Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Why were exploiters not simply permanently banned?
Wrennardx
Member
At first I was really excited to read that Steven and his team at Intrepid were coming down hard on the exploiting players from the last little bit of testing. However, when I actually read the 'punishment' i was incredibly disappointed. I guess my whole issue comes down to a pretty simple maxim: If you're willing to exploit in an alpha 1, you have no interest in helping create a good game.
Players who are willing to do these kind of things aren't interested in helping a game or community form, they're interested in gaining their own personal power for the purpose of ruining the experience of other players and stroking their egos. These players need to be sent flying into the sun, thanks but no thanks.
I'm also super disappointed that what Intrepid and Steven consider punishment basically comes down to removing the ill-gotten gains and in some (rare?) cases, character deletion. When someone robs a bank, it's not much of a warning if all they have to do is return the stolen money. As far as character deletions go, this is an Alpha where there are already plans for a wipe within the next couple weeks anyways, so this doesn't feel much more impactful than returning the stolen cash.
I've heard some individuals say a couple things that I think are off base: 1.) Some of the players stream, so setting and example for their audience is a good thing. And 2.) These accounts are now flagged, which means they'll be watched more carefully in the future.
Well, as to 1.) It's actually setting a really bad precedent for players who exploit the game and show exploits to their community to be handled softly. Also, a slap on the wrist sends the opposite message that Intrepid and the team seems to want to send.
For 2.) Why on earth would you just create more work for your team by having to keep track of the kind of players who don't have an issue with exploiting the game in an Alpha. As said above, doing this shows a complete and utter lack of interest in helping to create a quality game and quality experience.
MMOs aren't new, bugs in MMOs aren't new, everyone who do this knew what they were doing and understood that they were screwing over everyone else, they simply didn't care. Get rid of them imo and don't look back. I myself would go as far as banning the accounts, blacklisting the CC's and personal information (surface level) from the cards to make sure that if they want to play the game a couple years from now they have to jump through a ton of RL hoops. But maybe that's just me and my MMO PTSD that runs back to UO.
Anyways, hope everyone has a good weekend, a solid testing period and then a Happy Thanksgiving.
Players who are willing to do these kind of things aren't interested in helping a game or community form, they're interested in gaining their own personal power for the purpose of ruining the experience of other players and stroking their egos. These players need to be sent flying into the sun, thanks but no thanks.
I'm also super disappointed that what Intrepid and Steven consider punishment basically comes down to removing the ill-gotten gains and in some (rare?) cases, character deletion. When someone robs a bank, it's not much of a warning if all they have to do is return the stolen money. As far as character deletions go, this is an Alpha where there are already plans for a wipe within the next couple weeks anyways, so this doesn't feel much more impactful than returning the stolen cash.
I've heard some individuals say a couple things that I think are off base: 1.) Some of the players stream, so setting and example for their audience is a good thing. And 2.) These accounts are now flagged, which means they'll be watched more carefully in the future.
Well, as to 1.) It's actually setting a really bad precedent for players who exploit the game and show exploits to their community to be handled softly. Also, a slap on the wrist sends the opposite message that Intrepid and the team seems to want to send.
For 2.) Why on earth would you just create more work for your team by having to keep track of the kind of players who don't have an issue with exploiting the game in an Alpha. As said above, doing this shows a complete and utter lack of interest in helping to create a quality game and quality experience.
MMOs aren't new, bugs in MMOs aren't new, everyone who do this knew what they were doing and understood that they were screwing over everyone else, they simply didn't care. Get rid of them imo and don't look back. I myself would go as far as banning the accounts, blacklisting the CC's and personal information (surface level) from the cards to make sure that if they want to play the game a couple years from now they have to jump through a ton of RL hoops. But maybe that's just me and my MMO PTSD that runs back to UO.
Anyways, hope everyone has a good weekend, a solid testing period and then a Happy Thanksgiving.
2
Comments
Call them exploiters and maybe they are, but them doing that has been more beneficial to the future health of the game than all the people just playing it like an early access game.
