Rules are Rules

[dindin]

"By playing the game, you agree to the following rules. Not complying with these rules will result in your account being terminated."

"6.You may not profit or otherwise gain from abuse of glitches via the game or Playerdex. If you find an exploitable glitch, you MUST report it. Do not inform other players of exploitable glitches."


i dont know why even prm riga said its Christmas mercy if the rules states it clearly. why not ban?

maybe because the players who abused/ tried to see the glitch if itss true/ are FAMOUS players and are mostly close to Staffs.

i even closed my client so as not to be a part of it. they were all over the all chat.

ABDisBack - saying he's found a glitch and mail bluerise 4 times or something...players getting angry at him telling him that after he got a lot of vouchers that he's trying to contact admin and stop the glitch, like to keep him all for himself or something.

then they asked them how and he told them "get out of the island and go back and everything will reset".

others say that all should do the same and the staff wont have to "punish" since its ALL. dr.virus even saying "unlimited vouchers" get off the island and go back to do the voucher quest.

while others are saying thats "bug abused" you could get banned.

but still they did it. will all the info on how its done, they did it.

so, be angry at me i dont care, im tired of playing anyway.

hrs super hard to get nowadays (for 2 events now), unlike the ones with snorlax and milotic that staff twitched it so everyone can get one and be happy
Nowadays its just getting harder and harder to force you to get ms. all about the money...

and bluerise banning everyone he wants to ban, unfair ban. why cant other GMs look at ban appeals. bluerise took so long to answer back and will
not say something reasonable. I even asked PRM riga about this, coz my friend who wasnt playing for a long time got back just for the event
even bought 12 tokens (thats 500+ in our currency) got banned without any reason at all. or maybe coz he got shiny houndour.

adm and staff doing everything they want without consulting players/ paying(donating) players of whats happening. reduce shiny/hr encounter, reduce the money they drop, lowering shiny ivs, making taking to npcs too long and boring.

and nowadays no staff is on, to check once in a while or something. they dont care anymore. I even hate the player saying "baka" all the time, as if i dont know that its japanese for stupid.

at least i said it all for once.

 

[HitmonFonty]

Thankyou for your honesty here. We do know baka means fool or idiot, it is not usually used in demeaning or hurtful manner, but if you consider it is directed unfairly at you please do report it on Community Watch on the Playerdex. Or just ask them to stop or use /ignore nickname.

We do need to be consistent in our interpretation of the rules, but justice is not always black and white. By giving leniency we could be saving players from getting more angry at a ban and doing worse on return. Many of the players who took part in this glitch abuse were new players only having started this month- acting to the letter of the rules would mean banning everyone here regardless of their intentions or understanding of their wrongdoing. It's possible they will just laugh and keep doing this stuff but the hope is that they will take the warning for what it was and adjust their play in our game.

Bluerise does not usually deal with normal GM cases, only cases that require Admin access to deal with- such as Token issues and anything that requires direct database access to investigate. Even there he often just provides the information for GMs and does not handle the cases himself. He has plenty of other work to do and does not do more ban cases than he needs to. I hesitate to point out that you started off by saying we are too lenient and now are saying that we ban too often? Ban cases are decided on information that is not seen by the public, and would be unethical of us to share- and judging whether the GMs and Admins are acting fairly is difficult if not impossible without that extra information.

We may not consult with players for day to day decisions, but we do ask for feedback constantly and our decisions are swayed by what we do hear back, no matter how the feedback is put before us. The game is for the players after all, all the players.

Spawn rates have not been reduced in many cases at all. In many cases they have been improved. Some pokemon and items that may seem harder to find now are just waiting on their preferred habitats to see the best rates. One example is the dragon scale, which has been far more difficult to find until now that Seafoam Islands have been updated and now it is as easy as ever to get fishing in Seafoam Island B4F.

