Action For The Ravager's Exploit

[Infernixx]

Don't quote me on this, but I would say that if eric is posting the specifics then the bans have already starting going out.

 

He 'did' say 'as of this post...'

[Darslk]

I still believe that their long-standing tradition of ignoring exploiters and simply fixing the exploit is what led to how wide-spread this particular exploit got.

 

If they'd come down hard on Nefra exploiters, this wouldn't have ever been an issue.

 

Yes.

 

Hopefully this marks a firm change in their policy, and all exploiters from now will be looking at account sanctions. I agree that the Ravager's exploiters really, had almost no reason to expect any bans after the Nefra incident. Sucks for them Don't exploit.

[Aurelinus]

Extreme long reaction time, but still fair. While i'm earning hard piece set by piece, some others laugh me in the face. Just next time be faster on those cases, Bioware. Edited January 29, 2015 by Aurelinus

[Frybert]

I still believe that their long-standing tradition of ignoring exploiters and simply fixing the exploit is what led to how wide-spread this particular exploit got.

 

If they'd come down hard on Nefra exploiters, this wouldn't have ever been an issue.

 

Agreed. I guess one would have to stay though 'You have to start sometime'. Still hoping their policy changes before the next big one hits.

[Taratahi]

To be fair Mr. Musco, I find you lack in vision in the matter disappointing....

 

Thought I completely agree that actions that should be taken against those that used to exploit for wealth( selling the lockouts, selling the mats or having an advantage to other crafters by selling mods to thrid parties by reverse enginering. It's not very sportive...

 

However! Using the exploit for personal reasons and just gear up your toons.... sorry that is your failure to address an issue in time. You were aware of this in PTS, you let a bugged-patch into the live servers knowing about it. And when people started posting about it, it took you weeks to do sometthing about it.

 

No offence, but you failed to take decisive action here gentlemen....

 

Further more, I will admit that even I took advantage of the lockout to help gear my own characters, I won't lie about it or be hypocritical about it.

 

However, now that you're punishing people for using the exploit. Will you compensate them now as well for the all the times you screwed up in our disadvantage? I remember that for about two weeks in 2012 I lost millions on doing Explosivie Conflict Hard Mode on repair bills cause somebody made an error with the patch and you corrected it. But the damaged was already done... and was there any compensation, like a week no repair bills... no.

 

Or a more rescent issue was for all the early acces players that lost roughly a million per character on leveling their abilities from 55 to 60. Only to hear a week later that you spontaniously decided to remove all learning costs in the future... What did we get as compensation... niets, rien, nada, niente, nothing!!!!

 

So when you make a mistake in my advantage, sorry, but than i'm just gonna take that as compensation.... You seldomly make mistakes in our advantage, so don't mind me if I take it whole like a crocodile eats a chicken...

Edited January 29, 2015 by Taratahi

[SebastiaanZ]

Hey folks,

 

As I talked about in my previous post we needed to finalize our data and ensure that we were ready to move on appropriate actions for those players who abused the Ravager’s Exploit. Since we have been a bit more open in our process regarding this particular exploit, we thought it would be best to bring it full circle and tell you specifically what we are doing to those players. As of this post, our actions against players has begun. Here are the types of actions we are taking based on the severity of their exploits:

• Received a warning along with anywhere between 1-7 days of in-game suspension time.
  
  • Anyone who received an in-game suspension will also lose their forum privileges for the same period of time.
    

  [*]For our most egregious offenders, they will have received a suspension up to a permanent suspension.

Inside of those categories of player’s it is also possible they could have very specific additional actions taken against them including:

• Removal of inappropriately obtained high-end gear and crafting materials
  
• Removal of credits and commendations
  

We know that one of the gameplay impacts from this exploit was an influx of crafters being able to make items which they reverse engineered from ill-gotten gains. Any player who exploited (regardless of severity) and gained a crafting pattern is likely to see that pattern removed.

 

So all of you know what to expect, this is an example of the messaging sent to those players who are receiving an in-game suspension:

 

 

Dear Customer,

 

We are contacting you regarding your account for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. This is to notify you that we will be taking action against your account for a violation of our Terms of Service. After a thorough investigation, we discovered the following Terms of Service violations:

 

This account participated in looting the final chest of the Ravager’s Operation without legitimately completing the content. By doing so, this account was able to acquire high-end gear, commendations or crafting patterns, or crafting materials, in a manner violating our Terms of Service and the related Rules of Conduct, specifically:

 

“… you may not engage in any of the following behavior:

 

Exploit any bug in the Service to gain unfair advantage in the game and/or communicate the existence of any such bug (either directly or through the public posting) to any other user of the Service.”

