Kotaku: Hundreds Of Players Banned In Final Fantasy XI

[Xno Kappa]

more stuff

Are you even reading anything I've posted? The FFXI player-base is not meant to be SE's beta-testers, so the whole "BG Dupe Cover-up Scandal of 2008" is a failed argument. The glitch/exploit was reported through the PROPER channels LONG before November.

I've already said my peace as well as many others who've reported the glitch before it was adjusted. Personally, I don't have to take responsibility for a damn thing. I never used the exploit, I retain the ability to log on whenever I see fit and I've already stated my agreement with the punishment to those who abused it. Whether you choose to see the hypocrisy in SE's action is up to you.

[Day]

Are you even reading anything I've posted? The FFXI player-base is not meant to be SE's beta-testers, so the whole "BG Dupe Cover-up Scandal of 2008" is a failed argument. The glitch/exploit was reported through the PROPER channels long before November.

I've already said my peace as well as many others who've reported the glitch long before it was adjusted. Personally, I don't have to take responsibility for a damn thing. I never used the exploit, I retain the ability to log on whenever I see fit and I've already stated my agreement with the punishment to those who abused it. Whether you choose to see the hypocrisy in SE's action is up to you.

WHY DIDN"T THEY FIX IT INSTANTLY I DON"T UNDERSTAND.

[Xno Kappa]

WHY DIDN"T THEY FIX IT IN THE 1.5 YEARS PPL WERE ABUSING THE SHIT OUT OF IT I DON"T UNDERSTAND.

Fixed.*

[Day]

Same difference. Rome wasn't built in a day son.

[ringthree]

What kind of psuedo-"listen here youngin" nonsense are you talking about? How is the situation even remotely close to a car? I'm sure the majority of us on this forum are grown adults so please spare us any irl-comparing rhetorical bullshit. If I tell you verbatim step-by-step how to recreate the glitch, how is it not possible to address the manner or at the very least raise awareness to deter any further use? It's not me giving SE too much credit but rather you over-estimating the simplicity of said glitch. This is the same company that took their sweet ass time in making such a simple adjustment in sky via Ullikummi.

I completely agree there should have been punishment. My one and only argument all this time is the negligence of SE to address the manner in a timely fashion until it involved hundreds of players who obviously had friends to hate see them go. To say SE were oblivious to the exploit is naive at best.

Well, your attitude, candor and lack of knowledge about car repair leads me to believe that my assumptions were correct, but lets assume that I was wrong for the sake of argument.

My "rhetorical bullshit" was simply an analogy that would exist whether or not I was old and enfeebled. The case remains the same, if you take your car in to be fixed and the person working on your car can't reproduce the issue to fix it, then they can not fix it. Just because you hear a grinding in your transmission doesn't mean the technician is going to tear it down and tinker about just to see if there is something really wrong if they can't figure out what the grinding is to begin with.

This is true of anything. Just saying there is a glitch in the game does nothing, the opportunity cost for fixing the problem has to be high enough to justify fixing it. The fact that you think I was over-estimating the simplicity of the glitch only further proves my point, the more complicated it is, the more difficult it is to reproduce, and the less concern SE has about the issue because it will be difficult for others to reproduce too.

I know that some believe that SE is staffed with millions of workers that move at near light speed and can diagnose computer problems with a Micah-like laying on of hands (god, I am so glad they ditched him). Again, I will mention the irony of this situation, because those people that believe that SE has this programming god-force, are the same people that are blaming SE instead of themselves for their banning. I, on the other hand, believe that SE are run by humans that work in a business, and those people have to make decisions based on budgets, man-power, risk, reward and many other things. The people that duped were just humans too, working on similar criteria.

Before the dupe got out, it was a small confined problem, SE might or might not have known about it, but if they couldn't reproduce it consistently, it is quite possible that they just decided that the reward of recoding something they weren't sure was going to fix the problem (like the technician tearing down the transmission just to poke around) wasn't worth the effort and could just cause more problems. Once the dupe got out and everyone started doing it, then it became a major issue, rebalanced the cost-benefit analysis and demanded more of SE's attention.

This same scenario can also be looked at to explain SE's lack of attention to the claims of people reporting the glitch. Before the glitch got out, there were limited number of people that could have reported the glitch, so the signal to noise ratio in SE's suggestion box was low. Even the best company when it comes to such things will not pick up on things like this, especially if some of the notes they receive are as infantile as some of the players act. Just saying there is a glitch does nothing really if they aren't instructed in how to reproduce the glitch. Once the glitch got out, the signal to noise ratio reversed and SE could then see there was a problem that demanded attention. From the time that the glitch became an issue on BG (which likely caused a flood of reports to SE) to when it was fixed was pretty quick. The bannings they had every right to take their time with.

