Another 18,000 Korean Accounts have been actioned for CoC violations

At the start of the new year, on the official Korean forums it has been revealed that over 18,000 accounts have been suspended.

Note that the following quote has been roughly translated using Google Translate and edited where appropriate to English game terms.

Click here for the original post and the list (it is too big to paste into the English forums).


On a personal note, while I know there are reasons why players who are actioned for things like cheating are announced on the Korean forums, I wonder why they do this for the non-cheating violations as well. Something I feel like this would make a huge impact in our community, but the risk of doing is this by causing “witch hunts” and have retaliatory comments come out. Still, I would love to see periodical reports to at least give some basic numbers be released periodically.

In any case, I welcome this as very good news, knowing that if there as this many accounts in Korea, I know there has to be some strong efforts worldwide to make Overwatch a better game for us all.

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might be that socially shaming people works in a different way given cultural differences.

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And I suspect this is the most likely reason. I rather not see a list of names, but updated numbers from time to time.

From what I recall when I lived in Asia near Korea, South Korean gaming culture is quite toxic and verbally abrasive because it’s treated much more competitively in their culture than it is in American culture.

They may be announcing it to raise awareness that those actions will result in punishments for what is usually deemed as a cultural norm.

A similar thing happened with Chinese Overwatch with the hall of shame. I guess it’s modern day’s version of warding off other hackers and leaving these as an example.

Mr Kaplan, I don’t feel so good.

I hope the western servers will see a snap , uh, I mean banwave soon, even if cheating is seldom spotted here.

Only one question: Why only the asian ban wave have been announced since launch? Whats with american and european ban waves for toxicity, cheating, etc.? Or am i the only one who havent seen them?

Oh they’ve happened, they’re just not always announced. You have to guess based of a sudden influx of complaints on hacker forums.

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I’d only want to see a daily report (by device) of

n1 players suspended for less than a week for game sabotage
n2 players suspended for more than a week for game sabotage
n3 players banned permanently for game sabotage
n4 players suspended for less than a week for toxicity
etc etc

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still waiting for blizzard to deal with boosters, smurfs etc. I don’t know if this wall of shame makes any difference in lower ranks

without generalizing too much i think they’re trying to use it as a deterrent and an exemplar of what sorts of things they dont want to see in their servers. in the US in general making a big ol list of usernames who are bad and banned with details of what they did would rub everybodies feathers the wrong way. we’d think about privacy concerns probably since our usernames follow us around accounts and systems and if its actually alright for a company with that info to tell everyone what itis we did wrong or if that violates our rights.

vs a more community-based society where its important to be held accountable to the community at large for negative behaviors.

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And their most used character. It would be 50% Sym 40% Torb (For all the false reports)

I wish they’d stop messing around with silences for repeat offenders. Ban them already. These toxic clowns can still throw and troll without talking or chatting. Show them the door already.

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It’s certainly interesting to hear about, I have to wonder what the goal in publishing the actioned account’s names were though. Is it intended to act as a scarlet letter, or a warning by example?

I’d love to see something similar done here though. Maybe remove the name and instead provide actioned account statistics on a monthly-quarterly basis.
Like: 5000 accounts were actioned for (infraction), of those x% were actioned again for (same infraction), x% recieved (punishment) x% were banned and x% were cleared of the accusation.

I think it would really be interesting to see the stats behind how many offenders are repeat offenders, what levels of punishment are doled out and how rampant false reporting is. I’d love Blizz to at least do something to show us “Yes we are monitering the community and actioning those deserving” because on here it seems faith that they are keeping thier eyes peeled is waning.

Now I forgot to mention there have been some rough percentages released before in developer update videos and certain forum posts earlier this year. Still, I suppose this comes down to the same issues of not hearing from the devs in general.

Past resources:

They working on this in EU and US? Based on tonight’s experience, I guess not.

Last few days since I got back from vacation have been the worst I’ve known.

I too have had some rough go rounds last night, however I am getting report notifications just as equally.

Just seems to be par for the course every time they put a sale on, they trash the state and reputation of the game even further; and for what?

I noted in my own thread:

It feels like they’re happy to chase accounts but are far less willing to chase the culprits. It’s clear from these numbers that those aren’t 18,000 independent individuals; this is a much smaller number simply acting across a vast number of accounts.

It shows just how untouchable they are and how unwilling Blizz are at seriously pursuing it.

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What people don’t realize is just how commonplace cheating actually is in gaming.

If you believed 99% of players don’t cheat, then, statistically, 10.5% of all your games of Overwatch would contain at least 1 cheater.

What? That seems crazy! How can that be true?!

Simple: Probability. Imagine you flip a coin 1x… what are the odds you get Heads? Easy: 50%. What if you flipped the coin 11 times instead… now what are the odds at least one Heads popped up? 99.95%

This is exactly the problem with cheating: even if only 1% of players cheat, there are still 11 other players in each and every match you play. Therefore, the odds that no one is cheating is 89.5%… which means the odds at least 1 person is cheating would be 10.5%.

This is why game developers never release detailed information about cheating in their games. Instead, they release purposely vague and useless information like: “Hey guys! We banned 20,000 players over the last 6 or 7 months.” This gives people the impression the developer is ‘doing something’, without actually allowing us to figure out how big the problem is.

There are a few studies on the internet in regards to how many players cheat in video games. One such study - a poll of 9,436 adults (5,911 of which were gamers) - discovered that 1 to 5 percent of players admit to “Always” using cheats when playing multiplayer games online. If true, it would mean that 10.5 to 43 percent of your 11-person Overwatch games contain a cheater.

Some people would say this number is too high, but the fact is most cheats are designed with the intent of being extremely difficult to notice, and most gamers are not well-versed enough in programming to detect signs of cheating… and that’s just scratching the surface of the problems anti-cheat faces.

And for those non-believers out there who just don’t want to accept that cheating is rampant in gaming, I’ll leave you with this mathematically-correct statistic:

For there to be a 99% chance that a match contains zero cheaters, you would have to believe that only 1 player in every 1095 people actually cheat.

… and that would be ridiculous. Estimates are that 6 people in every 1000 is a Kleptomaniac. Obviously Kleptomania and cheating are two different problems, but to believe that cheating in video games is 600% RARER than one of the most rare disorders is simply ludicrous. If, for fun, we assumed 6 people in every 1000 cheated in video games, it would result in 6.4% of all your games containing at least 1 cheater. That’s about 1 in every 16 games.

Blizzard can’t stop all types of cheats on their own. Many programs don’t interact with the game, and developers don’t have the legal right to inspect every program running on your PC. This is why Player Reports are so critical: in many cases they are the ONLY thing that can stop some cheaters.

So the next time you see a Widowmaker with 65% accuracy, or a Hanzo who gets headshots 80% of the time, don’t be afraid to make a quick Report. If you’re wrong, nothing bad will happen to anyone. If you’re right, you’ll help flag a cheater so we can get rid of the real problem.