 

The action taken against your account is a <TIME> suspension and the removal of any learned crafting recipes from the use of this exploit from any characters on this account that participated.

 

It is important to note that should this account partake in any future exploit, it will receive a more severe action up to and including permanent suspension.

 

We appreciate your continued participation with SWTOR and remind you the game needs to remain fun and engaging for everyone. To prevent future situations where you may encounter a potential exploit, we encourage you to review our Terms of Service and Rules of Conduct which can be found here: http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBTERMS/US/en/PC/, and here: http://www.swtor.com/legalnotices/rulesofconduct

 

 

If you feel that this action has been applied in error, please contact swtoraccountdisputes@bioware.com.

 

Sincerely,

 

<i>Star Wars ™</i>: The Old Republic™ Terms of Service

 

We didn’t take these actions lightly and reviewed every account to determine where we could be lenient. From our end, this was a no win situation. We feel responsible for allowing the exploit to occur and remain in the game for an unreasonable length of time, but we also cannot and will not condone cheating. Thankfully, a large majority of our players didn’t exploit at all, but unfortunately, some of those who did have been with us for a long time, even all the way back to launch. It breaks our hearts to see a few of those loyal players partake in the exploit. Still, it would be unfair to not punish those players, and so we had to take action.

 

We have all learned some valuable lessons this past month or so, and we’re hopeful to catch these types of situations long before they get released or very quickly thereafter. Please continue to do what you can to notify us quickly should we create another situation where someone can benefit by exploiting a bug in the game.

 

We appreciate your understanding of our position and hope you’ll continue to enjoy your time with us. We have a lot of great additions coming to SWTOR this year and we look forward to sharing them with you.

 

-eric

 

How about you put this aside and have the team fix the damn slot machines? We all know you are not permanently removing people from the game, cause you cannot afford it.

 

(Thank god I never took part in any exploit.)

[Muzyka]

Hey folks,

 

As I talked about in my previous post we needed to finalize our data and ensure that we were ready to move on appropriate actions for those players who abused the Ravager’s Exploit. Since we have been a bit more open in our process regarding this particular exploit, we thought it would be best to bring it full circle and tell you specifically what we are doing to those players.

As of this post, our actions against players has begun. Here are the types of actions we are taking based on the severity of their exploits:

• Received a warning along with anywhere between 1-7 days of in-game suspension time.
  
  • Anyone who received an in-game suspension will also lose their forum privileges for the same period of time.
    

  [*]For our most egregious offenders, they will have received a suspension up to a permanent suspension.

Inside of those categories of player’s it is also possible they could have very specific additional actions taken against them including:

• Removal of inappropriately obtained high-end gear and crafting materials
  
• Removal of credits and commendations
  

We know that one of the gameplay impacts from this exploit was an influx of crafters being able to make items which they reverse engineered from ill-gotten gains. Any player who exploited (regardless of severity) and gained a crafting pattern is likely to see that pattern removed.

 

So all of you know what to expect, this is an example of the messaging sent to those players who are receiving an in-game suspension:

 

 

Dear Customer,

 

We are contacting you regarding your account for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. This is to notify you that we will be taking action against your account for a violation of our Terms of Service. After a thorough investigation, we discovered the following Terms of Service violations:

 

This account participated in looting the final chest of the Ravager’s Operation without legitimately completing the content. By doing so, this account was able to acquire high-end gear, commendations or crafting patterns, or crafting materials, in a manner violating our Terms of Service and the related Rules of Conduct, specifically:

 

“… you may not engage in any of the following behavior:

 

Exploit any bug in the Service to gain unfair advantage in the game and/or communicate the existence of any such bug (either directly or through the public posting) to any other user of the Service.”

 

The action taken against your account is a <TIME> suspension and the removal of any learned crafting recipes from the use of this exploit from any characters on this account that participated.

 

It is important to note that should this account partake in any future exploit, it will receive a more severe action up to and including permanent suspension.