I 100% disagree, you want people who report the exploits imo, not the ones who find them and use them to screw over the entire in-game economy.
You think the point of an alpha is to exploit every aspect? Finding the exploit(s) is the point, not finding them and then destroying the entire in-game economy (which makes it almost impossible to track any other economic issues that might arise from regular game play). There are plenty of players that discovered the dupe, reported it and then stopped using it. None of those players were punished, cause that wasn't what the punishment was for. I'm not sure you're understanding what happened and why it happened. But, to be clear, there is no 'debate' about if these players exploited my friend, it's not disputed, what is disputed is what the punishment for exploiting is.
Needless to say, Steven fired a warning shot to show intrepid isn't going to let it take root in it's game - I'd say that's a lot more than they deserve but I certainly would not expect mercy next time.
PvE focused: WoW / FFXIV / Lineage II
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I agree with pretty much your whole post, except where you think that Steven fired a warning shot so it won't take root. I think the slap on the wrist and no actual punishment makes it much more likely that this stuff continues (more likely than if they'd dropped the hammer on them). None of this is new, people who are exploiting know exactly what they are doing and should be treated as such.
While it's true that a lot of the 'easier' exploits would be found anyway, removing the players altogether has the chance, however small, to create false positives and drama whereas keeping that sort of 'get ahead no matter what' player around helps with other things.
Messing with them is better than removing them. Maybe this stance should change in Phase 2, but for now, it's probably not worth prioritizing.
I might just be biased because I've responded exactly the same way as Intrepid in similar situations. Devs are honestly more inspired to find ways to track or mess with these players than to spend their time 'perfecting things so that they don't have to deal with drama'.
And it's still the point to do these things, because it's a testing phase. There's no lasting harm done, because it's a testing phase.
There is no economy at work or balance to fret over yet. It's all up in the air. If this was after launch, I'd agree to hit the players with a ban, but it isn't. This is specifically, explicitly a temporary phase of the game where it's intended for the community to do these things. Too much in this case? Yeah, sure, but there's no harm done and the bug is now sufficiently known, the process able to be rechecked and corrected to fix it and prevent it happening in the future. All in all, this was a positive for progress toward the actual game.
I can imagine 2 Reasons.
First : Sir Steven is a merciful God. He forgives at least one or maybe even several Offenses before smiting us Mortals down with his mighty Hammer.
Second : These People are actually helpful. And there is no pain or harm done by acknowledging that. These People "HELP" finding the Exploits. Helping to find Solutions to prevent the finished Game to be exploited in the way that were used during the Alpha to exploit the Game.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Currently no guild !! (o_o)
Exactly this.
Someone seems to think we’re playing a finished product with completed and robust economy features.
This is moronic. A ton of Dev time was wasted DOING the reverting, a ton of data on the building of nodes and economy was tainted. Stevens time at applying disipline was a waste. How you can't see that ACTUALLY exploiting en mass is DAMAGING to the testing and in no way a good thing and in no way the same as a bug report, is mind boggling. Please go think about the nonsense you have said and reflect on it.
Ugh, these are both just made up positions guys. You can find a bug without exploiting it. It's crazy to be giving these kind of players cover, they obviously don't care at all about helping to create a good game. The bug was reported by tons of players wouldn't didn't actively use it, because actively using it caused a myriad of other problems that spread through the entire game, making other information gathering almost useless.
C'mon.
Thank you, this was my whole point. The fact that so many people don't see this is crazy. There were plenty of people who found the dupe and then reported it without trying to gain an advantage and bricking the whole freaking economy.
To be clear, no one has an issue with finding bugs. No one. The issue is when the person finds the bug and then exploits it which ruins a ton of other acicularly features of the game and makes information gathering on all other other subsystems nearly useless.
If you really thought that 'nothing matters in the alpha but finding bugs and issues..." you would hate this kind of stuff, because it makes everything else harder.
These people aren't helpful. The people who find the bugs and then report them, while not using them and ruining other aspects of the Alpha are helpful. What exploiting these bugs did was break other aspects of the Alpha while making it so that Steven and his team needed to waste time repairing the entire system which they broke, rather than just fixing a bug.
