Recent actions against some customer accounts

[Radiatonia]

To the best of my knowledge:

 

* The planet Ilum is designed in mobs and quests for level 50s. It had an area that didn't have mobs placed. It did however have slicing nodes that you could slice above 340-or-so in skill.

 

* The planet is also part of an end-game zone where Empire and Republic can take 'control' of the planet by capturing a point. It has been reported that both sides basically took turns capturing this, for unrelated quest reasons. When that happens it forced the slicing nodes to respawn, hence quicker than regular slicing nodes.

 

* Some players created characters, built up slicing and went to this area at the earliest level where they cashed the lv50 lockboxes and augments.

 

* A very small number of players basically had their lv10 characters sit there 24/7 and slice the continously respawning lv50 nodes, making extremely huge gains. Those that have done this received temp-bans but have kept the money. According to one post you could easily make 40k in 15 minutes, so we're probably talking millions.

 

* Apart from confirmed goldsellers, nobody else received temp or perm bans or warnings. Not even for: A) visiting Ilum, B) exploring Ilum, C) opening a small number of slicing nodes on Ilum at level 20, D) doing anything but farming the lv50 nodes with great regularity.

 

Quoting this again for this page.

 

 

Basically, these people were doing bad things that were exploits. I'd go a step farther and say that if you camped the nodes illegally, you should have the money that was earned earned from this removed. That way the rest of the players on the servers these players did this on don't suffer from having the economy suddenly inflate when their bans wear off.

 

Anyone thinking that this is acceptable behavior is in full on "screw you got mine" mode, or really does not understand how the economy of a server works.

 

 

And no, "IT'S BIOWARES FAULT!11!!11" is not an acceptable excuse for your or their behavior. Even assuming that Bioware left a bug in that allowed for this to happen, two wrongs don't make a right. There's certain things that are obviously exploits. And no amount of players playing rules lawyer changes that. Nor does it excuse crappy behavior on the part of the players that partook in the exploiting themselves.

Edited January 3, 2012 by Radiatonia

[zebukiel]

I am ok with there agressive stance agaisnt Credit farmers, and if a few innocents get caught up in the wake.... I am ok with it as in the long run it will benifit the majority... even if I were one to get banned it would be acceptable..

 

 

but plan and simple, if people are playing the game and enjoying it.. They wouldnt be in these zones so far under leveled.

 

People who have gone here, directly wanted some advantage that was questionable to begin with, everyone has a inner voice and feeling saying hey this might not be right... Well your inner voice was right this time. GG bioware, on handling this in a timely manor.

[WookieBob]

BAN BAN BAN and BAN again then BAN more

 

ban the people who bought power leveling - includes valor ranks

ban the goldfarmers

ban the explooiters

Ban cheaters

ban idiots- after you take their money

 

people who claim they're innocent- but were exploiting? ban instead of suspending

[Darth_Voltarie]

Stephen,

 

 

As the voice of Bioware we the people come to you seeking answers. Each of these times is an opportunity to be either an ally or an enemy of those seeking answers and this time is no different.

 

 

As you well know the population of Star Wars: The Old Republic consists of gamers both new and old, and to both the actions taken here appear rash and childlike.

 

 

Having followed SW:TOR since the beginning I believe I have a fairly good understand of the general consensus of its player base, however, rather than alienate my fellow gamers whose views may differ from mine I shall use my own experience from hence forth.

 

 

Prior to the emails in question being release a patch was applied to the game altering Slicing which by many was seen to be invaluable in obtaining credits. This was because more often than not a single mission would yield anywhere from 100% return to 500% return. Most players made tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of credits from this. Modifying slicing had a huge impact on the economy.

 

 

From my exploration of SW:TOR I have found chests that contain credits as low as 500, to as high as 15,000 and having also seen the chests on ilum in question most of those chests would fall in the middle.

 

 

For comparison sake lets say 20 people per server were taking advantage of ilum on a daily basis. Very vew of the chests on ilum can be accessed by a low level therefore lets reduce the number to 5. 5 players taking advantage of 5 chests at the same time would equate to roughly 214,000 credits an hour total or 42,000 credits per person. Compared to slicing which was used by many many players perhaps even as high as 1/5 the population of a server. The difference in economic impact is laughable. Additionally most low level players accessing said chests would be doing so to either a.) pay for crew skills b.) pay for invo slots / bank slots c.) Pay for riding skill, or d.) Other items such as vendor or exchange goods.

