118297-reported-gold-exploit

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== Content ==
			
Hello all,
 
We are aware of the gold exploit feedback that has been circulating social media and the forums.  At this point, we are working to get a hotfix put together as soon as possible.  A rollback will not be necessary at this time; the current scope of abuse is not outside our ability to manually correct where necessary.  Please understand, if you have abused this exploit, we will be taking action against your account.  As you all know, we take exploits seriously and will not hesitate to lifetime ban accounts that have been caught abusing any exploits.
 
That being said, if you have used this exploit - you have 24 hours to contact Customer Support.  They will confiscate your exploited items and reduce your punishment.  This is a one-time offer, I suggest you take it.
 
 
I will be posting more info as I have it.   
 
 
UPDATE 8:45pm PST: We have disabled gardening in order to prevent further abuse.  Read details here.	
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I should roll an Esper. I feel especially psychic today ;).
 
Posted about 1 minute before this thread:
 
{| class="blockquote"
Lets put roll backs into context: assuming we take them at their word they have 200k subscribers with a base cost of 15 dollars per month, every free day they have to give out as a result of roll backs is literally $100,000 pissed into the wind. With this having spun up 2 days ago, we're already looking at over a quarter of a million dollars GONE if they resort to rollbacks.
 
That's how far down the apocalypse flowchart things have to fall before they even vaguely consider it. Bans, fixes, and detangling the marketplace by hand if necessary are WAY less damaging to the company than the poison cocktail of days of free game time + every innocent player in the game having their legitimate activities erased back to patch day + plus the bad press field day of the Drop 3 being delayed two months for bug fixes only to contain the most degenerate bugs to date.
 
Seriously, let them get out a mop and a dust pan rather than leaping straight for the nuclear option ;).
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			Thank You for the update!	
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			yay \o/ As we all know a rollback would have hurt Tony the most. o/	
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Good to hear you're doing something. Hope those exploiters burn. :)
 
But, this doesn't address the other problems here. What about all the items purchased with the gold created? Or the CREDD? Prices have over doubled as it has been rapidly purchased.	
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			Sounds like a good solution :)	
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			yay, I get to keep my quest progress in the Defile! :D	
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{| class="blockquote"
Hello all,
 
We are aware of the gold exploit feedback that has been circulating social media and the forums.  At this point, we are working to get a hotfix put together as soon as possible.  A rollback will not be necessary at this time; the current scope of abuse is not outside our ability to manually correct where necessary.  Please understand, if you have abused this exploit, we will be taking action against your account.  As you all know, we take exploits seriously and will not hesitate to lifetime ban accounts that have been caught abusing any exploits.
 
That being said, if you have used this exploit - you have 24 hours to contact Customer Support.  They will confiscate your exploited items and reduce your punishment.  This is a one-time offer, I suggest you take it.
 
 
I will be posting more info as I have it.   
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So carbine makes tons of money off credd due to market going nuts. 
 
Real reason for no roll back. Carbine just made a TON OF MONEY since players bought credd. I know of tons of people who bought it today just because of high prices.	
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			Wonder just how reduced the punishment for these guys will be for cooperating. I realize it will make it more convenient to clean the market with them turning themselves in, but... If they're not catching a lifetime ban, I feel something should be done so their crime is permanently visible to the community. Maybe force renaming them to have "cheater" in their name?	
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			So when will ban actually go out? The next few days should be interesting.	
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			Thanks for updating us Tony, go gettem!	
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{| class="blockquote"
So when will ban actually go out? The next few days should be interesting.
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			Really glad the way you guys are handleing this. Thanks for the post Tony.	
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{| class="blockquote"
So carbine makes tons of money off credd due to market going nuts. 
 
Real reason for no roll back. Carbine just made a TON OF MONEY since players bought credd. I know of tons of people who bought it today just because of high prices.
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{| class="blockquote"
LOL some guild you might know has tons of exploits but carbine turns the blind eye at them. But you all seem to stay around. Why they are making this "deal" since they play double standards. Wildstar will be officially dead I think soon enough for how wide spread this issue seems to be. Just a matter of time.
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yay! no rollback!
(i start 2 days ago and i played 22+ hours =). rollback can kill my all account! )	
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{| class="blockquote"
LOL some guild you might know has tons of exploits but carbine turns the blind eye at them.
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			Cool.  Pretty much what I expected.	
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Asking people to report themselves sounds like you're not at all sure that you can find everyone who exploited and fix everything.
 
I also really doubt that you can manually correct the already broken economies without doing a rollback. This exploit touched a lot of things.
 
But we'll see, I hope it will work out but I'm sceptical. 	
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No, they probably dont know every account that did it yet, but if they troll through the logs they will.
 
The "own up to it" says to me that they would rather spend their time on the game then waisting man hour catching people who may hand themselves in	
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{| class="blockquote"
So carbine makes tons of money off credd due to market going nuts. 
 
Real reason for no roll back. Carbine just made a TON OF MONEY since players bought credd. I know of tons of people who bought it today just because of high prices.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
LOL some guild you might know has tons of exploits but carbine turns the blind eye at them. But you all seem to stay around. Why they are making this "deal" since they play double standards. Wildstar will be officially dead I think soon enough for how wide spread this issue seems to be. Just a matter of time.
 
 
They sold 28,000 copies last Quater and only 16,000 so far now. Game isn't doing good at all. 
 
http://i.imgur.com/AVPKAKk.png   <---------------- Sales Report
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{| class="blockquote"
So carbine makes tons of money off credd due to market going nuts. 
 
Real reason for no roll back. Carbine just made a TON OF MONEY since players bought credd. I know of tons of people who bought it today just because of high prices.
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			Thanks for the update, Carbine! I hope steps will be taken to return the CREDD and commodities markets back to normal.	
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			What about people who passed off some of their exploited plat to friends/alt accounts/etc? Can this be tracked so those people also have their stuff confiscated? Because I've seen this happening.	
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{| class="blockquote"
LOL some guild you might know has tons of exploits but carbine turns the blind eye at them. But you all seem to stay around. Why they are making this "deal" since they play double standards. Wildstar will be officially dead I think soon enough for how wide spread this issue seems to be. Just a matter of time.
 
 
They sold 28,000 copies last Quater and only 16,000 so far now. Game isn't doing good at all. 
 
http://i.imgur.com/AVPKAKk.png   <---------------- Sales Report
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{| class="blockquote"
They sold 28,000 copies last Quater and only 16,000 so far now. Game isn't doing good at all. 
 
http://i.imgur.com/AVPKAKk.png   <---------------- Sales Report
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{| class="blockquote"
 
 
They sold 28,000 copies last Quater and only 16,000 so far now. Game isn't doing good at all. 
 
http://i.imgur.com/AVPKAKk.png   <---------------- Sales Report
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			Thanks Tony	
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{| class="blockquote"
LOL some guild you might know has tons of exploits but carbine turns the blind eye at them. But you all seem to stay around. Why they are making this "deal" since they play double standards. Wildstar will be officially dead I think soon enough for how wide spread this issue seems to be. Just a matter of time.
 
 
They sold 28,000 copies last Quater and only 16,000 so far now. Game isn't doing good at all. 
 
http://i.imgur.com/AVPKAKk.png   <---------------- Sales Report
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{| class="blockquote"
What about people who passed off some of their exploited plat to friends/alt accounts/etc? Can this be tracked so those people also have their stuff confiscated? Because I've seen this happening.
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{| class="blockquote"
Asking people to report themselves sounds like you're not at all sure that you can find everyone who exploited and fix everything.
 
I also really doubt that you can manually correct the already broken economies without doing a rollback. This exploit touched a lot of things.
 
But we'll see, I hope it will work out but I'm sceptical. 
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{| class="blockquote"
What about people who passed off some of their exploited plat to friends/alt accounts/etc? Can this be tracked so those people also have their stuff confiscated? Because I've seen this happening.
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{| class="blockquote"
Doing this without a roll back is going to be... tricky. Maybe we'll all get another 30 boom boxes out of this. :)
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{| class="blockquote"
Wonder just how reduced the punishment for these guys will be for cooperating. I realize it will make it more convenient to clean the market with them turning themselves in, but... If they're not catching a lifetime ban, I feel something should be done so their crime is permanently visible to the community. Maybe force renaming them to have "cheater" in their name?
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{| class="blockquote"
Asking people to report themselves sounds like you're not at all sure that you can find everyone who exploited and fix everything.
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Hopefully they turn themselves in if they care about the game - i can see how this can be fun but it really isn't when people get screwed over more than you profit.
 	
