As a developer, I’ve been responsible for creating moderation tools and policies for a number of different games, all based around the idea of moderating accounts, not people. While BanSync checks a lot of boxes and shows quite a bit of promise, its current implementation, particularly the alt-inclusive ban feature, puts developers and moderation teams in an adversarial position when it comes to bans that include alt accounts.
Currently, my moderators and anti-cheat ban individual accounts for cheating. Anti-cheat bans are automated and are actioned on any account that is without a doubt cheating. Moderators log evidence of cheating and manually ban accounts that players report, or that the anti-cheat isn’t certain of. Because we only ban single accounts, we’re able to strongly enforce our moderation policy of “Your account is your responsibility, it will not be unbanned if found cheating”. Even if it turned out that “my friend/family member was using my account” or “I got hacked, it wasn’t me” was true, we still observed the account cheating, and the ban is valid.
This policy does not work with the current implementation of the alt ban system. As a developer I have:
- No way to lookup the owner/main for a banned alt account
- No access to the ban history for that alt account/group of accounts
- No way to display information about a ban to an alt account
- No way to unban just that alt account.
Alt-inclusive bans oppose our policy of “Your account is your responsibility”. Without access to any ban history for an “alt” account, moderators are forced into an adversarial position when handling ban appeals for alt accounts. Moderators are forced to assume that Roblox got it right, and that the person appealing is lying about what their account is. We have no reasonable recourse for verifying the validity of their ban, nor any intentional way of verifying that this person’s account is an alt or not. We can’t even unban that account unless the user provides us with their main, or knows which account got them banned in the first place.
I cannot in good faith implement alt-inclusive bans knowing how problematic my moderation policy becomes due to a lack of information given both to developers and players. I do not want to blindly trust that Roblox got the detection correct, I do not want my moderators enforcing a policy that can lead to instances of frustration and confusion, and I do not want to assume players are lying about the ownership of their accounts.
It is important to me that:
- Anyone banned is shown enough information to appeal their ban with my game’s moderators
- I have access to the ban history of a persons main-banned-account to verify the validity of a ban
- I have the ability to correct false bans per account, not just by main, in the event my moderators or Roblox made a mistake
I could easily adopt alt-inclusive bans if:
- Alt accounts are displayed the same “message to user” that the main account sees instead of “You created or used an alt account to avoid an enforcement action taken against another account by the creator of this experience”
- Ban history from the main account is accessible from an alt accounts user id.
If Roblox were to properly address these concerns, I would be more than welcome to adopting the alt-inclusive ban feature. It’s just that, despite how powerful this tool is, the trade-offs that would affect both my players and my staff team far outweigh the benefits of adopting this feature in its current state.