BioWare, this is an ALL-OR-NOTHING situation

[Acyu]

Originally Posted by JovethGonzalez

Hi everyone,

 

I just wanted to be clear and let you all know that we’re definitely aware of individuals who took extreme advantage of this situation and we will be carefully evaluating and taking action as necessary.

 

 

Translation: "I will do something if I feel like it."

 

This is what is referred to as an "illusory promise." A promise that has no binding effect on the parties whatsoever.

 

What the quote means is simply that BioWare will have unlimited and unsupervised discretion over who they ban, for how long, and even whether they want to ban at all.

 

The bottom line is, no one will even notice.

 

I can almost guarantee that there is not a single player who has EVIDENCE (a screenshot) of another player's valor rank BEFORE the server went down, and a screenshot of that same player right now, after the supposed "extreme advantage."

 

What this means is that there is no way for the player community, which is all that matters, to oversee or make sure BioWare actually does something about this. This translates to BioWare not doing anything.

 

Let me give you a real situation that happened on my server:

 

A player used a simple bot to queue/join/leave warzones from 11-45. So was such a well-known botter that whenever he joined a warzone, that team would report him and assume they are one person down.

 

At level 45, this person, a Sith Juggernaut, found a bug in the Juggernaut storyline that allowed him to repeatedly kill an wave of "ambush" as part of the story objective. This ambush, which consists of 3 "weak" mobs, took less than a minute to kill. The objective gave 20K XP upon completion. He was able to get 20K XP per minute and that prompted him, a habitual botter, to actually manually level from 45-50 (not that it took him long at all).

 

After he hit 50, he continued to bot. Two days later, he was seen in warzones with almost full champion set and at 51 valor rank.

 

Later that day, he was banned.

 

One might assume that with an offense THIS SERIOUS, the only possible punishment would be perma ban or a deletion of character since he basically did not earn anything on that character.

 

Guess what the punishment was? A week ban and a warning not to do it again.

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Ilum 1.1 is much different from the above situation. There was no "exploit," but instead people capitalized on a design flaw, a mistake that BioWare themselves made. It's human nature. This is not some speed hacking, botting, or any other form of cheating.

 

So what do you expect BioWare to do in this situation? Probably nothing.

 

There were not "gears" gained from Ilum 1.1, but only valor ranks that may or may not have given you access to battlemaster gear (it is impossible to go 1-60, or even 40-60 with Ilum 1.1) depending on your existing valor ranks.

 

You didn't get mass credits or gears. So a rollback? Not likely.

 

As much as people want to claim, valor ranks is NOT that significant, nor is it GAMEBREAKING. If you were close enough to battlemaster, you got it, but you were going to get it soon anyway and you probably had full champion gear to begin with. If you were no where close to 60V, you got sent closer, but you're not there yet (50-60 is a long grind). The three pieces you can purchase immediately, compared to their champion counter-parts, do not even give that significant of an advantage.

 

A rollback would create MORE problems than it solves, even though that is the "right thing to do," simply because there are plenty of people who received gears today from all other sources of PvE/PvP. Imagine if someone got his RNG last piece champion gear today, from a bag that has nothing to do with the "valor exploit," and his gear was rolled back. How would that person feel?

 

Believe it or not, there is no "separate" backup for valor ranks on a MMO system, because it is not a currency and it is not an item.

 

This is an all or nothing situation. It is either a complete ROLLBACK ("system restore") or they leave it as it is and make bullcrap promises like the above.

 

And it seems like BioWare already made their decision on the subject - see quote.

 

A rollback is NOT going to happen.

[Drengir]

All they need to do is check their logs/metrics. It should be rather obvious that you exploited if you gained 100k valor today, or went from valor rank 27 to 54.

 

It wont be hard to check, and it should result in a valor reset and/or a ban. Especially considering that bioware statet that something was not working as intended and that they were looking into it.

 

And no, defending yourself with "Bioware should have shut down the servers or not released the patch if this wasn't intended". rofl.

[Acyu]

First, you drastically overestimated the amount of ranks gained today. And you drastically overestimated BioWare's effort.

