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SWTOR Player Banned for Looting Above His Level - confirmed, with a caveat.

Also, I'd like to think some of the reaction about it is some sort of a show that they recognize Galaxies; remember the mess the economy took there?

So why didn't they just copy Wintergrasp? I mean it wasn't that great of a concept but it wouldn't have resulted in this happening.

I'm not familiar with Wintergrasp (quit WoW before then) but some Googling shows it's a timer based system? If so, I don't know. I don't actually play SWTOR so I don't even truly know how this works beyond anecdotes from some searching.

And that doesn't mean it isn't a fucking joke decision that I won't bend over to.

There's two different issues, however. Whether or not the punishment was fair (i.e., sufficient warning or not) is the primary one; most people just kind of jumped into this with "lol unwarned perma ban?!" and that's a bit off-base. Punishment fitting the crime is a different story. I agree a permanent ban is a bit over the top but ... there were none doled out according to CMs so ...

Yeah and then they should have fixed it, not sat back and waited.

It's already been fixed, albeit with a temporary stopgap solution.
 
Yeah and then they should have fixed it, not sat back and waited.

It only recently been happening, if they could just fix it instantly I'm sure they would, but from the sounds of the problem it's not something that a hotfix will remedy. Some people act like this has been going on for weeks, game just came out. I wouldn't expect it to be fixed till next week when the next patch rolls around. A patch comes out tomorrow but believe it's too late for them to get it into this weekly update. They likely will have a something tossed in till a more comprehensive fix can be rolled out.
 

You win. Perfect.

"The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. HeÂ’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevents him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. "
 
Yeah, unless he used a hack, this is bullshit. The reward for going to high risk areas is good loot. That is the essence of MMO/Open world gaming.

That just sounds like a clever thing to do, to me. If they don't like it, they should have thought about their game design a bit more.

Edit: I don't play MMO's though, so maybe there are some unspoken rules of honour or some such I am unaware of.

For someone that doesn't play MMOs you sure seem to know about the essence of them.

I think its perfectly reasonable.

What type if self-absorbed, arrogant developer bans players for playing their game in an unforeseen (but completely legitimate) way?

I'd hate to play a game, with the omnipresent concern that if I play it in a way not prescribed by Bioware's internal masterplan, they will ban me for it. Its made me certain that I'm never, ever playing this game, after all, what if I play it wrong?

Its completely fucking absurd. How this terrible studio made some of the greatest games ever last generation, I have no idea.

I think it was in RO, RYL, and/or RF that I know people who reported other people (presumably lower lvl) because they took their loot, hell, sometimes they wouldn't even want the loot for themselves yet they would still get pissed of at others taking them.

In many games kill stealing, waiting til the enemy has locked on and has less health, is frowned upong and gets you suspended. Not just because its a pretty shitty thing to do, but also because rather often it is done by gold farmers/bots.

In Ragnarok I used to summon bosses in low level areas looking for special loot, that way I wouldn't have to worry about anyone kill stealing from me. Unfortunately now and then they would get out of hand and cause rampage around the map. The low level people would report my ass all the time and GM10 (i forgot her number) would always give me a heads up that I was going to get suspended again (:C), all I could do was take it....after all, they were right.

Would you really blame the mechanics of the games on all of those cases? of course not.

Its an MMO, what you do affects others, its not just about you, period.
 
Whew, I can imagine what you guys would have thought of the Salvage bans in FFXI a few winters ago. This is nothing new and a very tame example of shit that happens in MMOs all over the place, all the time. Exploitation of a bug is explicitly forbidden in the TOS that you agree to every time you sign in.

That was clearly an exploit and those people should have been banned.
My Salvage group knew how to walk right through locked doors, but we didn't do it.
 
There is another new exploit, dunno if there was a thread about it:
entering the command /getdown not only begins the game's social character dances - it also causes your opponent's attacks to be continually interrupted.

We haven't verified for ourselves whether this affects player-versus-player combat, but the video below suggests players participating in even the most challenging end-game group content could effectively breeze through the toughest - and most rewarding - bosses.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vun5geNHA5M

lol, more bans soon?
 
Wow @ /getdown
 
But honestly, outside of PVP, how can you really abuse this? I take it that the quests are easy already and there are no big raids in the game?
 
Tried on an elite after taking down his health like in the video and he still attacked me like usual.

