Teach SSG a lesson

[boredGamer]

I don't kmow how far back SSG has accounts archived but those caught cheating should have their entire accounts rolled back. My reasoning is that if they cheated on 1 toon then used it to get items, plat anything else to an alt or stored things in a shared bank they would still benefit from the exploit even indirectly. Also as straight punishment a 1 year rollback would be appropriate if possible..

And I advocate a complete account ban. It's pretty easy to get back up to cap and first life characters are viable. Not sure why our society thinks any differently. It's a game. Don't cheat. End of story.

[hinton]

Guilds should lose exp, gained from the cheaters too.

[FiendishCrusher]

Bugs are turbine's fault.

But if you got caught exploiting just man up and suck it.

Saga recycle is a thing since sagas were implemented and this last one was not even the best xploit.

i miss the old days when you could get 20 lives per day.

[Loromir]

Do not pay for anything for awhile, cancel vip, etc. Money talks and they will get the message that their programming stinks and policies are idiotic.

NO!

I like the game and will keep playing.

[Rys]

This thread is golden. Legit witch hunt. Love it. A lot of posters here have a very short memory about how Mayban was executed.

[FiendishCrusher]

This thread is golden. Legit witch hunt. Love it. A lot of posters here have a very short memory about how Mayban was executed.

I remember it pretty well, it was when i dropped my sub and stopped to give turbin any money.

[Chai]

I'm not defending anyone involved in this incident. What I am saying is that having a properly designed, fair process, protects both players and the company. Are you really unable to tell the difference between that and the issue of what should be done with people who exploit, once it's proven they definitely have done that? Apparently so.

Your reply assumes guilt and accurate detection of guilty people. We both know that there have been problems with this before. Both in this game and others. But that's not the only issue here; the real issue is the potential for error that can lead to a ban in a process that doesn't allow a player's side of the story to be heard before a ban is enacted. Hearing a player out before making a decision is just an opportunity for SSG to check its work and make sure they haven't missed anything before taking action. If you are not a fan of procedural fairness, looking at it like that might make you feel better.

Apart from the lame attempt to straw man me and your apparent support of a process where players are required to prove their innocence, my favourite part of your post was your attempt to declare, completely arbitrarily, that a directly relevant example of a process like this not being done well by the company before is 'prehistoric' and therefore irrelevant. Perhaps you could let us all know how recently, according to you, an event needs to occur for it to be relevant to a current discussion? Be sure to show your work too.

Thanks.

Your reply again assumes the same inaccurate detection is occurring, from an era which had very little employee overlap to this era. You are further assuming they did not hear players out this time around.
Team 1 made a mistake, and youre still raking teams 2 and 3 over the coals for it 7-8 years later.
Not the same producer. Not the same community manager. Most of the dev names have changed. Company name has changed twice. Not the same publisher.
Some dude who lived in a house down the road that one time was a jerk, so that means the current owner, 2 owners removed from that situation, is also a jerk? The logic doesnt follow.

The more the same few people irrationally defend the exploiters, the more those same few people should also be looked into. Im not saying they are all guilty (or any of them for that matter) mind you, but it does warrant a look. They could then get a first person perspective on how the current process works, and be able to differentiate from previous processes.

[Riddle_of_Steel]

Citation please.
...
Now show us where they stated they profit more and more players are online when they allow exploits (an absurd claim, even on a good day), and where they also stated no permabans occurred (I already know this to be incorrect, but if you can show us where they stated it, Ill lol, heh).

The entire DDO forum, all iterations old and new, are archived in multiple internet archive cites, and we can usually find information we want within minutes of remembering it was posted at some point, and we still have yet to find a reference to someone who worked for the company past or present, stating any of the three errant claims made recently. I can find threads where people were carrying on about "spaz attacking" (people being able to shorten attack animations yet receive multiplicitively more full attacks than the regular animations would allow) in 2005 during beta, but cant find any of the three "they said..." style claims stated on this same page. Keep in mind Im not doubting some players spammed this stuff over and over again in some eras while attempting to justify and defend blatant cheating, but not company employees.

