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FC takes no action against PvP exploiters
Rawiz
Member UncommonPosts: 584
So, it seems FC took no action against players who exploited their way to PvP XP lvl 5. All they did was fix the exploit and allow every single exploiter keep wearing the gear.
Pretty horrible decision to make in a PvP game when you can get a huge advantage over honest players by exploiting.
It really seems that exploiting is never punished by FC, maybe because of low subscription numbers so they can't afford to lose anymore?
Comments
This is it for me, I will now not ever play Age of Conan or any funcom game again, it's completly unacceptable not to permantly ban the pvp level 5 people when it's not possible to be that level without exploiting.
Any game where the developer prefers to take money from cheaters than give a fair gameplay experience deserves to completly fail.
Of course it's not possible to idenfity everyone that cheated like this but all pvp level 5 and probably all level 4's should either be permantly banned or a 2 week ban + character deletion. Punishments need to be strong otherwise next time there is an exploit everyone will know it's the right thing to do to exploit it, many already knew that from funcoms discraceful handling of the gem dupe, it would have been harder to identify the cheaters in that case though but this time people are basically wearing big signs saying I'm a cheating low life but you don't dare ban me becuase you need my money.
I just hope the remaining players voice their opinions with their wallet and the game gets what it deserves.
Of course if funcom suddunly annouce the banning of 2000 people I'll take all of this back and apologise.
I've noticed the moderators deleteing perfectly reasonable threads about this issue over the past couple of days, of course if someone posts how to exploit their post should be deleted and the account warned/banned but there is no reason to take down threads talking about one of the most serious issues relateing to age of conan. If this thread dissapears then I guess mmorpg.com isn't the site I thought it was.
lool they are going to let the exploiters get away with it? Unreal. Guess they cant afford to lose the members. Saying that they are going to lose a hell of a lot more if they dont rollback.
Avery any idea where the thread has gone which linked the official EU forums moan post about the pvp exploiters. Can not understand why that thread was deleted....All it showed was 100's of peed of players threatening to quit, not sure why it has been deleted from these forums again or is anything remotely negative being removed from these forums too.
When are you guys gonna wake up and see who youre dealing with? ITS FUNCOM! What makes you think they would do anything about this exploit when they didnt do anything about the gem duping exploit? For those of you who stuck it out playing AoC I feel bad for yah. I would feel cheated too.
Funcom has to be the worste gaming company I have ever seen. They never cease to amaze me on the mistakes they make with their games and continue to make mistakes over and over again. The writing is on the wall. Funcom is goin down and its gonna go down big.
There was at least 2 threads on the subject here deleted, neither of which explained how to do the exploit so there was no reason to delete them and even if someone did post the exploit then you delete thier post not the entire thread, I can't really articulate how disapointed I am in the moderation here by deleteing those threads, it meant the moderation was even more pro funcom on that issue than the funcom moderaters on the actual aoc forums.
I had always concidered the moderation here to be fair but I can't see where they are coming from on this issue at all.
Funcom never punished people in the past for exploiting, why would they start now? Why is THIS incident suddenly a big deal, when there are countless incidents of exploiting in the past that have gone equally as unpunished?
Is the current playerbase just completely unaware of how often this has occured with funcom, or do they just cling to a false hope that it will be dealt with the NEXT time?
Such a lot of noise over something people should be used to by now. Its not even worth posting about anymore.
Waiting for: A skill-based MMO with Freedom and Consequence.
Woe to thee, the pierce-ed.
I firmly believe they don't know right from wrong at Funcom. I mean not morally, what is morally right about taking people's money for something you promise, but never deliver, LOL. But even ethically.
Case and point this issue, also I'll cite the exprience I had on Tyranny. I informed my guild of about 250 players (we came from another dying server) maybe 150-175 were still active at the time that we needed to seek a stable populated server and that we should go to Tyranny because they were a stable active bastion. This was in the last month I played AOC. We invted members from our guild and invited new members. Members were promoted to the level that they could access the bank and also promote new members. Everybody was expected to work together to help build that guild. Within 2 weeks, that guild has been destroyed by a member.
Upon contacting a GM, I was told by the GM the name of the player, who was last to leave, and that all members, (100+) had left within several seconds. So I asked them to investigate and ban the individual who left last. They would not. Nor have they enabled guild rights by guild masters, so that we can intelligently establish a guild so this could not happen. Just like hundreds of other exploits they don't bother to manage.
This is an exercise in fucking their customers over. Pure and simple.
Back in June, when people were posting about everyone quitting.. One of the responses was "who cares how many people quit, I'm having fun".
This is exactly what happens with low population games. You have no QA to test content, you have no GM's to monitor the exploits, and you have a financial incentive NOT to ban anyone.