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{| class="blockquote"
It sounds more like Carbine is wanting to offer people a chance to admit their mistakes and apologize, so they don't have to swing the banhammer too hard. It's a compromise. The players keep their accounts but lose their exploited gains, while Carbine has an excuse not to pass out a ban wave. They're probably not at the stage where they can mass ban a bunch of accounts and not suffer financially for it.
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			Well, this is disappointing news to see.  I just about had enough plat to buy a CREDD, and was going to see if I couldn't supplement my game time with gold.  With this news, it seems the market is far too inflated and will take time to balance itself.  To exploiters, It seems you *cupcake*d up the economy...I'll have to check the dmg when I log in for the night. 	
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This is the time that you don't mess with Carbine, because if you mess with Carbine...
 
 
...you get the 209. Two-oh-nine. Tony.
 
Yeah, you get Tony. 24 hours to comply.	
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{| class="blockquote"
LOL some guild you might know has tons of exploits but carbine turns the blind eye at them. But you all seem to stay around. Why they are making this "deal" since they play double standards. Wildstar will be officially dead I think soon enough for how wide spread this issue seems to be. Just a matter of time.
 
 
They sold 28,000 copies last Quater and only 16,000 so far now. Game isn't doing good at all. 
 
http://i.imgur.com/AVPKAKk.png   <---------------- Sales Report
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The opportunity to turn yourself in isn't for the people who made 1,000s of plat. As someone mentioned above, that's the quick road to a 50 year ban instead of lifetime. Its so that people who cycled the exploit a few hundred times or less can plead their case, get the slap on the wrist, and move on. Injecting 2-5 platinum into the economy is mice-nuts. That's you got one rare drop in a time where they just wiped tens of thousands of plat worth of purples out of circulation with the no-notice BoP change. The turbulence from that economic shock is probably what masked the first few hours of this.
 
When there was the snowflake loop in Guild Wars 2 I cycled it around 150-200 times. Not to make some kind of mad monies - it was a rare opportunity to test salvage rates using the exact same object a few hundred times. I didn't sell anything. I had basically no impact on the larger economy whatsoever. I quite publicly reported my actions and motivations and I didn't even get a frowny-face email while other people were getting baned for the same basic action... carried out orders of magnitude more times.
 
With things like this its important to realize that SCOPE means something. That and your actions afterwards are subject to even more scrutiny than the "exploitive" behavior itself.	
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{| class="blockquote"
With things like this its important to realize that SCOPE means something. That and your actions afterwards are subject to even more scrutiny than the "exploitive" behavior itself.
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{| class="blockquote"
It's just a bummer that some people can't see beyond their own grubby fingers.  Most people believe they're invincible.
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			And humans deserve the occasional $60 lesson in not being a dick.	
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			MRW when I comeback to WS after a day of class.	
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{| class="blockquote"
Stop spreading misinformation if you don't know what those numbers even mean. That's not 16,000 game copies, it's 16,000 x 1 million Korean Won. 16,000,000,000 KRW = $14,607,360 USD, which is how much money WildStar earned in the last quarter. What combination of that is box sales, subscriptions, or CREDD, we don't know. But 16k box sales? No, it's a heck of a lot more than that.
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props to thacheez!
 
thank you for no rollbacks!-was gonna enter omni tonight!...was waiting for carbine feedback!	
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Awesome!!! Way to make a stand against the abusers! 
 
Also +1 to Nike's idea of a wall of shame. 	
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{| class="blockquote"
So carbine makes tons of money off credd due to market going nuts. 
 
Real reason for no roll back. Carbine just made a TON OF MONEY since players bought credd. I know of tons of people who bought it today just because of high prices.
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			Can someone briefly explain to me what's happening? I've been away from the game for a while but this seems interesting.	
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{| class="blockquote"
Can someone briefly explain to me what's happening? I've been away from the game for a while but this seems interesting.
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{| class="blockquote"
This is why there was no rollback. Go back and read what Tony said again.
 
 
 
The focus is all on "we will punish the bad people and take their stuff." No where in there does he guarantee that the items or plat that have been cycled through the market will be affected in any way. 
 
The amount of plat you get for 20 bucks just shot through the roof. I guarantee you that cash sales of CREDD just shot through the roof. The exploiters have just been told "you have 24 hours to move everything to other accounts, gift it to friends, launder it through the market."
 
This is fundamentally no different from what Carbine did when they announced that ratings tankers in PvP would be banned once drop 2 went out. Once people knew that they'd be just fine until then, they redoubled their efforts to keep milking the system for plat as hard as they could before the party was over.
 
And Carbine raked in the proceeds from the CREDD sales the entire time.
 
Tony, I get that you need the money. I get that it must be really agonizing to look at the cash you're pulling in from CREDD right now and question whether you should keep it or give it back. And I'm not going to make some smarmy argument about you should do a rollback and send that money back because it's the right thing to do. Your job is to make money. Not doing a rollback lets you keep the money. I get that.
 
The reason to do a rollback and give that money back is because when you make a profit off of some of your players cheating, the rest of us slowly come to realize that even if you didn't directly plan it with them, even if you didn't actively collaborate with them, you put the system in place where you could make a profit off of the damage to the game that happens when cheaters trash the experience for the rest of us.
 
If you don't make it clear that you refuse to make that profit, then what you do make clear is that you're just fine with making a buck off of your customers getting screwed, as long as there's someone to punish for it other than you. And when that happens, a lot of people will walk away and never come back.
 
Your game took a real hit from what happened here a few months ago with PvP. What you choose to do here can cause it to take another real hit.
 
Choose wisely. Because the players are listening.
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			Well now I'm curious about something. I had listed CREDD to sell last night before this happened. I'm sure when I get home it will be sold. If it is I think I may submit a ticket asking for my $20 back in exchange for the plat back considering the exploit. Just to see what the response is. I think I could make a good case. I may lose out on 5-10 plat but meh, I just want to see what the response will be.	
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{| class="blockquote"
This is why there was no rollback. Go back and read what Tony said again.
 
 
 
The focus is all on "we will punish the bad people and take their stuff." No where in there does he guarantee that the items or plat that have been cycled through the market will be affected in any way. 
 
The amount of plat you get for 20 bucks just shot through the roof. I guarantee you that cash sales of CREDD just shot through the roof. The exploiters have just been told "you have 24 hours to move everything to other accounts, gift it to friends, launder it through the market."
 
This is fundamentally no different from what Carbine did when they announced that ratings tankers in PvP would be banned once drop 2 went out. Once people knew that they'd be just fine until then, they redoubled their efforts to keep milking the system for plat as hard as they could before the party was over.
 
And Carbine raked in the proceeds from the CREDD sales the entire time.
 
Tony, I get that you need the money. I get that it must be really agonizing to look at the cash you're pulling in from CREDD right now and question whether you should keep it or give it back. And I'm not going to make some smarmy argument about you should do a rollback and send that money back because it's the right thing to do. Your job is to make money. Not doing a rollback lets you keep the money. I get that.
 
The reason to do a rollback and give that money back is because when you make a profit off of some of your players cheating, the rest of us slowly come to realize that even if you didn't directly plan it with them, even if you didn't actively collaborate with them, you put the system in place where you could make a profit off of the damage to the game that happens when cheaters trash the experience for the rest of us.
 
If you don't make it clear that you refuse to make that profit, then what you do make clear is that you're just fine with making a buck off of your customers getting screwed, as long as there's someone to punish for it other than you. And when that happens, a lot of people will walk away and never come back.
 
Your game took a real hit from what happened here a few months ago with PvP. What you choose to do here can cause it to take another real hit.
 
Choose wisely. Because the players are listening.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
LOL some guild you might know has tons of exploits but carbine turns the blind eye at them. But you all seem to stay around. Why they are making this "deal" since they play double standards. Wildstar will be officially dead I think soon enough for how wide spread this issue seems to be. Just a matter of time.
 
 
They sold 28,000 copies last Quater and only 16,000 so far now. Game isn't doing good at all. 
 
http://i.imgur.com/AVPKAKk.png   <---------------- Sales Report
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Well now I'm curious about something. I had listed CREDD to sell last night before this happened. I'm sure when I get home it will be sold. If it is I think I may submit a ticket asking for my $20 back in exchange for the plat back considering the exploit. Just to see what the response is. I think I could make a good case. I may lose out on 5-10 plat but meh, I just want to see what the response will be.
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{| class="blockquote"
Awesome!!! Way to make a stand against the abusers! 
 
Also +1 to Nike's idea of a wall of shame. 
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{| class="blockquote"
I think you've got a good case too, considering that it's very likely the exploiters used their plat to buy up all of the available CREDD and then re-list it for much higher prices because they now had an effective lock on the market.
 
Frankly, you'd be a lot better off with your twenty bucks than you'll be if you're stuck with only a third of the plat that 20 bucks is now worth as a result of that exploit.
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{| class="blockquote"
Hello all,
 
We are aware of the gold exploit feedback that has been circulating social media and the forums. At this point, we are working to get a hotfix put together as soon as possible. A rollback will not be necessary at this time; the current scope of abuse is not outside our ability to manually correct where necessary. Please understand, if you have abused this exploit, we will be taking action against your account. As you all know, we take exploits seriously and will not hesitate to lifetime ban accounts that have been caught abusing any exploits.
 