:( I don't have the moves
 
I posted this once in another thread in which people were crying that ground/terrain glitchers should be banned. They had a shit fit.

If you don't want people exploiting the flaws and weaknesses of your game then fix the fucking game.

The truth.

Back at the beginning of the Burning Crusade in WoW rogues could exploit chests solo in instances and get masses of items and gold (the exploit being you could enter more than 5 unique instances per hour). Did I do it? you're damn right I did

I didn't get banned either, no one did. Banning people for your shitty game design is a really stupid thing to do.
 
I posted this once in another thread in which people were crying that ground/terrain glitchers should be banned. They had a shit fit.

If you don't want people exploiting the flaws and weaknesses of your game then fix the fucking game.
It's a lot easier to ban your paying customers, than have a product that works correctly in the first place.
 
I posted this once in another thread in which people were crying that ground/terrain glitchers should be banned. They had a shit fit.

If you don't want people exploiting the flaws and weaknesses of your game then fix the fucking game.

And then after making a completely bug free MMO at launch, come back to reality and realize that tons of games have exploits and issues even in the biggest games out there. A game of this scale is obviously going to have flaws that testers didn't find. In fact as annoying as some of the bugs have been this game is by FAR the smoothest MMO I've ever played at launch.

When you use an exploit, get told don't do it, then keep doing, what the fuck do you expect to happen? Games like CoD, Halo, CS, Battlefield, Starcraft, Warcraft, ect ban THOUSANDS of players for exploits. You can get banned in basically any online game for constantly exploiting.

Acting like no one else does it and expecting a gigantic MMO to be perfectly glitch free at launch tells me you've either never played a game online before or you are in a fantasy world.
 
And then after making a completely bug free MMO at launch, come back to reality and realize that tons of games have exploits and issues even in the biggest games out there. A game of this scale is obviously going to have flaws that testers didn't find. In fact as annoying as some of the bugs have been this game is by FAR the smoothest MMO I've ever played at launch.

When you use an exploit, get told don't do it, then keep doing, what the fuck do you expect to happen? Games like CoD, Halo, CS, Battlefield, Starcraft, Warcraft, ect ban THOUSANDS of players for exploits. You can get banned in basically any online game for constantly exploiting.

Acting like no one else does it and expecting a gigantic MMO to be perfectly glitch free at launch tells me you've either never played a game online before or you are in a fantasy world.

I don't consider entering a zone intended for a level higher than yours and looting things an exploit. It's an MMO, you should be allowed to go wherever the hell you want.
 
Exactly. Dire Maul/Uldaman, anyone?
 
I don't consider entering a zone intended for a level higher than yours and looting things an exploit. It's an MMO, you should be allowed to go wherever the hell you want.

To be completely clear, while players may choose to travel to Ilum earlier than the recommended level (40+) and may loot containers if they can get to them, in the cases of those customers that were warned or temporarily suspended, they were systematically and repeatedly looting containers in very high numbers resulting in the game economy becoming unbalanced.

Exactly, you can. You can't do it so much again and again that it starts effecting the economy. Obviously those people were farming that area a massive amount.
 
So you can

a) fix container respawns or do whatever is required to lessen the amount of loot gotten
b) ban people for using poor game design for personal gain

What to do, what to do..
 
So you can

a) fix container respawns or do whatever is required to lessen the amount of loot gotten
b) ban people for using poor game design for personal gain

What to do, what to do..

Or: temp ban the worst offenders while you get the programmers to patch the game.
 
So you can

a) fix container respawns or do whatever is required to lessen the amount of loot gotten
b) ban people for using poor game design for personal gain

What to do, what to do..

They warned the guy, he kept doing it. Fuck him if he's too stupid to get the hint. And obviously it's on the list of things to fix but so is about 45,688 other issues. How about fixing bugs like: Not being able speak to companions, flashpoint loot chests not opening, storylines breaking, textures not working, game crashes, PVP or one of a million other issues rather than making some exploit the top priority because some dip shit wants to farm the area 500 times? No, I want actual bugs fixed first and if those people farm then they can get a warning. If they're too stupid to listen to that warning then cya later.
 
Can someone explain to me what's so fragile about this game's economy? I mean it's not like EVE Online where anything goes right? What's the worst that can happen with a minority of people having a ton of money?
 
I don't consider entering a zone intended for a level higher than yours and looting things an exploit. It's an MMO, you should be allowed to go wherever the hell you want.