 

They have ZERO incentive to "ban" these 0.00001% of players that NO ONE WILL EVEN NOTICE.

 

If i took them over a week to even do ANYTHING about a server-wide known botter, what makes you think they will even TRY to ban anyone.

 

As far as logs/metrics go, I think you're way overestimating the power of that as well.

 

Forgive me for bringing WoW up, but whenever WoW implemented a patch that had "gamebreaking" effects, they rollback everything. And Blizzard is 1000X better than BioWare at customer service. Good luck trying to get BioWare to take such specific, time intense, and worthless action.

 

Soon people will be calling on BioWare to provide a list of names of the people they banned, their valor rank gain, and SCREENSHOTS of their characters.

Edited January 19, 2012 by Acyu

[Kirbyg]

1k valor per minute is what I was getting on the republic while getting stomped. BM rank is a big thing, and you have no idea what you are talking about if you say otherwise. If its not rolled back, the reality of this will show soon.

 

100k is an underestimate, by far. If I got that with only 0-2 nodes held, then what were they getting with 5 and killing me at the spawn constantly.

 

When I can log into the sith side and see BM ranked individuals with green gear it makes me sick.

[Talkative]

I heard you know what you're talking about.

 

But then I read what you wrote and realized you can't be right.

[Mackuss]

It doesn't matter, OP.

 

I'm not even trying to be mean to either party, but they don't give a **** about what you have to say - or what anyone has to say. If you take a step back and think about it, even in the giant threads of people complaining about something, and that have an official response in them (most notably the thread about hi res textures), even though they said "we are looking into this" yadda yadda, nothing is happening, nothing happened, and nothing will happen.

 

They're pumping out content instead of fixing ANYTHING. And look at the list of things they're "fixing" - it's so arbitrary, lol.

 

what about the numerous spots in the IA story that made it unplayable? Or the numerous quests that were broken? And the STILL unscavengable nodes?

 

lol, F this game and company that doesn't care about its customers and product.

 

P.S. Compare Rift two weeks after release, and this game NOW, a month after.

[Mackuss]

All they need to do is check their logs/metrics. It should be rather obvious that you exploited if you gained 100k valor today, or went from valor rank 27 to 54.

 

It wont be hard to check, and it should result in a valor reset and/or a ban. Especially considering that bioware statet that something was not working as intended and that they were looking into it.

 

And no, defending yourself with "Bioware should have shut down the servers or not released the patch if this wasn't intended". rofl.

 

Can you tell me what was being exploited? Also, what happened today that made everyone want a rollback? Please respond in detail.

 

Thank you.

[Astarica]

Just cap today's valor ranking at 50K. That's more than what it takes to go from 59-60. If that's somehow 'easy' to get for you, then you must already be a Battlemaster and shouldn't care about gaining valor to begin with.

[Nightfalll]

bioware isnt going to do a damn thing to those players.

 

 

guaranteed

 

 

Theyre just saying that stuff to appease us, the players that are actually getting screwed....

 

Dont be so naive people..........Put your grown up glasses on for once

[klathnagma]

Believe it or not, there is no "separate" backup for valor ranks on a MMO system, because it is not a currency and it is not an item.

Loled and quite hard. What do you know ?

 

Do you really think there is a need of a separate backup to make a rollback ?

 

They got to have any sort of DB system one way or the other.

 

Do you know what is data mining ?

 

Do you have any expertise in the field ?

 

You don't need yo have a separate backup to rollback part of information from a database system.

 

You can setup another server instance, load the backup, get the relevant data and apply that data change to the current database system, make a backup of the current data just for disaster recovery as last backup is invalid and go for a coffee.

 

Belive it or not, you are quite clueless of what a DBA can do with data if you think that there is technically imposible to get that data out of the backup, extract in with the proper queries and apply the changes to the curret database.

[Dalnar]

LOL, why they would need screenshots in age of databases ? Just compare databases, find abusers, nuke them to hell.

[EternalFinality]

Exactly. Bioware pulls the most limp-wristed cover-my-bases response and expects everyone to be satisfied? Here's the appropriate response:

 

"Servers will be rolled back to the state of 10 AM (or whenever) January 18th. We are terribly sorry for the inconvenience but such a change was for the good of the game. We are providing 2 extra days in compensation to every active player."