Money drops have not been changed, on the contrary with higher level spawns added at each update far more money is available earlier on in the game than ever before. I'm not sure what you mean about NPC dialogue being longer and more boring. Maybe you mean the quests? Quests are getting more involved and challenging, this must include more explanations from the NPCs who guide you through the quests. This may not suit everyone and in the long run we would like to have many different types of quests- the amount and type only bounded by our collective imagination and the time it takes to make them. So not all will need you to read walls of text! If that's not what you meant please clarify so we can understand what the issue is.

The chatroom shouldn't need constant moderation, and I do spend a lot of time watching without feeling the need to step in and do just that, the same for GMs who have other things to do ingame than moderate the chat all the time. If there are issues that we are missing please report them on Community Watch in the Playerdex.

 

[KaiReborn]

It's amusing how everything but the main issue this topic addresses got answered to

 

[HitmonFonty]

It's amusing how everything but the main issue this topic addresses got answered to

The main issue was using a lesser punishment that banning. I don't see how I avoided answering that.

We do need to be consistent in our interpretation of the rules, but justice is not always black and white. By giving leniency we could be saving players from getting more angry at a ban and doing worse on return. Many of the players who took part in this glitch abuse were new players only having started this month- acting to the letter of the rules would mean banning everyone here regardless of their intentions or understanding of their wrongdoing. It's possible they will just laugh and keep doing this stuff but the hope is that they will take the warning for what it was and adjust their play in our game.

 

[KaiReborn]

"By playing the game, you agree to the following rules. Not complying with these rules will result in your account being terminated."

"6.You may not profit or otherwise gain from abuse of glitches via the game or Playerdex. If you find an exploitable glitch, you MUST report it. Do not inform other players of exploitable glitches."


i dont know why even prm riga said its Christmas mercy if the rules states it clearly. why not ban?


ABDisBack - saying he's found a glitch and mail bluerise 4 times or something...players getting angry at him telling him that after he got a lot of vouchers that he's trying to contact admin and stop the glitch, like to keep him all for himself or something.

then they asked them how and he told them "get out of the island and go back and everything will reset".

others say that all should do the same and the staff wont have to "punish" since its ALL. dr.virus even saying "unlimited vouchers" get off the island and go back to do the voucher quest.

while others are saying thats "bug abused" you could get banned.

but still they did it. will all the info on how its done, they did it.

Consistency... does that mean players who got banned as a result of abusing exploits in the past will be unbanned? How will similar cases be handled from now on? Justifying a measure that differs from the ways of enforcing a misdeed in the past with chirstmas mercy may have not been the most suitable choice... had it been said instead that punishment policies regarding that kind of action had been reviewed and changed as a consequence, maybe there wouldn't be such a reaction from the op (whose reason to be upset about this particular episode seems to come from the reason given for the punishment). So the way I see it, there was a bit of a generalistic explanation that didn't fully address the issue

 

[Nikola]

I still remember people getting banned for duping even a single Pokeball or Potion. I also remember people getting banned for abusing token store with rollbacks being done which means that total damage has been avoided leaving only stuff ingame where undo was not feasible. Most of those people appealed through different time periods and their appeal was rejected. Heck, even some bans were not lifted due to bias or personal gain. I still remember very well one guy getting banned for getting 2 Beldums instead of one. Following current punishment system what would happen is that one beldum gets removed and person who abused or not abused, depends how you look at things..they would get small warning and thats it. Unban would happen after several weeks of agonizing and begging because that is normal in this game now, current GMs would be exception here. What happened back then is that guy never got a warning or Pokemon removed. What he got was a ban and after he faded away a GM moved Pokemon from guys account to his players account. So legit reason not to unban someone. But let's stick with this topic.

