Kotaku: Hundreds Of Players Banned In Final Fantasy XI

[Yugl]

Really, it doesn't bother me at all that people who were abusing this glitch were banned. What bothers me is that people who didn't even know about it, (IE: the alliance leaders/LS leaders just did it without asking permission, resulting in a member new to the LS getting banned along with them? BS.) were still banned just the same. I know SE's investigations are a bunch of bull shit, as I've experienced them first hand before. That's the real problem here. They don't investigate in the sense we all think, they just do it to make examples. And what about people who discovered this by accident and didn't abuse it? Someone accidentally disbands before something drops and they get banned? It doesn't seem likely all those people just got off with a warning, after reading a lot of the stories. Sure, they could be lies, but I tend to trust the gamers more than I do SE's methods of investigation.

Oh and how would you distinct between someone who knew about the glitch and someone who was randomly involved in a scenario where the glitch was used?

[tebian]

Regardless of what anyone thinks, it's still irresponsible of a company to had left that glitch alone for as long as they did. I, as well as many other people I know reported this glitch a long ass time ago before it blew up in November. When you get the "everything is working as intended" from GM's of course people are going to abuse it. Not to say those who did aren't wrong, but SE's hands are no cleaner then theirs for piss-poor management. What SE did is just some bullshit attempt of trying to portray a sense of righteousness as if they're genuinely pissed and had no idea what was going on, taking zero responsibility.

I am sorry but I totally agree with this. This was their fault and there should have been warnings given out or temp bans but no one at all should have lost all their work and time cause of there BAD PROGRAMMING. I wrote that over at allakhatrash and got sub-defaulted for it. Oh well I add my two cents here too.

SE made the obvious programming error and yes the did exploit it but the punishment does not fit the crime by any stretch of the imagination. Who did not use the chest and arrow thing in Periqia assaults when it existed for months ? Now that SE cant win the war on rmt's they are going after even the legitimate players for something to do. When do the stop waging war on everything and just make the game work. Where is WOTG that I paid for last year ? or are those guys reading pages of logs all night long to find 500 "evil" people out of the thousands that play this game all day ....

[BRP]

People got banned for duping, not exploiting. Think about it.

[tebian]

People got banned for duping, not exploiting. Think about it.

tell that to them when they decide to ban you for what "you can do" on the game is now bad i am sure they will want to discuss the difference ...

[Kuya]

I guess even Zam knows when to spot stupid.

[BRP]

tell that to them when they decide to ban you for what "you can do" on the game is now bad i am sure they will want to discuss the difference ...

http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/3602/whatyp8.gif

[Kenji]

Help me out here, because I'm hearing about contradictory information.

On one hand, people said, "We don't want to tell you about this cheat, because SE could find out about it."

On the other hand, "SE had to have known about it all along because we told them."

Something doesn't compute. If SE already knew, what was the harm in telling people? After all, one of the arguments was "If you knew about it, you would have cheated,too!" Surely telling people about it would have allowed us to know for sure, and you would have had the pleasure of them being banned, too.

Or maybe, just maybe, these groups kept a real tight lid on the secret, so that SE didn't find out until perhaps a couple months before the fix.

Either way, we don't know for sure, so it's pretty arrogant to say which way or the other.

[Lordwafik]

Help me out here, because I'm hearing about contradictory information.

On one hand, people said, "We don't want to tell you about this cheat, because SE could find out about it."

On the other hand, "SE had to have known about it all along because we told them."

It's not a contradiction if it's two different groups of people saying those sentences.


For me, I knew SE knew about it because someone in my salvage group knew someone who reported it (because a rival LS was claiming sandworm nonstop) and the GM basically told them they know all about it.

[Suiram]

Let me guess, the GM said, "Yes, we are aware of the situation. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do for you at this time. Is there anything else I can help you with [Name], [Job] of [Server]?"

I thought it was a given by now that what a GM says is as likely to be true as flipping a coin heads.