That being said, if you have used this exploit - you have 24 hours to contact Customer Support. They will confiscate your exploited items and reduce your punishment. This is a one-time offer, I suggest you take it.
 
 
I will be posting more info as I have it.
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			Bringing down the ban hammer, yay! Not sure what you're going to do about auction house and stuff, if anything can be done to it apart from roll back ( which you say you wont do)
			
				
	Edited November 14, 2014 by BusterCasey
	
		Language	
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{| class="blockquote"
This is why there was no rollback. Go back and read what Tony said again.
 
 
 
The focus is all on "we will punish the bad people and take their stuff." No where in there does he guarantee that the items or plat that have been cycled through the market will be affected in any way. 
 
The amount of plat you get for 20 bucks just shot through the roof. I guarantee you that cash sales of CREDD just shot through the roof. The exploiters have just been told "you have 24 hours to move everything to other accounts, gift it to friends, launder it through the market."
 
This is fundamentally no different from what Carbine did when they announced that ratings tankers in PvP would be banned once drop 2 went out. Once people knew that they'd be just fine until then, they redoubled their efforts to keep milking the system for plat as hard as they could before the party was over.
 
And Carbine raked in the proceeds from the CREDD sales the entire time.
 
Tony, I get that you need the money. I get that it must be really agonizing to look at the cash you're pulling in from CREDD right now and question whether you should keep it or give it back. And I'm not going to make some smarmy argument about you should do a rollback and send that money back because it's the right thing to do. Your job is to make money. Not doing a rollback lets you keep the money. I get that.
 
The reason to do a rollback and give that money back is because when you make a profit off of some of your players cheating, the rest of us slowly come to realize that even if you didn't directly plan it with them, even if you didn't actively collaborate with them, you put the system in place where you could make a profit off of the damage to the game that happens when cheaters trash the experience for the rest of us.
 
If you don't make it clear that you refuse to make that profit, then what you do make clear is that you're just fine with making a buck off of your customers getting screwed, as long as there's someone to punish for it other than you. And when that happens, a lot of people will walk away and never come back.
 
Your game took a real hit from what happened here a few months ago with PvP. What you choose to do here can cause it to take another real hit.
 
Choose wisely. Because the players are listening.
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Come on folks- the conspiracy theory is ridiculous. They didn't roll back because it would've sucked for a ton of people. It's that simple.
 
I doubt any additional CREDD sales due to not rolling back (I'm skeptical there are any) would even be a blip on the radar in terms of profit.	
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{| class="blockquote"
Come on folks- the conspiracy theory is ridiculous. They didn't roll back because it would've sucked for a ton of people. It's that simple.
 
I doubt any additional CREDD sales due to not rolling back (I'm skeptical there are any) would even be a blip on the radar in terms of profit.
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{| class="blockquote"
Oh, and big respect for them when they offer people who exploited a pardon if they turn themselves in within the next day.  :lol: Mad props for that one. It would be a terrible shame if exploiters got banned for cheating.
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			While I'm sure there were purchases of CREDD because of this exploit, I think the profit that Carbine made from it might be getting blown out of proportion. You're assuming the entire community knew about the exploit. I'd like to think the majority of the community wasn't aware of it (I wasn't), which is probably why they're able to identify the guilty without a rollback. Just my two cents, since the servers are down and I'm here having a read. :)	
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			UPDATE 8:45pm PST: We have disabled gardening in order to prevent further abuse.  Read details here.	
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{| class="blockquote"
While I'm sure there were purchases of CREDD because of this exploit, I think the profit that Carbine made from it might be getting blown out of proportion. You're assuming the entire community knew about the exploit. I'd like to think the majority of the community wasn't aware of it (I wasn't), which is probably why they're able to identify the guilty without a rollback. Just my two cents, since the servers are down and I'm here having a read. :)
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{| class="blockquote"
UPDATE 8:45pm PST: We have disabled gardening in order to prevent further abuse.  Read details here.
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			GJ Carbine, perma ban the bunch of them.	
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{| class="blockquote"
Hello all,
 
We are aware of the gold exploit feedback that has been circulating social media and the forums.  At this point, we are working to get a hotfix put together as soon as possible.  A rollback will not be necessary at this time; the current scope of abuse is not outside our ability to manually correct where necessary. 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
While I'm sure there were purchases of CREDD because of this exploit, I think the profit that Carbine made from it might be getting blown out of proportion. You're assuming the entire community knew about the exploit. I'd like to think the majority of the community wasn't aware of it (I wasn't), which is probably why they're able to identify the guilty without a rollback. Just my two cents, since the servers are down and I'm here having a read. :)
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{| class="blockquote"
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{| class="blockquote"
UPDATE 8:45pm PST: We have disabled gardening in order to prevent further abuse.  Read details here.
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			What was the exploit and how profitable it was? I'm wondering how it have messed up the economy..	
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{| class="blockquote"
What was the exploit and how profitable it was? I'm wondering how it have messed up the economy..
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Chua recommend subjecting all Humans to Science.
Chua promise will never abuse again.
 
 
On a serious note, banhammer all the way to be honest.
If you cannot play the game honestly, you don't deserve to be playing at all.	
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{| class="blockquote"
That being said, if you have used this exploit - you have 24 hours to contact Customer Support.  They will confiscate your exploited items and reduce your punishment.  This is a one-time offer, I suggest you take it.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
What was the exploit and how profitable it was? I'm wondering how it have messed up the economy..
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
This is why there was no rollback. Go back and read what Tony said again.
 
 
 
The focus is all on "we will punish the bad people and take their stuff." No where in there does he guarantee that the items or plat that have been cycled through the market will be affected in any way. 
 
The amount of plat you get for 20 bucks just shot through the roof. I guarantee you that cash sales of CREDD just shot through the roof. The exploiters have just been told "you have 24 hours to move everything to other accounts, gift it to friends, launder it through the market."
 
This is fundamentally no different from what Carbine did when they announced that ratings tankers in PvP would be banned once drop 2 went out. Once people knew that they'd be just fine until then, they redoubled their efforts to keep milking the system for plat as hard as they could before the party was over.
 
And Carbine raked in the proceeds from the CREDD sales the entire time.
 
Tony, I get that you need the money. I get that it must be really agonizing to look at the cash you're pulling in from CREDD right now and question whether you should keep it or give it back. And I'm not going to make some smarmy argument about you should do a rollback and send that money back because it's the right thing to do. Your job is to make money. Not doing a rollback lets you keep the money. I get that.
 
The reason to do a rollback and give that money back is because when you make a profit off of some of your players cheating, the rest of us slowly come to realize that even if you didn't directly plan it with them, even if you didn't actively collaborate with them, you put the system in place where you could make a profit off of the damage to the game that happens when cheaters trash the experience for the rest of us.
 
If you don't make it clear that you refuse to make that profit, then what you do make clear is that you're just fine with making a buck off of your customers getting screwed, as long as there's someone to punish for it other than you. And when that happens, a lot of people will walk away and never come back.
 
Your game took a real hit from what happened here a few months ago with PvP. What you choose to do here can cause it to take another real hit.
 
Choose wisely. Because the players are listening.
----
			Were all the servers effected by this? Or were more so than others?	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Hello all,
 
We are aware of the gold exploit feedback that has been circulating social media and the forums.  At this point, we are working to get a hotfix put together as soon as possible.  A rollback will not be necessary at this time; the current scope of abuse is not outside our ability to manually correct where necessary.  Please understand, if you have abused this exploit, we will be taking action against your account.  As you all know, we take exploits seriously and will not hesitate to lifetime ban accounts that have been caught abusing any exploits.
 
That being said, if you have used this exploit - you have 24 hours to contact Customer Support.  They will confiscate your exploited items and reduce your punishment.  This is a one-time offer, I suggest you take it.
 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
And now Carbine has lost the very last bit of street cred(d) they had left. Do you honestly think 1 single person is going to be like "I'm a bad bad man, I'm going to turn myself in"?
 
Then ask yourself what punishment they plan to hand down to the ones they actually catch? 1 week, 1 month ban? Please, maybe a token few to show "dey mean business" they might straight up ban. But the likely-hood of them catching even a smattering of the overall number of exploiters is very low. That ill gotten plat has been moved around more than FedEx freight by now.
 
And at the end of the day if they can't get rid of most of the ill gotten plat then the economy was just effectively destroyed with massive inflation and prices on premium AH/CX items forever being inflated higher from now on and CREDD market being spiked in Carbine's favor at the detriment of the free market.
 
I'm living off CREDD from when it was cheap and already moved on to another MMO months ago. Now I am especially glad I did. I have ZERO faith Tony, et al will make any meaningful impact in making this situation right.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Who said there was a conspiracy? Carbine doesn't need to be working hand in hand with exploiters to profit from it when the exploiters shred the economy. All they need to do is sit back and watch the CREDD prices skyrocket--which they have--and let the CREDD sales go forward--which they have. And then they profit. Which they have.
----
			Expect 1k plat mount and 500 plat riding skill level 4 in drop 4?	
----
			
I don't care about conspiracies or credd sales, or any of that nature, but I think this is a poor decision.
 
