Concerns About Players Being Suspended

[cool-dude]

Banning someone for something they paid for is what is ridiculous to me. Unless they are doing something serious, stealing account information from users, hacking your servers to get personal information, etc, long term suspensions are more appropriate.

 

that's just my view

Edited May 24, 2013 by cool-dude

[branmakmuffin]

So in other words BioWare made a system were people could exploit

That is the definition of an exploit. If the loophole did not exist, the exploit would not exist.

[sepulhead]

should check out other internet sources out there ie reddit. They have a list of those banned during this it looks like the number is way higher than 150. Looks more like thousand.

 

150 of them where wrongfuly banned the rest of them where rightfuly banned.

[SilentKitty]

Our guildie got a "We are very sorry"-mail and some extra days playtime. Just very happy to have him back in the game and that everything got sorted out

[LordArtemis]

A few folks have raised some concerns about my dismissive stance with respect to this obvious error on Bioware's part. That is understandable and expected, but I must say my opinion is hardly important.

 

However, perhaps I should address further my opinion on this matter...specifically those that received forum bans for behavior after getting unwarranted suspensions.

 

I will make a sincere attempt to not be judgmental here. Since I am prompted to clarify however, it is necessary to state my view on this behavior.

 

I think that many folks, including myself, have either come close to violating forum rules at one time, or did actually step over the line. Thankfully I personally have not pulled any suspensions, though I think I did draw a few warnings.

 

I accepted those warnings, if I remember correctly, because the only behavior I can control is my own. And I did not do that. I broke the rules and had to face that fact. So I deserved my punishment...it didn't matter that I was prompted, attacked, turned out to be correct, etc.

 

In the case of folks that were unfortunately banned from the forum due to behavior after being suspended from the game unfairly...well, IMO...and it's just my opinion which means next to nothing...they chose to act that way. Justified or not there were rules in place and they made the conscious decision to violate them.

 

That said...I think that it would be in Bioware's best interest, PR wise, to consider a soft hand with respect to this kind of situation due to the circumstances. It might be prudent to consider temporary bans instead of permanent ones in this case.

 

That's pretty much my viewpoint on the matter of personal responsibility.

[tanktest]

That is the definition of an exploit. If the loophole did not exist, the exploit would not exist.

 

 

Loopholes are all ways gonna be any place RL as well .

 

But if they come out and say it is not a EXploit imo , no two ways about it, it is not , loop hole or not .

 

Like the RE thing way back when, is still in the game and is now a intented thing, they fixed it a better way, imo .

 

SO,if it was a exploit the only real way to fix it, is stop legacy .

Edited May 24, 2013 by tanktest

[Shoogli]

They chose to act that way. Justified or not there were rules in place and they made the conscious decision to violate them.

 

I beg to differ on that specific "conscious decision" part : when you're wrongfully banned from a game you love, it may happen some people react a bit strongly on the forums. Especially when they've been heated by some other people on the forum calling them liars, cheaters and whatnot... Especially when those other people do not apologize after Eric's last post, and especially after we still see them posting as if nothing ever happened...

Edited May 24, 2013 by Shoogli

[LordArtemis]

I beg to differ on that specific "conscious decision" part : when you're wrongfully banned from a game you love, it may happen some people react a bit strongly on the forums. Especially when they've been heated by some other people on the forum calling them liars, cheaters and whatnot... Especially when those other people do not apologize after Eric's last post, and especially after we still see them posting as if nothing ever happened...

 

Remember, I'm not speaking to justification. I am speaking to making the decision to react.

 

A person, as a general rule, is not considered wrong for how they feel. Only how one acts based on those feelings. They were not forced to put fingers to keyboard, but one could say perhaps they were baited or their reaction was understandable.

 

That does not, however, remove the fact it was a violation of forum rules, justified or not.

 

Remember..I specifically stated that Bioware should, IMO, be gentle in their application of discipline. I also would like to see some rather predatory comments made by certain community members retracted, and apologies given. I will not name drop since that would be predatory on my part. Those that made comments that were obviously harsh and turned out to be completely baseless know who they are. It is up to them to demonstrate self respect.

