What Happened To You Today?

Skye

(I bought credits btw. ty ily)

Aegoth

             

Lisbethae

Sarapis said:

Klendathu said:

On an unrelated note, I would just like to say how lovely Sarapis' cowl is looking today. Not that it doesn't look lovely every day, it's just looking extra specially lovely today. And Makarios' too. Hair, cowl, shrubhammer, w/e.

I'm using a new brand of detergent to wash it these days, involving certain essential oils squeezed from a certain type of shrubbery. Thanks for noticing!

Do they call it, "Rustle"?

Dochitha

You have slain a fairy Lady of Sidhe, retrieving the corpse.

Your soul cries out in ecstasy as it reaches new heights of power. You have advanced to level 115.

You have reached the illustrious level of 2nd Echelon of the Paramount.

A small pile of sovereigns spills from the corpse.

YES!

Sobriquet

Is that really an achievement with lvl 3's of everything and a cape? You know, just saying

Aegoth

Dochitha said:

A small pile of sovereigns spills from the corpse.

YES!

NO

Dochitha

Aegoth said:

Dochitha said:

A small pile of sovereigns spills from the corpse.

YES!

NO

You are observant! I hit gold cap chasing after the level up!

Ismay

Umm a massive gold generation bug that has been around, and reported, for a year? That isn't a failure on the players' parts...

Antonius

Yes, it is. It was obviously a bug. Abusing it just because it wasn't fixed is absolutely your fault.

Caelan

Austere said:

Nazihk said:

Aegoth said:

You can't just shrug and say "WELP IT'S OVER NOW, LET'S MOVE ON!" because this massively affected the in game economy to a huge degree. Hundreds of millions of gold, Klen... that's not something that just "diminishes over time". The fact that the punishments basically amount to nothing is extremely worrisome, considering the scope of this abuse.

The scope of the abuse is why the punishment can't be harsher. If you drop too heavy a hammer on a large percentage of your playerbase, they'll just quit. If enough people have been doing it, that can be a crippling blow to the game, because shrubbing/banning n players can result in you losing 3n players after their friends quit and friends of those friends quit and so on and so forth. 

There is absolutely no good way to handle a bug of this size and magnitude. Honestly, I'd probably just throw a good sized lump of bound credits at the people who didn't abuse it and call it a day. Slap the fuckups on the wrist, reward everybody else, call it a day. 

I'm not sure establishing this precedence for future abuse is the best idea either. Now, we all know that all we have to do to avoid scrubbing with bugs is just to involve enough people that any sort of realistic punishment is unfeasible. I'm not saying I think those involved should get permanent ip bans, but I think that this is really going to make it difficult to establish what is "fair" in the future as far as cheating punishment goes. I'd hope to see further action taken, preferably in line with previous cases of abuse, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.

Take the biggest abusers (longest users of it - or just highest amount) and shrub them and their alts for 3 months.  Shrub the others for one month. If people could REASONABLY be seen as not knowing, dock them credibility for a bit (it comes back).

I honestly think it's bullshit to not punish them because of the scope.  In the end, I know it's a business, but the integrity of the community should be close to 'as important' as the bottom line.

Antonius

Caelan said:

Austere said:

Nazihk said:

Aegoth said:

You can't just shrug and say "WELP IT'S OVER NOW, LET'S MOVE ON!" because this massively affected the in game economy to a huge degree. Hundreds of millions of gold, Klen... that's not something that just "diminishes over time". The fact that the punishments basically amount to nothing is extremely worrisome, considering the scope of this abuse.

The scope of the abuse is why the punishment can't be harsher. If you drop too heavy a hammer on a large percentage of your playerbase, they'll just quit. If enough people have been doing it, that can be a crippling blow to the game, because shrubbing/banning n players can result in you losing 3n players after their friends quit and friends of those friends quit and so on and so forth. 

There is absolutely no good way to handle a bug of this size and magnitude. Honestly, I'd probably just throw a good sized lump of bound credits at the people who didn't abuse it and call it a day. Slap the fuckups on the wrist, reward everybody else, call it a day. 