For a company that's just been hit by the layoff train, and still can't seem to produce a bug-free patch (despite claiming that was the reason it took an extra few months), having a team go in and selectively find the exploiters and somehow readjust the economy seems like a mismanagement,
 
"Turn yourselves in and we'll let you go?"  Really?  What MMO has ever took such a lax stance on exploiters? This wasn't an exploit that people could stumble on and then take advantage of, it was in fact:
 
An exploit that took specific, deliberate steps.  These people knew what they were doing.  They weren't just stumbling across a cheap vendor or anything--- they were specifically taking the time to abuse the system for their own gain.
 
CRB is effectively telling the playerbase that you only get a slap on the wrist for intentionally and deliberately exploiting.  It's such a poor stance to have and simply justifies the actions of the exploiters.	
----
			^They're confiscating the ill gotten goods, do you really think that they can't track what you did with your plat? I've seen people on my rivals list be wiped from existence in previous ban waves and they have not returned so far. I don't think that they're even allowed to show to the public exactly what people they anned and for how long. 	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
To all of those that think that they're going soft on the bans, read the red text.
 
Hyperinflation might be good for the server in a long run. Blighthaven hoverboard costing 100 platinum, there being a botomless bad on sale with the Shady Vendor that costs 500 platinum, it costing so much to dye your gear, makes me think that Carbine thought that the ecconomy will be more inflated faster than what it was.
 
As for the damage, EU servers seem to have suffered less or almost none at all. Bloodbriar went really cheap, but other than that pretty much no price growth in Jabbit and Luminai stayed the same.
----
			
@yasfan:
 
No single company/game is even legally allowed to advertise whose accounts they're banning.
This has complications with privacy regulations, how stupid they might sound.
So having such a page is really not an option.
 
Hyperinflation is definitely bad. Trying to defend this idea is a no-go.
How they fix this, I don't know either, but if they can pull if off without rollback, then even better, since it means less damages on people.
 
All this speculations and threats is really not needed.
All it does is make you look like a raging kid who got his candy taken away.
Just wait till the actions are taken, and if if then still looks bad, then you can complain. But raging about something that's not even "fixed"....	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I don't care about conspiracies or credd sales, or any of that nature, but I think this is a poor decision.
 
For a company that's just been hit by the layoff train, and still can't seem to produce a bug-free patch (despite claiming that was the reason it took an extra few months), having a team go in and selectively find the exploiters and somehow readjust the economy seems like a mismanagement,
 
"Turn yourselves in and we'll let you go?"  Really?  What MMO has ever took such a lax stance on exploiters? This wasn't an exploit that people could stumble on and then take advantage of, it was in fact:
 
An exploit that took specific, deliberate steps.  These people knew what they were doing.  They weren't just stumbling across a cheap vendor or anything--- they were specifically taking the time to abuse the system for their own gain.
 
CRB is effectively telling the playerbase that you only get a slap on the wrist for intentionally and deliberately exploiting.  It's such a poor stance to have and simply justifies the actions of the exploiters.
----
			
@Yasfan
 
I understand you, completely. CRB effectively profits by this exploit.  Whether it is their intent, or even a factor in their decision at all is a moot point.  What still remains is that it's a public stain, and ethically questionable. 
 
Whether this is just an oversight due to incompetence, or an engineered way for Carbine to increase the purchases of CREDD, doesn't matter.
 
What matters is that CRB has taken a public stance saying that they're looking out for Carbine, not the players.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Just because you want to pretend that a 300% increase in the plat obtained with CREDD leads to no additional CREDD purchases doesn't mean the rest of us have to cover up our eyes and yell "I see nothing!" along with you.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
 
@yasfan:
 
No single company/game is even legally allowed to advertise whose accounts they're banning.
This has complications with privacy regulations, how stupid they might sound.
So having such a page is really not an option.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
^
They're confiscating the ill gotten goods, do you really think that they can't track what you did with your plat? 
 
I've seen people on my rivals list be wiped from existence in previous ban waves and they have not returned so far. I don't think that they're even allowed to show to the public exactly what people they anned and for how long. 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
You seem to be thinking that this is about people choosing to buy CREDD to enhance their buying power. That's not the reality of the situation. Your buying power just tanked unless you buy CREDD to pocket the plat that the exploiters just injected, or you are one of the exploiters yourself.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I'll admit, I have no idea how many people use CREDD to get plat. But I'd think if I were one of those who did, I wouldn't pick the moment that the economy goes nuts to buy it. I'd wait an see how things stabilize. Either way, neither of us really have any idea how much extra CREDD was purchased because of this.
 
Personally, I don't feel like my buying power has changed that much since there's not much that I feel like I need to buy. Last night when I checked how much the new rune slot modules and flux cost they seemed to be about where they were before.
 
Basically, not much in my world changed because of this, but a lot would change if they rolled back any progress I'd made on my character. Which you seem not to care about at all.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Basically, not much in my world changed because of this, but a lot would change if they rolled back any progress I'd made on my character. Which you seem not to care about at all.
----
			
Eclipse, responding here because the other thread was locked.
 
{| class="blockquote"
... with the reasonable expectation that it would not be exploit friendly.  They also paid good money for CREDD, traded it for platinum, only to see the buying power of their 20$ tanked.  This effectively destroys the integrity of the CREDD system.  People have paid good money to do a lot of things in this game, and a 2 day rollback is just a drop in the bucket compared to the severity of this exploit.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Kindly direct your accusations about who doesn't care about your game to the people who actually don't care about any of our games.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
If the ill-gotten goods were placed on the auction house and bought, do you think Carbine will be taking them away from the person who bought them? If the answer is "no", then the ill-gotten goods can be laundered very effectively, and the people who need to do so know that they've still got several hours to get it done.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
In Short: The WildStar economy has been ruined by hyperinflation. ...  We had a 500-1000% increase in prices in under a day with zero relief in sight.  That's not something an economy can recover from.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
 
Eclipse, responding here because the other thread was locked.
 
 
2 day rollback right after a drop when people are playing like crazy is NOT a "drop in the bucket".
 
Look, I get it- bad stuff happened while the servers were up. But good stuff did too. And these things have to be balanced. If you minimize the effect of rolling back people's progress because you only care about the economy, well you aren't going to get my sympathy.
 
Because yeah, if you roll back my progress I'll pretty much unsub immediately. It would cast a dark shadow on my gameplay for the future if I knew any progress I ever made could be rolled back due to actions beyond my control.
 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Does it not cast a dark shadow on your gameplay in the future, knowing that CRB takes a very easy stance on people that intentionally exploited the game
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I don't think that CRB is taking a very easy stance on people that intentionally exploited the game. It sounds to me like they are going to deal with them pretty severely.
 
I don't expect the exploiters to be back reaping the rewards.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
They are taking a comically EASY stance. The vast majority of "perma" bans we all heard about got reverted to 72 HOURS and sometimes 7 day bans. That is a joke.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I understand the exploiters are responsible for the bad state. I'm not accusing you of that. I AM saying that you've show very little sympathy for those who would lose a lot of progression of your demands were met.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I understand the exploiters are responsible for the bad state. I'm not accusing you of that. I AM saying that you've show very little sympathy for those who would lose a lot of progression of your demands were met.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Pretty much this. Any and all times actual character progression gets rolled back, I lose a little (to a lot) of faith in the company that does it. In a game like Wildstar, where character progress is slow and takes weeks to months (for example, I got an actual item upgrade (not a side grade) pretty much for the first time since I started raiding like 3 months ago), I'll pretty much be done if they roll us back.
 
Plenty of other games out there built on character progression that actually treat that progression as sacred.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Where is this info?
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Where is this info?
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
They are taking a comically EASY stance. The vast majority of "perma" bans we all heard about got reverted to 72 HOURS and sometimes 7 day bans. That is a joke.
 
As far as removing Plat, guess what most people already turned their Plat into Modules/Flux/other items that greatly benefit their character. So unless carbine starts removing gear from peoples characters or flux/modules/runes people who exploited made out like bandits and get a joke of a 3 day exploit. 
 
They wonder why people always do this stuff, it is because there is no downside. Sad.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I'm guessing it's in the same place your statement that cheaters will be dealt with severely is.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Does that address your concerns while addressing mine at the same time?
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I'm looking at the OP, which says they will be perma-banning people.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Tell that to all the people in higher end progression guilds sitting on 3 or 7 day "bans" for said exploiting. I bet every platinum I have they will be back in a week and sitting prettier than when they left.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
 
 
But part of it is, I don't believe the economy will permanently suffer for this. I could be wrong, but I don't think the long term effects are going to be as bad as you think they are.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Unfortunately, no, but I appreciate the effort. I have some nice loot drops I'd hate to lose. But even at that, just the idea that thousands of hours of the communitie's playtime spent enjoying the new content would just be GONE is a big hit.
 