 

But again, I can't control others. Only myself. The absolute undeniable fact that I can control myself proves that I have to make a conscious decision to react in a way that will get me suspended or banned.

 

Mercy does not translate into automatic recognition of justification.

Edited May 24, 2013 by LordArtemis

[Shoogli]

Fair enough, I think we can agree on that.

[Kesphin]

Why am I not surprised that the old white crystal I bought before 1.2 is not part of the collection but the cartel market one is?

 

Why should I have to spend 500 dollars in gambling when I already have one? Eric please respond.

[Rosiett]

Legacy items are made to send mods , repeat after me Andryah. Err tumble weeds.........

"Can be used to send mods" does not equal "Intended to be used to send mods".

 

A gun can be used to shoot oneself in the foot, but that doesn't make self-foot-shooting the intended purpose.

[SkuzBukit]

Why am I not surprised that the old white crystal I bought before 1.2 is not part of the collection but the cartel market one is?

 

Why should I have to spend 500 dollars in gambling when I already have one? Eric please respond.

 

Simply because the collections system is designed purely with cartel-market items in mind.

 

Your old white crystal was purchased with credits, the cartel ones were purchased with cartel coins - i.e. real cash (by the original purchaser anyway even if put on gtn later).

 

Not rocket-science is it?

[SithKoriandr]

I've been looking and can't find any list....but somehow I seriously doubt people were able acquire a truthful list of real people that were proven to be wrongly banned (remember, there are people who are banned, for actually using the exploit for monetary gain). Because nobody ever lies on the internet, right?

 

If you're going with that line of thinking, then you're not going to believe anything said over the internet.

 

BW...they don't have your best interests at heart, Chuixupu.

 

Now that I said that, do you believe the statement I just said?

[Swuulerian]

Having a trigger happy CS banning for exploits is a vast improvement over the standard BW approach of ignoring them like they have in the first year which subsequently borked things as fundamental as gear progression in this game..

BioWare CS has been trigger happy since day one of SWTOR. I got an official warning a couple weeks after the game released. The reason for the warnig was that I had according to the CS used a derogatary comment against others in my post.

 

What was my crime? I wrote something along the lines "An Euroweenie like me does not like the servers going down in prime time during a Friday evening".

 

One must not mock oneself on BioWare forums. If you do that you will recieve a warning

 

In all honesty I think the CS just saw some of the American posters use the Euroweenie in a post, and then blanket warned *everybody* who happened to have the word in their post. You know, if a wanted criminal is hiding on a ship, it is better to sink the ship with all hands, just to be sure. Seems BioWare still believes in that policy.

[Stoofa]

Correct, using a Legacy Weapon to move a Color Crystal which you pulled down from your Collections UI is not an exploit. This is the case because there is no way to manipulate the system to allow for a large amount of credit gain as there was prior to 2.1.0b.

 

OK, then here is a nice and simple request.

I would like all of the cartel coins that I've paid to allow my characters to "pull down" the various crystals in my collection refunded.

I read your patch notes and to me it seemed pretty clear. You obviously wanted to make more money on the cartel market and introduced a charge to allow you to get more copies of items for each character.

 

Do I just need to raise a ticket for "accidental cartel purchase" for this?

[aeterno]

BioWare CS has been trigger happy since day one of SWTOR. I got an official warning a couple weeks after the game released. The reason for the warnig was that I had according to the CS used a derogatary comment against others in my post.

 

What was my crime? I wrote something along the lines "An Euroweenie like me does not like the servers going down in prime time during a Friday evening".

 

One must not mock oneself on BioWare forums. If you do that you will recieve a warning

 

In all honesty I think the CS just saw some of the American posters use the Euroweenie in a post, and then blanket warned *everybody* who happened to have the word in their post. You know, if a wanted criminal is hiding on a ship, it is better to sink the ship with all hands, just to be sure. Seems BioWare still believes in that policy.

 

Oh I agree that these forums heavily (over)moderated in the past.