 

 

While I understand the importance of keeping any economy in balance the fact of the matter boils down to this. If a chest is accessible by lower players either remove the chest, prevent low levels from reaching it, or add a mob of proper level to guard it.

 

 

By "Warning" your player base who by the TOS (which I have read extensively) has committed no wrong. You alienate the vast majority of your customers and many who have had unblemished records in every other game they have played now feel disowned and labeled "Exploiter" or get the feeling they have done wrong when in actuality Bioware has simply shifted the blame.

 

 

Per the vast majority of legal documents any word which is subjective is defined either in a legend or appendix of a document so that all parties involved can understand what is proper action and what is not.

 

 

Per your statement "our Terms of Service team is extremely careful and thorough in their investigation of any potential exploit or unusual activity in-game" there thoroughness is pointless if the players do not know what is right or wrong until they have already crossed the line, and by --- Bioware --- defining 'Normal' game play you also alienate your consumer base because everyone plays differently.

 

 

To use a close proximity, in wow it was normal for any level of character to farm a gatherable resource node for long periods of time, and even chests in high level zones were farmed by rogues to profit themselves. Many ex-wow players will remember how Blizzard added new game mechanics in Botanica and Mechanar to prevent rogues from looting blue level gems without any difficulty. They did not punish their user base for taking advantage of something which was easily available, nor did they site the rogues as being exploiters but they themselves took the blame and made changes to preserve the game.

 

 

So I ask of you three things.

 

 

An apology to those who have been greatly offended by being labeled exploiters and who have been warned for what they would consider normal game play.

 

 

A clarification as to the warning itself, as to whether or not it is merely a verbal warning or an actual flag on their account. (If the later holds true than a removable of this flag from the 'warned' accounts)

 

 

And lastly send the TOS or EULA to your legal department and have them draft up a copy which actually details in detail not ambiguity what exactly subjective terms such as exploit mean and how you see it, so that your entire community may understand and not violate the rules and thereby be unjustly punished.

 

 

Thank you for your time.

 

 

-Voltarie

[fluke_nuke_em]

But it's OK, I know that no post where you try to feel superior to another person isn't complete without a rolleyes emoticon. Seriously, these forums are worse than any other forum I've ever been one.

 

I wasn't trying to feel superior to anyone. I was did a "rolleyes" because they have loads of fixes they need to implement sooner rather than later, and here is yet another one. And also at the fact that, rather than implement these fixes, they will utilize their Customer Services resources instead. I just think the whole situation is lulzy.

 

I've been on your side during this thread, but you sure know how to alienate people.

[Oogresh]

yeah this reminds me of the ensidia thing in wow.. banned for doing something you didn't know was exploiting the game.

 

did the people who made tons of gold with slicing get banned.. no you fixed the problem which is how this should have been handled imo.

[Yulivae]

* A very small number of players basically had their lv10 characters sit there 24/7 and slice the continously respawning lv50 nodes, making extremely huge gains. Those that have done this received temp-bans but have kept the money. According to one post you could easily make 40k in 15 minutes, so we're probably talking millions.

 

Well I have done something like this (at level 34 while waiting for a mate getting home from the hollydays)

 

You basically sit there at a spot and wait for the respawn of the credit chest.

It respawns exactly every 7 Minutes and has 2.5k - 4.5k and a green item in it. (btw you have those chests on every planet, but it has the most on illum in it)

 

Meanwhile I was doing guild stuff, chatting and pushing my crafting skills and other stuff.

 

So the 40k in 15 minutes thing has to be some kind of exploit.

 

I don't see how spending my time doing this is violating any rule. I don't exploit anything, I just open accessible chests!!

 

Well perheaps I will get banned after this post but I don't feel I'm doing anything wrong.

And well if BW decides to ban me for this, they will have (and it's neither a problem for me nor for them) to relinquish my 13 Euros!

 

Oh and for those blaming me for taking away the chest for the lvl 50s ... I have no problem to let anyone else open it a few times instead.

