Heroic/Epic Otto's Boxes need immediate attention

[slarden]

Why isn't this problem fixed yet?

Put an ID on all stones of xp, and then ban people publicly when they are duped.

It really only takes banning 2-5 people for life (if public and loud) before 99% of the players stay away from duped boxes.

There were many bannings on Sarlona last time around.

Bannings would be effective if they didn't always wait until the problem was already way out of hand. When I reported that the anniversary cards were going to be massively exploited while it was on Lam they kept deleting my posts without taking any action until I was more subtle about it - they left the post but still didn't take any action and released the anniversary cards knowing full well it was exploitable. They knew but didn't seem to care and didn't think it was important enough to delay the release.

[Michaelaz2]

Look a AH Shard prices , its very obvious theres an exploit , inflation is outta control

[Soulfurnace]

3. Price of Ottos box at store, the way epic and Improved epic were setup, all points to a creating a wall and then asking players to pay massively to bypass that wall. Someone clever found a way to make this cheaper. Capitalism always wins, as former USSR can attest.
4. This has made people to roll up alts and get to cap for raiding, keeping cap scene a bit more tolerant.
5. This has made lot of people who left DDO, come back and are on TR train to complete their lives.

TLDR: There are lot of benefits I can see from this saga for both players and (maybe) Turbine. Leave it as is.

Note: I play first life barb, I do not like TR system as-is, don't plan on doing one anytime soon(R).

It's a literal exploit. That's not "clever". That's not "bypassing a wall".

Who cares about raids? I'm sorry, running r1 or hard raids isn't an endgame scene. You may not understand that, but people throwing together a lazy alt isn't going to make exciting, difficult raid content.

Also, if the only reason they're playing DDO is literally to take advantage of an exploit, maybe they should just... stop.

[devashta]

It's a literal exploit. That's not "clever". That's not "bypassing a wall".

Who cares about raids? I'm sorry, running r1 or hard raids isn't an endgame scene. You may not understand that, but people throwing together a lazy alt isn't going to make exciting, difficult raid content.

Also, if the only reason they're playing DDO is literally to take advantage of an exploit, maybe they should just... stop.

Running raids is definitely part of endgame. There are raids almost daily in Ghallanda in addition to guild runs on different days. People using duped boxes and getting tons of past lives has absolutely no impact on your gameplay. This is just a game, just chill and move on mate.

[Quikster]

Im surprised this has gone on so long. This should have been priority number 1.

[zappy]

lol 50% off hearts of wood, its like they dont even care. maybe the devs are the ones selling the stones at a very cheap price and giving people a chance to catch up to people that have been around for a decade?

[Quikster]

lol 50% off hearts of wood, its like they dont even care. maybe the devs are the ones selling the stones at a very cheap price and giving people a chance to catch up to people that have been around for a decade?

It's much worse than that. I've seen hearts, shards, xp pots, xp bonus, and on and on. Yeah sure seems like some synergy.

[Soulfurnace]

Running raids is definitely part of endgame. There are raids almost daily in Ghallanda in addition to guild runs on different days. People using duped boxes and getting tons of past lives has absolutely no impact on your gameplay. This is just a game, just chill and move on mate.

I'm on ghallanda, as you routinely seem to forget. Those hard/r1 raids aren't endgame, they're honestly boring. If that and being carried in r10's is your idea of endgame Bhima, that's a serious worry.
There's no challenge to be derived from bringing competent players into r1 raids - aside from thth which doesn't scale well into reaper, which is why even LD, who managed r10 PN, haven't even done r4 thth.

[HungarianRhapsody]

Agree - there is no way they are profiting from it - typical argument by people duping to make themselves feel better.

They aren’t making as much on 50 duped boxes as they would on 50 DDO STORE purchased boxes, but they weren’t going to sell those 50 boxes at $20-$40 each. They are making money on the process that’s involved duping and they are making money on players who have come back to the game because of the cheap boxes and they are making money on the hearts of blood (currently at 50% off). And they’re making money off the Astral Shards being used to purchase boxes from the ASAH.

