(Discussion)should you get flagged for late syncs?

[charxsetsuna]

Since the dispute that this debate started in simply got off track because of the debate I thought to move it to this thread.

[DaivRules]

I need to know what “very late” versus “late” versus “not late” are to accurately vote. 

[Sergen]

It should be handled on a case by case basis. I am rather concerned that they could disregard evidence that proves trophies were earned legit but the person decided to sync them late... It's optional whether you want to sync your trophies on PS3 and similar to just hiding your trophy list, does someone get flagged if they have hidden their entire trophy list for a few years but return to the website and have a lot more platinums than before they were hidden? If I late sync I will also be providing evidence to go with it and if the game is still obtainable then people have the option to provide evidence themselves and my concern is the cheater removal team deciding not to consider the evidence and rather to keep the flag on your profile simply because you decided to sync later. A website shouldn't be able to dictate your decision to not want to sync your trophies, if the trophies are proven to be earned through legitimate means then no amount of time that the trophies weren't synced should be considered. I believe that late syncing for things that can't be proven anymore, such as syncing a game that has had its servers shutdown years after they were shut could be acceptable flags for late syncing, like if someone were to randomly sync the online trophies for Homefront to their profile today and claim they did the trophies years ago without any evidence to support their claim then I think the flag would stick but if they synced Homefront today and showed their online stats for the game from that time period to support their claim then I think the flag should be lifted.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Sergen

[charxsetsuna]

1 minute ago, DaivRules said:

I need to know what “very late” versus “late” versus “not late” are to accurately vote. 

I was thinking over three months but everyone has different ideas on what very late is so it's purely subjective. Which is part of the issue honestly.

[locoporkko]

I dont understand because people want to sync the trophies very long time,i always sinc my trophies at the moment 

Edited May 27, 2020 by locoporkko

[charxsetsuna]

3 minutes ago, locoporkko said:

I dont understand because people want to sync the trophies very long time,i always sinc my trophies at the moment 

Me neither personally but I understand how easy it would be to forget to sync ps3 trophies especially if it's a spare ps3 you dont use often.

[Beyondthegrave07]

I don't think the question is should people be flagged for late syncs, but how long of a grace period should be given until you have to provide evidence for it.

 

I think we can all agree if you sync 10,000 kills for Resistance 2 in 2020, it's cheated. However, if I forget to sync my Heavy Rain trophies for a couple of months because I was at college or whatever... Different story. It's not a game that's likely to be cheated, and I could reasonably explain away why it was late synced.

 

I 100% understand though why @B1rvine wants some sort of standard for this though. People could easily just use the excuse for anything CFWed even if the likelihood of them syncing multiplayer games 8 years after shutdown is miniscule.

 

I'd put it at a year honestly. After that, the proof of burden falls on the player. I think you'd need to treat closed servers a little differently going forward, but I think as a general rule, a year is fine.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Beyondthegrave07

[DaivRules]

6 minutes ago, charxsetsuna said:

I was thinking over three months but everyone has different ideas on what very late is so it's purely subjective. Which is part of the issue honestly.

Then the poll doesn’t make any sense if everyone is voting on something they’re interpreting completely differently.

[charxsetsuna]

1 minute ago, DaivRules said:

Then the poll doesn’t make any sense if everyone is voting on something they’re interpreting completely differently.

I can understand that, the poll is honestly just there to gauge general feelings. 

[Sergen]

4 minutes ago, Beyondthegrave07 said:

I don't think the question is should people be flagged for late syncs, but how long of a grace period should be given until you have to provide evidence for it.

 

I think we can all agree if you sync 10,000 kills for Resistance 2 in 2020, it's cheated. However, if I forget to sync my Heavy Rain trophies for a couple of months because I was at college or whatever... Different story. It's not a game that's likely to be cheated, and I could reasonably explain away why it was late synced.

 

I 100% understand though why @B1rvine wants some sort of standard for this though. People could easily just use the excuse for anything CFWed even if the likelihood of them syncing multiplayer games 8 years after shutdown is miniscule.

 

I'd put it at a year honestly. After that, the proof of burden falls on the player.

 

I support the idea of needing to provide evidence if there is a very late sync for trophies. I'd say that there were risky games in the past where people commonly left it unsynced until they could guarantee their platinum. An example would be Fight Night Round 4, back in 2014 a lot of people got the belt trophies for it, but some of those people also didn't sync the trophies one by one, they instead earned a belt trophy without syncing it but waited a few months for the other belts that they could be helped with because they would rather not commit the game to their list and risk never being able to platinum it when it was a toxic environment to be involved in. I can provide evidence for anything that I sync late myself and my concern is solely whether people say "you synced this after the 3 month grace period so we can't accept this evidence and you're staying flagged".