 

We appreciate your continued participation with SWTOR and remind you the game needs to remain fun and engaging for everyone. To prevent future situations where you may encounter a potential exploit, we encourage you to review our Terms of Service and Rules of Conduct which can be found here: http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBTERMS/US/en/PC/, and here: http://www.swtor.com/legalnotices/rulesofconduct

 

 

If you feel that this action has been applied in error, please contact swtoraccountdisputes@bioware.com.

 

Sincerely,

 

<i>Star Wars ™</i>: The Old Republic™ Terms of Service

 

We didn’t take these actions lightly and reviewed every account to determine where we could be lenient. From our end, this was a no win situation. We feel responsible for allowing the exploit to occur and remain in the game for an unreasonable length of time, but we also cannot and will not condone cheating. Thankfully, a large majority of our players didn’t exploit at all, but unfortunately, some of those who did have been with us for a long time, even all the way back to launch. It breaks our hearts to see a few of those loyal players partake in the exploit. Still, it would be unfair to not punish those players, and so we had to take action.

 

We have all learned some valuable lessons this past month or so, and we’re hopeful to catch these types of situations long before they get released or very quickly thereafter. Please continue to do what you can to notify us quickly should we create another situation where someone can benefit by exploiting a bug in the game.

 

 

> added spoiler to prevent Wall-of-Text spam posting

We appreciate your understanding of our position and hope you’ll continue to enjoy your time with us. We have a lot of great additions coming to SWTOR this year and we look forward to sharing them with you.

 

-eric

 

Hi Eric,

 

Thank you, as always, for doing your best to keep us all informed.

 

Speaking on behalf of myself, my guild members, and the majority of the community members who I talk to on a regular basis, both fully support your actions, and understand the difficulty of the situation as a whole - especially when looking subjectively and realising that the majority of players who were partaking in this exploit were paying customers.

 

It is important to remember that just because someone is a customer, does not make them a loyal one. Disrespecting the ToS, exploiting for loot and monetary gain whilst blaming the developers to excuse their actions. Flaunting it in the faces of everyone around them with complete contempt and utter disregard to the consequences of their actions, with impunity, and because "it's their own fault for allowing it to be possible" etc.

 

I believe that taking a strong stance on this matter sends out a much needed message, that you & the devs care about the state of the game, and that you will not stand idly and allow these people to destroy the in-game economy, make a mockery out of any genuine progression guilds, and continuously disrespect you and the entire SWTOR community.

 

I sincerely hope your team have the strength of conviction to stand by these actions, and that you deal with repeat offenders with the same degree of contempt that they showed throught this whole fiasco.

 

Finally I would like to repeat the sentiment of my opening statement, and once more say thank you to both Eric, and the developers, for maintining an open line of communication throughout, for reverting back to us with a comprehensive explanation of your conclusions and for explaining the actions you will be taking regarding this matter.

 

Thank you, and best regards.

 

- Muzyka

for, and on behalf of <Shades of Grey> TRE (eu)

 

 

Also,

 

I know there will be people out there who do not agree with me, or who think that the SWTOR devs are at fault for this matter.

 

You are wrong.

 

No matter how or why the exploit came about, people CHOSE to abuse it. The only reason they are so butthurt now is that they were caught doing something which they knew was wrong, thought they could get away with indefinitely, and now they've had their hands slapped.

 

Just because you pay for a service, doesnt entitle you to try and take more from it than is allowed... Just as your cable company if they catch you hacking channels despite paying for a basic package...

[ptwonline]

From Eric's OP:

 

Guess it will take some time then because there are people who I know exploited that are in-game right now.

[_Coragin]

While I appreciate the good will here, I honestly think it is a smack on the wrist.

 

7 day suspension? Really?

 

And just looked at the people looting the final chest? Check who the gear got traded to. In case others have forgotten, you can trade gear gotten in OPs to another member who was also in the OP group for 2 hours. Which I am sure the exploiters thought of....

 

Make a throwaway account, buy an OPs pass on GTN, loot with said throwaway account, pass gear to main account that was also in the OPs but did not loot.

 

Exploit once? 7 day suspension.

Exploit 3 times, 30 day suspension.

Exploit 4+ times, BAN.

 

And I would check the looters to make sure they didnt just loot and pass gear to an account that did not loot to try and keep the "innocent" appearance.

[Icebergy]

Do we know when we can expect the suspensions to start? It will be pretty disruptive for a lot of guilds I would suspect, and so an approx timeframe (this weekend? next week? TODAY?) would be good to know so they can plan accordingly.

