Heroic/Epic Otto's Boxes need immediate attention

[HungarianRhapsody]

This is true and a few people from the previous duping bans said they were banned for purchasing mats from the ASAH. Whether they were cleansing duped goods through the ASAH and actually guilty - I have no idea.

In all honesty I would not even purchase or use boxes right now for fear of being labeled a cheater and/or reported. Because honest people frustrated with duping can also get a little crazy with their accusations sometimes.

Even after this Hardcore season is over, there is zero chance that I would by a box from DDO because of concern about being banned for using boxes.


(and that’s in addition to my general concern about paying $20-50 in order to not play content.

[dcstogner]

[QUOTE=slarden;6350620]I am not pointing fingers at anyone - just saying the whole reaper system is tainted due to cheating. I earned my 3 characters wings and 100+ points honestly long before the duping started but it doesn't change the fact that system is tainted due to cheating. With double-boxing people can earn rxp at a tremendously fast rate by running only level 30s on higher skulls for big rxp then TR then double box up to 30 with very little questing with duped boxes. With an iconic triple boxing with duped boxes you can get to 30 with no running prior to 30. This was done honestly through purchases prior to the duping and now is done with duped boxes as well.



there has been a dupe for the boxes ever since they first came out , this has been a issues for almost a decade now

[slarden]

I am not pointing fingers at anyone - just saying the whole reaper system is tainted due to cheating. I earned my 3 characters wings and 100+ points honestly long before the duping started but it doesn't change the fact that system is tainted due to cheating. With double-boxing people can earn rxp at a tremendously fast rate by running only level 30s on higher skulls for big rxp then TR then double box up to 30 with very little questing with duped boxes. With an iconic triple boxing with duped boxes you can get to 30 with no running prior to 30. This was done honestly through purchases prior to the duping and now is done with duped boxes as well.



there has been a dupe for the boxes ever since they first came out , this has been a issues for almost a decade now

Some of the older exploits were fixed and newer ones were discovered. I have no idea on the timeline but it seems the recent duping is less than 2 years old - but of course I have no idea if people have been doing this longer. The problem seemed to start around the time the improved boxes were released, but that might be more that it created the opportunity to triple box with duped boxes vs. the timing of when the exploit was found. Triple boxing itself wasn't possible until improved epic boxes were released.

Certainly the ability to go from 1 to 30 immediately with duped boxes didn't start until improved epic boxes were released.

[Mindos]

1. Don't ban anyone for Duping. They dupe and they play. The more players the better.
2. Spread the duping method far and wide. The more who know how, the better. Let the players choose themselves whether to dupe or not. No more they have that and it's not fair argument. Your choice.
3. Heck SSG could even monetize this whole thing. There's obviously demand for Otto's. Legitimize the Duping! Instead of super secret tricks, traded in dark alleys, make a Dupe Button right on the inventory page.
4. But, give any toon that uses said Dupe Button "Taint of the Duper" It won't do anything at all. Just a "de"buff that others can see when examining them. The people who care about "pure" will know. /shrug

Also, all this legal speculation has me curious. Does anyone know Texas case law? (asking for a friend)

[Dark_Lord_Mary]

OK one second, do people really not know some players are positioned to buy as many otto's boxes as they want ? and to utilize them however they want?

[KoobTheProud]

OK one second, do people really not know some players are positioned to buy as many otto's boxes as they want ? and to utilize them however they want?

This is not the issue. The issue is that some people apparently are duping boxes and getting around the need to spend money to use boxes to power through lives. Some people are apparently duping boxes and selling them on the ASAH as a cheap source of astral shards, which basically buy most of the rest of the stuff in the game.

The people who buy legitimately and are positioned to buy whatever they want are not the issue. They're not going to dupe this way unless they are risk-takers who do it just to see if they will get banned.

The issue is that everybody else, the people not positioned to buy whatever they want, will be pressured to either dupe themselves or to play at a disadvantage to their peers if they don't.

The DDO model is all screwed up at this point however that's a different question for a different time.

Duping destroys DDO's integrity and in the process magnifies everything else that is screwed up about the game.

[Swimms]

Wow, just checked for the first time in a while on Argo. There would rarely be a single Otto box for sale on the ASAH on occasion and now there are 5-packs up for sale, ***. Pretty disappointing really. I do not care what others choose to do but as someone who is sitting on 5 boxes that were ligitamatelly obtained over time through mostly direct purchases but one through the AH about 5 months ago, I am now concerned about getting in trouble for having them on my account.

[Veltamore]

Can you please make all boxes and XP stones in those boxes bound to account immediately? It is getting out of hand the amount of duped boxes out there.

I was offered a heroic otto's box for a piece of raid loot today. As tempting as it was, i decided not to do the trade and placed the item up for roll due to the fear of being banned. The reasoning is, how am I to know if the Otto's box was legitimately bought in the DDO Store or duped. In fears of being banned I did not make the trade.