Edited May 27, 2020 by Sergen

[VoidVictorious]

Syncing late has nothing to do with cheating. Why would you be flagged for it? I really hate to see the community start a witch hunt over a few bad apples regarding a trophy syncing process.

[hittheroadbucky]

Why would you get flagged for not syncing trophies? ?

[eigen-space]

Not everyone has consistent internet to sync every time they get a trophy. I personally didn't have internet for a couple years to save money. What's the point in saving money if I'll have to spend it on some software to record my gameplay to prove I didn't cheat?

[charxsetsuna]

3 minutes ago, hittheroadbucky said:

Why would you get flagged for not syncing trophies?

It mimics cfw, causing confusion so its often treated like it could be cfw.

 

If this was ps4 it wouldnt be as much of a issue because that takes screenshots but ps3 doesnt so getting proof for many people will be hard or impossible.

Edited May 27, 2020 by charxsetsuna

[hittheroadbucky]

Really? I didn’t know that ? if I play my vita away from home I’m not on wifi so my trophies won’t sync. Pretty sure there was like a month or so between earning the couple Uncharted trophies and when I eventually synced them up again. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t earn them though 

[charxsetsuna]

1 minute ago, hittheroadbucky said:

Really? I didn’t know that if I play my vita away from home I’m not on wifi so my trophies won’t sync. Pretty sure there was like a month or so between earning the couple Uncharted trophies and when I eventually synced them up again. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t earn them though 

I doubt you have anything to worry about with only a month, most people wouldn't even call that a long time.

[Parker]

People should only be flagged and taken off leaderboards if there is no doubt that they cheated a game. If there is any possibility, however unlikely, that the game was done legitimately (such as syncing trophies late) then I don't think that user should be flagged. 

 

All my opinion, of course. 

 

 

Parker 

[NamoPh]

Two questions for the mod team, even if they are probably not relevant to the referenced dispute in question:

 

i) How can you tell when a trophy was synced after the fact, unless you were already keeping watch on a specific account?

ii) If I recall it's been said that this site doesn't track users unless someone added them, and also doesn't update users that have been inactive for a long time. So how can you know for sure it was the user who synced them late, and not on the site's side?

[zenovka]

Here's my 2 cents , yes late syncing can mimic cfw, but a website should not at anytime dictate when I sync MY PROFILE. If I want to wait a year or one month it should not matter . It's my profile and not psnp's profile.  The only company I could even see having any say over my profile is Sony themselves.  

[Sergen]

1 minute ago, NamoPh said:

Two questions for the mod team, even if they are probably not relevant to the referenced dispute in question:

 

i) How can you tell when a trophy was synced after the fact, unless you were already keeping watch on a specific account?

ii) If I recall it's been said that this site doesn't track users unless someone added them, and also doesn't update users that have been inactive for a long time. So how can you know for sure it was the user who synced them late, and not on the site's side?

 

You can tell when a trophy list is synced late because the list would appear above their most recent trophies, so if someone synced a trophy list that had trophies earned in 2017 for the first time today, their trophies from 2017 would appear at the top of the list and above the ones they've earned in 2020.

[AiManiaTrophyhuntres]

and what about all the hunter who prepare more than a year for platinum rains? are they all cheater now? It's just absurd to have a dictation how I play and sync games.

I often play games on a new account without PSN connection to see if I like it, sometimes i even Platinum the game there bc I don't want to have a 200h game open in my profile before I am done with it, and when I have platinum, I sync the trophys by loggin into my account. lots of ppl do that, it's not cheating at all and it can take a year to get there.

God, seriously slowly but surely this leaderboard is going downhill with all the controll-freaky behaviour... there are sure a lot ppl on the board who shouldn't be there and we all know that.  it ill never be perfect but you must not start a damn wichhunt over things like a late sync.

[Golem25]

A decently thought out grace period is the linchpin here, because otherwise you open yourself up for a huge degree of debate.

 

Coincidentally enough, this is something I have been thinking about recently. Right now, I am playing Corpse Party on Vita; a horror game that has a bit of a nasty cover image which I don't want to see on my profile. Because of this, I've been playing the game with my Vita on flight mode. No internet, no sync, no problem. However, I started last week and popped 23 Trophies, and will pop the remainder somewhere at the start of June. When I take the Vita out of flight mode and sync, all of a sudden all 38 or so Trophies will pop up on my profile (plus whatever game I play immediately after to bump CP off the top of my list), and I've no doubt some eagle-eyed fellow hunters would find that somewhat odd given that the site updates my profile almost daily.