If this had been a game with a high populations
1. QA would have caught the bug before it made it into the game
2. GMs would have been in the game to catch exploiters
3. Players that did exploit would have gotten banned.
Dying games die fast. Its a fact of the industry.
Anyone who endured through AO's release AND the shadowlands debacle knows enough to stay well clear of any funcom sh*t. They keep repeating their mistakes with shoddy programming and clearly Lying to the playerbase. The shadowlands thing was the best ive ever seen - released a year+ too soon and then they inserted bugs to stop people from progressing through the content because the next content in line wasnt even on the damn cd they sent.
- Oh are you only getting 1 xp from every mob? oops
- Oh is the quest-mob you have been looking for not spawning at all? oops
- Oh do all the mobs in this dungeon have 10 times their normal HP so you cant finish it and move on? oops
- Ah there we patched and now its working, incidentally now the server database contains data on mobs in higher level areas than elysium. oops did that give us away?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
1 xp per kill seems particularly conspicious. I mean how can that even slip? Single player and grouping would have to have been tested. Nobody noticed that a lot of differnt group combinations, in fact the majority of them, yielded 1 xp per kill for the group.
Yeah right. WTG FC you losers. .
Jesus way to shoot yourself in the foot Funcom. Never mind the players that will leave. What about thoes that might have come back due to the PVP patches?
I was burnt by AOC when it was launched and left after my first month.
But ive been reading through the last 2 patch notes and thought things might have changed, especially with the new director. And i liked what i was reading... i decided that i was going to give AOC another chance. Before anyone points this out i know what my avatar currently is, but that's Funcoms fault and would have been changed if my opinion of the game had changed after playing it again.
That wont happen anytime soon. I see that the same old attitude, decision making and poor communication still reins supreme. I had the client reinstalled 3 days ago and was prepared to fire it up this weekend after my exams are over.
Ive uninstalled it today.
Seems that things havent changed much. This is why FC and Sony ( not just SOE but anything made by Sony or its spin offs) are off of my Christmas list barring pigs flying or hell freezing over
"Who cares who quits" in an MMO is right up there with "well things couldnt get worse" in RL, lol
Everyone reactivate your AoC account and exploit your way glory!!!
Its almost how it feels when exploiters are not punished. When in Rome..
The problem is they fixed the exploit. So the people who did exploit now basically have a permanent advantage.
And what it tells players is that when the next exploit comes along, you better exploit that one and not wait for something fair to be done about it.
Be interesting to see what our Correspondants thoughts are on this subject. Its ok advertising all the *proposed* upcomming patches and saynig how wonderful everything is in Hyboria. But you have to take the rough with the smooth.
As Avery is pretty close to Funcom be interesting to see if he knows or can find out what FC's stance on this topic is. Are they going to let the exploiters get away with this? Are they thinking about a rollback? Is Funcom not banning expoiters accounts because theres simply not enough of them left to ban?
This is their official word and stance:
Tarib
Senior Community Manager
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since today's update corrected an exploit for the PvP consequence mechanic, players have been asking about the plans to "punish" players who possibly exploited the system before the fix. We are aware that some players indeed gained PvP experience in a very fast manner. However not all of the players raising fast in the PvP ranks exploited the mechanic and we don't have any automatic guaranteed foolproof way to determine the exploiters from the honest players. The only 'fast and dirty' approach would be to roll back everyone's PvP XP to what it was before last week's update.
But this would mean that many thousand players would have lost what they worked hard for to gain. Not only players with PvP level 4 or 5 but also those players who just made it to level 1 or 2 or 3. We can't punish the vast majority for an issue with one mechanic a few players have decided to exploit so we decided to not roll back PvP XP. We will however keep on investigating single cases and take action where needed. This is, as you will understand, a time consuming and difficult task.
We will of course keep you up to date about any news in that regard. But as of now, we do not consider a PvP XP rollback to be the right course of action.
__________________
Oliver 'Tarib' Kunz
Senior Community Manager
After reading the forums for the past 30 mins or so, Both EU and US, it seems there are more legitimate people posting who don't want to loose their XP with a roll back. There are also many people who are in favour of a roll back too both people who have obtained levels and mainly those that haven't played since the main update.
If we remember back a few months FC was pretty harsh with exploiters and these were dealt with on a more one to one basis.
They do say that they are investigating single cases and taking action. I have even read GM responses to encourage this.
I think it's a tough choice for them, it's not about loosing people by getting the banhammer out. Population woes are often exaggerated when you consider the bigger picture for all servers, I got 6 guys on 6 different servers now and see the difference big time. It's my opinion population has nothing to do with it.
Remember when people were obtaining gold / city materials etc in an exploiting fashion. There is no reason not to think that FC will deal with "reported" exploiters any other way then they have done previously, and that is harshly. They are looking at reported issues and taking action..
