudia for inviting me, I obviously follow these chats and I think they are a great opportunity to interact with you guys more directly.
I’m sure some of you might be very looking forward to this specific chat, as fair play, hacking and bans are some of the most frequent topics in terms of questions, complaints or comments, and I hope I can answer most of them in an efficient manner. Please bear in mind, however, that there’s going to be a common theme in most of my replies, and that is that there will be a line that I won’t be able to cross in some of my explanations. This very logically responds to the fact that our internal workflow, systems, and policies are confidential as they could be very well taken advantage of if they were known by bad actors. However, I am sure I’m going to share a lot of previously unknown information and to respond to most of your biggest questions.
Stay tuned to ☑-dev-chat-vote for some voting during the chat so you can have a bit of fun with them and let us know your thoughts. (editado)
Also if you want to laught at me, you can go to 🗿-a9-memes and see my emotional state 10 mins ago. All good now 
Okay, so let’s start with some of your most common questions/requests related to today's topic!
==== Common Questions ====
Automated detection
One request I've seen a lot is: “why don’t you detect automatically all cheaters?” or “why don’t you detect nitro boosts in the first 3 seconds of a race and ban those players immediately?”.
The truth is, we do have automatic detection (we ban almost 1,000 thousand players every day) and it is something we try to improve and expand all the time. With technology there are little things that are impossible, but I can tell you that we do face some limitations that will prevent us to have a 100% perfect system. Our game is not old, but some of the changes we would need to do in order to have that perfect system are really hard to implement at this stage. This doesn’t mean that we won’t get there, it is just that we can’t rely entirely on that and we need to find ways of improving also in other directions. The good news is that we have a team of dedicated people trying to improve anti-hacking all the time and, together with your reports, we keep improving every day.
What I can tell you though, is this: we can track a lot of stuff automatically and my advice to anybody reading this () is to play it safe and don’t do anything against our terms of use. If you’re unsure if you’re breaking them, don’t worry as we’ll cover everything in this chat.
Avoid banning legit players
That leads me to a very important aspect of our fair play enforcement. Our golden rule is to not ban any legit players. And although this has happened sometimes, we have dealt with those cases individually and compensated players for that.
The impact that this has in our workflow is that we don’t ban players until we’re 100% sure that they’re not legit. This can rule out some of the drastic measures sometimes we see suggested by the community, but it is very important to us that every ban action we take is correct.
I’ve read sometimes that you’re worried that somebody is reporting without proof or using weak arguments, but please do not worry. We’re not banning nobody based on reports. Reports just help us to look closer into certain places, but we are not basing our final decision on the fact that the report exists.
For those of you that are legit players and had an issue with our ban system in the past: we apologize! We have had issues with the system that are now solved and nobody should be flagged incorrectly. We worked hard to fix this and we will be working hard to avoid this from happening again, but please know that our intention has always been to ensure a fair competition and a fair playing experience to everybody.
By the way, I take this opportunity to tell you that, if you haven’t received a reply in more than 7 days from our Customer Care team, please let Mina, Claudia or myself know and we’ll look into that.
"Dear Lord, why are hackers coming back?"
Talking now about the “not-so-legit” players, one of your recurrent complaints is that you’ve seen a player coming back a few times after being banned. Obviously, we all would like to know why a player is wasting time in creating new accounts despite us banning every single one of them swiftly, but regardless of the reason, some people choose to do that. While IP bans or device bans could be somewhat effective here, the risks are far worse than the rewards, as some of these bans might affect legit players too.
However, one of the main topics I want you to take out of this chat is that: EVERY CHEATER WILL BE CAUGHT eventually. For that reason, while some players might stick around longer creating many accounts, they will eventually be gone from the game. You might remember some cases we had of clubs or players that sticked around longer than usual, but you will also remember that they were gone in the end. Our goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes from the new account creation until the new ban, and let me tell you something beautiful: we have improved this drastically and if somebody wants to waste time like that, you’ll have to deal with them much less than in the past.
Of course, automated detection is key for this, and we for sure get them faster and faster everyday.
How can I know if a player is cheating?