 

No sympathy here. Exploiters should have considered how their actions would impact others before they chose to cheat.

[Infernixx]

Agreed. I guess one would have to stay though 'You have to start sometime'. Still hoping their policy changes before the next big one hits.

 

I think they went about this the wrong way. They've admitted to responsibility for the whole thing, so that's good, but they should have simply instituted a clean slate policy, instead.

 

Admit to being responsible, accept the blame, give a few mea culpas and then make it abundantly clear through in-game mails and emails to all accounts that any exploiting going forward will be dealt with severely and quickly, that the days of ignoring exploits and exploiters is now in the past.

 

That way, no one can go forward and exploit and say that they didn't know.

 

You're right in that they have to start somewhere, and it's good that they've taken their share of the guilt for this debacle, but you can't get away from the fact that most of the players wouldn't have exploited if they honestly believed that BW would do anything to them for exploiting. And those players had good reason for that belief that BW didn't care.

[Kumbel]

To be fair Mr. Musco, I find you lack in vision in the matter disappointing....

 

Thought I completely agree that actions that should be taken against those that used to exploit for wealth( selling the lockouts, selling the mats or having an advantage to other crafters by selling mods to thrid parties by reverse enginering. It's not very sportive...

 

However! Using the exploit for personal reasons and just gear up your toons.... sorry that is your failure to address an issue in time. You were aware of this in PTS, you let a bugged-patch into the live servers knowing about it. And when people started posting about it, it took you weeks to do sometthing about it.

 

No offence, but you failed to take decisive action here gentlemen....

 

Further more, I will admit that even I took advantage of the lockout to help gear my own characters, I won't lie about it or be hypocritical about it.

 

However, now that you're punishing people for using the exploit. Will you compensate them now as well for the all the times you screwed up in our disadvantage? I remember that for about two weeks in 2012 I lost millions on doing Explosivie Conflict Hard Mode on repair bills cause somebody made an error with the patch and you corrected it. But the damaged was already done... and was there any compensation, like a week no repair bills... no.

 

Or a more rescent issue was for all the early acces players that lost roughly a million per character on leveling their abilities from 55 to 60. Only to hear a week later that you spontaniously decided to remove all learning costs in the future... What did we get as compensation... niets, rien, nada, niente, nothing!!!!

So when you make a mistake in my advantage, sorry, but than i'm just gonna take that as compensation.... You seldomly make mistakes in our advantage, so don't mind me if I take it whole like a crocodile eats a chicken...

 

This is a huge deal to me since I did level 5 toons and fully trained them before I heard. even worse was we preordered expainsion only to stress test and basically level under extreme lag. Love paying to do bw's job.

Edited January 29, 2015 by Kumbel

[Ardarell_Solo]

Thank you for sharing this, really appreciate the transparent way you're dealing with this, even sharing E-Mail details.

 

Very good that you are looking at each offender and adjusting punishment individually. This reads as "We want you to play our game and love it, but for the love of it, do not cheat, as you've all agreed via terms of services."

 

Which is exactly what I hoped would happen.

[Noghriwarrior]

I'm just glad we are getting more communication. Whether or not the bans/suspensions are too lenient or to severe, at least a step in the right direction over transparency was struck. yes its one problem down, a million to go, but most of the time we never get explanations so I'm happy for that.

[Rhesus_TOR]

Hey folks,

 

As I talked about in my previous post we needed to finalize our data and ensure that we were ready to move on appropriate actions for those players who abused the Ravager’s Exploit. Since we have been a bit more open in our process regarding this particular exploit, we thought it would be best to bring it full circle and tell you specifically what we are doing to those players. As of this post, our actions against players has begun.

 

We know that one of the gameplay impacts from this exploit was an influx of crafters being able to make items which they reverse engineered from ill-gotten gains. Any player who exploited (regardless of severity) and gained a crafting pattern is likely to see that pattern removed.

 

We have all learned some valuable lessons this past month or so, and we’re hopeful to catch these types of situations long before they get released or very quickly thereafter. Please continue to do what you can to notify us quickly should we create another situation where someone can benefit by exploiting a bug in the game.

 

We appreciate your understanding of our position and hope you’ll continue to enjoy your time with us. We have a lot of great additions coming to SWTOR this year and we look forward to sharing them with you.

 

-eric

 

Thank you! Thank you so much for stepping up and doing the right thing

[Nmyownworld]

Thank you for sharing this information with us.