I'm not sure establishing this precedence for future abuse is the best idea either. Now, we all know that all we have to do to avoid scrubbing with bugs is just to involve enough people that any sort of realistic punishment is unfeasible. I'm not saying I think those involved should get permanent ip bans, but I think that this is really going to make it difficult to establish what is "fair" in the future as far as cheating punishment goes. I'd hope to see further action taken, preferably in line with previous cases of abuse, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.

Take the biggest abusers (longest users of it - or just highest amount) and shrub them and their alts for 3 months.  Shrub the others for one month. If people could REASONABLY be seen as not knowing, dock them credibility for a bit (it comes back).

I honestly think it's bullshit to not punish them because of the scope.  In the end, I know it's a business, but the integrity of the community should be close to 'as important' as the bottom line.

You're a bit behind. People have been shrubbed. Investigating something of this scale just takes time.

Caelan

Sarapis said:

Antidas said:

Before everyone gets -too- up in arms about this, I would love to hear from @Nicola @Makarios regarding whether or not they feel this bug really is the culprit for our massively high CFS prices or not.

They certainly contributed, but insofar as market pricing involves psychology it's impossible to 'prove' what percentage of the increase (somewhere between 0% and 100%) this was responsible for. We've said all along that there's no question gold supply is the major problem with CFS prices rising, and this just reinforces that fairly obvious truth.

As for punishments, everybody calm the fuck down. The Achaea team spent a very long day trying to unwind just the gold from yesterday's bug abuse (40 million gold went into the system yesterday just from bullshit ship trades) which is necessarily an entirely manual process. Doing that and stopping the abuse was a lot more important than shrubbing some people who could no longer cause further damage. Then they went to sleep, because they're not expected to work 24 hours a day, believe it or not. The work of rectifying this is far from over.

THERE'S the old Sarapis! Nice!

(And to add to my previous.. I don't think anyone thought this was "over".   I just couldn't believe some people were saying to let it go with a slap.  )

Caelan

Antonius said:

You're a bit behind. People have been shrubbed. Investigating something of this scale just takes time.

I guess I am.  Have been at work and just popping into forums to check new posts while drives are imaging.  Also, see the addendum to my last.  Pretty obvious it will take time to manually sort gold logs and a year's worth of bug abuse.

Exelethril

Achaean SEC 

Ismay

I'm not saying that the admin have to fix bugs as soon as they're filed. But with something this big, a simple news post serving as a warning would have taken no time at all. You can't blame players who may have little to no prior experience with seafaring when the real fault lies with how it was overlooked by the admin and not handled properly. Talk about running players off.

Kresslack

Yes, I was one of the people who did this. Yes, I was shrubbed. I take full responsibility for my actions because at the end of the day it should have been obvious to me that it was "too good to be true".

I had come back and was doing trades the old fashioned way because wasn't even sure what the deal with the Ship and Personal distinctions were. So when someone said to me a couple of weeks ago, "Hey, you're doing that wrong, do it this way and you can make a lot more for the time and effort", obviously that should have been a red flag, but I ignored it and jumped on the trade train. Seemed like the obvious choice at the time. It wasn't until people started getting zapped that I thought, "Well, I've really messed up."

At the end of the day, something like this obviously has an effect on the game in various ways, and in hindsight, that really sucks.

Either way, I have no qualms about the punishment doled out and think it appropriate considering the details and magnitude of how this affected the game over the course of apparently the last year. I really should have just hung up my hat the moment I started losing interest in the MUD experience.

So mote it be.

Makarios

All I'm going to say on this topic is the extremely problematic bug in question isn't the one most people seem to be assuming it was. As the announce post stated, this wasn't a single bug, it was a combination deal. A player actually did bring it to our attention which is what prompted us to look into it yesterday.

Aegoth

Makarios said:

All I'm going to say on this topic is the extremely problematic bug in question isn't the one most people seem to be assuming it was. As the announce post stated, this wasn't a single bug, it was a combination deal. A player actually did bring it to our attention which is what prompted us to look into it yesterday.

