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The True Story of the Massive Wave of Recent Bans
Mrhockey
Member Posts: 5
In the past few days over 100 accounts have received bans of various natures, from permanent bans to 7 day bans. The bans have been a result of a dupe, which allowed players to clone items and cash from their inventory. Originally, a number of those duping had planned to sit on their stockpile of goods and cash so that they would never have to grind again. Yet like the criminals who pull off the perfect caper, but can't keep their mouths shut, the actions of the exploiters did more to implicate themselves in the matter than any active investigation.
The Duping began around 9/8 when a recent patch cause stability issues with the auction house zone server. Players were able to replicate items from their inventory via the auction until 9/12-/914 when patches closed the bug. The exploit was widely know by 9/10 and numerous people took an active roll in duping items during this time period. During this initial phase the original dupers, began handing out items to their society mates, econ alt accounts, trusted friends and lot swap partners. Most of these secondary holders were told that there was an active exploit and these were ill gotten goods.
For the first few days the primary dupers and secondary holders were able to keep quite and go about their usuall business. Then temptation got the better of a handful. Player events were sponsored with suspect money and items, people just handed out ships and cash to other players, others went on wild spending sprees, while some listed items for well below cost on the Auction House. One player had duped so many items that he had no way to move all the goods. Via nation chat, he offered players a 50k haulage fee if they purchased the items in on port sailed to another and re-listed the same goods on the other ports auction house.
All this erratic behavior attracted the attention of other players who quickly noted something was rotten in Denmark, and Flying Lab Software (FLS) followed up with a full investigation. On approximately September 18'th the primary dupers began to receive bans on the accounts that had done the actual duping. With in two days, the primary dupers, secondary accounts, which had been used to mule the goods, had been banned. FLS has widened their banning scope with in the last 48 hours, banning players who have received any ill gotten goods, knowingly and unknowingly, for 7 days and removing the goods. As the scope of the bans has widened FLS has begun to ban players receiving ill gotten goods via the auction house. This has drawn criticism from players as the Auction House is a blind bid system.
There are current reports of player backlash against the bans. Players have taken to overpaying by millions of dollars for items in the blind auction house system. In the hopes of implicating as many other people as possible in the exploiting. Players are also listing good well below market value for the same reason.
FLS appears to be manually going through each individual's accounts associated with ill gotten goods and banning the players who posses them and removing the goods. There is currently no information on when Flying Lab Software will have restored it's economy to the pre-exploit state and conclude it's investigation in this wide reaching exploit.
Comments
The issue is, FLS banned a massive quantity of players (some permanently, including myself) who were not involved and had no knowledge of the events which ultimately lead to the bannings. FLS screwed the pooch big time in this move. I do agree that cheaters should be banned, but FLS carried this out in a monumentally bad manner.
never played this game but i just read the post and think the company did exactly what they should have done. unfortunately they have no way to tell if you knew or not because they were not sitting there when you acquired said duped items. its guilt by association and you have to pay for it.
No the issue is a small group of people, members of your society, found an exploit and used it to make so much they actually had the power to completely crash the economy. They continued to use the exploit after FLS told the player base not to list on the AH, and they passed their ill-gotten gains out to others on the various servers. The number of people and servers the ban hit only goes to show the depth of the problems they caused.
Given the option of giving a ban to more than were involved, sorting it out and then letting the innocent back in and letting the exploit go and crashing the economy I think I know where a majority of any player base would fall.
If you are truly innocent I'm sure the logs will prove you out. Until then I guess you've learned to be careful who you play with in a game. I wonder if you've joined them in Dark Fail. If so that shows how little of a lesson you've learned.
So by your analysis, anyone who bought a duplicated ship off of the auction house should be banned? There is absolutely no way to prove anything, and so FLS should have banned only those they were 100% sure had actually exploited. Randomly banning players because you think they might have done something illicit is not good business strategy.
People who were banned but did not exploit have also been permanently banned from the forums as of several hours ago. This suggests to me more and more that FLS has something to hide.
noone who posts on this forum probably knows anything about how to run a business. especially people that come on here pissing and moaning that they got banned and got banned on the forums for doing something illegal in the game.
Too funny, you are comparing the huge amount of items you were given with buying a ship. I've not heard they banned anyone for buying a ship on the AH unless the ship was listed below cost and purchased right after the list at an out of the way port.
