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[golem]

Apparently something interesting has been going on inside the world of StarWars:Galaxies. There is some sort of credit duping bug and after being heavily exploited by folks such as this "bruceleee" on the Intrepid server. Such an original name! Well apparently he and others started giving out these duped credits for nothing or were "tipping" heavily with them. Instead of trying another less extreme method first Sony banned everyone involved. Whether they knew they had these duped credits or not! So after this mass banning all sorts of friends of these people gathered in Theed (you know, Naboo?) to protest this or something. A bunch of CSRs (GMs, essentially) told them all to leave or they'd shut the whole server down! I find that part particularly amusing. So this one player, Allehe, starts acting as a reporter giving a play by play of whats going on while being randomly transported across the game. I guess some people even got teleported into space. Ouch. I guess they did shut down the server at some point when Sony made good on their threat but is now up and running again!

rofl what a trainwreck.. more here

http://www.warbucket.com/ibforums/index.php?act=ST&f=23&t=17655

actually me and my friends did something of the same sort back when UO was new.. haha

 

[Trasher]

Sucks for all of the people who got banned, and are now going through SWG one by one to get in again after who knows what they will be charged with.

 

[ManaByte]

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Announcements&message.id=249#M249

It is unfortunate that a tiny minority of players feel compelled to cheat. This harms other players by inflating the Star Wars Galaxies economy and diverting development and customer service resources away from servicing our players. Approximately 200 people were directly involved in the exploit and attempting to hide the gains realized from it. Some of these people admitted directly they were trying to destroy the SWG play experience. All their accounts have been permanently banned.

Much of the discussion on this has centered around the possibility that innocents were being banned unfairly. In a case like this, our first priority is to suspend accounts, and freeze the movement of the duped credits in order to limit damage to the game economy. There is always a chance that in doing so, players who received the credits unawares will find their accounts suspended. This is why we have an appeals process--so that each individual case can be examined by customer service after the fact.

Over the last week we have been carefully looking at each appeal. In this case approximately 15% of the appealing accounts were deemed to be not involved by this process. These accounts have been restored and credited for the play time lost, and each player has also received an apology from us.

We understand and appreciate the concern shown by both these players and their friends ... we do not want to wrongly accuse anyone. We hope that everyone appreciates that our primary goal is preserving the integrity of the game. We'd like to thank those players affected for their patience and forbearance while we investigated. As a reminder, anyone banned or suspended can appeal that action by emailing swgsupport@soe.sony.com

We have full and complete logs of every transaction, and all appeals will be scrutinized carefully.

We need to stress that the suspensions occurred at such a rapid rate in order to lock the credits down before they were dispensed into the economy. We apologize again to those that were inconvenienced by this, but we are always going to try to protect your play experience as much as possible.

The majority of the appeals from the recent exploit are complete at this point. About three dozen appeals are left to process--mostly ones that came in during the last 24 hours. We hope to have these resolved very soon.

When all is said and done, despite any controversy that may have arisen, we believe that the end result has been:

- the removal of around 200 players who were willing to damage the play experience of others for personal gain

- the confiscation of approximately 550,000,000,000 credits that were undermining the legitimate earnings of adventurers, crafters, and merchants throughout SWG

We remain committed to enforcing our terms of service to ensure a safe and fair environment for the players of Star Wars Galaxies. Thanks again for your patience during this past week.

1. The CSRs cannot port players into space as Penny Arcade was saying because, uh, thats not possible as there are not space areas for them to port players to until JTL comes out. They WERE most likely porting the Naboo players to 0,0 on the map (the exact middle) as there is where problem players are sent. It's like the jail in UO.

2. They were NOT going to shut down Intrepid. They were threatening to shut down the server Naboo resides on to stop the game-crashing spam and lag they were causing in Theed. Plus the people spamming "Thunderheart sucks cock" would be suspended even if they WEREN'T spamming as that right there violates one of the SWG in-game policies in terms of language.

 

[Bog]

Seriously, do you have a job?

 

[ManaByte]

Seriously, do you have a job?

I used to be a GM on SWG, which is how I know that they weren't porting people into space. They were sent to the middle of the map.

 

[KingV]

I don't understand why you'd want to pay for a game where the mods can teleport you all over the damn place at will. What's the fun in that?