It's a cop out of the highest order, of course it's not possible to punish everyone but it is possible to punish a large segment of the people who cheated. Every single 1 of the people who are pvp level 5 cheated, it's not possible to have done it so quickly, the same is pretty much true of the level 4's too so you ban all level 4 and level 5 people, be ready to look into any of the level 4's who complain quickly just in case it was legit.
perfection shouldn't be the enemy of the good, just because they can't get everyone who cheated doesn't mean they shouldn't punish all of the obvious ones.
I feel the exact same contempt for funcom after that post as before, it's just spin.
On the Euro boards Tarib stated they aren't going to do a rollback but they are looking back through logs to find people that used scripts and other methods to cheat the system.
Taribs comment was about scripts that could locate exploiters, if they have any kind of loggin in theyr game , it should be pretty trivial to locate the exploiters through a query , if they dont log things tough , they are majorly screwed and for all future exploits , ill give it some days before i give my final vote on this game. extremely sad if they dont fix this because i was really enjoying my last couple of months in this game.
Im sorry but who is running the show over there at Funcom? I mean come on! Roll Back for certain, across the board. Consider 2.0 a bone you were thrown to keep you busy while funcom finished a snack patch for you?
That top paragraph should read something like : Notice to all players, we here at funcom were so depserate to give you ANY patch that we decided yto patch in an exploit, weather you knew about and took advantage of it or not. ALL PLAYERS WILL BE RESET TO PVP STATUS 0 and the slate is wiped clean. This our fault because we have our heads up our collective BUMS and we apologize.... Anything but that weak sauce ...
That above basically says this " We dont want to piss the rabid fanbois off, so honesty went out the window in hopes of being able to keep the lights on through thanksgiving. Have a nice DAY!"
SUCKERS! Wow I just cant believe this companies ability to stick its foot in its mouth OVER and OVER and OVER.... bad form... just bad form....
Why are you blaming Funcom?Cheating exists everywhere lamers can do it.You can blame the players,they are the ones trying to ruin the games.I have seen so many different cheats over my time ,it is amazing that i still see new ones creeping up.Sure we like to see players punished for there actions,but can FC really pinpoint who cheated and who did not?
I remember way back when,wondering what people saw in the game Counterstrike.I thought hmm a bunch of kids looking to cheat so i looked up cheats for CS.LOL i was amazed to see the cheats took 3 scrolls of my screen to see them all,there was literally over 100 just for that game alone.You can just look at how many cheat sites are out there.Go into one of there chat rooms and you will see tons of little cry babies begging/pleading insisting they need a cheat to get by in life.
It is an epedemic and it will NEVER go away.The type of game design that would remove cheating would also remove 90% of it's interest,so it's a no win situation.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
This is FUNCOMs own words from their :policy
The investigating of exploits in Age of Conan is based on two sources of information: Reports from players and reading through logs. All reports received through mail and petition is used to get exploits out of the game.
In addition, we are able to find detailed information about characters. This is used to find characters that have disproportionate amounts of credits or are augmenting in level faster than we would expect.
It is important not to spread information about exploits after they have been discovered, as the team needs time to solve the problem. It is dangerous to tell you that we are working on a fix, because this information could lead to more people learning about the exploit and using it. While the team is working on it, please don’t tell anybody about the exploit.
Created 5-20-2008
Modified 7-28-2008
This is their own policy and words. According to them they have very easy ways of tracking cheating. What would it cost them to deal with cheaters? Nothing, meaning they probably are doing it on a low profile basis when reported cases are material. Thanks god for that. It makes me feel much safer that they have a system in place to kill off real cheaters. Imagine some 15 punk reporting you for a cheat " I saw him in PvP level 3 yesterday and today you are lvl 5" and that this somehow would get you banned or nerfed. Be glad cheating is handeled the way it is and that FC handels these issues as professionally as they do.
I appologize for not capturing that Apprentice/Mentor bug on TL though. Well it is anyway all good now with the hotfix.
Tarib's post is just some damage control it seems. I find it really hard to believe that anyone is actually getting banned for this at all. Weathering the storm and all that..
Even if I'm wrong on that, it will still leave everyone who only exploited up to like pvp level 3,5 totally unpunished.
FC should've taken drastic action instantly on this one, because it's by far the worst exploit that could've happened in their pvp game.
Rollback of less than a week would've at least shown that they can make tough decisions.
With such a small player base they can't ban people, is just that.
I for one am blaming both party's you cant just Blame FC yes we know they screwed up but if these so called fanboys had a real love for the Game then they would have Notified FC of the Exploit and not taken Advantage of it so yeah we can blame the Players as well as FC.