I also haven't seen them "randomly ban" people. Until you are willing to admit you grouped with a bunch of cheaters and gained from their efforts you probably won't be invited back.
As for your line that "FLS has something to hide" I'm still smiling over that one. What could they have to hide? Pretell what have they done that would cause them to "hide" by banning more people? Frankly I wish they could charge you and your buddies for all of the time they are having to spend going through the records to find out who did what. You messed up. Best to admit it and move on to something else. You still haven't answered if you are hanging around with the cheaters in a new game which tells me a lot.
One day you will get out of high school and learn that not everyone is picking on you. Sometimes your own actions actually are the reason things happen.
Edit: It was items he was given and not items he gave.
That many people STILL play this POS game?
And you post this tripe here, as if any of the general gaiming community still give a flying f**k what Flying Lav Software does?
That many people STILL play this POS game?
And you post this tripe here, as if any of the general gaiming community still give a flying f**k what Flying Lav Software does?
POS game? if you say so. but i still play this game and so do alot of others. guess you think because you don't like everyone has to as well. guess what skippy there alot of players who like this game and still play.
The company did what they needed.
There is no excuse for cheating. Accepting any duped items is cheating. It's exploiting and the account should be banned.
Anyone saying otherwise is just crying about getting caught cheating.
SHOHADAKU
Yikes.. that is bad. I played this awhile back for a few days, wasn't really my thing.. but I can understand why the obvious abusers were banned, and the ammount of effort they seem to be putting into their research is admirable to say the least. But as for the *blind* auction bidders that seems a bit too extreme.
Also, instead of mass banning for a problem they created why the hell didn't they just roll back their servers? Can someone say "lol"? Surely they kept a back-up of pre-patch, most games do this before applying a patch to avoid such problems.
Which leaves me to think of nothing other than the famous saying: "Don't hate the player, hate the game".
About 4 people from BSS (one of the largest socs in the game, had been dominating two different servers at the same time a few months back) exploited this.
They should be banned, yes.
The people who got a free ship from a BSS member to compete in a 1v1 tournament a few weeks ago all got temporary bans.
The people on servers where BSS didn't even play but were lot-swapping (as in, someone logs in to a lvl 2 toon on Roberts and does econ for someone, and that someone does the same for them on Antigua.... extra econ slots without buying extra accounts) got temporary bans.
The people who bought a ship off the auction house that was listed by a BSS member were banned.
Yes, banning exploiters is the right way to go and I'm glad FLS finally did something about it(see this thread), but randomly banning anyone who ever did anything with BSS isn't the right way to go about it... I know a lot of people quit over this.
The fastest I've ever leveled a character to 50 and run missions for items needed in PvP is about 24 hours. They didn't patch this until 48 hours after the exploit was released, and didn't ban anyone or delete the duplicated items for another 10 days. That's enough time to level 12 toons to 50 all by myself, if i were to be playing for 12 days strait all by my self (lol).
That's enough time for all the non exploiteres to make over 2mil doing daily missions every day, all solo
Rolling back the servers would punish anyone who wasn't part of this, and wouldn't really hurt anyone who did abuse this exploit.
I was one of those who received a 7 day ban (which ended up only being 2 days) because I had bought exploited goods off the auction house. I only blame those who exploited for causing the grief, as the right thing to do would have been to report the issue, rather than exploit it. The problem got so bad and the guilty parties were abusing it so much it was causing lag on the servers.
FLS couldn't roll back, as many players (again, like me) had been running their economy, doing missions, pvp, rvr whatever since the patch went live and rolling back would have affected all, rather than just those touched by this. So it was all damage limitation in my eyes. Although I didn't like it when I saw the message, when I spoke to someone at support and they explained the ban was only to remove the exploited goods, I was fine. I got the money I spent on the items back and, as I said above, I was back in and enjoying the game after 2 days.
The long and short of it is this. Those who have been given perma bans were those who directly used the exploit. They can tell that as they told me they look at what you've been doing eco wise but also things like chat, where you've been in the game etc. Those who only received the items as a result of the exploiters got a temporary ban while FLS removed the items.
Those who are saying otherwise are only butthurt that they got caught. It's their own stupid fault and they've caused many players like me great annoyances, all to earn piles of cash quickly. I'm glad FLS has banned them so I can carry on playing, safe in the knowledge that people like them are no longer in the game.