 

But I was thinking more along the lines of ingame enforcement. The RE thing was as clear an exploit as day. Non RE-able armoring inserted and extracted became RE-able. BW ignored it until it became rampant and then redesigned the system instead, even when the practice destroyed their already paper thin endgame and nearly buried the game.

 

Compared to what AN banned people from GW2 players in SWTOR have been getting away with murder. I've got no sympathy for those that abused this system to rack up a bunch of credits. High time BW started doing something about something and not just chalking it up to another instance of "creative use of game mechanics" and letting it slide.

[Zylaro]

OK, then here is a nice and simple request.

I would like all of the cartel coins that I've paid to allow my characters to "pull down" the various crystals in my collection refunded.

I read your patch notes and to me it seemed pretty clear. You obviously wanted to make more money on the cartel market and introduced a charge to allow you to get more copies of items for each character.

 

Do I just need to raise a ticket for "accidental cartel purchase" for this?

 

I was thinking the same thing. I have legacy weapons to trasfer crystals between alts but assumed this would be considered an exploit and so unlocked the crystals in collections. So can we have our cartel coins back then? and if so how is the best way to do so?

[Alec_Fortescue]

Hey yo. I am back and I officially apologize for being too furious. Turns out I wasn't a cheat! But seriously, double check things out before causing such mess and provoking further hatred :'(

 

<3 TOR and CMs who turned out to be humans

Edited May 24, 2013 by Alec_Fortescue

[Kilora]

it's late here and i haven't read everything from this quote on.

we can go back through the record and whatnot, but if kilora and andryah wanted to go ahead and say, 'wow, you were spot on curtkram. we were way off base to question you. in the future we will respect your opinion as wise and well informed.' that would be ok.

 

thanks.

 

You know why I won't say this?

 

Your opinion was based off of the same information I was given. I never attacked you -- but felt as if the majority of my earlier discussion was to show two possible sides of the story.

 

Yes -- I was wrong. I'm still surprised they are allowing us to circumvent a CC charge, as that goes against the evil EA mantra everyone keeps droning on about.

 

I respect your opinion the same as anyone elses opinion. In that you have a right to have one, and I have a right to question how you came to that conclusion.

 

It is sad that so many people were incorrectly actioned. At the same time, it is a good thing they managed to fix this in a day. They owned up to a mistake. Many companies not only take much longer to fix massive issues such as this, but also refuse to admit they made a mistake.

 

In the end, we will never know what happened. There could've been 500 different reasons peoples' accounts were flagged. To assume they purposely made a script without testing it is rather ignorant -- it sounds like someone made a simple programming mistake that happened to negatively affect an non-trivial amount of people.

 

In any event -- the mistake was made, owned up to and fixed quickly, and enough of a wakeup call to them that internal policies will obviously change. If they used this same method in the past with no issues, obviously they thought it would work properly.

 

**** happens. If it gets fixed, we should be happy. Obviously we should be concerned if they don't learn from this -- but to immediately assume a company handed out blanket bans to thousands of people for absolutely no reason, that is just moronic.

[iimagiicii]

Your reports have been fully investigated and I wanted to pass on what we discovered, and what happened as a result. As some of you are aware there were some exploits which were introduced with Game Update 2.1 around Color Crystals and Collections. These exploits were fixed with Update 2.1.0b. We take exploits in our game very seriously and we had been working to action players who had used those exploits. Yesterday was our Terms of Service team doing exactly that.

 

What occurred, and what you folks reported, is that there was a small subset of players who were incorrectly caught in this tracking and subsequently actioned. Just to give you a bit of perspective, there were less than 150 people in total who were incorrectly actioned as a part of what happened yesterday. If you were one of those players who had not been exploiting and were wrongly flagged, you should have already been contacted by CS as of reading this message. If this is what occurred to you I cannot express how sorry we are. We are going through great lengths internally to avoid situations like this happening in the future.

 

If you have not had your suspension reversed and you feel this was in error, please contact accountdisputes@swtor.com and they will be able to look into the issue further. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused, again if you were affected you should have already been contacted and if not please email the address listed above.

 

-eric

 

 

 

So you guys banned people who sold crystals they could just keep making from collections... that's rough..

[Jaing]

Here's one way to think of the Crystals.