Just like in all piracy, there are some benefits to the company and the costs to the company are wildly exaggerated.

[jax2649]

They aren’t making as much on 50 duped boxes as they would on 50 DDO STORE purchased boxes, but they weren’t going to sell those 50 boxes at $20-$40 each. They are making money on the process that’s involved duping

And the process does not work with just 1 box. For a duper to get a decent amount for them to be able acquire all lives they'd need a couple more and do the process more than 6 times and SGG profits from that alone.

[nokowi]

Their next system will invalidate the old system anyway, and the end game meta crowd that drives design (but not content) will not care the heroic/epic content is not balanced, and that any balance that exists now will be removed as their change things for the new 30+ system design. Those playing in the heroic/epic cycle will just play whatever is easiest anyway, and just looking at how heroic balance is viewed (it doesn't matter because players roll over content), the same will be said for anything 20+ that exists today.

This is not a player issue, it is just how SSG designs.

I hardly see how it matters given that they invalidate their own design with each new system, and that rewards were never correlated with player ability but rather who played the easiest build(s) and limited content to just the best rewards per time.

[nokowi]

They aren’t making as much on 50 duped boxes as they would on 50 DDO STORE purchased boxes, but they weren’t going to sell those 50 boxes at $20-$40 each. They are making money on the process that’s involved duping and they are making money on players who have come back to the game because of the cheap boxes and they are making money on the hearts of blood (currently at 50% off). And they’re making money off the Astral Shards being used to purchase boxes from the ASAH.

Just like in all piracy, there are some benefits to the company and the costs to the company are wildly exaggerated.

If that was true, they could drop the price and extract all the value themselves - no need for players to take a cut. Anything that offers too much rewards per time threatens their pay-to-bypass monetization.

The correct answer is they can make something new that hasn't been duped with 30+ levels, and that they are going to invalidate the game prior to level 30 anyway by designing all class changes around that 30+ content and issues, in the same manner we have seen heroic content invalidated since this team at SSG took over. Their "vision" was players running through content so fast that they complained about opening doors.

[Visty]

/not signed.

1. TR/eTR/Racial TR is personal choice of a player. It is not required to play the game. The number of lives a person has and how he had it (playing, boxing) has no impact on my and your gameplay.
2. We have been asking Turbine to remove the XP penalty for TRs so new players, returning players can catch up IF they want to. 10 years+ and it is still on deaf ears. Recently I posted a suggestion to allow power-levelling which was voted down by both Turbine and some players, which would been a legitimate way to level up alts.
3. Price of Ottos box at store, the way epic and Improved epic were setup, all points to a creating a wall and then asking players to pay massively to bypass that wall. Someone clever found a way to make this cheaper. Capitalism always wins, as former USSR can attest.
4. This has made people to roll up alts and get to cap for raiding, keeping cap scene a bit more tolerant.
5. This has made lot of people who left DDO, come back and are on TR train to complete their lives.

TLDR: There are lot of benefits I can see from this saga for both players and (maybe) Turbine. Leave it as is.

Note: I play first life barb, I do not like TR system as-is, don't plan on doing one anytime soon(R).

i hope you realise Turbine has absolutly no say in this

[Mindos]

Dupers play the game. In their way. But they do play the game. So what's the punishment? More Extreme Prejudice? Can SSG really ban dupers if the amount of dupers is a very large amount? I don't know. I've given this some thought and I'm torn over what the best thing for the game is to do. On the one hand, outright banning and account deletion might work. Figuring that these dupers just might be the most passinate players we have. Meaning, they'll come back. On the other hand, mass bannings might just decimate server populations. Driving non duping casual players away, since there won't be anyone to play with from their perspective.