[Sylriana]

Here's the appropriate response:

 

"Servers will be rolled back to the state of 10 AM (or whenever) January 18th. We are terribly sorry for the inconvenience but such a change was for the good of the game. We are providing 2 extra days in compensation to every active player."

 

Yeah. ****** your entire playerbase to cover for a minor glitch is totally the "appropriate" response.

[EternalFinality]

Yeah. ****** your entire playerbase to cover for a minor glitch is totally the "appropriate" response.

 

There is absolutely nothing minor about what occurred today. Anyone who thinks so is a complete fool.

[SigmaRho]

The amount of crying that has gone on today is epic, this is just more for the QQ waterfall.

[Sylriana]

There is absolutely nothing minor about what occurred today. Anyone who thinks so is a complete fool.

 

A small glitch that effected a tiny fraction of the playerbase and even then only when playing in a certain zone definitely falls under the "minor" heading.

[Laserus]

A small glitch that effected a tiny fraction of the playerbase and even then only when playing in a certain zone definitely falls under the "minor" heading.

 

I don't know about your server but ever 50 I know got at least 6k valor just doing the daily illum today in less than 20min, the ones who stuck around got wayyyyyy more. I fully expect half the players in the warzones tomorrow to be rocking their newly minted battlemaster titles.

[Acyu]

Loled and quite hard. What do you know ?

 

Do you really think there is a need of a separate backup to make a rollback ?

 

They got to have any sort of DB system one way or the other.

 

Do you know what is data mining ?

 

Do you have any expertise in the field ?

 

You don't need yo have a separate backup to rollback part of information from a database system.

 

You can setup another server instance, load the backup, get the relevant data and apply that data change to the current database system, make a backup of the current data just for disaster recovery as last backup is invalid and go for a coffee.

 

Belive it or not, you are quite clueless of what a DBA can do with data if you think that there is technically imposible to get that data out of the backup, extract in with the proper queries and apply the changes to the curret database.

 

I find your optimism amusing.

 

This is a business. You allocate your resources based on the profit it can generate. It is irrelevant whether it is possible to datamine and replace the valor ranks people gained together. All that is relevant is whether BioWare has the "incentive" to allocate "precious resources" to complete this task.

 

A character restore takes an average of 6-8 days.

 

An item restore takes longer because it is not an escalated-type ticket.

 

I never said it wasn't "technically possible." But instead that BioWare has ZERO incentive to waste time to do so.

 

Why? Because unless they actually provide proof to the community that they did so, no one will believe them. Because the "extreme abusers" comprise of such a TINY population of the player-base that it would be pointless to ban them or revert data on them.

 

Reverting EVERYONE's valor is much easier than reverting SOME people's. However, you cannot just revert everyone's because people WZ for valor too.

 

So what constitutes "extreme abuse." 100K valor? 200K? 300K? It's entirely discretionary and arbitrary.

 

There won't be any bans/rollbacks/actions whatsoever.

Edited January 19, 2012 by Acyu

[EternalFinality]

A small glitch that effected a tiny fraction of the playerbase and even then only when playing in a certain zone definitely falls under the "minor" heading.

 

Tiny fraction....lol

[Crujido]

Umm, lol at this entire post.

 

Why would Bioware ban over 80% of the game already?

 

Aion did, they seem to be doing wonderful lol

[Acyu]

Tiny fraction....lol

 

Keep in kind they're only punishing "Extreme abusers." I'm assuming they're talking about the people who stood there and farmed for like 10 hours straight. People who were there for like an hour or two won't have anything done to them.

 

Therefore, yes, it's a TINY fraction compared to the entire player base.

[Acyu]

Umm, lol at this entire post.

 

Why would Bioware ban over 80% of the game already?

 

Aion did, they seem to be doing wonderful lol

 

Reading comprehension is hardddddd

[aeterno]

This would be so easily avoided if they simply put a daily valor gain cap in place, like dare I say most other mmos do with similar "currencies".

[AtmaTheWanderer]

A small glitch that affected a tiny fraction of the playerbase and even then only when playing in a certain zone definitely falls under the "minor" heading.