No one thinks that bug finding/reporting is bad, it's the exploitation for personal and guild power that is the problem. I'm surprised you can't see that.
I understand your theme here, but if 'tracking' them and 'using' them was the goal, you wouldn't warn them at all. You'd just let them get away with it and then burn them later. I also think that you're way off when it comes to "not mattering" because that actually makes this worse.
The fact that these players did this in an Alpha that wasn't permanent shows how much they just don't care about the game going forward. They were willing to brick the whole freaking economy (there is one) and ruin the entire node progression for a little boost to their egos.
Keep in mind, the reason for initial node testing is to see how things are balanced, to see if the progress is possible or if the numbers are tuned too high. Now, after the exploit, all the data is useless, they don't have any idea how the numbers look now. Sure, maybe it's not the end of the world, but it's wasted time again and again.
I might have a biased perspective due to being part of the Pre Phase 1 test group.
For various reasons, I don't believe node progression balance is being tested at this time, in any capacity, nor any economic incentives. I have reasons to believe that when they say they want tests of Nodes and such, it is the most basic version of the testing: "Does the Node get exp when it's supposed to get exp under all conditions?".
I'm also very very picky/arrogant about economy stuff. The Ashes of Creation economy in Phase 1 is a placeholder. It serves no longterm purpose and the thing it is testing is not meaningfully affected by this to the point where banning the exploiters is worth doing.
Ok, if we go with your way of thinking here, isn't this the best[/i] time to ban these players as doing so gets rid of them before they can cause actual problems?
I'll say again, if a player was willing to do this right now then they'll have no problem doing it in the future. What this 'punishment' might actually have done is get them to behave in the pre-launch parts of the development and then go back to exploiting once the game opens up and they can get lost in the shuffle. Either way, I haven't heard a convincing argument as to why these guys should be kept around.
You and OP are both horribly hung up on something that does not matter at this point of the development cycle outside of doing a great job showcasing an error in need of fixing.
It's not moronic to know that this testing phase is specifically for finding these bugs, and the only harm was the weapons still existing, which was fixed via a character KO. The total wipe is less than a month away, there was nothing done that would justify a flat out ban for a testing phase, and Phase 1 is about stability, not the placeholder game economy.
I can't imagine being so hostile toward testers, the volunteer Q&A, finding bugs and blasting them to the extreme. Woo they got ahead for a day, and now those characters don't exist and the bug is being corrected. What benefit is there to banning players at this stage who did what this testing phase is for?
Because the issue here is about how you 'prove' that they did it on purpose.
MMORPGs are very complex, and people don't always pay a lot of attention. Bluntly put, some people are sometimes literally 'not even intelligent/attentive' enough to understand that what they are doing is not intentional to the game's design.
Sometimes they are testing if it will happen every time.
Sometimes you have to test if it happens to just you for some reason so you have to call someone else to also attempt the same exploit. Simply 'gathering all the data on the conditions of the bug for your bug report' can take long.
Is this the most likely reason people did this? Nah. But the banhammer is a heavy tier penalty for something that must be carefully weighed. And when you write 'punishment scripts' or similar for these things, it's more work to make them accurate when you have additional parameters to 'make sure you don't hit anyone you didn't mean to'.
And yes, this is true even when the same data being checked for item removal is the one being checked to see who exploited.
I don't know all the details internally, I'm guessing based on my own experiences with this. I don't expect to convince you either, but I figured I'd elaborate on my 'argument' for no ban.
I'm going to guess you don't really know how the bug went down or what the actual issue is/was. It wasn't a matter of something being done a couple times, it was done thousands and thousands of times by some of the biggest players and guilds on the servers. While I would completely sympathize with someone who did it a couple times on accident, the evidence in this case is staggering. Plenty of YT vids on how wide and over the top the stuff was. The prevailing attitude there now is "Oh, well we weren't taking it seriously anymore anyways, there was a wipe coming so we didn't really care.".