And the bannings would be pointless anyway unless SSG bans all the duper's sleeper accounts, hoarding ill gotten gains. It's a tough situation for SSG. Historically, I don't think there's a way to track inventory. Probably be a lot of work to reindex and rebuild the games databases, linking and counting and itemizing each and everything. Would probably have to bring the servers down for hours or even days...

[SerPounce]

The fact this thread is still here shows how not on-it they are. They probably need to come up with some new forms of "punishment" other than character deletion and account bans like removing PLs/RXP. I don't think someone should be banned because they bought a duped ottos on the AH for a price they should have know was too good to be true, but they should lose the PL. Actual dupers and their direct circle should be banned of course, but it's probably hard to find them since they presumably do it on alt accounts and launder the boxes through the AH/trades, possibly through multiple cycles.

[Thar]

/not signed.

1. TR/eTR/Racial TR is personal choice of a player. It is not required to play the game. The number of lives a person has and how he had it (playing, boxing) has no impact on my and your gameplay.
2. We have been asking Turbine to remove the XP penalty for TRs so new players, returning players can catch up IF they want to. 10 years+ and it is still on deaf ears. Recently I posted a suggestion to allow power-levelling which was voted down by both Turbine and some players, which would been a legitimate way to level up alts.
3. Price of Ottos box at store, the way epic and Improved epic were setup, all points to a creating a wall and then asking players to pay massively to bypass that wall. Someone clever found a way to make this cheaper. Capitalism always wins, as former USSR can attest.
4. This has made people to roll up alts and get to cap for raiding, keeping cap scene a bit more tolerant.
5. This has made lot of people who left DDO, come back and are on TR train to complete their lives.

TLDR: There are lot of benefits I can see from this saga for both players and (maybe) Turbine. Leave it as is.

Note: I play first life barb, I do not like TR system as-is, don't plan on doing one anytime soon(R).

it's not capitalism if your stealing to get the boxes.

[Haloivae]

I don't do it myself but If I was a new player I definitely would. Imagine starting as a new player in this game deciding I really like this game then realizing if you want to get the best character possible you need to grind for 2 or 3 years to get past lives from classes and races you don't even like. So spend years grinding instead of playing or get some duped boxes and actually enjoy playing the game. They created a massive grind wall, no reason to act surprised when people find a way to avoid being bored to tears for a few years just to enjoy a game.

[SerPounce]

I don't do it myself but If I was a new player I definitely would. Imagine starting as a new player in this game deciding I really like this game then realizing if you want to get the best character possible you need to grind for 2 or 3 years to get past lives from classes and races you don't even like. So spend years grinding instead of playing or get some duped boxes and actually enjoy playing the game. They created a massive grind wall, no reason to act surprised when people find a way to avoid being bored to tears for a few years just to enjoy a game.

Experiencing all the built up content and trying different builds is the best part of this game. Skipping all that by cheating so you can get to the middling at best "endgame" scene is a terrible idea. How long ago was that WoW south park episode? And people still don't get it. There's nothing much to do once you have everything.

[Haloivae]

Experiencing all the built up content and trying different builds is the best part of this game. Skipping all that by cheating so you can get to the middling at best "endgame" scene is a terrible idea. How long ago was that WoW south park episode? And people still don't get it. There's nothing much to do once you have everything.

For some people mabey but my main is heroic completionist and I absolutely hated every single non-caster life to the point that I boxed about 4 of them and leveled as a caster and used hearts to swap classes before reincarnation for most of the rest. Hard to believe I know but some people play wizards because they enjoy playing wizards and not fighters, barbarians, rangers, or any other class there is.

[Soulfurnace]

For some people mabey but my main is heroic completionist and I absolutely hated every single non-caster life to the point that I boxed about 4 of them or leveled as a caster and used hearts to swap classes before reincarnation for most of the rest. Hard to believe I know but some people play wizards because they enjoy playing wizards and not fighters, barbarians, rangers, or any other class there is.

You are aware that you don't need completionist, right?

Especially on a wizard?