[Radiatonia]

*Ridiculous long winded post trying to justify the actions of people who exploited game design to their own benefit.*

 

 

You're not getting an apology for them doing their jobs. This is how the real world works. If you break a rule, or otherwise do something that infringes on the balance of the game in a way that is deliberate or has malice in its intent, you're going to get banned. It's as simple as that. The alternative would be to let people who do stuff like this run rampant, and screw up the game for everyone who doesn't do it. IE: Pretty much everyone else.

 

Anyone with any level of experience in MMO's (And lets be serious here, if you had the know-how to figure out how to camp Ilum for millions of credits at level 15 or so, nine times out of ten, you knew exactly what you were doing.) will tell you that what happened with the Ilum chests was not intended.

 

Chests commonly gives blues, and almost always give greens. Greens alone can sell for 1K at level 50. And if not that, close to it. Blues sell for 2K at around 42, and increase from there. That is a huge benefit for a group of people exploiting that alone. Nevermind someone exploiting slicing to get a huge amount of credits per hour. This is all before you get into auctioning them off, which is what really can screw up the economy, and make someone lots of credits.

 

Slicing in particular gives credit boxes. You might have seen these things in your quest rewards every now and then. From 30 onwards they can give up to 3-5K per box. Imagine if a level 15 character sat there twenty four hours a day, seven days a week and did nothing but farm level 50 nodes that granted their equivalent credit boxes?

 

That's not intended. That's not even in the realm of "emergent gameplay". That's exploiting the gameplay. And anyone with two cents worth of common sense can see that.

Edited January 3, 2012 by Radiatonia

[The_Grand_Nagus]

If someone is farming credits to sell that is obviously against the rules. However if they are farming them for their own use I dont see how that is any different than killing tons of NPCs and selling the junk loot.

[Aisar]

Makes me wonder what else you can get in trouble for in this game ^^

[Aisar]

You're not getting an apology for them doing their jobs. This is how the real world works. If you break a rule, or otherwise do something that infringes on the balance of the game in a way that is deliberate or has malice in its intent, you're going to get banned. It's as simple as that. The alternative would be to let people who do stuff like this run rampant, and screw up the game for everyone who doesn't do it. IE: Pretty much everyone else.

 

Anyone with any level of experience in MMO's (And lets be serious here, if you had the know-how to figure out how to camp Ilum for millions of credits at level 15 or so, nine times out of ten, you knew exactly what you were doing.) will tell you that what happened with the Ilum chests was not intended.

 

Chests commonly gives blues, and almost always give greens. Greens alone can sell for 1K at level 50. And if not that, close to it. Blues sell for 2K at around 42, and increase from there. That is a huge benefit for a group of people exploiting that alone. Nevermind someone exploiting slicing to get a huge amount of credits per hour. This is all before you get into auctioning them off, which is what really can screw up the economy, and make someone lots of credits.

 

Slicing in particular gives credit boxes. You might have seen these things in your quest rewards every now and then. From 30 onwards they can give up to 3-5K per box. Imagine if a level 15 character sat there twenty four hours a day, seven days a week and did nothing but farm level 50 nodes that granted their equivalent credit boxes?

 

That's not intended. That's not even in the realm of "emergent gameplay". That's exploiting the gameplay. And anyone with two cents worth of common sense can see that.

 

Basicly BW screwed up their system, players saw an opportunity and used it. I see no wrong doing on the player's part when they were farming chests. BW is just covering their end and strong-arming. Anyone else reminded of the Empire? lawl.

[Radiatonia]

Basicly BW screwed up their system, players saw an opportunity and used it. I see no wrong doing on the player's part when they were farming chests. BW is just covering their end and strong-arming. Anyone else reminded of the Empire? lawl.

 

Yes. How dare the developers enforce the rule of law on the product they spent years producing. What an evil company they are for ensuring players can't screw over other players.

 

Perhaps they should start force choking dissenters? It seems like it'd clean the forums up at least.

 

(I hope you can detect the intense sarcasm in this post.)

 

 

 

Fact of the matter is, it doesn't matter if there was a loop-hole. It happens. WoW had some nasty ones itself. And people cried and cried and cried when they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar on there too. It doesn't change that the players abusing the loop-hole was wrong, and a good deal of them probably knew it too.

