The account suspensions and gil reset leave a black mark on this game.

[Susanoh]

Because SE did...what no reputable MMO company has ever done without extreme backlash, punished innocent players for the company's mistakes.

Exactly this. And after they did that, they offered no support through any of their channels that could help them by any accounts. They offered no communication to their player base over the issue, other than a vague statement which implies that they went after RMT and cheaters. Anyone sympathetic to the suspended players, as Kherza mentioned many are, are sympathetic because we as players have pieced together enough information to get somewhat of an idea of what happened, not because of the vague and useless level of communication that we get from the developers of this game who carried out the punishment.

[Kherza]

The bans that were given out and lack of specific communication are why SE are not faultless. For that, I can certainly understand a level of anger. But going through this thread, I can't find a single comment that places blame on the real perpetrators, the hackers/cheaters/botters/RMT people. It's like taking your frustration out on the police who repossess your stolen car, rather than the crooked salesman who sold it to you in the first place.

Compensation for the taken gil would have been a nice gesture, but isn't necessary. While completely unfair to the crafters, removing the gil was the right thing to do. Leaving that much excess gil in the economy hurts it and over time badly. Hence why there is such a big move to drive away RMT. In all, SE shares some of the blame but a large portion of this anger should be directed towards the real violators, the cheaters.

[Susanoh]

The bans that were given out and lack of specific communication are why SE are not faultless. For that, I can certainly understand a level of anger. But going through this thread, I can't find a single comment that places blame on the real perpetrators, the hackers/cheaters/botters/RMT people. It's like taking your frustration out on the police who repossess your stolen car, rather than the crooked salesman who sold it to you in the first place.

Compensation for the taken gil would have been a nice gesture, but isn't necessary. While completely unfair to the crafters, removing the gil was the right thing to do. Leaving that much excess gil in the economy hurts it and over time badly. Hence why there is such a big move to drive away RMT. In all, SE shares some of the blame but a large portion of this anger should be directed towards the real violators, the cheaters.

No one is talking about the cheaters because no one expects anything from cheaters. Some will exploit to their hearts content, some will hack your account without a second thought. Yeah, a lot of us dislike them, but they exist, so there isn't much to talk about.

I would expect more from the developers of this game than I would a cheater. They're the ones who are providing the experience, who one would think would be on the side of the players, but in my opinion when it comes to situations like this they are doing an extremely poor job of it. The developers are supposed to be who players can turn to if they have an issue, instead they provide no support or communication, and arguably have been causing more issues than they've been solving. Saying that compensation for those SE targeted isn't necessary is your opinion and not one that I share. In another game that I played recently, the developers clearly messed something up. They responded on their official forums almost immediately, and denied it at first, and it seemed they legitimately did not believe anything was wrong. Well, it turns out they were wrong, and some players ended up feeling cheated. It wasn't anything overly major like losing weeks of progress or anything, but it was a minor annoyance and clearly the developers were at fault. Well, a few days later I logged into the game, and I received a letter of apology from the developers (that I had not even asked for), stating that they had made a mistake, and along with it the very item that was related to the mistake they had made, for free. This is in a game that I never paid a dime for after the initial purchase, by the way.

Now, let's compare that situation to this one. SE has clearly messed up in allowing this to occur to begin with. After seeing the inflation occur, SE is faced with a choice of exactly how to deal with it. Their solution is to take a week away from paying customers, and reset their progress completely. You may find player progress something to be taken lightly, that players who spend time in their first month progressing is worthless and something that can be easily tossed out in order to reset balance, but many don't. Many also don't enjoy paying money for developers to take their game access away. But alright, maybe SE doesn't isn't ahead of the curve when it comes to preventing the cheaters of exploiting. Maybe the don't have the manpower to do a real investigation, so all they can manage is an obviously inaccurate method of taking the richest players and taking away 99% of their funds, while leaving everyone else who also benefited from the inflation to keep 100% of their funds (though I would argue that even without the manpower to do a thorough investigation, this is just flat out ridiculous). Does SE do anything to try to make it right? Do these players even get so much as a "Yeah, sorry guys"? No. They get a message that says that they banned a bunch of people suspected of RMT and exploiting for gil, leaving their reputation tarnished and a bunch of people all over the place saying things like "Can you really trust these guys? They probably bought gil, etc."