FYI, There IS a citation however I cannot link to it as linking to the site that it's on seems to result in a ban here. That said, on that site, a former Turbine employee who started in QA, eventually was producer and moved to LOTRO before moving onto another company describes that management senior to himself (QA management no less) didn't care about quality and said so to his face. It was all about profit.

In another post he describes his efforts to deal with cheating and dupers (weight of regrets or whatever it was called was one of his ideas) in ways that had less of a risk of losing the customer entirely and would hopefully result in a change in behavior or positive peer pressure. He was all for taking what was gained illegitimately but not as big on the ban idea basically but he was basically being stonewalled in being able to deal with any of it until related store sales dropped. Hint, hint they made a LOT of $$ in Guild Renown Pots, XP Pots, Huge Bags and Shared Bank sales during this period often referred to as Dooopolooza.

When that money tap started to dry up only then was action allowed to be taken. It's in his own words on that site and if you think about it, it does make sense if you are purely looking at it from a business perspective. If you think about the time that this was happening the "powers that be" we were on their way to planning the transition to a mobile app dev house instead so at that time median and long term viability would have been a very minor concern as opposed to milking as much short and short-medium term cash out of the IP as they could. Knowing they were going to transition to mobile app development they would, of course, spin down their MMO properties into maintenance mode and shutter them once their profit margin dropped. I think that it's entirely likely they were thinking that they would have DDO around for 2 to 3 years at the very most, maybe less.

Granted with the spin off to SSG this decision was VERY harmful to long term game health for sure but from what I can tell nobody who made the above decision also made the move to SSG so I doubt they care now or saw the spin off as a real possibility. In the end they had bad management who made very nearsighted decisions in order to show strong quarterly numbers / milk the cow before putting it to the pasture/slaughter house.

Thankfully they are gone now and the crew at SSG will do, really has to do, the best they can to recover from it. So far I think their current actions make sense when looking at the long / medium term but what remains to be seen is if they receive a backlash or reactions to these actions that results in short term loss that they cannot recover from. Personally I think they will be fine, most players aren't dupers or cheaters intentionally. I say intentionally there because I am sure in the day I have probably bought something that was duped and I do know for sure that I one time did dupe a stack of about 40 or so Medium Power Cells when the big dupolooza was going on, but it was literally so easy that just using your bags normally could cause it to happen if you were a fast clicker.

Like I said though the citation is there but I don't want a ban so I can't and won't link to it but you should be able to find it if you look. Frankly I may have said too much in the above and might just get that ban anyway but I thought it should be known that at one time Turbine did indeed allow an exploit to run live because it made them some really good money. That being said I do not believe anyone who was involved in making that decision ever split off with SSG.

[blerkington]

Your reply again assumes the same inaccurate detection is occurring, from an era which had very little employee overlap to this era. You are further assuming they did not hear players out this time around.
Team 1 made a mistake, and youre still raking teams 2 and 3 over the coals for it 7-8 years later.
Not the same producer. Not the same community manager. Most of the dev names have changed. Company name has changed twice. Not the same publisher.
Some dude who lived in a house down the road that one time was a jerk, so that means the current owner, 2 owners removed from that situation, is also a jerk? The logic doesnt follow.

The more the same few people irrationally defend the exploiters, the more those same few people should also be looked into. Im not saying they are all guilty (or any of them for that matter) mind you, but it does warrant a look. They could then get a first person perspective on how the current process works, and be able to differentiate from previous processes.

Rather than continually repeating this false claim that I am defending exploiters, show me where in what I've said so far that has happened. Hint: I didn't, you're just making it up.

My gripe here is about the potential for error. Contacting players for a statement before banning them is fairer and reduces the chance of errors being made. If you have a process that goes straight to a ban before talking to the player, as has happened in this case, the chances of errors increase. It means bans occur before false positives can be identified.

People make mistakes, that is inevitable. If you are trying to argue that hasn't happened before with SSG or won't happen again you are just being ridiculous.

When you are setting up a process like this you should aim for it to be fair (not banning before hearing people out) and constructed to minimise error. Neither of those things have happened in this case, and making that observation is not even remotely the same thing as defending exploiters.

Thanks.