The only thing that really shocked me about the whole situation is that the glitch was kept pretty well hidden for so long.

Again, I have to chuckle to myself because of the blame that SE is assigned for not being god-like in their knowledge of everything that happens in the game at all times. Just because you know about something does not mean that SE does as much as you wish it were the case, or more importantly as I stated in my first post and again in this one, even if they knew about it the demand to fix it before it exploded onto the scene could have been low if they did not think it was more than a non-reproducible glitch. Ullikummi was years and years ago (and believe me I knew the absolute frustration of that time) and many, many things have changed since then including SE's response time to problems. I am lead to believe through logical observation that SE learned about this being a major concern about the same time it was made relatively public.

You can believe what you want, but in the end, to believe more than what can be logically observed requires assigning god-like abilities onto the company of SE and then also the paranoid delusion that SE also hates it's player base.

Holy shit... I didn't realize I wrote a book.

tl;dr: You think SE is some kind of God. They aren't. People cheated, SE banned them. Case closed.

[Kenji]

Are you even reading anything I've posted? The FFXI player-base is not meant to be SE's beta-testers, so the whole "BG Dupe Cover-up Scandal of 2008" is a failed argument. The glitch/exploit was reported through the PROPER channels LONG before November.

I've already said my peace as well as many others who've reported the glitch before it was adjusted. Personally, I don't have to take responsibility for a damn thing. I never used the exploit, I retain the ability to log on whenever I see fit and I've already stated my agreement with the punishment to those who abused it. Whether you choose to see the hypocrisy in SE's action is up to you.

This is where you fail, because you lack the knowledge to understand the words you are throwing around.

Beta testers are only used in the Beta testing phase. This is where the majority of glitches are found and fixed. The goal of beta testing is to create a usable product. The fix the worst glitches and bugs that would otherwise cause it to become unplayable.

Play Age of Conan or Tabula Rasa sometime, to find out what it's like to play a game that came out of beta testing too soon. Or play WoW.

The point you still don't comprehend, is that every damn piece of software that gets released today is going to have bugs. It is physically impossible to catch them all. In the context of a persistent online world, which is accessed by a multitude of different PC setups, there are going to be bugs. The programmers understand this. The suits understand this.

Everyone in the damn world understands this except you.

If you are going to continue to claim that perfection is possible, then you aren't living in the same reality as the rest of us, and thus any future comments from you will seen as similiarly flawed.

My challenge still stands: Create a bug-free MMO. If you can do that, you can name your reward. Want 100 billion dollars? I'll rob banks until I pay you all of it. Come on, we're waiting. Put your damn money where your mouth is.

To sum up: Every MMO will have bugs. QA, product testers, and developers won't catch them all, so they rely on their players to point them out. Every paid-for MMO out there has the exact same clause in their TOS: If you find a bug/exploit/whatever, you must report it.

It's a smart business move. The dev's are able to find the last of their bugs and fix them, and the players get a better world to play in, and thus keep paying money. And the suits get richer.

In closing: Compared to other MMO's I've played, FFXI has been damn-near stable and bug free.

[Kohan]

In closing: Compared to other MMO's I've played, FFXI has been damn-near stable and bug free.

Though I haven't played other MMOs -- only other online titles -- this is exactly part of the reason why I still play and enjoy FFXI. I've worked in game development, I'm still in the industry (though a different part), and I can thus fully appreciate the amount of effort that went into creating FFXI. Most people simply don't understand how complicated a game of this size and scope is, and they never will, unless they one day sit in a corporate chair on a project of respectable size. Learning how to code in college or releasing a small indie game does not count.

I have to disagree on the point you made about beta testing, though. From my personal experience, that definitely is not where the majority of bugs are found. They're usually found in alpha and by internal testers.

[lolwut]

Play Age of Conan or Tabula Rasa sometime, to find out what it's like to play a game that came out of beta testing too soon.

Very true. I picked up TR just after launch, and played it through to the end, and it was bugged to hell the whole time. Unplayable zones, tons of heavily glitched instances, glitched terrain so bad that they had a player command that allowed you to pos hack slightly to the side to clear you from obstacles just to cut down on the endless calls from trapped players. And this from a company with a long history of MMOs (Guildwars, City of Heroes, Exteel, etc.) who are the makers of the MMO most of the banned players (Remedy is supposedly moving en masse) are moving to - AION. Then there are the MMOs that never move out of beta, and simply are tested and reworked forever with no release like Huxley.