 

What happened here was called a loop-hole, or exploit. It's what happens when a player finds a glitch in the games design theory that gives them an unfair edge. Believe it or not, it's very difficult to find every single bug in a program until you hit a large user-base. The reason being that as the size of the product increases, the harder it is for a small base of testers to find everything.

 

 

People need to grow up.

 

On a side-note: If you got caught and are one of the ones acting like Bioware killed your dog, you need to seek therapy, because that is really narcissistic of you. You were doing something very wrong.

 

And you'd have not had to ever of played a game before to look at this in-game and think to yourself "Y'know. Maybe the developers didn't intend for me to make potentially millions of credits per hour with absolutely no input to the game aside from *CLICK* every two minutes."

Edited January 3, 2012 by Radiatonia

[Samboni]

So everyone that knew there had to be some part of the story missing now know what the missing info was - people were banned for selling credits to other players. The people who were just exploiting Ilum for their own gain received warnings or temporary suspensions.

Has anyone from EA/bioware confirmed this? If true (and "selling" means for RL money) I have no problem with the bannings and I don't imagine most other people would either.

 

If not, and players were actually permabanned for camping a chest.... wow, that is an impressively bad move on Bioware's part.

Edited January 3, 2012 by Samboni

[JAFOBRIA]

so if players what to spend all day farming credits for their own use they can be warned or banned? That doesn't seem right and runs contrary to maintaining an open economy.

 

free tibet!!!! Down with mao!!!

[Radiatonia]

Has anyone from EA/bioware confirmed this? If true (and "selling" means for RL money) I have no problem with the bannings and I don't imagine most other people would either.

 

If not, and players were actually permabanned for camping a chest.... wow, that is an impressively bad move on Bioware's part.

 

The very first post in this topic answers your question.

 

Second, a smaller number of accounts were warned or temporarily suspended for exploiting loot containers on Ilum. To be completely clear, while players may choose to travel to Ilum earlier than the recommended level (40+) and may loot containers if they can get to them, in the cases of those customers that were warned or temporarily suspended, they were systematically and repeatedly looting containers in very high numbers resulting in the game economy becoming unbalanced.

 

 

If they only got a temp ban or warning, I do hope their ill gotten gains were removed from their character.

 

I'd rather not see prices globally jump upwards on my server because someone decided to dump god knows how many credits into blinging their character out at level twenty or fifty at the expense of everyone else.

Edited January 3, 2012 by Radiatonia

[Darth_Voltarie]

@Radiatonia

 

I am not arguing Bioware enforcing the rules, to the contrary if the rules were detailed enough to where the common man can understand what they mean by exploit than there would be no question as to why they have done what they did.

 

But the fact of the matter is that it is in question because they are not clear and many feel wronged.

 

But I won't go so low as to insult you as you did at the beginning of your response. I will simply ask one question.

 

If you get bored and go exploring, say level 20 and you got to a level 40 planet. You find a chest that has no guards, and the EULA clearly stats do not loot chests above your level, are you going to loot it or completely obey the EULA and ignore it?

[spaceball_]

So, what Bioware is saying is, now we can be permanently BANNED for their bad game design? They aren't going to fix what's wrong with the game and instead just ban players that were obviously only doing what comes natural if you find a very profitable spot in an MMO, credit farmers or not? This is outrageous! Those people had better have gotten refunds and an apology stating that BW was sorry that they programmed that area!

 

ANd what economy is there to ruin anyway? My toon is level 50 and I've only bought 1 or 2 things from the market, absolutely everything you need is given to you from quests and commendation gear.

[Shimmon]

Why are people not reading? They were banned for selling credits for real money and that to me sounds like a fair ban.

[Yulivae]

Yeah it's basically: here you have chests with a treasure in it ... but you are only allowed to pick them up "insert random number here" times a day

 

In my eyes, that doesn't make sense

 

 

Why are people not reading? They were banned for selling credits for real money and that to me sounds like a fair ban.