Maybe if there are different ban methods such as banning trades, spawns or something else things could be done differently. When I was a GM I started with giving out the punishments by the book until I started not giving any pardon to anyone and no exceptions. Slowly as I was blending in talking more with my GM team with every case punishments were discussed. It was often talked about not being so much stern etc. What actually happened is that community got reduced a lot and at the end I used to struggle to find someone who is botting while scamming and abusing always happened. We were about to work on punishment system as well. It's supposed to be official. It annoys me how Chocobos document got forgotten on GMs forums. Everyone could give their own opinion and suggestion about the punishments as there was a template to fill. What is needed is that something like that becomes official and known to everyone. If you do this or that you get THIS and no playing favorites. There should be no exceptions made for anyone. If you are not sure about the punishment, look at document to remind you. Give same treatment to everyone. If you feel that you can't issue a ban as you might have emotions or bias mixed up with your decision then give that case to someone else, pretty much simple thing to do.

Admins aren't supposed to do GMs work. They are supposed to help them if something happens where GMs can't reach to see the evidence from games side. They are supposed to organize, coordinate and manage. What is happening in PWO is that admins are solving code issues, testing them and applying live and yet they are heavily involved into GMs job. Admin is supposed to be heavily involved into the game and trends to help with organizing and coordination. Communication skills on highest level with Jinji as exception here as he can talk to people. However, ingame presence is the issue as well. Totally wrong distribution of tasks. Having such system in place..it opened place for number of new ranks due to Admins not doing what they are supposed to do. One of them as a DEV and another one as Admin..but well it's easier to go through all hassle with adding new permissions ranks etc than given proper title. But well on another hand, you are only here because you can trace stacks when game crashes and apply updates everyone once in a while. You are not here because someone likes you as a person, you are here because someone likes you for being cheap or free work force and can do basic things. You are to deep into this so you will probably never see the issue. You may be given the impression that you are a good guy and nice person but everyone would try to make you feel like that because you work for free or you work cheap.

What I can advise here is to make sure that you are being equal to everyone with no exceptions. You have to know what type of the punishment you need to make. What you did now is pretty much prove to everyone that what you did was wrong when banning people who abused one Pokeball or cloned Pokemon or two. And what happened recently is worse than just cloning several items or Pokemon. Definitely there needs to be official punishment book where everyone can see it and expect certain punishment for certain act.

 

[HitmonFonty]

The trouble with hard and fast punishments is that players will do the crime expecting it and then complain if it is harsher. A player for example who joins the game and spouts expletives in All Chat would maybe be upset to find out he's earned a 3 day ban for it may think that's unfair, but if the GM deemed it appropriate no doubt the punishment fit the crime. However if a regular player who well knows the rule says the same stuff expecting to cop a three day ban, say knowing he'll be away for the weekend anyway and therefore avoiding any punishment at all- the GM taking in all this may make the punishment suitably harsher.

Justice as I said is not black and white. If there is no lee-way what is the point of having GMs, why not just make it an automatic process? As I've said the reasons for the ban are mostly not revealed to the players, so how can they be judged? You can only accept that the GMs are being fair given the information they do have- or not accept it. In this case there were no GMs available when the issue was discovered and dealt with, so no bans could be issues. Many staff members were involved in the discussion on how to fix the issue and deal with the people who abused. We made our decision after much discussion considering all the information and factors we had in front of us, then showed it all and our decision to the first GM that came online, who agreed with what we did.

It was not a random decision taken by one person, but discussed and agreed upon by a majority of the staff. As you said Nikola in the past punishments were more hard and fast, they had to be as we were coming out of time when there were no consequences for abusing glitches. As a player who has laboured hard for all the pokemon I have gained over the years- I've never bought one I hunted them all- I do agree with harsh penalties to discourage cheating of any sort. But there is always room for leniency in any justice system. We are not robots.

 

[drvirus]

You twisted my words, Dindin, thats an offense.... I said i knew no one will get banned, and wanted everyone to have an equal chance, which i was right, No one got banned, and they are still selling/buying all those items, i knew all of this would happen, i just hope i could of spread the word earlier and made all voucher items cheap sadly i couldnt....

as for Fonty, since you said its christmas, and mercy and stuff, you should also reward the players that havent abused this bug, im pretty sure you can do a simple search function in the data base stating who has gotten/used more than 2 vouchers from date X to date Y, then reward each player who wasnt in that critirea with X amount of Vouchers appreciation of them not abusing the bug.