So, you have some players out there that are unawares of the duped boxes, so if and when the ban hammer drops and they made a trade for a duped box and get banned. Is that really fare because Standing Stone has not made a stand or announcement of the ramifications of making such a trade.


The simple fix is to make all current and future boxes bound to account. Then you can easily find out who is duping and drop the hammer on them.

As a player that has been playing on and off from launch of the game. I have never seen it this bad for duping. This needs to be addressed sooner than later.

Thx.

V/R

Yes it is way out of hand and something needs to be done about it.

[timmy9999]

ok to settle everyone's anxiety, and to add more flavour. Its ssg putting the boxes on the AH not dupers. They get twice or 3 times the money for them...think about it. So stop pointing fingers, people are a pending like crazy buying shards on special. Its the perfect crime. Why else would this post still be up....

[nokowi]

ok to settle everyone's anxiety, and to add more flavour. Its ssg putting the boxes on the AH not dupers. They get twice or 3 times the money for them...think about it. So stop pointing fingers, people are a pending like crazy buying shards on special. Its the perfect crime. Why else would this post still be up....

There is a set of the population who just love conspiracy theories.

It's a judgement call by Cordovan, but in the past it has generally been okay to talk about a commonly known issue, as long as the mechanism for doing so is not being shared and as long as locations for learning how to do so are not being shared.

When SSG pretends a well known problem doesn't exists, they look incompetent. In my opinion, it's better to allow productive talk than to try to hide from the reality of their game.

Ultimately it's a judgement call from one person, when and why to close a thread. No conspiracy theory is needed.

[aGarde]

I think most of the speculation/chatter here is silly now. SSG knows exactly who's duping. The only question is why are they allowing it to continue? I don't suspect we're going to get an answer to that question though. Duping is rampant atm, and it's a rather disgusting and depressing.

[HungarianRhapsody]

I think most of the speculation/chatter here is silly now. SSG knows exactly who's duping. The only question is why are they allowing it to continue? I don't suspect we're going to get an answer to that question though. Duping is rampant atm, and it's a rather disgusting and depressing.

And even if they don't know who's duping, it's something that they reasonable should know by now and if they don't know, that's their own fault at this point.

[mikarddo]

Hopefully they atleast remove not only lots of past lives but also lots of reaper points from those who have used the duped boxes.
If this goes unpunished it completely ruins any sense of accomplicement wrt. gaining xp which is, or has been, a big part of DDO.

[Thrudh]

You think gaming news media wouldn't go absolutely bonkers if SSG filed criminal complaints? It would be the biggest advertisement for DDO since well... ever.

Actually getting a criminal complaint to get pled out or go to trial and winning would be massive in terms of press, and pretty ground-shifting because then lawyers would be angling for this kind of work.

And no, the ambiguity makes it worse for the duping-inclined. "Are you going to get caught? How did they get caught?" Turns paranoia up to 11.

ETA:

Criminal complaints are in fact, usually publicly accessible. Would also be a fascinating test of jurisdiction and value interpretation. Felony theft is usually around $500+ (so 10 duped boxes). Because one would file the complaint in say, MA, and if they got a judge to issue indictment things get very complicated for defendants out of state. Then every time defendant has to fill out a form about being charged with a crime, they have to explain themselves. There's a huge fat tail of effects on doing this just a handful of times. Just ruin a couple people's lives and pretty soon we'll have this new thread of media about kids or adults ruining their futures because they committed IP theft crimes in MMOs (which will also bring scrutiny to some shady MMO things as well).

Shame and name is not really sustainable and we tried that like maybe 200+ years ago. What's next, throwing tomatoes at them?

I was responding to the guy who mentioned criminal complaints. I think criminal complaints are silly too.

My point was to make whatever you do public. Bans is all that is necessary.

And Shame and name works very well, and is used today effectively in many situations.

Haven't you ever heard the phrase "make an example out of him"?

One scenario is a teacher who comes down extra hard on the first kid breaking the rules early in a semester, and then has no problems from the rest of the class for the rest of the year.

If you let the bad kid get away with stuff all year long, at some point, even the good kids are going to stop following the rules.

[Thrudh]

The problem in a nutshell is that SSG's response to the current duping wave is pretty much going to set the standard for how the community views duping moving forward.

If there are a series of high profile bans related to duping then the community standard will remain as it currently sits, with most people viewing duping as a disreputable practice that is highly volatile and unsafe for the people practicing it. It is my general feeling that this is how the problem has been approached in the past and it is why we're having the conversations we're having today. I could be very naive on this issue but I believe that SSG has closely policed duping in the past and banned people when they discovered that duping was occurring.