But part of it is, I don't believe the economy will permanently suffer for this. I could be wrong, but I don't think the long term effects are going to be as bad as you think they are.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Only proves you nothing about economics. I could point you to some handy books on the topic of hyperinflation.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Unfortunately, no, but I appreciate the effort. I have some nice loot drops I'd hate to lose. But even at that, just the idea that thousands of hours of the communitie's playtime spent enjoying the new content would just be GONE is a big hit.
 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Did you even bother to read it before you said NO? For your reference, it was right here:
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
They are taking a comically EASY stance. The vast majority of "perma" bans we all heard about got reverted to 72 HOURS and sometimes 7 day bans. That is a joke.
 
As far as removing Plat, guess what most people already turned their Plat into Modules/Flux/other items that greatly benefit their character. So unless carbine starts removing gear from peoples characters or flux/modules/runes people who exploited made out like bandits and get a joke of a 3 day exploit. 
 
They wonder why people always do this stuff, it is because there is no downside. Sad.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I did bother to read it. I misunderstood. Forgive me.
 
If they were able to restore just about everything, then yes, that would work. But I think the amount of work involved for them to do that would make it a practical impossibility.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Or is there another reason why you don't want a rollback?
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
This is why it was so important for Carbine to shut the servers down immediately in lieu of a gardening block / full roll back.  You might think that we're not on your side here, but we are!
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
And yet you don't believe it's a practical impossibility for them to track the profits and proceeds of the exploiters and remove it? That's interesting. Why can they write code to do one and not the other?
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I really hope this isn't a subtle attack accusing me that I'm some kind of exploiter.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
 
In the end the economy and player trust in CRB are the two things hit hardest by this fiasco.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I don't necessarily think they'll be able to follow all the downstream effects of the exploiting. I think we'll take the hit for that. I do think they'll be able to identify the exploiters and ban them/take away their stuff.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
True. But this game isn't a model of normal economics anyway since their are gold sinks and price fixes steams of income. So I'm not sure what my knowledge of economics matters, really.
----
			I love reading Yasfan's posts, thank you very much. Also is your name a reference to the great Carl Yastrzemski?	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Except that if you did that, people wouldn't have been able to log on and play the game. Most people I ran into were having fun playing the game and didn't care one way or the other about the exploit.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Ah, OK. For a moment there I thought that I was respecting your concerns and you were respecting mine.
 
If your position is actually "one of us has to take the hit and it's not going to be me", following up with the phrase "boy are you unsympathetic when I lobby for you to take the hit so I don't have to" says some really interesting things about your mindset.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Yeah, because the 40 people online outside of primetime take precedence over the 100s of people that continued to raid / pvp / progress during primetime hours while the exploiters were still going strong.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
D'aww, thanks.  :lol: And it's actually an acronym. Shhhh.  :ph34r:
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I love reading Yasfan's posts, thank you very much. Also is your name a reference to the great Carl Yastrzemski?
----
			Wow these forums can get heated :) - if anything its an entertaining read	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Wow these forums can get heated :) - if anything its an entertaining read
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
We are passionate about the game we enjoy.
----
			
Morning all,
 
In an effort to put the issue to rest, there will be no rollback. Every minute that we decide not to do one from the moment it enters our mind exponentially increases the cost of doing one. That ship has sailed.
 
At one point yesterday I heard that over 300 accounts had been actioned, and it wasn't the final tally by any stretch. 
 
We are issuing perma bans, 7 day bans, and 3 day bans based on the severity of the exploiting, and the overall damage done to the economy through laundering (yes we can see them doing that - if you make it harder on CS to fix, we come down harder on you in the punishment). The leniency clause was as much to provide a security blanket to those people who sampled the exploit out of curiosity as it was to save us some time on hunting down each one of the exploiters. One point late in the evening last night, over 40 people had already written in - some of whom had gained only 8 plat, others who had perma bans, and a everything in between. I can't count how many people were asking me in game when I was chatting with people, "if I only did it once, am I okay?" The response to that is "contact CS and you shouldn't have anything to worry about" given the leniency clause. The value of that peace of mind is extremely important given how many Good People might have been concerned because they touched the poisoned fruit once and then remembered they were good people :)
 
This fear-mongering about us making decisions about profiting through CREDD sales during the exploit is just that... fear-mongering. Myself or my team was a part of every single decision as this was developing and not once was this thought brought up or discussed in any of the conversations we had. I can appreciate the fear, and while there may be some truth to some of the cause/effect/opportunity in some arguments posted above, there was no intent along those lines.
 
Our teams have a lot of work in front of us today to clean up the mess. While I will not promise a perfect resolution to all aspects of the economy, I will promise that our teams will work their tails off today and beyond in order to reduce the damage done by those who abused this exploit. 
 
Sorry about this all, and thanks for playing and enjoying WildStar :)	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Morning all,
 
In an effort to put the issue to rest, there will be no rollback. Every minute that we decide not to do one from the moment it enters our mind exponentially increases the cost of doing one. That ship has sailed.
 
At one point yesterday I heard that over 300 accounts had been actioned, and it wasn't the final tally by any stretch. 
 
We are issuing perma bans, 7 day bans, and 3 day bans based on the severity of the exploiting, and the overall damage done to the economy through laundering (yes we can see them doing that - if you make it harder on CS to fix, we come down harder on you in the punishment). The leniency clause was as much to provide a security blanket to those people who sampled the exploit out of curiosity as it was to save us some time on hunting down each one of the exploiters. One point late in the evening last night, over 40 people had already written in - some of whom had gained only 8 plat, others who had perma bans, and a everything in between. I can't count how many people were asking me in game when I was chatting with people, "if I only did it once, am I okay?" The response to that is "contact CS and you shouldn't have anything to worry about" given the leniency clause. The value of that peace of mind is extremely important given how many Good People might have been concerned because they touched the poisoned fruit once and then remembered they were good people :)
 
This fear-mongering about us making decisions about profiting through CREDD sales during the exploit is just that... fear-mongering. Myself or my team was a part of every single decision as this was developing and not once was this thought brought up or discussed in any of the conversations we had. I can appreciate the fear, and while there may be some truth to some of the cause/effect/opportunity in some arguments posted above, there was no intent along those lines.
 
Our teams have a lot of work in front of us today to clean up the mess. While I will not promise a perfect resolution to all aspects of the economy, I will promise that our teams will work their tails off today and beyond in order to reduce the damage done by those who abused this exploit. 
 
Sorry about this all, and thanks for playing and enjoying WildStar :)
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Morning all,
 
In an effort to put the issue to rest, there will be no rollback. Every minute that we decide not to do one from the moment it enters our mind exponentially increases the cost of doing one. That ship has sailed.
 
At one point yesterday I heard that over 300 accounts had been actioned, and it wasn't the final tally by any stretch. 
 
We are issuing perma bans, 7 day bans, and 3 day bans based on the severity of the exploiting, and the overall damage done to the economy through laundering (yes we can see them doing that - if you make it harder on CS to fix, we come down harder on you in the punishment). The leniency clause was as much to provide a security blanket to those people who sampled the exploit out of curiosity as it was to save us some time on hunting down each one of the exploiters. One point late in the evening last night, over 40 people had already written in - some of whom had gained only 8 plat, others who had perma bans, and a everything in between. I can't count how many people were asking me in game when I was chatting with people, "if I only did it once, am I okay?" The response to that is "contact CS and you shouldn't have anything to worry about" given the leniency clause. The value of that peace of mind is extremely important given how many Good People might have been concerned because they touched the poisoned fruit once and then remembered they were good people :)
 
This fear-mongering about us making decisions about profiting through CREDD sales during the exploit is just that... fear-mongering. Myself or my team was a part of every single decision as this was developing and not once was this thought brought up or discussed in any of the conversations we had. I can appreciate the fear, and while there may be some truth to some of the cause/effect/opportunity in some arguments posted above, there was no intent along those lines.
 
Our teams have a lot of work in front of us today to clean up the mess. While I will not promise a perfect resolution to all aspects of the economy, I will promise that our teams will work their tails off today and beyond in order to reduce the damage done by those who abused this exploit. 
 
Sorry about this all, and thanks for playing and enjoying WildStar :)
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I think if they take the ill gotten items out of circulation by banning the exploiters, while everyone else will see some temporary inflation, various gold sinks will hopefully serve to bring prices back down.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Morning all,
----
			
The big issue I have with exploiters is that it ruins it for the rest of us. 
 
Especially exploiting the economy in a way that is not intended.
 
In this particular case, there is no way it was intended to be able to farm gardens every 30 seconds.  You could literally set a macro that does an AE attack on the garden (and vacuum), go away for an hour, come back, and you would be able to vendor all the plants for EASILY 5P.  You could actively farm between 4-5 plots, and just do laps of the farm, to increase this for 20P.
 