[altwight]

<3 how everyone is saying end game will be affected and bans were too heavy. fuck everyone

[Aymee]

Really, it doesn't bother me at all that people who were abusing this glitch were banned. What bothers me is that people who didn't even know about it, (IE: the alliance leaders/LS leaders just did it without asking permission, resulting in a member new to the LS getting banned along with them? BS.)

It's called the "Help Desk". You use it to call a GM when you notice there's a bug/exploit or there's just something amiss in general about the game. This is how ALL bugs are discovered and fixed. This was a coding error same as a thousand others that have come up over time--they all get reported the same way, remedies are formulated, things that are exploits always get an extra rush to be repaired once discovered. You made a previous post saying that they knew of this and sat on it for ages, but I highly doubt it. A ninPatching was done on extremely short notice and that's the usual flag of the developers saying "oh crap...".
If you seriously want to tell me that there were runs where not a single thing was said in a log about the duping process AND no one asked about why there were extra drops AND said person never lotted a single duped thing AND someone was actually stupid enough to not see anything duped......... lol. There's no way you could seriously say that. ...Even if you did, I'd dare you to find me a case where said person has a perma and not a temp, because I haven't seen any testimonials like that here.

And what about people who discovered this by accident and didn't abuse it? Someone accidentally disbands before something drops and they get banned?

I'll say again... GM call. Anyone in Salvage that actually pays attention would notice an extra armor dropping-- most would even see an extra 'drite or cell out of place. It's their own fault if they deliberately chose not to report it. If I'd have seen this I'd have reported it as soon as the run was over. If it had been an armor or pouch drop I'd even ask the GM what to do with it. This is the difference between people who bragged and got banned versus those giggling continuously the past few days. Whether or not you believe it, there are -some- people with some honor still around.

[mallister]

For me, I knew SE knew about it because someone in my salvage group knew someone who reported it (because a rival LS was claiming sandworm nonstop) and the GM basically told them they know all about it.

this keeps getting glossed over and buried in the finger pointing, gloating, and q-qing. they knew it was happening. maybe not the extent of it, but they knew. for whatever reason it didn't place high enough on the radar to warrant action. who knows what protocols gm/help desk use to file bug reports?

we know they were parsing logs/drops/salvage output due to statements that were later made by SE. it should have been really, really obvious something was horribly wrong much sooner by even a casual examination of the logs. of course, having the data collected and bothering to examine it are two different thing.

it should have been easy to spot just by a casual stroll through WG that there was something...off. in my first six months in salvage i hadn't seen a single 35 ares/morrigans body drop and we did arrapago 4 days a week (yes with TH3/4). took 9 months for us to get the three bodies we needed from the zone. in the next 6 months i saw 2 more drop. the sheer amount of completed bodies on my server alone should have been a massive indicator there was something fishy going on. the damn things were everywhere. (eyeballed, yes, i don't have a secret squirrel drop parser inserted into POL that only i have access to...but still...)

my point is that SE had all the information in front of them (we know the zones were logged due to them checking for duping after the fact), we have multiple instances of people GM/bug reporting and being told the usual 'working as intended.'

i am NOT excusing the duping or rationalizing it, everyone (myself included) that knowingly used this glitch deserves thier 72 hour ban at least. however, the arbitrary banning of some while others get a warning and others get the 72 suspension when SE was informed/had the information that this was going on for months and months is retarded. in my group's case, one of our monks got permabanned, while the leaders and everyone else got the 72 hour. however, my first salvage crew was completely gutted, with 5 permabans that i know of. there are others i know of that by their own admission duped their asses off and came out unscathed.

to sum up this wall of text:
-SE knew this was going on for some time, from a variety of sources (logs, parsed drops, bug/gm reports)
-it was never acted on, the people with knowledge of the glitch figured it was SE's business as usual and gleefully carried on exploiting
-SE massively over-reacts and arbitrarily bans some while warning/suspending others
-bullshit ensues, etc

i'll take my suspension without a complaint, i deserve it and anyone that argues at least a suspension wasn't in order is just self delusional, bad coding/inaction by SE for months aside. but the way this was handled as a whole is asinine. this is supposed to be a video game, not an undercover narcotics sting. fix the problem, punish in a uniform manner and fair manner, and leave your fucking magic eightball at home when coding/designing your games.