If there are not a series of high profile bans related to duping at this point the community standard on duping will become much more relaxed and people will see it as part of the experience of playing DDO - if you're in a hurry and you know how to dupe well what's the big deal, SSG obviously doesn't care enough about the issue to take action. This community standard will take a lot less time than we'd think to set in. Given the current box wave on the ASAH you could argue that we're already in the beginning phases of the DDO Dupe Meta.

I think a strong statement from SSG that duping is absolutely unacceptable and that dupers, and clients of external sales operations related to duping and other DDO-related services that are against TOS, will be permanently banned without appeal if they are discovered to be in violation of TOS on these issues is overdue at this point. Yes, the statement has been made in the past however it needs to be reinforced, particularly with the new customers that have arrived since F2P really became F2P this spring.

I think SSG probably needs to do a tech rinse of the Otto's Box creation process to make sure that each box and each XP stone included have a unique identifier to allow SSG to trace the history of a box and it's most important contents from creation to end use.

There are parts of this process that are going to be very uncomfortable for SSG as they look to take back control of the high-end items market.

They can't afford not to do that though.

This. This was my point. Great post.

[Captain_Wizbang]

No conspiracy theory is needed.

Look bro,I just spent 12 hours making my new solar powered tinfoil hat.

I WANT and NEED a juicy conspiracy to brighten my day. The "hey Lynnabel" thread is just too boring. And Im sick and tired of S&B, Reaper, HCL, Monks are nerfed, nerf warlocks, and pew pew threads that are...........well let's just say those threads have no "aha" moments.

[SerPounce]

There is a set of the population who just love conspiracy theories.

It's a judgement call by Cordovan, but in the past it has generally been okay to talk about a commonly known issue, as long as the mechanism for doing so is not being shared and as long as locations for learning how to do so are not being shared.

When SSG pretends a well known problem doesn't exists, they look incompetent. In my opinion, it's better to allow productive talk than to try to hide from the reality of their game.

Ultimately it's a judgement call from one person, when and why to close a thread. No conspiracy theory is needed.

Well said.

I would however really like to know if it's safe for me to buy those Otto's on the AH. I'm inclined to think that since they must know about them at this point and they're still there that as a bona fide purchaser with no actual knowledge of exploits that I'd be OK, but I'm not confident enough in that to risk my account. Sure is it's certainly tempting though!

[myliftkk_v2]

I was responding to the guy who mentioned criminal complaints. I think criminal complaints are silly too.

My point was to make whatever you do public. Bans is all that is necessary.

And Shame and name works very well, and is used today effectively in many situations.

Haven't you ever heard the phrase "make an example out of him"?

One scenario is a teacher who comes down extra hard on the first kid breaking the rules early in a semester, and then has no problems from the rest of the class for the rest of the year.

If you let the bad kid get away with stuff all year long, at some point, even the good kids are going to stop following the rules.

School isn't a commercial enterprise. And, even there, you get expulsion. MMOs are strictly commercial enterprises, and so property law applies.

I don't "teach" customers how to not steal from me. I don't know anyone who owns a functioning business who would (we can debate to the extent SSG is "functioning", but that's their nominal goal). Encouraging others to engage in finger-wagging shaming only increases problems.

What's silly and childish is trying to pull some schoolyard habits in rules based system that very much is designed to adjudicate these types of disputes. It's why, for example, I've a friend involved in a current legal dispute with a major global brand over IP rights and not whining about it in a forum somewhere.

[ggmarquez]

there are certain places where the title "legendary cheater" would be a title worth aspiring towards. some people would compete for the right to wear such a badge. calling that type of player the very thing they wish to be associated with would in no way solve the problem. making it public knowledge that cheaters cheat would only serve to give them further validation. as for the proposed mass bannings... trickle-down effect. it would be harder for me as a solo guild and pug raider to acquire threads/runes if all of the large raiding guilds saw another wave of bans.

maybe make otto's like filigree's... don't let 'em stack?

[SerPounce]

School isn't a commercial enterprise. And, even there, you get expulsion. MMOs are strictly commercial enterprises, and so property law applies.

I don't "teach" customers how to not steal from me. I don't know anyone who owns a functioning business who would (we can debate to the extent SSG is "functioning", but that's their nominal goal). Encouraging others to engage in finger-wagging shaming only increases problems.

What's silly and childish is trying to pull some schoolyard habits in rules based system that very much is designed to adjudicate these types of disputes. It's why, for example, I've a friend involved in a current legal dispute with a major global brand over IP rights and not whining about it in a forum somewhere.

It’s really common for businesses of various types to choose not to seek criminal charges. Even retailers facing classic property theft will often try to deal with small time stuff in house (show them security footage and have them sign something agreeing to not come back, etc). I find it surprising also sometimes, but many companies really don’t like starting processes they won’t have control over particularly when there’s minimal tangible financial up side.