There are those who did this, and did not get caught.  For example, someone could have multiple alts, all set to "100% harvester".  That person could do laps on these alts (and main), and it would not get caught without pilfering the logs to find individual actions.  As these mats did NOT go into the mailbox, this was not easily detected as lookign for individuals with massive mailbox inboxes would not point them in their direction.
 
 
Generally speaking, them having or getting plat is not necessarily an issue.  It is how this plat gets used, and recycled into the economy.  The first thing these exploiters did, is absolutely demolish the market for the high priced items.  Most servers are now completely bunged up in their Ability Points / AMP point economy, CREDD, Fire Started, Shadow Blast, Eldan Fusion Rerolls / Slot adders.  Those who were exploiting eagerly grabbed all of this up off the market.  Now, those who were selling things (often for absurd prices) are laughing, as the tainted market indirectly fed their pockets.  As well, the items that were bought, will now be removed and not placed back into market.
 
Essentially, they have REMOVED these items from the economy or regular players.  As the market is based on supply demand, the demand has stayed constant, whereas the supply has disappeared.  This creates a very high ceiling for all the commodities that were already rare, artificially inflating prices which will likely take a long time to overcome.
 
What does this mean to the 'proper' player?
 
Every item that you have been saving for, maybe saving for weeks for, has now just got higher.  That 50P ability point, will be atleast 75P.  That 20 piece rune set you were after, just doubled in price.  Hope you weren't caught half way. 
 
IT has basically tarnished the economy, which will simply cascade down from high end to low end.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
~snip~
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Debatable.  The cheap inventory has been drained temporarily, the exploit has been halted, and the ones responsible will at best lose their bankroll (but more likely banned outright).  When the supply returns over time who exactly is going to be able to afford the items at the super inflated prices? 
 
IMO, it'll correct naturally over time and if it doesn't Carbine can tweak drop rates if absolutely necessary.
----
			
A few thing,
 
Firstly thank you carbine for keeping us in the loop. I trust this dev team more than any other to deal with this issue properly and professionaly without compromising the majority of players. 
 
Secondly there's a lot of negativity here. A lot of people seem to think of carbine as this big nasty organisation who will turn a blind eye to anything that makes them money. To these people i say if you don't trust the devs don't play the game amoung the negativity there are some ligitame concerns but it's being drowned out by the nonsensical outrage from the sort of people who waste there life's looking for things to be out raged by. If you think carbine arnt going to do everything reasonably possible to fix this then you are wsting your time.
 
Third point, this ones about the hyper inflation. Surely if prices have skyrocketed then it's easier for people to make money. Yea there are people frothing at the mouth raveing about how people who have exploited millions of platinum will rule the world, but these people don't seem to realise that pretty soon that money will dissapeare and what we will be left with is an environment where it is easier to make and spend money. Putting some of the more expensive luxuries in the players hands 
 
Finally if you are offended by what I'm saying then I am sorry but i feel I am forced to speak out because of the shear lunacy on this form. The bottom line is the devs will fix it and if you think they won't then don't play but for God sake please have your outraged miss informed frothing at the mouth fits somewhere else, your makeing a terrible mess on the carpets and drowning out people with ligitamate concerns.	
----
			
Hi Cougar,
 
Thanks for letting us know. I am glad to hear that you're reviewing the actions of a lot of accounts. I am aware that the rollback ship has sailed, and I understand that the costs of doing one increase enormously as the time that would have to be rolled back increases.
 
Since I'm also aware that this will not be the last time that a game-breaking exploit takes place, I would like to encourage you in the strongest possible terms to review how long it took you guys to respond to this after the exploit was publicized at around 11 PM PDT on 11/12/14. By my count, it was almost an entire day before the spigot on the exploit was even shut off. If you are serious about protecting us from exploiters, you will need a far more streamlined process for recognizing "Hey, this isn't a little bug, you can use this to invent infinite amounts of cash" and implementing a response as soon as you are aware of it.
 
This wasn't the first time this game has taken long-term damage from exploiting, and it surely won't be the last. Please take the time to create a general action plan for an immediate response BEFORE the next one hits. 
 
{| class="blockquote"
We are issuing perma bans, 7 day bans, and 3 day bans based on the severity of the exploiting, and the overall damage done to the economy through laundering (yes we can see them doing that - if you make it harder on CS to fix, we come down harder on you in the punishment). The leniency clause was as much to provide a security blanket to those people who sampled the exploit out of curiosity as it was to save us some time on hunting down each one of the exploiters. One point late in the evening last night, over 40 people had already written in - some of whom had gained only 8 plat, others who had perma bans, and a everything in between. I can't count how many people were asking me in game when I was chatting with people, "if I only did it once, am I okay?" The response to that is "contact CS and you shouldn't have anything to worry about" given the leniency clause. The value of that peace of mind is extremely important given how many Good People might have been concerned because they touched the poisoned fruit once and then remembered they were good people :)
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
That is the real problem that I'm trying to point out and ask you to think about how to address: the conflict of interest generates an appearance of impropriety whether there actually is impropriety or not. I hope that you can understand why some of us don't find reassurances terribly reassuring when they come from the same people who have the conflict of interest in the first place. 
----
			
"Also out of curiosity you mentioned that you got ripped off by cheaters, I'm curious how you specifically were impacted by this exploit."
 
Thats easy! Before the exploit i would be able to buy 2 runic eldan slot adding items. After the exploit and the money being injected into the economy my purchasing power is down the toilet to the point where i can only now purchase 1/5 (20%) of 1 runic eldan slot adding item. That has happened nearly accross the board with everything on the auction house and commodity exchange.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
"Also out of curiosity you mentioned that you got ripped off by cheaters, I'm curious how you specifically were impacted by this exploit."
 
Thats easy! Before the exploit i would be able to buy 2 runic eldan slot adding items. After the exploit and the money being injected into the economy my purchasing power is down the toilet to the point where i can only now purchase 1/5 (20%) of 1 runic eldan slot adding item. That has happened nearly accross the board with everything on the auction house and commodity exchange.
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{| class="blockquote"
Firstly Yasfan thanks for your taking the time to respond.  I know I'm not Cougar but I've seen you on a lot of threads and I appreciate that you defend the game sometimes and hold it to task in areas that you think we can improve.  I don't think, in general, you're causing damage to the game by bringing up points of concern.  I think tempers can flare and people can get frustrated and that's natural and why we have the awesome staff of forum moderators that we have to lock threads when they get too heated, but I would hate for people to feel like they weren't being encouraged to share those opinions. 
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If you have patience you won't be cheated/ripped off.  Just have to wait for it to even out.  It is currently 4pm EDT(USA), Entity server, and I am looking at:
 
Eldan Runic Module for 1p 10g(give or take a few g/s/c)
 
Runic Elemental Flux for 2p 70g(give or take a few g/s/c)
 
I honestly have no idea how much it got up to last night during the worst of this, I didn't think to look then.  But I do know there was plenty of people in chat telling everyone about the prices going up at insane rates and to not buy anything yet.  
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And I really appreciate it, thanks.  :) And no hard feeling to Cougar, either--I don't take the explicit word choices that people make in any given post terribly seriously until I see a long and continuing pattern of abusing the word choices that a person uses. Cougar clearly doesn't do that.
 
 
 
Well... yeah. That's the point. When you make a decision to pass on the hit from cheaters but keep the profit, you have a conflict of interest. You may be honestly telling me that you made the decision independent of the profits--or you may be handing me a self-serving rationalization. I have no way of knowing for sure until I've watched you make lots of decisions and see whether your decision-making process ever results in you taking the hit right next to me.
 
But so far, I've seen you face this kind of choke point in two major exploits: this one and the wintraders/ratings tanking in PvP. So far it's been Profit: 2 Players: 0. A third one that goes the same way is going to be an unmitigated disaster for this game. You have got to have a solution before then. One where you don't just watch me take the hit and wince and promise me that it just is the best option on the table.
 
In a game where the management doesn't HAVE a conflict of interest, a player can have every confidence that the management views the exploit as unambiguously bad. That's not the case here. The CREDD market ties your profit margin directly to the game's economy. When any player with an ounce of caution can trace a line straight from an exploit to the revenue line in NCSoft's spreadsheets, you can't use the phrase "Trust me". You're working off a business model that doesn't actually allow me to do that.
 
 
 
 
What Cougar pointed out is that the accounts that were used can be identified and dealt with by a decision-making process that is completely obscure, and the phrase "we can deal with the fallout" doesn't even make clear that you understand how much damage was done here.
 
So OK. Justice is being meted out. 300 accounts have been reviewed. Somewhere >0 people have been permanently banned. An unspecified number are out for one week--a cash value of $3.50 if paying for a subscription with cash. The rest are out for a long weekend--$1.50 of lost subscription time. I hope you'll forgive me if I doubt they've learned their lesson when you force them to spend a weekend playing some other game as punishment for directly participating in tanking this game's economy.
 