[tymora]

I think I can answer some questions here. Anyone of you would had ever worked anywhere in or close to tech support would probably know this.

Bugs are assigned priorities. If said bug is not prevalent or not widespread, it is not important, even if it is a big glaring bug to those who know about it. In short, if enough people bitch about it, it will be assigned a higher priority.

MMoGs are games that are permanently in Beta development. This is true for ALL releases out there. No MMoGs are ever released with 100% of their features (i.e no updates) and certainly none of them are bug-free. I think anyone with bigger than a pea-sized brain can just imagine how long that bug/feature queue is.

As a result, bugs don't and won't get fixed on Day 1 (or 10), unless it affects all the players. Notice how fast those controls/display issues got fixed real quick?

It is not that SE wants to wait till they want to bait you but rather simply that it wasn't on their radar till much later when more people knew about it.

And why are some people let off the hook? Apart from the possibility that their names didn't show up guilty on the logs, please refer to the Chinese saying of "Killing 1 to warn the hundred." Some people got hit (across all categories from light usage to heavy abusers) and it put across the message that "exploiting the game will not be tolerated by anyone" nice and clearly.

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I also believe the "Bug fix" thread(s) caused if not exacerbated the bans. I am not saying that SE is reading the forums or if they do, treat the forums seriously. I am saying that people who were bragging on it and saying all those crap about "only unskilled people don't use the cheat" (seriously if you are skilled, you won't need it no? - on cells).

Like it or not, they pissed off a lot of people. If those banned wants someone to blame, it would be those who posted crap on that "Bug fix" thread and other related threads across all FFXI forums. People who would be straddling the fence on the whole morality of this exploit will be swayed to the other side.

Think what happens when an angry mob floods their mailbox with "FU SE, TAKE ACTION ON THEM", especially with a nice convenient list of character names? Why, they even provided a nice, convenient form that doesn't take 10 min to fill out, to send a direct report to the STF! Besides, what better chance to use this exploit to get rid of players you dislike?

Put it simply. They reaped what they sowed. They issued a challenge to the authorities and SE responded with a virtual layoff.

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In my 2 years in the army, I was often told "You can do whatever you like, just don't get caught."

Bragging about an exploit is probably the dumbest thing that can be done because it is like admitting to a crime.
I am not advocating cheating but seriously if you want to cheat, just shut up and keep quiet about it and pray no one knows that you do. The braggers fail at life in this respect.

And love your fellow players, even if just to avoid having them dropping boulders on you when you are down. People like Wopadobop never bothered with this little tidbit of life.

[Kaeko]

In my 2 years in the army, I was often told "You can do whatever you like, just don't get caught."

Bragging about an exploit is probably the dumbest thing that can be done because it is like admitting to a crime.
I am not advocating cheating but seriously if you want to cheat, just shut up and keep quiet about it and pray no one knows that you do. The braggers fail at life in this respect.

And love your fellow players, even if just to avoid having them dropping boulders on you when you are down. People like Wopadobop never bothered with this little tidbit of life.

This is so true. It's similar to how I think most people are ok with or have just accepted windower users, but if you are one, don't go off spouting it in game.

Your point about the priorities list being based on the number of people complaining or are affected makes sense as well. My question then becomes, though, why have all 3 AV kill methods been patched so quickly? Certainly compared to this. This bug is over 1.5 years old, and was widespread in the NA community for at least 3-4 months. It also affects a very large number of players and 3 instances.

Someone finds a new way to kill AV and SE swoops in within a month tops. The most recent one took SE FOUR DAYS. That's like how long it took them to fix the ATNM test fiasco on PW or the infinite Salvage tags trick. Does AV really take that much priority?

