Alex Supply and Salvage Cheating- Accounts Not Banned?

[Panda2013]

Right but if you were working on R/M/E, mythic specifically, this does affect you. These guys were obtaining 30k alexandrite in 10 days, where as we are slaving away at getting barely 150 a run and the competing to buy the currency with funds we get from dynamis etc. It's just disheartening and makes me feel like quiting when something I've been working on for years can be obtained just like that through illegitimate means. O and this will definitely have an effect on the economy. How will having BILLIONS of gil PER HACKER not affect the economy in any way? There were a lot of people that did this. Some even managed to walk away with almost 15 mythics. It's just bullshit.

[Pixela]

Cheating is cheating. I don't care if you jaywalk or rob a bank, you've still done the wrong thing.

Only people that would make that argument are people that abused this exploit or have friends that did, it's a way to play down blatant cheating they did.

As I say, what you're saying is as stupid as a bank robber trying to get off by saying the jury jaywalked so can't judge him. Whole other level.

[Hoshi]

I did not abuse this exploit nor did any of my friends. I do however have a friend who broke her leg and had to appear in court from jaywalking. I don't really have an opinion on if cheating is good or bad, I'm simply saying that you can't say that one form of cheating doesn't hurt anyone and isn't bad while the other form of cheating is bad. I work in science and any form of a lie is a lie... I don't care if you think your hunch is right and you're just tweaking the data to make it more plausible and it really doesn't matter if you are right and that lie would speed up the entire field.

[Safiyyah]

I did not abuse this exploit nor did any of my friends. I do however have a friend who broke her leg and had to appear in court from jaywalking. I don't really have an opinion on if cheating is good or bad, I'm simply saying that you can't say that one form of cheating doesn't hurt anyone and isn't bad while the other form of cheating is bad. I work in science and any form of a lie is a lie... I don't care if you think your hunch is right and you're just tweaking the data to make it more plausible and it really doesn't matter if you are right and that lie would speed up the entire field.

Stop trying to derail the topic with Windower discussion, please. If you'd like to make another thread about how all players who use Windower should be banned, then by all means, go ahead. This thread is about the Salvage exploit.

[dasva]

Cheating is cheating. I don't care if you jaywalk or rob a bank, you've still done the wrong thing.

But what if it is vanilla windower that just does the same thing as SEs official windowed mode except is less resource intensive? Is it really cheating if there is no in game advantage gained? Then what about the other advantages that windower addons have that SE is adding/has added to the game? It's clear that SE approves of a lot of the things the windower team has developed so would those really still be cheating just because you used a different version of it?

According to the definition of cheat no it wouldn't

[Calipso]

I thought I'd pop in and offer my 2c, and maybe give some people a different point of view.

Before I start, as a disclaimer, I have never even once used any of the 3rd party stuff (no Alex dupe, no unlimited tags, no ase, etc) in the acquisition of my mythics. (I have four).

Also, before I start, if they were going to ban every windower user they would be well within their rights, as it is a violation of the ToS. However, trying to compare windower use with duping hundreds of thousands of alex (and the other things people did along with it) isn't something you can do. It's like apples and oranges. They just plain aren't comparable, and you just sound silly. So just stop.

I'm going to go on a limb and say that either:
A) SE really doesn't care, or they are worried about the repercussions of banning a large amount of people... and don't try to say that there wouldn't be repercussions. I have a good idea of who did and didn't do this on Odin (just a note, I don't care and am not going to or trying to point fingers, so don't ask!), and it's pretty safe to say that it'd cripple the leadership of a couple linkshells. I can't say if those linkshells would recover or not. I'm certain that others would have quit if their friends had been perma'd. I am not trying to justify it or say it was or wasn't deserved, but I can understand why they might be worried about losing subs. They really are at a point in the game where a large mass banning of hardcore, endgame players would negatively effect the game.

B) They don't have/keep salvage logs (or logs in general) at all or for longer than a week or two. This fits with the knowledge I have with the bannings that only the people that did it very recently were banned. I know of more people that got off without even a 3 day ban than ones that got a ban. Hell, I know people that only did it once or twice that got a 3 day ban and people that made multiple mythics with it and didn't even get hit. Maybe they felt since they couldn't fairly hit everyone, they would just give a 3 day to the people they could. I'll admit I'm slightly ignorant about how se operates, so take this with a grain of salt.

I'm not going to try and say if the bans were or weren't deserved (although I honestly just don't care, as it doesn't affect me in the least), but I will say if anything comes out of this I hope it forces the dev team to at least look at the alexandrite situation (and possibly other things like the time on assault tags) because of the lengths people are going to to circumvent it. There's been times in the past where the alex situation has been incredibly terrible and finishing a mythic was an expensive game of 24/7 bazaar watching. I've vouched for this before, but adding a different, more reliable means of obtaining alexandrite would help a lot.

[Camiie]

I thought I'd pop in and offer my 2c, and maybe give some people a different point of view.
A) SE really doesn't care, or they are worried about the repercussions of banning a large amount of people... and don't try to say that there wouldn't be repercussions. I have a good idea of who did and didn't do this on Odin (just a note, I don't care and am not going to or trying to point fingers, so don't ask!), and it's pretty safe to say that it'd cripple the leadership of a couple linkshells.

Cripple the leadership of a couple of linkshells? That hardly counts as a repercussion. My world view is a little too wide to see that as even a blip on the radar, and my world view shouldn't be nearly as wide as SE's.

[Pantafernando]

Btw, i dont think its windower who suported the exploiting.

I was browsing in google some words throwed when someone goes to windower forum to ask about cupper and cure bots, and its easy to find the actual page that leave in front page the "services": cupper, stun bots, cure bots, fish bots. All those being developed in that site. Idk in deep about that, but seems like a similar program to windower, but that doesnt care with rules.

So, i meant, if you gonna throw windower name, could as well throw the actual names that in fact allow all this mess.

[Hoshi]

No I never said that windower enabled people to use other programs. My objection was to the statement that rampant cheating was ruining the game from a player who was likely cheating themselves (which is why I said cheating is cheating). This exploit was severe and as I said earlier, I would support rollbacks for it. I do not support permabans as the OP demanded because I do not trust SE to hand them out fairly.

[Afania]

I think I play a very different game than you guys. I play with a group of friends and have had help making most of what you just listed. I have had to pay for very little aside from food and hq rings. I rarely join shout groups even though I actually have the jobs they are looking for because playing with people I don't know is a gamble. I also don't think this is the gil generating exploit you should be concerned about destroying the economy (at least they fixed haks).

Again you're not looking at the big picture. Ppl can farm alex 30x faster than you means they make gil 30x faster than you. Therefore they can easily afford more expensive food/rings. If we follow the supply and demand economy rule, the food/rings price will increase because they have 30x more money than you.

It doesn't matter if you don't play with others and your entire LS gave you free alex/plates/currency(I highly doubt that though), as long as you're part of the economy it'd affect you negatively in the long run.