A lot of times you are also asking us to show examples of hackers or educate you of the different types of hacks that you can encounter in the game. While I personally don’t see the value in providing a detailed account of all the cheating that you could potentially see in the game, I can provide you some tips on this. Let's go:
* Most of the times, if you encounter a hacker you’ll know right away. 99% of the times is clear-cut.
* Please note that if you see players teleporting with red lights around them, this is not a hack, players don't get a benefit because they are not actually teleporting. These are network issues that the player is facing and are affecting the amount of information that is reaching your device, so you will not be able to see that car normally. Also know that you won’t be banned for having a poor connection. Trust me 100% on this.
* If you are unsure, please go ahead and use our report option, as there’s no harm in that, but also do it responsibly. I have seen players reporting their whole GP group, and you must be realistic here: you won’t find a whole group of GP players cheating, or at least that’s a very, very, very unusual scenario.
Talking specifically about GP/EP, we have seen some suggestions about having a report button for GP. This is a good suggestion, I believe, so we’ll be sharing it with the team to evaluate if it’s possible adding this to the game in the short/mid term.
Please know that it is not your responsibility to detect cheaters in the game, it wouldn’t be fair for us to ask you that. However, as this Discord server is proof, our amazing Community can help a lot when it comes to improving the game, so we of course appreciate the fact that you take your time reporting players in and off the game.
Botting 
Okay, it’s time now to talk about botting!
You have done a great job to bring this issue to our attention and we are aware now that there is an issue with players using bots. Please note that the use of third-party software to get advantages in the game, such as constant racing in the Multiplayer mode is not allowed by any means. (editado)
Good news for legit players worried about botting: we’re making a lot of progress in the detection of this type of cheating, and I can tell you that we’ll be bringing down a lot of players that do this. We have, in 2021, brought down to zero another type of exploits in the game (less visible and known to all of you, maybe), and our hope is that we can do the same with botting, or close to that. Bad news is that it might take its time.
There's where you can actually help us! We ask you to use the Multiplayer report option for botting too (not only other types of more obvious hacks) so we can speed up this process.
Account sharing
Another topic that has been brought to our attention is people sharing their accounts for multiple reasons. Please let me state clearly the following: allowing the access of another person (regardless of your relation to this person) is not permitted in the game. Doing this will end up with your account being banned from the game.
We take account sharing very seriously and let this be a warning to everybody (no matter your level, trajectory or involvement in the game), if you are sharing your account, stop immediately. I understand that you might have done this for a while without repercussions, or seen others do so before doing this yourself, so I don’t blame you. However, it is time to stop now, as we have made big progress in the detection of this and results will follow soon. (editado)
Account sharing, to put it clearly, is allowing another person into your account, no matter if it's only for a second or for 2 hours. Stop that for your own good.
Emulators 
Many of you are worried about the use of emulators. Will that get you banned?
Long story short: we are not specifically against emulators, but we don't advise you to use them. Why? Your account might be detected by our anti-hacking systems. My advise is to only play the official builds released by our approved stores.
eSports
Some of you might be worried about hacking on eSports competition. How do we keep these competitions fair? What I can tell you is that we thoroughly check players who advance to later rounds and we have specific rules and systems to check this type of events. Rest assured that every player that ends up in the final stages is legit.
"Why was I banned?"
Some of you have requested us to provide more details about your bans or account restrictions. We can of course look into it, but follow our classic instructions: get in touch with Customer Care. They will review your case and provide more details if appropriate.
Game exploits and mythological creatures
Okay, so it might be a good time to address some of the true game exploits we have detected and some of the false rumors that I'm seeing in the chat.
Don't always believe at face value what some players might be saying. For example, there are no such things are account cloning, pack glitches, etc. There can always be bugs or weird isolated cases (comes with technology) and we'll investigate that and provide answers if you approach our Customer Care team with that.
However, there are game exploits that sometimes go undetected for a while and players start to talk and they start to use them. A couple of examples: - Crashing your car to get teleported in the Osaka track - Bypassing purchase limits. Again, my honest advice: if you hear about an exploit, don't do it. We'll end up banning you, it might take us a while, but we'll get there. Of course, we believe in fair warnings and second chances, but be smart.
==== Live Questions ====
Okay so I'll be focusing now more about live questions, so shoot your shot! 