The comparison between this company and the last game I played is night and day. SE is not only not "faultless," they perform poorly every step of the way. When developers make a mistake, you would think they would want to try extra hard to make it up to their player base. When SE makes a mistake, they issue the quickest, easiest and most inaccurate fix possible, and don't even say a word. If they cannot keep up with hackers, then that's one thing. Maybe they tried to the best of their ability, maybe not. But the lack of communication, the lack of support, the lack of any regard for the customers who spend their time and money playing their game, is abysmal. And it affects all of us, even if we have not been hit by this specific event. I remember seeing a thread made by someone just a few days ago asking whether the community thought transferring money from one account to another would be ok, or whether he'd be flagged for suspicious activity. This type of thing is something we all have to keep in mind when playing, that even if we don't cheat, if we get caught by one of SE's RMT catching bots, we are just screwed. The very people who players would want to come to for help in a situation that puts their account in jeopardy are actually the people who players are coming to realize that they need to be most afraid of.

[Kherza]

You do make a valid point, and even I've admitted in past posts that SE's communication skills have been less than adequate in regards to this issue. However, unlike many people, I see SE as stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand they can take these swift, far reaching measures to eliminate RMT quickly but also catch legitimate players in the net. However, on the other hand they could have meticulously, and very slowly, checked every single person suspected of RMT. While this 2nd method would surely not catch any innocent players it also wouldn't make a dent on the cheating population. People would then accuse them of doing nothing about the cheaters and we'd have 20pg threads about that. Aside from not banning the suspects and having better communication, I'm not sure what they could have done that would have made everyone happy. Had they compensated all people who had gil removed, the cheaters would have also been compensated and we'd be back at square one.

[Nica]

You do make a valid point, and even I've admitted in past posts that SE's communication skills have been less than adequate in regards to this issue. However, unlike many people, I see SE as stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand they can take these swift, far reaching measures to eliminate RMT quickly but also catch legitimate players in the net. However, on the other hand they could have meticulously, and very slowly, checked every single person suspected of RMT.

I disagree that SE only has those two choices, and if it truly is the case, then they either put themselves there by not allocating sufficient resources to deal with the issue, or is simply mind-numbingly incompetent. I've mentioned this before(not sure if this thread), but look here:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/0...rency-traders/

CCP managed to track and ban over 6,000 RMT accounts in one fell swoop with almost laser precision, with less than a dozen false positives. And no, CCP didn't suspend a bunch of people's account while they take their sweet time to "investigate"(not), they did their investigation in the background, identified the offenders, and went after the offenders, not innocent players who did nothing wrong.

Most importantly, they clearly communicated to the player base what happened, punished the right people, and reversed those that were wrongly caught in their net, which there was almost none as they didn't just do a "lololol 1/100 their wallet" script.

Also: "We are quite confident that false positives are practically non-existent, but we examine all requests for review," he explained. "So far less than a dozen have been found to be false positives." The project is ongoing, and so far CCP has banned approximately 9,000 accounts.

SE should be ashamed of itself on that point alone, whereas CCP look at requests for review, SE just give people the good old runaround routine - CS: lololol go talk to GM; GM: lololol go talk to CS kthxbi.

To add insult to injury, CCP was, and remains a FAR smaller company than SE with far less resource to work with.

While this 2nd method would surely not catch any innocent players it also wouldn't make a dent on the cheating population. People would then accuse them of doing nothing about the cheaters and we'd have 20pg threads about that. Aside from not banning the suspects and having better communication, I'm not sure what they could have done that would have made everyone happy. Had they compensated all people who had gil removed, the cheaters would have also been compensated and we'd be back at square one.