FFXI may be crappy by design and management, but it's still cleaner and better developed that a lot of what's out there. I think too many people are holding it to a console game standard, and not thinking about the real logistics of maintaining a MMO of this scale and age on a worldwide basis, especially for a company where MMOs are more of an afterthought than a business focus.

[Raineer]

Ringthree wins just because of the sig.

[Ziero]

Are you legitimately trying to defend SE's assumed ignorance and the failure of its GM's?

It's easier to defend SE then it is the dupers.

Year after year of weird talk/hints, development team teases and the infamous video are strong proof that they've always been extra picky about AV. No one is entirely sure why, but one of the developers apparently takes the NM waaaaaay too seriously... like it's his own child or something, or he gets paid to only watch over AV. This has just always been on the priority/paranoia list, no matter what else is going on. Few other things have sparked a GM intervention so severe as to move a full LS out of a zone, either.

I'd liken it to being the DM of a D&D game. Yea, you're all there to have fun, but you want to push some challenges on the people playing. So you go about, create some super monster and expect them to have an epic fight, only to watch them wail on it like it was nothing. Next game, you make a stronger mob and *wham* dead as a doornail. As the guy running the game, you want them to know you make the rules and don't want the players trouncing all over your strongest mobs. So you make one that can't be beaten...and then all your friends stop coming over.

anyone that plays this game long enough has many examples of exactly how arbitrary and asinine GM/SE actions can be. this is merely the latest in a long list of fail.

And anyone who plays this game long enough knows that duping is a highly bannable, easily trackable offense with very little/no leniency granted to those who perpatrated it. Nothing arbitrary or asinine about these bannings.

The mistake was not making salvage reasonable in the first place.

If it was reasonable, no one would have cared to dupe or do anything. It was either risk your character or waste 2 hours of your game time every 3 years to get the gear you needed. It is not a coincidence that almost every single person who know about it took advantage of it.

People risk their characters all the time just to do nothing more then gain quick gil or run slightly faster then normal. It's ridiculous to think people wouldn't dupe something unless it had a low drop rate. If people could dupe freaking hi-pots, they would. The only mistake was made by the people who thought they'd get away with it.

I think that the people who don't get why so many people are upset is that Square goes ape-shit over duping in Salvage, but still does fucking nothing (or next to it) about botting and gil-buying. How about pos-hacking and flee-hacking? You would think that fixing that shit would have been a huge priority as well, but it took them forever to make an automated system to deal with it.

For as long as I can remember, and I've been playing this game for years, SE has always banned for Pos hacking and duping. And especially since they added the STFu, and have been kicking the crap out of RMT, pos hackers, botters etc etc, anything that can be easily proven, you would think Dupers...the easiest of all things to prove, would be smart enough to not do it. Don't try to spout off the "SE never banzorz ppls!" BS, because for the past few years they've been mauling anyone dumb enough to use obvious hacks like Pos, Flee and fishing.

Whether the community as a whole openly discussed the exploit or not is irrelevant. We're not their beta testers, plain and simple.

Actually, we are the beta testers, in a sense. When we log in, we are contractulally obligated to report any glitches, bugs, exploits or problems we come across in game. Very few (infact I've only counted 1-2 people since this whole thing started) admitted to reporting this glitch. There's no reason one or two stray reports would ever cause SE to raise it's warning flag.

As for why somethings are deleted and others are not, that isn't for one person to decide. As per your examples, the unlimited salvage permits was an obvious bug that was obviously going to get fixed. (And didn't it require you to have the Assault Points to get more permits? So no one was really hurt, since you were limited by the number of points that you had.) The less than 6 people to enter a Salvage zone doesn't hurt anyone either, unlike Nyzul, there are no lines to get into Salvage areas and if you couldn't make it with less people you only hurt yourself. (These examples, of course, are my own opinion and may not be shared by the admins or other mods.) Duping on the other hand was wildly inappropriate and we knew that there would be a shitstorm if that got out since people would say that we are condoning it by letting people know about it.