[Akanei]

Publicity helps. A lot.

It's also considered the pinnacle achievement of that expansion. For someone to completely shit on something designed to actually be done (according to them) a specific way, to provide some sort of difficulty, it'd be absurd for them not to fix any other ways to bypass that.

Edit: What if dyna statues were suddenly bugged and dropped 100pieces 100% of the time? That only affects the amount of time it would take to get relic weapon, but it's, in the designers' eyes, a huge problem that would demand an immediate hotfix, considering the achievement getting one is (supposed to be).

[tebian]

I guess even Zam knows when to spot stupid.

w/e...

[Aymee]

to sum up this wall of text:
-SE knew this was going on for some time, from a variety of sources (logs, parsed drops, bug/gm reports)

...Fair enough. If we assume this is true, it doesn't excuse no GM calls... I have a feeling that anyone that does have a GM call about this on their acct has a suspension at worst.
To anyone that did call a GM on this-- what did they tell you, exactly? They'd either have to tell you to stop doing it or risk being banned, or try to use you in their covert sneaky ops! ...Ok, maybe not. ...I guess the stubbornness of those who participated is part of what made the investigating so sweeping.

So, either...
1) GMs knew about this before the patch and were taking advantage of people keeping hushed about it to collect more data.
Or...
2) GMs didn't know about this until it was patched and would still be pissed that no one ever called a GM about it.
And in both cases...
3) Any GM browsing BG could have instantly given them a large number of names to investigate. Anyone who boasted anything in the old fix thread was probably instantly flagged for permaban. Just because they can't use the forums as evidence doesn't mean they can't 'accidentally' run across a few names in the logs...


It doesn't particularly matter, but the irony is awesome. People got in trouble because they refused to speak up, and were found out partially because they were stupid enough to speak up. Nice.

Does AV really take that much priority?

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.

[mallister]

For me, I knew SE knew about it because someone in my salvage group knew someone who reported it (because a rival LS was claiming sandworm nonstop) and the GM basically told them they know all about it

see also ashira, others. there were GM calls made.

[Kenji]

this keeps getting glossed over and buried in the finger pointing, gloating, and q-qing. they knew it was happening. maybe not the extent of it, but they knew. for whatever reason it didn't place high enough on the radar to warrant action. who knows what protocols gm/help desk use to file bug reports?

we know they were parsing logs/drops/salvage output due to statements that were later made by SE. it should have been really, really obvious something was horribly wrong much sooner by even a casual examination of the logs. of course, having the data collected and bothering to examine it are two different thing.

You're right on one thing: This is glossed over. The fact that people are still looking to blame SE; that somehow, SE purposefully knew and did nothing. And so we get the "My brother's friend's girflfriend's sister's nephew told a GM!" Because GM's are paragons of virtue and know the game inside and out? It's been demonstrated that some GM's have no clue how the game runs sometimes. There could be some GM's that were in on the dupe and so chose to not pass it on, and instead erase their own logs(if they played). Or a GM who thought it wasn't that big of an issue somehow, or was just lazy("Dude, I do not want to look at a year's worth of logs, so I'll just not report this one").

Anyone who has worked in a big corporation knows, that quite often, the right hand really doesn't know what the left hand was doing. The "right" people at SE didn't know about this until recently. That is, the policy setters, the head developers, the suits, etc.

And yes, they had logs, but as any programmer knows, logs aren't checked regularly. Logs are just something stored, and only gone into if there is a reason.

So, the logical conclusion to draw is: The right people at SE didn't know, because the players who did know, kept a tight lid on it. However, no secret can remain a secret forever, so it did eventually trickle up to the right people, who said: "Why weren't we notified of this sooner!? Fix it and start reviewing logs to ban people who exploited!"

Of course, if you want to believe that SE is pure evil, and purposefully set you up just so they could ban you and then giggle, I suppose no amount of reason will reach you.

[Xno Kappa]

stuff

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