 

As it seems: not everybody was selling credits for real money. Those who were doing this absolutely deserves the ban

Edited January 3, 2012 by Yulivae

[The_Grand_Nagus]

Why are people not reading? They were banned for selling credits for real money and that to me sounds like a fair ban.

 

You apparently didnt finish reading the OP. There are 2 different issues that people got in trouble for:

 

1) farming and selling credits for real life money aka "gold farming"

 

2) farming and selling loot for in game money(credits)

 

The first is an obvious violation of the rules. The 2nd is only a "problem" because Bioware felt it was unbalancing the in game economy. However the second isnt actually against the game rules.

Edited January 3, 2012 by The_Grand_Nagus

[Samboni]

Why are people not reading? They were banned for selling credits for real money and that to me sounds like a fair ban.

You know, I thought I read it, but somehow I didn't put 2+2 together. Something with the phrasing, I dunno.

 

All the permabans was farming credits to sell for real money. Fair enough.

 

Why is this thread 40+ pages? Did everybody misread it like I did?

 

@Nagus: From what I read, nobody was permabanned for #2 in your list. Some people may have been tempbanned, but my guess is most of them were warned first.

Edited January 3, 2012 by Samboni

[chizhik]

What it comes down to is that I see game rules in black and white - an action is either allowed, or it is not. Glitching into Old Ironforge is exploiting whether I do it only once, or a dozen times. Taking my 4-week old EVE character deep into low sec to "systematically and repeatedly" run exploration sites, emerging with well over a hundred million ISK worth of loot, and then buying fittings I won't be able to use for months makes me an idiot, not a cheater.

 

With this "it's fine if you do X, but not too much" philosophy, I don't trust myself to determine what constitutes cheating in this game. It's not a good place to be.

[The_Grand_Nagus]

With this "it's fine if you do X, but not too much" philosophy, I don't trust myself to determine what constitutes cheating in this game. It's not a good place to be.

 

That really is the big problem here. They are saying it is ok to sell loot...just not too much. That leaves the player completely in the dark as to if they are doing something wrong or not.

[Radiatonia]

@Radiatonia

 

I am not arguing Bioware enforcing the rules, to the contrary if the rules were detailed enough to where the common man can understand what they mean by exploit than there would be no question as to why they have done what they did.

 

But the fact of the matter is that it is in question because they are not clear and many feel wronged.

 

But I won't go so low as to insult you as you did at the beginning of your response. I will simply ask one question.

 

If you get bored and go exploring, say level 20 and you got to a level 40 planet. You find a chest that has no guards, and the EULA clearly stats do not loot chests above your level, are you going to loot it or completely obey the EULA and ignore it?

 

Again. The first post clearly stated that they only temp banned or warned people who had done it consistently. If you had read the dev post instead of skimming through it, you could have saved yourself the time of typing up pages of text demanding an apology from the admin team for doing their jobs.

 

Second, a smaller number of accounts were warned or temporarily suspended for exploiting loot containers on Ilum. To be completely clear, while players may choose to travel to Ilum earlier than the recommended level (40+) and may loot containers if they can get to them, in the cases of those customers that were warned or temporarily suspended, they were systematically and repeatedly looting containers in very high numbers resulting in the game economy becoming unbalanced.

 

Basically, they didn't just "chance" across it. They traveled to the planet, and either upon discovering this, or upon learning of it before-hand, decided to deliberately exploit the bug for their own gain.

 

 

 

There is some serious failure at reading comprehension here. The ones that were perma-banned were the ones that tried to sell gold or otherwise exploit to screw up the economy. IE: Gold farmers like in WoW, and every other MMO.

 

If you think they deserve an unban. I'd direct you to go play something else. Because they are the bane of server economies and account security teams. They pretty much make their living off of ruining games and stealing other players accounts before getting them banned to fund their own activities.

Edited January 3, 2012 by Radiatonia

[Samboni]

That really is the big problem here. They are saying it is ok to sell loot...just not too much. That leaves the player completely in the dark as to if they are doing something wrong or not.

That's definitely a concern.

 

The real question here is how many of those people camping chests for their own use were warned before being temporarily banned.

 

If I can be banned, even temporarily, with no warning for something I have no clue is against their rules (and is not against the rules in any other MMO), that's not right. If they warn me first, no problem.