Alright, to get some stuff out of the way here, as I see people discussing things using screenshots of parts of conversations instead of the full conversations or are just making assumptions without understanding.
First of all -
we understand the frustration regarding this change. It is nothing we didn't expect. It is something we have discussed internally for months exactly because if its popularity, but it had to happen. Whether or not you agree with that is a different story. We totally understand using the browser and steam sessions became a thing since we introduced Steam at the end of 2020.
Somewhat ironically, back then many people reported the ability to use the browser and steam version at the same time a bug or an exploit, and even more people actually reported this as 'cheating'. In the very beginning we did not yet see a huge problem with this possibility and just decided to 'let it be'. Let's let the community use it as they please, somewhat in line with our "tolerance" towards co-playing (despite it being against the rules in the strictest sense). Us allowing this to happen of course grew the portion of players (including all of yourselves), to actively use this on a daily basis. It is actually funny when you think about it - our original good intent to give you what you want bites us in the ass right now.
Soon after however we started noticing an increased amount of users using certain abilities in a botting way. We can't go into details on this without revealing how or what (which bot-creators would be happy to read). This immediately brings us to our first constraint. We
need to make changes sometimes that we can't explain. Such information is exactly what bot-creators want from us, and they'll be using this against us, further ruining
your game with their bots.
Anyway, we watched for a while and this portion of 'unprovable' bot-users grew more and more, simply because of certain functionalities (again, can't go into details). The problem however was that due to this ability, our fight against botting became harder and harder, even impossible.
On a daily basis, we investigate and track dozens of players for potential botting. A majority of them, we are sure actually are but it became impossible for us to prove it. InnoGames maintains a strict policy that we do not ban people we are not sure about. We do make mistakes, and we try to rectify them, but on the moment of banning, we are always sure. Depending on the appeal, new items
may come to light that makes us reconsider. However, on the total amount of bans we place (for botting), the amount of reversing is very low.
Going back to the main story, more and more bots are being used worldwide and this is also something that led to more and more complaints from players against botting. Botting that we couldn't prove.
This change makes the fight easier again. We will be able to prove big portions of botting again. This change ensures that we can take away a big amount of botters from our game again. Will this be
all botters? No, definitely not. If you believe in a game where cheating doesn't happen, botting doesn't happen, ... then you need a reality check. We will never achieve 100% 'fair-play'. We can however try working towards 100% with all we got!
We also never said anywhere that this change will remove
all the botting that is happening.
It basically comes down to this - we have rules against cheating, and we don't have rules that support co-playing. We have had this discussion in the past. While we are aware co-playing happens, it will never be a factor in our decisions to limit rule-breaking or create game features. This will only become one once we do support co-playing (and
if ever). We are open for suggestions regarding this, in our Thinktank forums for example, but as long as there are no supported ways for co-playing, we will not be taking this into consideration for changes to the game, and
definitely not if this harms our ability to fight cheats.
To wrap up this big bunch of text - we totally and truly understand you guys. There is not a person at InnoGames or the team that doesn't understand the consequences for you. That is exactly why it took so long to get done. It is however a necessary evil if we want to fight bots. There is no other way of putting this. It is necessary. I already know many of you will start flaming right after I post this message and/or insinuate that you just gotta trust us.... Well... yeah. Sadly you do. We can't give you details, some of you also don't understand the technical parts anyway, so whatever we say here is just going to end up with you doubting it. We accept that. We understand that.
As our senior developer, morthy, pointed out yesterday - considering Tribal Wars on Steam was initially a test project to work on a framework to allow our games to be embedded in Steam and Microsoft store (which has been hugely successful for InnoGames), we never expected or wanted our current players to move over to using Steam. At best, this would bring in a new audience. For this reason, we are willing to risk that you stop using Steam, if that means we
can effectively fight a big portion of botters again.
We know. We understand. We accept.
I hope this clarified (somewhat) our reasons. I am sure it will
still leave a big portion of you unsatisfied. Probably for some this will just lead to even more negative comments or "doubt"-messages. Again - we accept that but it is not a discussion we are going to continue having. It is your right to not believe us when we say it is for the good of the game, but you also need to understand that InnoGames is a business. It is not in our advantage to remove a useful tool such as Steam "for no reason". At most, we may have made some shitty decisions about changes, game features, but we haven't
removed stuff "just because".
This is a typical case where we had good intentions, but the 0.1% ruined it for the 99.9% by abusing the mechanisms. I'm sorry.