It's not an "either/or", there are many MMO operators out there that have effectively fought RMTs without SE's signature brute-force method. Your scenario only makes sense if SE really is that incompetent. Sometimes it feels like many of those who supports SE's action here have never played any MMO run by any other company.

[Susanoh]

You do make a valid point, and even I've admitted in past posts that SE's communication skills have been less than adequate in regards to this issue. However, unlike many people, I see SE as stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand they can take these swift, far reaching measures to eliminate RMT quickly but also catch legitimate players in the net. However, on the other hand they could have meticulously, and very slowly, checked every single person suspected of RMT. While this 2nd method would surely not catch any innocent players it also wouldn't make a dent on the cheating population. People would then accuse them of doing nothing about the cheaters and we'd have 20pg threads about that. Aside from not banning the suspects and having better communication, I'm not sure what they could have done that would have made everyone happy. Had they compensated all people who had gil removed, the cheaters would have also been compensated and we'd be back at square one.

That's a fair point, I'll admit. If they had not taken such swift action, I'm sure there would be people complaining about cheating. Although if SE had a representative who came out and told people that catching the cheaters would take time, and if they acted in the quickest way possible, they would almost assuredly accidentally start punishing real players, I bet that would sway most of the community in favor of letting them take their time. No matter how many people we see now saying "Who cares?" (I'm not saying that you're one of those people, by the way, but it seems many others have become standoffish and uncaring) I would be willing to bet that a majority of players wouldn't want to risk it, not knowing what methods they would use if they were to try to sweep up RMT, and not knowing whether themselves or their friends would be swept up.

If they did care enough about the innocent players they swept up, but felt they needed to act swiftly and didn't have time do conduct a real investigation, another option would be to do exactly what they did, then immediately come out and state that they would do their best to make things right in a bad situation. Maybe they would investigate every account, or maybe they would ask that innocent players submit a report and they would examine each case and provide some sort of compensation for players who were inconvenienced. Whether it be gil, another form of in game compensation, or free game time tacked on to their account to make up for the inconvenience. I can't speak for those caught up in that situation, but if I were in that situation and they decided to do something like that, I'd still feel pretty crappy about the way the situation played out, but I might at least look at the company without complete disgust for attempting to do something about it.

[Aphraell]

People still don't seem to understand that much of each crafter's gil Could Not Have Been "Dirty", yet other players in the lower millions etc will have had just as much % of their gil "Dirty". So why only punish those with the most gil?

It was not "Dirty" gil they removed, but gil from the richest players, regardless of how it was obtained.

If you have used the market board, in one way or another you probably now have at least Some "Dirty" gil.

Couldn't agree more with you.

Fine they stuffed up and allowed hacks to create gil. But why just remove it from the richest player and not /100 everyone and admit the mistake.

[Susanoh]

I disagree that SE only has those two choices, and if it truly is the case, then they either put themselves there by not allocating sufficient resources to deal with the issue, or is simply mind-numbingly incompetent. I've mentioned this before(not sure if this thread), but look here:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/0...rency-traders/

That's actually very interesting, and I'm glad you posted it because it's a great read. This is exactly the type of action I would expect from a large MMO developer. Precision, communication, and despite that assuming that you could very well make mistakes and working with your user base to correct them. That is how a team that clearly cares about the treatment of its players conducts business.

[Nero92]

Silly question, but do Japanese servers experience an onslaught of spam when one enters a city? When I was 1017 for days, I don't remember, but at the same time I think it was only during open beta anyway..

[Kherza]

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/0...rency-traders/

That was a pretty interesting read, thanks for the link. I wish SE had done something like this, but there is one catch in this article that plays into what I mentioned. The article specifically states that CCP spent weeks observing RMT behavior to fine tune their "Unholy Rage" program. SE on the other hand didn't have weeks to do this. Had they waited that long we'd like have the 20pg threads i mentioned about how SE doesn't care about bots, spammers and the like. Could SE have done better in dealing with the aftermath? Sure. I'm not saying SE did nothing wrong, they made mistakes, only that the reactions here are too negative and over the top.