But that doesn't change the fact that you seem to pick and choose what exploits are allowed to be posted here. If this duping exploit was talked about, and a large fuss was made here about it, it would have been dealt with a long time ago. But it's obvious it was being covered up, as much of the EG community shared this secret and tried hard to keep it from getting out. But had it been a negative glitch, and instead of tripling Salvage drops, it reduced drops, the crap storm here would have been enormous and it would have been patched much quicker. Whether you like it or not, and by your own admission, SE does moniter these forums. And as the largest EG community in all of FFXI, BG is the voice of that community. And when that voice intentionally hides something, it's a problem. This was an issue that people did not want leaking out, and while BG may have not wanted it to get out to avoid trouble on their end (as seen by no BG member being banned) most wanted to keep it secret so it wouldn't be fixed. Now I'm not saying BG is somehow responsible for this being exploited as it was or all those who got banned, just pointing out that BG certainly didn't help to avoid the situation.

Hell, iirc, it was when the exploit was posted on GameFAQs that it became "common knowledge" and was subsequently fixed.

[Day]

Ok someone tell me where we are at now, was it players, SE or BG forums fault, because I'm getting confused.

[Ziero]

Players.

SE left the car door unlocked, and BG(forum, not LS) was across the street next to a cop, but they're not the ones who opened the door and made off with the stereo

[Raineer]

Ok someone tell me where we are at now, was it players, SE or BG forums fault, because I'm getting confused.

It's always SE's fault, no one would ever claim responsibility for such an obvious abuse of game mechanics.

If the game allows it, it must be legal.

edit: damnit ziero, your answer must be sarcastic, no real answers allowed

[The Blackrose]

Players.

SE left the car door unlocked, and BG(forum, not LS) was across the street next to a cop, but they're not the ones who opened the door and made off with the stereo

Are we starting with the analogy crap again?

[Raineer]

Are we starting with the analogy crap again?

How else will I know if I am right or wrong?

[Ziero]

Are we starting with the analogy crap again?

Analogies are fine if people consider the spirit of the two comparisons instead of the specific logistics behind it.

But the basic premise is still there. While SE left the glitch in, whether they knew about it or not is unimportant, and BG knew of this glitch and intentionally kept it quiet, in which the reasoning is unimportant, it was ultimately players who ended up commiting the actual crime.

Besides, people have never stopped using analogies, why stop now?

[ringthree]

Are we starting with the analogy crap again?

The problem is not with analogies... it's with stupid people making stupid analogies.

Leave analogies alone! ;_;

[Kenji]

I have to disagree on the point you made about beta testing, though. From my personal experience, that definitely is not where the majority of bugs are found. They're usually found in alpha and by internal testers.

Point taken. You are correct.

Actually, we are the beta testers, in a sense. When we log in, we are contractulally obligated to report any glitches, bugs, exploits or problems we come across in game. Very few (infact I've only counted 1-2 people since this whole thing started) admitted to reporting this glitch. There's no reason one or two stray reports would ever cause SE to raise it's warning flag.

An argument could be made about us being testers, but "Beta-Tester" has a specific meaning. It applies to people testing software in a Beta phase. FFXI is not beta.

But us being testers is part and parcel of the game; or of any MMO or large persistent world. That's just the reality of the situation, based upon how software is designed.

[Raineer]

Much as I'm not crazy about SE, sometimes there are just simply things you can not foresee or catch in beta-testing. That being said, they should not get a free pass for waiting 18 months to patch it.

The INTELLIGENT companies beta-test with people who can really put something through its paces. If SE was truly bright, for every major patch you give the best hackers you know some cash to try and break it. Who make the best security advisors in the real IT world? Former hackers who knew how to break it.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but I do have to stick up for SE somewhat in that it is very difficult to find every possible exploit before releasing content to the main population.

[Palom]

One thing I don't understand about the bug: it involved breaking alliance for the kill shot on the mob. Why didn't this work everywhere? (If it did, then I guess you can completely ignore the rest of this post!)

I'm guessing that for some reason, they changed how items were pooled in Salvage and in the Sandworm BCs (I'd go on to further speculate they originally were going to do it Dynamis-style, then halfhazardly changed it back to a normal alliance-style pool). On that fact alone there should have been some testing on it. Someone should have said, "gee, these items aren't dropping into the pool like normal, maybe we should do some extra testing and come up with different situations to see what happens."

From my perspective, as someone who had no knowledge of the bug, all I saw was: 1) We found a bug and killed it; and 2) Now you guys are banned. The whole process seemed knee-jerk and out-of-place to me. Perhaps it's just viewed as a much more "heinous crime" than claim botting (which is a more longstanding issue and continually goes unpunished), of which my opinion happens to be the opposite.