I want to draw your attention to a useful conversion factor here: plat has a defined exchange rate with real money. It's trivial for us to calculate how much real money value these guys were counterfeiting with this exploit. There's now enough plat to force the CREDD market up into the range $20=30 plat. If someone exploits what Cougar referred to as "only" 8 plat, they basically created a bogus $5, enough to outweigh the loss of the week's worth of ban time that is the largest listed punishment outside of a permanent ban. And that's according to the currently inflated range. If they exploited that 8 plat early in the exploit's cycle, they drew themselves more like $10-$15. And those are the ones that did so little of this exploit that the phrase "only" is being used to describe how small their offense was.
 
As for your ability to "deal with the fallout", have you read the last several pages of this thread? Several people have very eloquently explained how far that fallout ripples, and it goes WAY beyond the exploiters themselves. Even some of your staunch defenders--have said that they don't see how it's even possible for you to do that without a rollback. Once that plat hit the auction house, it soaked up the entire market of high-end items. The people who got the money from those items didn't do anything wrong. People who happened to be online to watch the economy exploding and moved to take advantage of it didn't do anything wrong. People whose CREDD sold like hotcakes didn't do anything wrong. But the fact remains that these are all people who made profits off of the exploit while the rest of us just watched our buying power fizzle away to nothing because of it. All that is part of the fallout that is now my reality playing this game.
 
So when you say that you going to "deal with the fallout", how exactly do you plan to even sort out how much fallout there was, much less actually correct it without doing a rollback?
 
 
 
Well, I'm happy to move a discussion of specifics to PMs, but as a general statement I think the way to fix the damage isn't with bans at all--and certainly not bans that only amount to doing something else for a weekend. A huge amount of plat was injected into the economy by this exploit. The damage to those of us who didn't exploit is economic, and economic dominance is what the exploiters were after. If you want to discourage them from doing it again, don't give them a weekend to go play another game--hit them where it hurts. Reduce their ability to maintain their economic dominance. 
 
How about the in-game equivalent of a class-action lawsuit against the exploiters? A player who exploited X plat of profit forfeits X plat into a fund that is distributed equally to everyone in the game who DIDN'T participate in the exploit. If they don't have the plat, I bet that most of them have CREDD stashes that can be cashed in for them to work off the debt.If they still don't, they can have a negative plat balance until they pay it off. I'm OK with that. They can always pay it off with cash for CREDD.
 
Cheaters don't prosper. Non-cheaters do. Penalties hit the perpetrator on the axis they wanted to improve by cheating.
The punishment fits the crime. Penalties scale directly. If you milked this one so hard that you couldn't possibly recover, you permabanned yourself.
The people who did what they were supposed to get compensated by the people who didn't. People who didn't participate may not get all of their buying power back because the effects HAVE rippled out, but at least they'll get SOME of it back. And it comes out of the pockets of the people who actually tried to screw them over.
 
 
 
The point of having a public accounting of actions taken and punishments imposed is that your actions taken in response to cheaters are aggressive. We all understand that EVERY MMO has people who want to cheat. You do not need to worry that admitting they are here too is going to work against you. You DO have to worry that the rest of us think you're being soft on them.
 
If you don't think the actions you took in response to this are strong enough to publicly summarize how you mete out punishment and how many people get punished in what way, then what you're telling us is that even you don't think your actions are nearly strong enough to withstand any scrutiny.
 
That's why it matters.
 
 
 
If you don't understand how someone else inventing plat doesn't affect me in a competitive game with a free-market based system of gear and shinies that literally ties the value of my cash to the value of plat, I'm not sure how to make the obvious clear to you. My buying power in this game is not independent of everyone else. There's now a bunch of players out there who can outspend me on every item we ever compete for. The goldsinks may remove the plat over time, but I get hit by the goldsink too.
 
This was an unequal creation of wealth. The way that the exploiter wins is by improving their standing relative to everyone else. Non-exploiters lose just by watching the gap between themselves and the exploiter widen. That's why it's called an exploit.
 
And please--do not try to tell me that my standing won't really change because every last little bit of fallout will be reversed. That's like promising a bug-free drop. You can say it, but we both know it isn't true.
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yasfan, on 14 Nov 2014 - 1:47 PM, said:
 
Well, I'm happy to move a discussion of specifics to PMs, but as a general statement I think the way to fix the damage isn't with bans at all--and certainly not bans that only amount to doing something else for a weekend. A huge amount of plat was injected into the economy by this exploit. The damage to those of us who didn't exploit is economic, and economic dominance is what the exploiters were after. If you want to discourage them from doing it again, don't give them a weekend to go play another game--hit them where it hurts. Reduce their ability to maintain their economic dominance. 
 
How about the in-game equivalent of a class-action lawsuit against the exploiters? A player who exploited X plat of profit forfeits X plat into a fund that is distributed equally to everyone in the game who DIDN'T participate in the exploit. If they don't have the plat, I bet that most of them have CREDD stashes that can be cashed in for them to work off the debt.If they still don't, they can have a negative plat balance until they pay it off. I'm OK with that. They can always pay it off with cash for CREDD.
 
Cheaters don't prosper. Non-cheaters do. Penalties hit the perpetrator on the axis they wanted to improve by cheating.
The punishment fits the crime. Penalties scale directly. If you milked this one so hard that you couldn't possibly recover, you permabanned yourself.
The people who did what they were supposed to get compensated by the people who didn't. People who didn't participate may not get all of their buying power back because the effects HAVE rippled out, but at least they'll get SOME of it back. And it comes out of the pockets of the people who actually tried to screw them over.
 
 
That is seriously an outstandingly awesome idea....	
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>snip
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			*cupcake* it, it ain't worth it. 	
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Thanks for the thought out response.  I want to respond to this but am probably going to be pretty busy for the rest of the day today, and like I said I don't want to totally derail this thread either.  I'll start up a thread in the Economy forum on Monday (or you can if you don't see one from me) and I'll respond to some of your points here, because I think moving things to PM denies other people the opportunity to weigh in too.  I'd love to talk about this more.  Thanks again for your feedback and thanks for sticking with us.  I really like the class action lawsuit idea haha.  If I get the chance to post again today or over the weekend I will though
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And I really appreciate it, thanks.  :) And no hard feeling to Cougar, either--I don't take the explicit word choices that people make in any given post terribly seriously until I see a long and continuing pattern of abusing the word choices that a person uses. Cougar clearly doesn't do that.
 
 
 
Well... yeah. That's the point. When you make a decision to pass on the hit from cheaters but keep the profit, you have a conflict of interest. You may be honestly telling me that you made the decision independent of the profits--or you may be handing me a self-serving rationalization. I have no way of knowing for sure until I've watched you make lots of decisions and see whether your decision-making process ever results in you taking the hit right next to me.
 
But so far, I've seen you face this kind of choke point in two major exploits: this one and the wintraders/ratings tanking in PvP. So far it's been Profit: 2 Players: 0. A third one that goes the same way is going to be an unmitigated disaster for this game. You have got to have a solution before then. One where you don't just watch me take the hit and wince and promise me that it just is the best option on the table.
 
In a game where the management doesn't HAVE a conflict of interest, a player can have every confidence that the management views the exploit as unambiguously bad. That's not the case here. The CREDD market ties your profit margin directly to the game's economy. When any player with an ounce of caution can trace a line straight from an exploit to the revenue line in NCSoft's spreadsheets, you can't use the phrase "Trust me". You're working off a business model that doesn't actually allow me to do that.
 
 
 
 
What Cougar pointed out is that the accounts that were used can be identified and dealt with by a decision-making process that is completely obscure, and the phrase "we can deal with the fallout" doesn't even make clear that you understand how much damage was done here.
 
So OK. Justice is being meted out. 300 accounts have been reviewed. Somewhere >0 people have been permanently banned. An unspecified number are out for one week--a cash value of $3.50 if paying for a subscription with cash. The rest are out for a long weekend--$1.50 of lost subscription time. I hope you'll forgive me if I doubt they've learned their lesson when you force them to spend a weekend playing some other game as punishment for directly participating in tanking this game's economy.
 
I want to draw your attention to a useful conversion factor here: plat has a defined exchange rate with real money. It's trivial for us to calculate how much real money value these guys were counterfeiting with this exploit. There's now enough plat to force the CREDD market up into the range $20=30 plat. If someone exploits what Cougar referred to as "only" 8 plat, they basically created a bogus $5, enough to outweigh the loss of the week's worth of ban time that is the largest listed punishment outside of a permanent ban. And that's according to the currently inflated range. If they exploited that 8 plat early in the exploit's cycle, they drew themselves more like $10-$15. And those are the ones that did so little of this exploit that the phrase "only" is being used to describe how small their offense was.
 