[Cantor]

Rather than continually repeating this false claim that I am defending exploiters, show me where in what I've said so far that has happened. Hint: it doesn't, you're just making it up.

My gripe here is about the potential for error. Contacting players for a statement before banning them is fairer and reduces the chance of errors being made. If you have a process, that goes straight to a ban before talking to the player, as has happened in this case, the chances of errors increase. It means bans occur before false positives can be identified.

People make mistakes, that is inevitable. If you are trying to argue that hasn't happened before with SSG or won't happen again you are just being ridiculous.

When you are setting up a process like this you should aim for it to be fair (not banning before hearing people out) and constructed to minimise error. Neither of those things have happened in this case, and making that observation is not even remotely the same thing as defending exploiters.

Thanks.

It depends on the process and detection used. I don't know how the exploit worked but for example : if the detection is "turned in the same saga multiple times within 10 minutes of itself", then I don't think any contact is needed, that is not happening in a legit way.

[Gremmlynn]

Rather than continually repeating this false claim that I am defending exploiters, show me where in what I've said so far that has happened. Hint: I didn't, you're just making it up.

My gripe here is about the potential for error. Contacting players for a statement before banning them is fairer and reduces the chance of errors being made. If you have a process that goes straight to a ban before talking to the player, as has happened in this case, the chances of errors increase. It means bans occur before false positives can be identified.

People make mistakes, that is inevitable. If you are trying to argue that hasn't happened before with SSG or won't happen again you are just being ridiculous.

When you are setting up a process like this you should aim for it to be fair (not banning before hearing people out) and constructed to minimise error. Neither of those things have happened in this case, and making that observation is not even remotely the same thing as defending exploiters.

Thanks.

That depends on the confidence they have in their detection system vs. the cost of sending and going through those statements. If they feel their margin for error to be low enough that the loss of customers or reputation from any potential error is of lower cost than paying people to send, read and confirm any errors, it wouldn't be in their best interest to do so. Fair really doesn't play into it except as far as how they may be perceived. As, for a business, losing more money by trying to be "fair" than simply being pragmatic is a bad business decision.

For example; If I own a candy shop and notice loss of inventory during times the same three young customers happen to be there. I'm not going to do nothing until I figure out which one(s), if any, are responsible. Nor am I going to spend more to investigate the issue than the losses are worth. I'm simply going to ban all three is that's the most efficient way to apparently solve the issue.

While this isn't how democracies deal with issues, a business generally isn't a democracy. While a business owner can decide to deal with the situation in a manner that is "fair" to all involved, they should feel no obligation to do so, as they are paying all the costs (in a democracy, it's theoretically the electorate that, directly or indirectly, decide how all will be treated and also agree to share the cost of doing so).

[Renvar]

This thread is golden. Legit witch hunt. Love it. A lot of posters here have a very short memory about how Mayban was executed.

You are referring to this?

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/285262

That was 8 years ago. How many of the posters here were playing back then?

[Loromir]

If SSG went as far as to delete characters that massively enjoyed these ill gotten gains I
hope they remember to disable the pay $20.00 to have the character undeleted option.
No sense leaving that avenue open to avoid the retribution.

Actually...I wouldn't have a problem if they allowed the deleted characters back. $20 penalty seems reasonable to me.

[blerkington]

It depends on the process and detection used. I don't know how the exploit worked but for example : if the detection is "turned in the same saga multiple times within 10 minutes of itself", then I don't think any contact is needed, that is not happening in a legit way.

Yep, but once again, the issue I'm on about here is whether you're actually identifying what you think you are identifying. I'm not taking about what should be done to people who have exploited, I'm talking about setting up a good process that may lead to a punishment.

Make a mistake specifying the report or processing the data from it and without any interaction with the customers you're straight at issuing bans, potentially by mistake, with no step in place to reduce the likelihood of people being wrongly punished. This process has clearly been designed with expedience as the primary concern, not fairness or with a safeguard to prevent customers from being treated badly if SSG gets it wrong.

It's kind of surprising to see people (not you, Cantor) defending a process where the subject is not allowed to give an account of themselves before guilt is decided and the punishment is applied. I can't imagine anyone here being happy if this was done to them by mistake, yet here they are endorsing it as fine for other people.