No, I believe I just have a different perspective than you do on this because of my development background.
You have to draw a line somewhere about who you ban and who you don't ban. And I wouldn't mind if they did exactly that and banned some people.
Unlike some others in this thread, my only point is that I can see a situation in which one holds back the banhammer to avoid drama, false positives, or a specific type of behavioural incentive change that often happens with exploits.
You asked why they weren't just permanently banned, but it's not like that is the automatic response that 'absolutely should happen'. I'd like to believe there's enough nuance that Steven himself could make the decision 'this isn't worth it' without the counterdrama of "Ashes of Creation Top Brass Compromises On Their Principles!"
It's really down to if you give them the benefit of the doubt or not, and I'm saying, as a developer, this isn't as easy to do 'safely' as some might think. I don't know if you know better trace methods than me, however, I'm not the expert on them, in my group.
The notion that there won't be any exploits or bugs when the game goes live is fanciful, so having some data on node progression gone wrong this early may well be beneficial- you and I don't know.
Same with developer time reverting things. That is useful experience that they may not have received until after the game goes live.
Again, you and I have no idea about any of this. We don't know how useful it was, wendont know if or when Intrepid saw the issue before it was logged, we don't know if Intrepud arenputting data from this to use in detecting exploits once the game goes live.
Since you and I don't know these things, all we can do is either trust Intrepid to do what they think is best, or not trust Intrepid. If we don't trust Intrepid, we should have no expectation that this game will amount to anything.
No one thinks that exploits or bugs won't be in the game, no one is saying this man. The issue is pretty simple, if someone found the bug, then exploited it or didn't report it (or reported it and then continued to exploit it) they don't have any interest in helping make a quality game. In that situation, I say show them the door.
While I understand why you may have thst position, it is not a great one to have.
First, literally all that matters is that the bug doesn't make it to live. Everything else is meaningless.
Second, with how early we are in the testing cycle, you and I are in no position to say whether thise thst found the bugs were going to report them or not. The notion of not exploring a bug when found is how you end up with games thst are full of bugs. You want your testers thst find bugs tonpick and prod at them, to get as much information on them as possible, and then to report thst information.
Third, even if the intent was to never report this bug, people capable of finding rhem are still exponentially more valuable as testers than people that think, for example, an ewrly alpha test has an economy that needs to be considered.
If developers know the people that find these bugs, they can easily just check up on those people periodically to observe what new bugs they have found. There is no specific need for them to be reported in order for Intrepid to be made aware of them.
Banning people that have shown you that they are good at finding bugs, at a point in development where you want to find bugs, is bad for the game. People that think banning these people is the right thing to do clearly don't have any interest in making a quality game - they are clearly ok with testers (and by extention Intrepid) finding fewer bugs.
I said nothing about if the crime warented a BAN or not, I'm perfectly fine with the level of punishment doled out. Just because I am disagreeing with YOU dose not make me in agreement with the OP.
I'm simply pointing out your view that their was no DAMAGE to the testing by the mass duping is a facilely moronic position to hold EVEN IF the economy is a placeholder, because Developer time is being wasted in disiplinary actions both in reverting the dupes and deleting characters. None of that was nessary to finding OR fixing the bug.
The people who were banned received warnings.
Many of them not only took advantage of the exploit, but also shared the detailed steps of repeating the dups with their guild members and said, "Yes. It's an exploit, but all the other guilds are doing it, so we should do it, too."
Players who accidentally gained advantage from the dups might have had their characters wiped or gold reduced to 0 or specific items removed, but weren't banned.
The harm done is the time it took for the devs to try to resolve the exploit without doing a full wipe of the server.
It's no more 'wasteful' than developers correcting the code so the dupe issue doesn't recur. They decided they wanted to reset back rather than move ahead with those weapons in the testing environment. Totally fine. They also could have handed everyone max level, heroic gear and saved themselves some time for the test phase.
But it's better they're testing their response systems now, ensuring the team is able to use the tools at hand to track duped weapons, verify which players have done what, and react to it. This whole scenario is a huge net positive for the development progress.