And if that was all it is then I wager nobody would care. The issue is that it's a PvP zone with rewards for PvP stuff. Except that the PvP part of it was circumvented by just dual boxing (or having a friend there, whatever) and flipping the zone back and forth since it's currently empty. This forces the chests to respawn basically as fast as they could be looted.

So you can

a) fix container respawns or do whatever is required to lessen the amount of loot gotten
b) ban people for using poor game design for personal gain

What to do, what to do..

A) They removed the chests.
B) Temp bans were given to those who didn't stop after being warned; nobody was banned out of nowhere and nobody was perma banned.
 
Can someone explain to me what's so fragile about this game's economy? I mean it's not like EVE Online where anything goes right? What's the worst that can happen with a minority of people having a ton of money?

It could lead to massive inflation for the player made economy, especially if you had lots of people doing it. Bioware probably figured they couldn't get this patched in time before the exploit spread like wildfire so they cut it off at the knees.

Were they too harsh? Who knows... I can't see the data they can. Is it worth all the rage spewed in this thread? No. Especially since 90% of the people raging can't even be bothered to read the full story.
 
Can someone explain to me what's so fragile about this game's economy? I mean it's not like EVE Online where anything goes right? What's the worst that can happen with a minority of people having a ton of money?

Becasue it's not a minority of people when it becomes known and more and more people do it. When exploits like this are found, the amount of people doing it grows and then it becomes an issue.
 
And if that was all it is then I wager nobody would care. The issue is that it's a PvP zone with rewards for PvP stuff. Except that the PvP part of it was circumvented by just dual boxing (or having a friend there, whatever) and flipping the zone back and forth since it's currently empty. This forces the chests to respawn basically as fast as they could be looted.



A) They removed the chests.
B) Temp bans were given to those who didn't stop after being warned; nobody was banned out of nowhere and nobody was perma banned.

If that's what they were actually doing he should feel lucky he wasn't perma-banned. That's pretty obvious intentional and knowing exploitation of game mechanics.

Why are people so quick to jump on Bioware for banning people? When I played WoW people got banned all the time for stuff and it was of no consequence; griefing/trolling/exploiting excessively was known to get you banned and players just dealt with it 'for the lolz'.

Anyone clever enough to dual box and flip a PVP zone is well aware that they are exploiting the game.
 
Can someone explain to me what's so fragile about this game's economy? I mean it's not like EVE Online where anything goes right? What's the worst that can happen with a minority of people having a ton of money?

Introducing mass inflation before the economy has really established itself. Destabilizing the games economy this early on will have potentially long term effects that dissuade people from participating in the market or scaring them out of the game, period.

There's really nothing wrong with temporary bans to people who exploit while a fix is being worked on, so all the teeth gnashing is confusing. It's a game where an individuals actions will influence the actions of other individuals, and it's not like you can shit a fix out in 5 minutes. Action has to be taken in the interim.
 
Can someone explain to me what's so fragile about this game's economy? I mean it's not like EVE Online where anything goes right? What's the worst that can happen with a minority of people having a ton of money?

They're trying to get the player auction houses and stuff figured out. If people have lots of money, then you have massive inflation.

People suddenly have enough money to buy massively overleveled equipment, quest rewards are no longer so appealing, suddenly you have people complaining about that.

Plus, you can possibly have players who aren't gaming the system feel discouraged when they see tons of people of the same class and the same level using much better gear.

But mostly because it'll destroy the Galactic Market before it's really gotten its feet under it.
 
Reading into what the "exploit" was, it seems like something that should have been foreseen by the designers prior to implementing the system. Probably a case of inexperienced designers putting in a flawed system and banning people when they realized the mistake.
 
Wait, so the dude was warned first, he kept doing it, then got temporarily suspended? Seems fine to me if that's the case. Would only be over the top if he had no warnings before the suspension. Yea, they still need to fix the issue so it doesn't happen again but all the complaining seems to be about the dude getting banned.
 
Reading into what the "exploit" was, it seems like something that should have been foreseen by the designers prior to implementing the system. Probably a case of inexperienced designers putting in a flawed system and banning people when they realized the mistake.

It also was not a properly tested part of the game. Illum pvp zone was not fully implemented in the beta. Same with the 2nd raid they put into the game which people are finding to be full of issues and it's obvious that it was just slapped into the game for launch as the next content update is basically "finishing" it.
 
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