Use a better process, SSG. That's all I'm saying.

Thanks.

[Riddle_of_Steel]

Actually...I wouldn't have a problem if they allowed the deleted characters back. $20 penalty seems reasonable to me.

Heck maybe stealth increase that "for inflation" and make it $35 for an undeletion.

I have to expect the number of times someone accidentally deletes a character is minuscule at best. That said though dump any past life XP or non-bound gear you know was duped. Thus you get no actual reward and a fee to get yourself right back to where you were before it started.

[blerkington]

That depends on the confidence they have in their detection system vs. the cost of sending and going through those statements. If they feel their margin for error to be low enough that the loss of customers or reputation from any potential error is of lower cost than paying people to send, read and confirm any errors, it wouldn't be in their best interest to do so. Fair really doesn't play into it except as far as how they may be perceived. As, for a business, losing more money by trying to be "fair" than simply being pragmatic is a bad business decision.

For example; If I own a candy shop and notice loss of inventory during times the same three young customers happen to be there. I'm not going to do nothing until I figure out which one(s), if any, are responsible. Nor am I going to spend more to investigate the issue than the losses are worth. I'm simply going to ban all three is that's the most efficient way to apparently solve the issue.

While this isn't how democracies deal with issues, a business generally isn't a democracy. While a business owner can decide to deal with the situation in a manner that is "fair" to all involved, they should feel no obligation to do so, as they are paying all the costs (in a democracy, it's theoretically the electorate that, directly or indirectly, decide how all will be treated and also agree to share the cost of doing so).

You do have a point, but the consequence of this line of thinking leads to situations like a car company deciding it's cheaper to pay the families of people who are killed when their gas tanks explode even in low speed collisions than fix the defect leading to those deaths.

Now obviously a week long game ban or even the deletion of a character is nowhere near a death in seriousness. But it is exactly the same line of reasoning that takes us to both places. The bottom line is not the only issue that should be considered in either one of these cases.

Thanks.

[Chai]

Rather than continually repeating this false claim that I am defending exploiters, show me where in what I've said so far that has happened. Hint: I didn't, you're just making it up.

My gripe here is about the potential for error. Contacting players for a statement before banning them is fairer and reduces the chance of errors being made. If you have a process that goes straight to a ban before talking to the player, as has happened in this case, the chances of errors increase. It means bans occur before false positives can be identified.

People make mistakes, that is inevitable. If you are trying to argue that hasn't happened before with SSG or won't happen again you are just being ridiculous.

When you are setting up a process like this you should aim for it to be fair (not banning before hearing people out) and constructed to minimise error. Neither of those things have happened in this case, and making that observation is not even remotely the same thing as defending exploiters.

Thanks.

Once again, assuming their current process goes straight to a ban, due to something like this happening years ago when most of the current set of employees didnt even work for the company (2 companies ago) who managed the game when they made that mistake. Im not here saying they are angels and have never made mistakes. I am simply pointing out that continually pointing at the "Mayban" incident is no longer relevant. The original creators made a mistake and you are blaming the current set of caretakers for that.

The non sequiturs keep rolling in.

[Gremmlynn]

Yep, but once again, the issue I'm on about here is whether you're actually identifying what you think you are identifying. I'm not taking about what should be done to people who have exploited, I'm talking about setting up a good process that may lead to a punishment.

Make a mistake specifying the report or processing the data from it and without any interaction with the customers you're straight at issuing bans, potentially by mistake, with no step in place to reduce the likelihood of people being wrongly punished. This process has clearly been designed with expedience as the primary concern, not fairness or with a safeguard to prevent customers from being treated badly if SSG gets it wrong.

It's kind of surprising to see people (not you, Cantor) defending a process where the subject is not allowed to give an account of themselves before guilt is decided and the punishment is applied. I can't imagine anyone here being happy if this was done to them by mistake, yet here they are endorsing it as fine for other people.

Use a better process, SSG. That's all I'm saying.

Thanks.