As long as this gets the gold cap removed!

Ahmet

Inb4 gold cap gets applied to all non-player sources of gold generation.

Byakko

Either way, the MTC got singled out for this and shrubbed when it was obvious there were PLENTY of other people doing the -exact- same thing. I love how one second they can say you're not getting shrubbed because it was a mistake, then decided yea.. we're just going to shrub these few to make a point. Like I said before, I came back and thought he trades had become epic... now I get shrubbed for it.

Melodie

You got shrubbed not only for abusing a hugely gold-generating bug, likely for months and months, but also using ANOTHER bug or two to cut down sailing times to make that gold generation even more insane than it already was.

If you don't get that, you really, honestly should probably find another game and not even appeal after the single year. Logic is necessary to play Achaea to its full extent and enjoyment.

Atalkez

You got singled out for being the most egregious user of several bugs in conjunction. Honestly? When you explain how the bug works to anyone that didn't know, so far the reaction has been 'how did they not know' - because the loophole was really that ridiculous. Kresslack admitted to realizing how bad it was, maybe you should do the same.

Aralaya

Out of curiosity, what was the travel time bug?

Byakko

Byakko said:

Either way, the MTC got singled out for this and shrubbed when it was obvious there were PLENTY of other people doing the -exact- same thing. I love how one second they can say you're not getting shrubbed because it was a mistake, then decided yea.. we're just going to shrub these few to make a point. Like I said before, I came back and thought he trades had become epic... now I get shrubbed for it.

Just saying that if all this shit was a bug, it would have been nice to fucking know ahead of time.. Seems homeport was a bug.. and aaall this other crap that everyone was using the same way was a bug.. and figureheads were a bug... so many bugs and aaaalll of a sudden it's wrong? Something seems off, and I am not the only one to think so...

Laedha

I think they mean using homeport between harbours. I don't think that's an obvious bug. Seemed to me a reasonable use of the power given that doing it has a high time or gold or credit cost. 

Aralaya

Shouldn't the large majority of this be in rants?

Atalkez

Laedha said:

I think they mean using homeport between harbours. I don't think that's an obvious bug. Seemed to me a reasonable use of the power given that doing it has a high time or gold or credit cost. 

It was never meant to be what that was. If you read the announce post for it, it even states that it's not a fast travel ability. It's designed as an emergency escape from a mechanic that generally takes hours to get out of. 

Ryldagh

Byakko said:

Byakko said:

Either way, the MTC got singled out for this and shrubbed when it was obvious there were PLENTY of other people doing the -exact- same thing. I love how one second they can say you're not getting shrubbed because it was a mistake, then decided yea.. we're just going to shrub these few to make a point. Like I said before, I came back and thought he trades had become epic... now I get shrubbed for it.

Just saying that if all this shit was a bug, it would have been nice to fucking know ahead of time.. Seems homeport was a bug.. and aaall this other crap that everyone was using the same way was a bug.. and figureheads were a bug... so many bugs and aaaalll of a sudden it's wrong? Something seems off, and I am not the only one to think so...

Something is definitely off.  But I don't think it's what you think it is.

I'm not entirely certain what you think you're going to accomplish here, but you're certainly not going to get sympathies from the people that deal with CFS being what it is because you and others decided abusing a bug was cool and devalued gold, essentially devaluing every OTHER person's time that didn't do the same.  If you're looking for a good way to contact the staff and plead your case, they definitely have a more direct and less soapboxy way of doing so via email or self-issues.

Klendathu

If you don't think the punishment fits the crime, appeal. I'd recommend a stronger starting point than "But I didn't know". I sail quite a lot, do a lot of trades. Never occurred to me to use homeport as a quick travel, because the information in the AB said it was to return to harbour. I didn't use the one person accepts / another person completes bug because it appears contrary to the idea of personal trades.

Simple rule of thumb: It it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Aralaya

The way I thought personal trades worked when I started seafaring was the captain accepted, did the trade and got stuff, and then got 3 people who wanted to help them complete the trade if they had 3 trades worth of stuff