 

Spending the CC for the account-wide unlock = you can get the crystals on any character, any server. (instant unlock, takes CC)

 

Using the legacy weapons = you can only get the crystals on that one server. (takes time and in-game credits)

 

 

Now I don't know what the aproximate value of CC is on all servers, but on my server it ranges from 600 to 1000 credits per CC depending on what type of item you're dealing with.

 

Unlockin a crystal using CC costs 60 cc (unless it's white, seriously, what's up with that). To character unlock a crystal, you have to extract it from a legacy weapon at a cost of 7.3k credits. If you have 12 characters, and want the unlock on all of them, that's close to 90k credits. The unlock through the cartel market is cheaper (relatively), but they did give us an alternate path and did not require us to pay an extra CC charge.

 

I've unlocked several crystals on several characters, just so I could change character or companion color crystals as it suits me. Spent at least 700k credits to do that. I have the credits, and I don't buy cartel coins. I'm glad that Bioware offers at least a possible path using credits instead of cartel coins.

Edited May 24, 2013 by Jaing

[Ottoattack]

I am really confused (primary because I do not understand the whole collections system). So if I have a legacy weapon, then I send a crystal i got from cartel market from one character to another that is an exploit?!

[oofalong]

As one of the players erroneously banned, I will say I was pleased with the end result (even if the journey was not fun). To recap, Bioware recognized their mistake, very appropriately apologized for it, and offered 3 days compensation. Considering we were suspended for basically 24 hours, that seems fair. Still, those 24 hours were worrying.

 

 

1. Upon appealing I was given no confirmation that my appeal email was even received; a simple auto-response saying we received your appeal and will look into it would have been reassuring.
    
    
   
2. I was also not given any estimate of how long the appeal process would take even by calling customer service. Knowing that we were approaching a holiday weekend for the US and that the Gree Event was back for a limited time, I was very interested in knowing if an appeal takes hours or days.
    
    
   
3. Next, early yesterday there were no posts of any sort from the community mods, then they started post the usual stuff despite the community raging about the suspensions still. Unfortunately, the long silence from the mods did nothing but further my fears and worries. I don't know when a decision was reached within BioWare, but a simple update before the successful resolution would have been nice.
   

 

In any event, for 24 hours I was unable to play SWTOR, which is a bummer especially because it could have been prevented. Still, I hope everyone involved learns from this - BioWare can improve their process of identifying accounts to suspend/ban and their appeals process while the community can work on maintaining their calm and composure even in the face of fiery issues.

 

Incidentally, during my suspension I was also banned from the forums. Yet, it seems other players were not. I wonder why...

[oofalong]

So you guys banned people who sold crystals they could just keep making from collections... that's rough..

 

Excluding mats, companion gifts and now reputation tokes, nothing from the Cartel Market has ever been vendorable. I feel this has been well documented and clearly understood. Thus, if you found a way to make limitless money via the Cartel Market and Collections, specifically, I feel you should have been aware that this capability never existed before. And, if you utilized this technique to profit unfairly I think you are probably also competent enough to recognize that this was not intended. If you did it once or twice on accident, I hope your suspension has been rescinded.

 

I appreciate some will feel the same way about sharing Collection Crystals via Legacy-bound weapons, but let's not rehash that debate.

[Jaing]

I am really confused (primary because I do not understand the whole collections system). So if I have a legacy weapon, then I send a crystal i got from cartel market from one character to another that is an exploit?!

 

Not an exploit. The exploits were selling some of the duplicated crystals to vendors (can't be done anymore), and reverse engineering some of the duplicated crystals for mats (can't be done anymore). Those were both mentioned in the 2.1.0b patch notes here although they weren't specifically stated in the notes as being exploits.

 

Those were the exploits, those were the bannable offenses. Unlocking crystals per-character using legacy weapons was no doubt unintended, but the mechanics in this game that the devs created, and support, allow that to happen. So you can spend 7.3k per crystals, per character, to unlock them using legacy weapons. That was not one of the listed exploits, and Eric gave us specific confirmation that it is an allowed action.

Edited May 24, 2013 by Jaing