It's not a matter of defending, just having realistic expectations. It's simply unrealistic to expect SSG to spend more in man hours to make sure some don't fall through the cracks than what they believe those theoretically falling through the cracks could be worth to them. Personally, I think it much more likely they simply double checked their data before taking any action and called it good.

As far as how I would feel if falsely suspended, ****ed enough to quit probably. But that doesn't change my expectations of how they are likely to conduct business any more than I think how I feel about extinction level events change my expectations of the likelihood of them occurring. As I have about the same amount of power to change either, none.

[Gremmlynn]

You do have a point, but the consequence of this line of thinking leads to situations like a car company deciding it's cheaper to pay the families of people who are killed when their gas tanks explode even in low speed collisions than fix the defect leading to those deaths.

Now obviously a week long game ban or even the deletion of a character is nowhere near a death in seriousness. But it is exactly the same line of reasoning that takes us to both places. The bottom line is not the only issue that should be considered in either one of these cases.

Thanks.

Unless an outside agency is going to enforce otherwise, the bottom line is likely what is going to matter. Which is pretty obvious when you consider that your example isn't hypothetical, but what actually has occurred.

[Chai]

FYI, There IS a citation however I cannot link to it as linking to the site that it's on seems to result in a ban here. That said, on that site, a former Turbine employee who started in QA, eventually was producer and moved to LOTRO before moving onto another company describes that management senior to himself (QA management no less) didn't care about quality and said so to his face. It was all about profit.

In another post he describes his efforts to deal with cheating and dupers (weight of regrets or whatever it was called was one of his ideas) in ways that had less of a risk of losing the customer entirely and would hopefully result in a change in behavior or positive peer pressure. He was all for taking what was gained illegitimately but not as big on the ban idea basically but he was basically being stonewalled in being able to deal with any of it until related store sales dropped. Hint, hint they made a LOT of $$ in Guild Renown Pots, XP Pots, Huge Bags and Shared Bank sales during this period often referred to as Dooopolooza.

When that money tap started to dry up only then was action allowed to be taken. It's in his own words on that site and if you think about it, it does make sense if you are purely looking at it from a business perspective. If you think about the time that this was happening the "powers that be" we were on their way to planning the transition to a mobile app dev house instead so at that time median and long term viability would have been a very minor concern as opposed to milking as much short and short-medium term cash out of the IP as they could. Knowing they were going to transition to mobile app development they would, of course, spin down their MMO properties into maintenance mode and shutter them once their profit margin dropped. I think that it's entirely likely they were thinking that they would have DDO around for 2 to 3 years at the very most, maybe less.

Granted with the spin off to SSG this decision was VERY harmful to long term game health for sure but from what I can tell nobody who made the above decision also made the move to SSG so I doubt they care now or saw the spin off as a real possibility. In the end they had bad management who made very nearsighted decisions in order to show strong quarterly numbers / milk the cow before putting it to the pasture/slaughter house.

Thankfully they are gone now and the crew at SSG will do, really has to do, the best they can to recover from it. So far I think their current actions make sense when looking at the long / medium term but what remains to be seen is if they receive a backlash or reactions to these actions that results in short term loss that they cannot recover from. Personally I think they will be fine, most players aren't dupers or cheaters intentionally. I say intentionally there because I am sure in the day I have probably bought something that was duped and I do know for sure that I one time did dupe a stack of about 40 or so Medium Power Cells when the big dupolooza was going on, but it was literally so easy that just using your bags normally could cause it to happen if you were a fast clicker.

Like I said though the citation is there but I don't want a ban so I can't and won't link to it but you should be able to find it if you look. Frankly I may have said too much in the above and might just get that ban anyway but I thought it should be known that at one time Turbine did indeed allow an exploit to run live because it made them some really good money. That being said I do not believe anyone who was involved in making that decision ever split off with SSG.

We are aware of what you are referring to. Its a poster with the same forum name of a former company employee seemingly ranting about the bad times they experienced when they worked for the previous iteration of the company. This is precisely what I am referring to, where the current caretakers are not even the same people for the most part, who were on board when many of those mistakes were made. While this doesnt disprove the current group working the project will mess things up as badly, it doesnt prove this will be the case either.