[TUXs]

Just because you pay for a service, doesnt entitle you to try and take more from it than is allowed... Just as your cable company if they catch you hacking channels despite paying for a basic package...

Hacking?! Calm down there soldier...nobody had to hack anything. If my cable company starts showing free HBO and does nothing to prevent me from watching it free for a month, I'll be damned if I'll pay them a month down the road for it. Nobody hacked this.

Edited January 29, 2015 by TUXs

[ptwonline]

No sympathy here. Exploiters should have considered how their actions would impact others before they chose to cheat.

 

And perhaps Bioware should consider how their own actions impact others before they hand out punishment?

 

All I was suggesting is to let them know when the bans were occurring so that guilds could plan around it. Obviously the ones benefitting from that planning would be the ones who are NOT being banned.

[Max_Killjoy]

No sympathy here. Exploiters should have considered how their actions would impact others before they chose to cheat.

 

As in, not at all?

[Cinnders]

Dear Bioware,

 

You have serious bug problems that we put up with. You leave exploits up for many many weeks without fixing them or suspending account users for participating in the exploits. When any type of customer service issue arises its a miracle to get it fixed in a timely matter or at all. You have credit spammers that stick around spamming fleet and our mail boxes for days at a time. We all report them over and over and you do nothing. When the expansion came out the Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice was broken. Those of us who had early access spent a lot of money on training which was another glitch. Upon the normal release you fixed it so it cost NOTHING but did not give us paying customers a refund of credits. Your fix for Ravagers allowed players who died and left the instance by mistake to come back in and get their loot. So your "fix" caused the exploit and you didn't fix it. The Underlurker boss in Temple of Sacrificed has been bugged since release and you only RECENTLY fixed it.

 

This exploit lasted for weeks across servers. People sold it on fleet. And you didn't do anything. So now you will take away items and suspend people because your game is seriously broken. The Nefra exploit went on for months and you could get Nightmare loot with only two people in the instance. How come there was never any consequences for that? It is obvious that this game is mostly fixated on making money which is understandable because its a business. If your actions for this suspension is as severe as you have described, you will be losing a lot of paying customers. They will quit paying for a broken game and go back to some panda loving. I seriously love this game, but it is very doubtful if I would continue paying for a game where the developers have absolutely no care about their subscribers.

 

You do not have your finger on the pulse of the gaming community because I don't think if you have enough actual gamers on your payroll. You fail to see the gamers mentality or perspective. It's sad because the concept and game play is the best I've played. A guildie told me that this exploit was going to break the game and I laughed her off, stating all of the above thinking that the game developers and Bioware was smarter then that. But obviously I was dead wrong.

[Nigredo]

BW kowtows to the pitchfork care-bears and look here .. the rabid dogs still are not satisfied.. shocking huh.. even if they permanently banned everyone.. you self righteous potatoes would still complain.. oh well we'll see what happens when the dust settles.

[Darevsool]

Hacking?! Calm down there soldier...nobody had to hack anything. If my cable company starts showing free HBO and does nothing to prevent me from watching it free for a month, I'll be damned if I'll pay them a month down the road for it. Nobody hacked this.

 

Except, from what I understand, this would be more like if you had a buddy who paid for directv giving you a spare box/dish and letting you hook it up at your house watching under his account. He may pay the $5 for the extra box on his account, but it's supposed to be at the same address...not down the street or across town.

Edited January 29, 2015 by Darevsool

[shadowopsx]

Way to make a mountain out of a molehill.

 

Now that that's over, how about you stop wasting resources on this nonsense and direct them at identifying and fixing bugs in the game.

 

That kind of thinking is what is wrong with the games; if anyone can exploit at will it removes the want to legitimately get gear and mats that are actually hard to get. Please refrain from giving your opinion as it is useless.

[Feargal]

Hacking?! Calm down there soldier...nobody had to hack anything. If my cable company starts showing free HBO and does nothing to prevent me from watching it free for a month, I'll be damned if I'll pay them a month down the road for it. Nobody hacked this.

 

Can't agree with your analogy. A better analogy would be that you piggybacked off your neighbor's cable for a month until the cable company caught it and then took action to cut you off from their service. The exploiters embarked on an affirmative, intentional, course of action, they didn't just passively stand by and reap rewards.

[Drockter]

Thank you for sharing/posting Eric! Great communication.