As for your ability to "deal with the fallout", have you read the last several pages of this thread? Several people have very eloquently explained how far that fallout ripples, and it goes WAY beyond the exploiters themselves. Even some of your staunch defenders--have said that they don't see how it's even possible for you to do that without a rollback. Once that plat hit the auction house, it soaked up the entire market of high-end items. The people who got the money from those items didn't do anything wrong. People who happened to be online to watch the economy exploding and moved to take advantage of it didn't do anything wrong. People whose CREDD sold like hotcakes didn't do anything wrong. But the fact remains that these are all people who made profits off of the exploit while the rest of us just watched our buying power fizzle away to nothing because of it. All that is part of the fallout that is now my reality playing this game.
 
So when you say that you going to "deal with the fallout", how exactly do you plan to even sort out how much fallout there was, much less actually correct it without doing a rollback?
 
 
 
Well, I'm happy to move a discussion of specifics to PMs, but as a general statement I think the way to fix the damage isn't with bans at all--and certainly not bans that only amount to doing something else for a weekend. A huge amount of plat was injected into the economy by this exploit. The damage to those of us who didn't exploit is economic, and economic dominance is what the exploiters were after. If you want to discourage them from doing it again, don't give them a weekend to go play another game--hit them where it hurts. Reduce their ability to maintain their economic dominance. 
 
How about the in-game equivalent of a class-action lawsuit against the exploiters? A player who exploited X plat of profit forfeits X plat into a fund that is distributed equally to everyone in the game who DIDN'T participate in the exploit. If they don't have the plat, I bet that most of them have CREDD stashes that can be cashed in for them to work off the debt.If they still don't, they can have a negative plat balance until they pay it off. I'm OK with that. They can always pay it off with cash for CREDD.
 
Cheaters don't prosper. Non-cheaters do. Penalties hit the perpetrator on the axis they wanted to improve by cheating.
The punishment fits the crime. Penalties scale directly. If you milked this one so hard that you couldn't possibly recover, you permabanned yourself.
The people who did what they were supposed to get compensated by the people who didn't. People who didn't participate may not get all of their buying power back because the effects HAVE rippled out, but at least they'll get SOME of it back. And it comes out of the pockets of the people who actually tried to screw them over.
 
 
 
The point of having a public accounting of actions taken and punishments imposed is that your actions taken in response to cheaters are aggressive. We all understand that EVERY MMO has people who want to cheat. You do not need to worry that admitting they are here too is going to work against you. You DO have to worry that the rest of us think you're being soft on them.
 
If you don't think the actions you took in response to this are strong enough to publicly summarize how you mete out punishment and how many people get punished in what way, then what you're telling us is that even you don't think your actions are nearly strong enough to withstand any scrutiny.
 
That's why it matters.
 
 
 
If you don't understand how someone else inventing plat doesn't affect me in a competitive game with a free-market based system of gear and shinies that literally ties the value of my cash to the value of plat, I'm not sure how to make the obvious clear to you. My buying power in this game is not independent of everyone else. There's now a bunch of players out there who can outspend me on every item we ever compete for. The goldsinks may remove the plat over time, but I get hit by the goldsink too.
 
This was an unequal creation of wealth. The way that the exploiter wins is by improving their standing relative to everyone else. Non-exploiters lose just by watching the gap between themselves and the exploiter widen. That's why it's called an exploit.
 
And please--do not try to tell me that my standing won't really change because every last little bit of fallout will be reversed. That's like promising a bug-free drop. You can say it, but we both know it isn't true.
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			can someone tell me what the exploit was? just for curiosity, considering that realms are down and its getting fixed :)	
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Markets fix themselves... sure there is a little more money in the overall economy but what does that mean? It means I can sell a Boost on the AH for 5 gold instead of 4 gold? So now I have slightly more money.. but what does that get me? Everything else is slightly more expensive too, so in the end I'm even steven anyway
 
 
As far as an advantage these exploiters have now... I'm not too sure. Yes they could buy out all the ability and AMP points on the AH but there was only a couple on there to begin.. Maybe they could buy out all the runics and have maxed out rune slots? Well I didn't exploit and I already have 1 set of gear fully runed out.
 
I'm thinking people are panicking when they should take a deep breath, relax and let Carbine perma banned the cheaters and/or remove their ill gotten gains	
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Ahem....
 
 
All ramifications to the economy aside. Forget about how little cretins deserve total ban-hammer annihilation.
 
Just WHO at Carbine is in charge of ensuring such monumental BUGS don't get into live production?
 
Common folks. Let's get real here. What's the estimated cost of developing a game that is to be a major contender in the MMO market? Asked another way; what's the cost of entry to this poker game?
 
$100 M? $150?
 
I've participated in IT programs in that range. We are talking about MAJOR IT renewal programs that totally replace a number of mission critical applications across a large enterprise.
 
We are basically talking databases. What is WS? A database.
 
The integrator that does a job as badly as this game has performed would be fired in short order.
 
But hey. I still play the game. Go figure.	
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With the right amount of regulation and gold deletion things will be sorted out in a few weeks. There's no such thing as an economy broken forever. With the right amount of fixes it will recover. I remember the Caturday event when I was playing neverwinter (basically the same thing happened, more or less, you may google it), and even though some people managed to hide some of the illegitimate currency, the economy was fixed about a month later. Not on its own (there's no such thing as self-regulation) but it was fixed. The devs can't do miracles and you seem to honestly have no idea of the amount of drama and ragequits a rollback can cause.
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can someone tell me what the exploit was? just for curiosity, considering that realms are down and its getting fixed :)
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This exploit was not possible to do unless you knew how to do it so again please permanently ban everyone that capitalized on it. Get these people off the game, your not a brand new game anymore you don't need to be soft like with the win traders. You need a milestone for people to look back on and then say "I better not do this or I'll get banned, I'll file a bug report instead". Honest players play honest games, have no mercy in regards to this whole debacle!
 
The reason I keep mentioning win traders because I want you to see the difference in player outcry.
Bans win traders and met with praise and adoration.
http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/15084018278?abt=nav1&utm_expid=68589644-24.yOgsCsWhSz-gOSDIbl82Wg.1&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
 
Doesn't ban win traders and moral plummets.
https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/103262-muffinman-responds/	
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{| class="blockquote"
This exploit was not possible to do unless you knew how to do it so again please permanently ban everyone that capitalized on it. Get these people off the game, your not a brand new game anymore you don't need to be soft like with the win traders. You need a milestone for people to look back on and then say "I better not do this or I'll get banned, I'll file a bug report instead". Honest players play honest games, have no mercy in regards to this whole debacle!
 
The reason I keep mentioning win traders because I want you to see the difference in player outcry.
 
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			People have gotten unbanned already and they didn't have credd removed nor runic flux/modules they used oh and they mailed alts friends plat you can guess what happended..	
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People have gotten unbanned already and they didn't have credd removed nor runic flux/modules they used oh and they mailed alts friends plat you can guess what happended..
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What did you expect would happen?  Carbine management is in the dumps.   Honestly, I'd understand the lack of a rollback if they took a pretty heavy hand against the exploiters.  Instead, they just kind of slapped them on the wrist and said, "deal with it," to the honest playerbase.
 
*cupcake*ing unprofessional if you ask me.	
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So I could have cheated, received a 72 hour ban, had you back off on the ban, keep all the stuff I bought with the plat I exploited to get, and told not to be naughty anymore?
 
 
Yep i seen enough!  Adious Carbine.	
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no, if you cared to read, they had all of their ill-gotten gains removed
they do have purchase logs
 
they took away all money related to plant sales
and all items bought with said money
 
they even went overboard to be sure (from what i heard people lost stuff that wasnt from cheating)
please stop saying they didnt get punished, this is the cheaters trolling you by saying they still have their stuff.	
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People have gotten unbanned already and they didn't have credd removed nor runic flux/modules they used oh and they mailed alts friends plat you can guess what happended..
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{| class="blockquote"
no, if you cared to read, they had all of their ill-gotten gains removed
they do have purchase logs
 
they took away all money related to plant sales
and all items bought with said money
 
they even went overboard to be sure (from what i heard people lost stuff that wasnt from cheating)
please stop saying they didnt get punished, this is the cheaters trolling you by saying they still have their stuff.
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This make me laugh so hard seeing u all get so worked up over a silly game.
you act like its real life and that your going to starve cause the supermarket shelves are empty cause the rebels plundered all the groceries.
"omg the economy is ruined" hahahaha
I dunnow about u but I play games to shoot baddies and slaughter monsters in a fictional setting.... not feed my RL insecurities about my total net worth in virtual reality.
make alts and farm the stuff u cant collect urself.
money trading in games is poor practice anyway- all it does is promote greed and anger like in the real world.( and exactly whats been happening here for the last 9 pages)
the whole idea of the game is to kill monsters in a social setting and get loot that you can only sell to a vendor in the long run anyway.
perhaps treat it as such?????
if not I would highly suggest to reevaluate your motives and/or morals.
again..... LOL	
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