I see that some of you mentioned third-party software, auto-clickers and so on. This is what I referred to as "botting" above. To sum it up: don't use them, if you see somebody using them report them with report button or contacting Customer Care. This is not allowed and it'll lead to bans.
Some of you would like to receive feedback when your report was useful to us. Although I'd like to hug some of you personally sometimes, please know this: EVERY report is useful. Every single one is productive as it allows us to have a wider view into the general state of the game. So thank you to everybody reporting.
Quick summary about how to report: in-game report button for Multiplayer, or Customer Care for other game modes (such as GP).
Somebody mentioned game dynamics such as 360 abuse or the difference between TD/manual drive. That doesn't belong to anti-hacking, I'm afraid, until it becomes an exploit. However, your feedback is always welcomed if you feel something is broken in the game and needs fixing.
Some of you have referred to the possibility of having resources back, taken from hackers even and redistributed among legit players.
That would be awesome and fair, really, but sadly virtually impossible. However, I can tell you this. Have you been very clearly wronged by a cheater? For example, you got displaced one position in the GP final leaderboard? Get in touch with Customer Care and we'll look at that for you. We are most of the times ensuring you get the right rewards.
About bad network and punishing players that experience it: this is not likely to happen, as everybody can experience bad network at some point, and you wouldn't want to be punished by it. Do you feel a specific players is abusing this? Please report it either to our Community team or the Customer Care team and we'll look at that individual case.
Also Chris pointed out that we're making those players ghosts so it doesn't affect you
It was also asked, why don't you punish players who falsely report?
Well, basically it's virtually impossible to learn about the intentions of a report. And as I said before, no report is bad, as it allows us to get more info and no player is being banned based just on reports, there's thorough checks behind every ban decision.
By the way, if you're curious about the amount of ban actions per season, stay tuned to our social media, as we do publish the accurate number of ban actions taken in the previous season once it has ended.
Obviously, a big number doesn't tell you much, but it is part of our commitment to be transparent and to have an open relationship with you when it comes to this topic.
Another big topic for you guys is clubs that are cheating, and this is related to botting. We don't punish clubs as there might be legit players in them. Remember our golden rule: we try to not ban any single legit player.
However, as I explained we're coming after every player that is using botting or cheating the game in other ways, so big clubs full of abusers will take a hit. I won't give specific details, names, or anything, but there was a famous club in Windows that was dismantled after your reports were found to be true, and there are currently top clubs' members being banned for botting.
Also, the dev team is always trying to come up with ways to keep the game mechanics as exciting as they are but with less room for abuse.
I see that you have made some complaints based on individual cases, which I understand. It is not very easy to understand why somebody is banned for something while you see other players do it. Let me address this while I dispel some false information:
Our wonderful Community team is not banning players. It is not just that they are awesome and fair (which they are). They job is simply not to ban players directly or influence those decisions.
So please stop going after the people in this Discord chat if you don't agree with a ban decision, as they haven't made it. Having said that, the only difference between a player that was banned for something and another that hasn't been banned is only one: time.
They will all be banned when the review process is completed, if they are found to be guilty.
One last thing before wrapping this up, you ask about multiple accounts for individual use. This is not allowed, sadly. Do it at your own risk. However, I can tell you we won't be actively going after people doing this strictly for personal use, but you are at risk of being flagged.
I'll hand this over to Chris now, it has been a pleasure to chat with you and read your comments, see you! 
Chris718:
Ok thanks @Charlie for taking the time today to join us. As we wrap it up please let me re-iterate some of the key points 
* Don't cheat 
* Please keep reporting cheaters 
* Changes take time but we are working on improving detection constantly. 
So thanks everyone for attending and your questions (it's a passionate topic as can be seen in the discussion channel). Have a good weekend all and see you next time
== #Dev-Chat-Vote ==
Mina:
===== Vote 1: =====
Has your understanding / trust in the fair play & anti-hacking system improved with this chat? ( YES,  NO,  DO NOT KNOW)
[Most people voted no]
===== Vote 2: =====
How did you like the HACKING MEASURES & FAIR PLAY RULES chat in general? (1 - I do not like it at all, 5  - I love it)
[Most people didn't liked this Dev Chat]
Category:Asphalt 9 Dev Chats