 

What if this had happened to an ops group, and the hard mode had been inadvertantly altered to be easier and faster than the normal mode version? What if that change had enabled hundreds of players to gain access to the best raiding gear in the game?

 

If this happened, people would be screaming bloody murder, and demanding a rollback. Why is it different that it happened for PVP instead of PVE?

 

Just because it is "just PVP" does not change the severity of this situation. On a vast number of servers, Imperials outnumber republic 2 to 1 at a MINIMUM, and there is already a huge gear rift being created. And this gear rift is a multiplicative problem, due to how extremely unbalancing expertise gear is in a PVP environment. So, basically it's very much a "rich get richer while the poor get poorer" situation. The situation that occured today is beyond twisting the knife, it's wrenching it around.

 

There is no answer, no response, or no correction that will suffice for this situation other than a complete and full rollback of valor gained in Ilum yesterday/today. I have very little incentive to continue on the path to 50, and thus keep my subscription active, knowing that what awaits me in PVP at 50 is my team of poorly geared republic going up against Battlemaster geared Sith. Game after game. With no chance of winning because expertise creates a 30-40% swing in damage taken versus dealt.

 

This is really the first big PVP "Oops" that has been made. It's easily correctable. I'm not advocating punitive action, but a loss of valor (and in the case of any Battlemaster gear obtained, deletion of said gear). If anything, the players who were camped should be awarded some additional valor as compensation for the horrendous waste of their time the situation created.

 

BioWare has a major problem on their hands - basically, there is a massive population imbalance due to the simple fact that it is blindingly obvious far more dev/artist time and creativity was invested into the Imperial side. Find me a Sith player willing to argue that they don't have better looking gear, better looking ships, better looking/written companions, better story, better voice acting...

 

Find me that player, and you can have all of Qyzen's points. And that statement, by the way, pretty much ends that debate.

Edited January 19, 2012 by AtmaTheWanderer

[Astarica]

What if this had happened to an ops group, and the hard mode had been inadvertantly altered to be easier and faster than the normal mode version? What if that change had enabled hundreds of players to gain access to the best raiding gear in the game?

 

If this happened, people would be screaming bloody murder, and demanding a rollback. Why is it different that it happened for PVP instead of PVE?

 

Just because it is "just PVP" does not change the severity of this situation. On a vast number of servers, Imperials outnumber republic 2 to 1 at a MINIMUM, and there is already a huge gear rift being created. And this gear rift is a multiplicative problem, due to how extremely unbalancing expertise gear is in a PVP environment. So, basically it's very much a "rich get richer while the poor get poorer" situation. The situation that occured today is beyond twisting the knife, it's wrenching it around.

 

There is no answer, no response, or no correction that will suffice for this situation other than a complete and full rollback of valor gained in Ilum yesterday/today. I have very little incentive to continue on the path to 50, and thus keep my subscription active, knowing that what awaits me in PVP at 50 is my team of poorly geared republic going up against Battlemaster geared Sith. Game after game. With no chance of winning because expertise creates a 30-40% swing in damage taken versus dealt.

 

This is really the first big PVP "Oops" that has been made. It's easily correctable. I'm not advocating punitive action, but a loss of valor (and in the case of any Battlemaster gear obtained, deletion of said gear). If anything, the players who were camped should be awarded some additional valor as compensation for the horrendous waste of their time the situation created.

 

BioWare has a major problem on their hands - basically, there is a massive population imbalance due to the simple fact that it is blindingly obvious far more dev/artist time and creativity was invested into the Imperial side. Find me a Sith player willing to argue that they don't have better looking gear, better looking ships, better looking/written companions, better story, better voice acting...

 

Find me that player, and you can have all of Qyzen's points. And that statement, by the way, pretty much ends that debate.

 

The funny thing is I bet most people who are already BM prior to Ilum might claim they'll quit but probably won't, because these guys (I am one of them) still already have the gear. It's the guys who missed out on the crazy valor gain that will feel it is unfair when they get crushed by a Battlemaster, since they'll just assume it's some guy who got lucky during the crazy valor gains, and felt they were wronged.