The background...
I play BF4 on the weekends with a couple friends and it's fairly casual as they don't game much and while we try to be competitive, we don't "own" the maps we play or anything. This past weekend I joined the server my friends were on and began flying around in a helicopter (it's a scout chopper called a "Little Bird". this matters because I mention it below) and was doing fairly well. After about 6 kills and 7 minutes I was inexplicably banned from the server. The message I got was "Permanent Punkbuster ban, cheating/hacking".
Needless to say, I was stunned. I've never used cheats in an FPS and certainly wasn't going to start while playing casually with friends. To be honest, I definitely used a "trainer" in Diablo when Battle.net was first out but that's a different story and the only time I ever blatantly used any kind of cheat!
To add to my credibility, some of you may recall I would get upset with Umblezi and others in DAoC when they would use quest guides and walkthroughs. I considered that a form of "cheating" and looking back on that today, I laugh at myself for being ridiculous. To this day I recall Umb saying to me "have a think about what you're saying". After a decade or so of having many thinks, I realized how silly my mentality was.
I digress...
Here is a post by post chronology of what went down when I went to the server's forum to request an unban. Enjoy...
I started off politely posting and asking for an explanation.
The first response was polite and informative, stating they would wait for a server moderator to look into it.
This is when the antagonist enters the scene. The person I would go back and forth with throughout the thread. He for some reason didn't want to reveal which stats are suspicious because then I might try to pad them.
Fanboi post
My plea for more information. I wanted to know why it took them less than 10 minutes to determine I was a cheater. What system were they using that is somehow better than every other server I had been on?
This is when it starts to get frustrating. "My stats" are what tell them I'm hacking/cheating. Yet they won't reveal how they are coming to that conclusion. He offers that I play on other servers and move on. However I'm not interested in getting unbanned anymore, I want to know why they think I was cheating.
I guess he doesn't know how to "quote" a post, but he quotes my previous post and then offers up an additional non answer. Capping it off with a comment to the peanut gallery. I was amused by this for some reason.
Not willing to accept his answer, I restated my innocence and what I'm trying to achieve by continuing to post.
(click to open this one)
Believing I was finally achieving some success in getting to the bottom of this, I get a post from the "webmaster" and "co-founder" of this community. No explanation provided, just a graph showing my play history, leaving me to assumptions.
The graph shows that about 100 hours of gameplay ago, my stats took a dive. I admit, that is suspicious looking but I'm of the opinion that stats only tell a piece of the story. It is not definitive to look at one's stats and assume cheating unless it's extreme. After studying my stats and play history, I came to a conclusion that I felt was plausible. I had switched to playing on "Hardcore" servers roughly 2 months ago. The difficulty is increased and a lot of the perks you enjoy in normal mode are gone. Thus, as I explain, my stats dramatically shifted.
(Clicky again)
They're not having it. Not only do I not get an explanation for how their system works, he laughs at the idea that switching to a more difficult game mode would cause my stats to drop. He then makes a claim that they know what average and good stats look like and not so eloquently states that mine stand out like a "sore dick".
(clicky)
Next, I decide to call him out a little more directly. I then ask him for his gaming alias in BF4 because "Juicey" isn't it (I checked). My intention was to see what his stats look like to compare. I honestly wanted to know what his standard was and figured that was a good place to start.
Not so surprisingly, he yet again ignores my questions. For some reason he decides to ask me about accounts that are similar to my own, implying that they must belong to me because they are similar in name.
Before I had a chance to reply to that post, he asks for the thread to be closed. I'd like to think he did this because he knows he's outmatched and can't back up his claims.
I responded to his post asking me about the other accounts before I saw his request to close the thread. I decided to call him out again because his logic was pretty ridiculous. The result when searching the name "Juicey" was dozens of accounts on xbox, PS and PC.
Realizing that the thread was about to be closed, I took a parting shot. I wasn't going to convince them of my legitimate play and I seriously felt the guy was too lazy to even look at my stats effectively.
(clicky)
Again, he's not meeting my challenges and decides to threaten me with a Punkbuster metaban (notice he adds 2 N's to a lot of words, I'm not sure what that's about). I don't believe he can do what he's saying. Honestly I don't know, but it would be a ridiculous system if someone could have another player banned purely because they "think" they are cheating based on dubious assumptions.
One last comment from the fanboi...again probably not even reading what happened and assuming I still cared about playing on their server.
Thinking I've been dealing with a teenager this whole time I look at the guys forum profile. I sure hope he lied about his birthday because if he's actually a 50 years old, I almost feel sorry for him.
If you made it this far, I commend you. This was cathartic for me to document this. If anything it has jaded me about the state of gaming these days.