 

Now, I don't think there is anything wrong with what I'm doing; I'm holding off the sync for a week or two so I can play another game after Corpse Party and not have to look at that cover image - that doesn't change the legitimacy of my unlocks. My Trophies are legit, I simply 'release' their information to PSN later than I normally would. Hunters should be given that degree of freedom, for sure - especially with PS3 not automatically syncing and the PS4 having lulled people into thinking manual syncs are a thing of the past.

 

A month without syncing? Sure, that can happen (or someone is OCD like me and purposely doesn't sync until a game is complete). Six months? A semester spent away from home, alright. But more than a year? That's where things get a little iffy. Put it this way, if you're into Trophies, and you care about the leaderboards, I don't see why you would wait for more than a year (or be unable) to sync your Trophies. Most of the time you can predict when you won't be able to sync, such as for a semester abroad (been there, see how many Trophies I earned from July 13th 2016 to the start of 2017), so you'd either make the effort to get them synced or inform a member of staff that, hey, this and that is happening and those Trophies will be showing up in X number of months.

 

Any longer than that without making a pre-emptive note of what will be a late sync, and I think you should accept that you will be open for investigation. It's unfortunate but that's the situation that we've been forced into by illegitimate players and Sony's general apathy for their own Trophy system. If you've nothing to hide, then no doubt it will be easy enough to prove your innocence (and even then, the Trophies in question may not be suspect at all, e.g. some common ones)

Edited May 27, 2020 by Golem25

[Xylobe]

I'm with Parker on this one, "might have cheated" isn't enough to justify a flag imo. There might be a little bit of wiggle room, but not much; if a user syncs an old game years later when they've synced other games on the same system in the meantime, it would be reasonable to at least have them prove that they own more than one of the system, or for relevant PS3 games, were subscribed to PS Now.

[MichMasteR]

Depends, if it's just 2 or 3 offline only games and you sync 10 years later why would that be suspicious?

[VoidVictorious]

I’m sorry that late syncs look fishy, but thinking that someone cheated without being able to substantiate it encourages all sorts of bad behavior doesn’t it like: favoritism, bad motives on the part of the reporter, and finally a crap load of false positives. This seems like a very dangerous road to follow...

56 minutes ago, Golem25 said:

A decently thought out grace period is the linchpin here, because otherwise you open yourself up for a huge degree of debate.

 

Coincidentally enough, this is something I have been thinking about recently. Right now, I am playing Corpse Party on Vita; a horror game that has a bit of a nasty cover image which I don't want to see on my profile. Because of this, I've been playing the game with my Vita on flight mode. No internet, no sync, no problem. However, I started last week and popped 23 Trophies, and will pop the remainder somewhere at the start of June. When I take the Vita out of flight mode and sync, all of a sudden all 38 or so Trophies will pop up on my profile (plus whatever game I play immediately after to bump CP off the top of my list), and I've no doubt some eagle-eyed fellow hunters would find that somewhat odd given that the site updates my profile almost daily.

 

Now, I don't think there is anything wrong with what I'm doing; I'm holding off the sync for a week or two so I can play another game after Corpse Party and not have to look at that cover image - that doesn't change the legitimacy of my unlocks. My Trophies are legit, I simply 'release' their information to PSN later than I normally would. Hunters should be given that degree of freedom, for sure - especially with PS3 not automatically syncing and the PS4 having lulled people into thinking manual syncs are a thing of the past.

 

A month without syncing? Sure, that can happen (or someone is OCD like me and purposely doesn't sync until a game is complete). Six months? A semester spent away from home, alright. But more than a year? That's where things get a little iffy. Put it this way, if you're into Trophies, and you care about the leaderboards, I don't see why you would wait for more than a year (or be unable) to sync your Trophies. Most of the time you can predict when you won't be able to sync, such as for a semester abroad (been there, see how many Trophies I earned from July 13th 2016 to the start of 2017), so you'd either make the effort to get them synced or inform a member of staff that, hey, this and that is happening and those Trophies will be showing up in X number of months.

 

Any longer than that without making a pre-emptive note of what will be a late sync, and I think you should accept that you will be open for investigation. It's unfortunate but that's the situation that we've been forced into by illegitimate players and Sony's general apathy for their own Trophy system. If you've nothing to hide, then no doubt it will be easy enough to prove your innocence (and even then, the Trophies in question may not be suspect at all, e.g. some common ones)

How could you prove your innocence when the crime is late syncing?