But instead you guys let the abusers freely get rich, and the "honest players" didnt get **** in return... thats not the right way to deal with the community.

Im so glad that i told everyone about the bug, i only wish i knew sooner....

 

[HitmonFonty]

Nobody got rich off the glitch, everything was removed.

 

[drvirus]

is that so? how come there are so many shiny stones/electubuzz item/ magmar item in the mart and 2 of those items from the same player? how come there are so many eggs in the mart also being sold by same player?

also just an other example how come there are still so many evolved forms of magmar/electabuzz/togipi in the game?

and I know for a fact those evolved pokes are from the abused vouchers.

You guys only removed the vouchers, but the guys who bought and sold those items got away with it getting rich from abusing the bug...

 

[HitmonFonty]

If you think someone is benefitting from the glitch still, report them on Community Watch on the Playerdex.

 

[drvirus]

Thats not how it should be fixed.... Im not going to pick out individuals and report them while others can just stay hiding in the back, you either fix it all or you dont fix at all.....

 

[AndyMister]

<font><font>O problema com punições duras

<font></font>

<font></font>

 

[AndyMister]

The trouble with hard and fast punishments

 

[mihay9245]

just ban the abusers lol...if you keep those noobs(i would use a lot of others words instead of noob but...) who abused ,you'll just ruin the community

everyone knows if they abuse a glitch,a bug,,,they will get some punishment if caught ,don't tell me new players didnt knew

 

[Rigaudon]

You guys only removed the vouchers, but the guys who bought and sold those items got away with it getting rich from abusing the bug...

These were also removed. I sat back and watched as any voucher-related items, including eggs that had already been put in the daycare, were removed from players. Unfortunately this took a much longer time to reverse than necessary because people were telling everyone on earth how to do it; that meant we had to remove things for the better part of a day instead of for just a few hours. It also complicated who did what and why, making this a total mess. It was not OK in the slightest to tell everyone how to do this. At all. I know you feel strongly about it but seriously, it made the situation much much worse for everyone involved.

I know you were staff a while back, but we have much improved tools compared to then and had complete ability to reverse nearly everything that wasn't already traded away fairly. (Key word - fairly.) The accounts that abused lost everything related to the issue. 90% of the exploited items are out of the game. The other 10% aren't going to hurt the market in any major way and are not on accounts that abused the error or related to abusive accounts. Most of the voucher-related items have similar prices pre-exploit as well; I’ve been ingame watching the trade chats and the marts to see how this might have affected the game; the actual prices have not varied much if at all. (Edit: mostly watching omas/kabus, 7 voucher items and pokemon, focus blast, etc since those seem to be sold more often past few days. I expect any small dips to recover quickly enough, granted.)

The reason staff decided to not straight up ban users is because of the huge pressure from being mislead into thinking this would be OK and even the only fair option to take. There is also the fact that some users who do not speak English as their first language came under the impression that the sidequest was intentionally repeatable. Honestly your and others' contributions made this go from an easy "ban the abusers who knew they were in the wrong and remove everything linked to their account” into a much more complicated situation.

Furthermore dindin, I explained to you and others on the chat pretty much the exact same thing Fonty said here, and you only cherrypicked my completely non-serious, silly note of "consider it Christmas mercy" after I had already gone through most everything. We don't know many these users and it is daring of you to assume we are so deeply biased about several dozen people most of staff haven't even met before. If I had known this was how you and others would have reacted to my being honest fairly transparent about the situation with the playerbase, I wouldn't have said a word. =/ Having an issue with what I actually said? Sure. Making one, lighthearted and actually almost non-related comment the basis of your entire post? No.

Drvirus - you and others who told everyone to do the exploit made the situation a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not because staff would not have normally just banned the main users and reversed any and all of the trades, but because when the number of abusive players goes from 30-40 to over 100 with a mix of "did they do this intentionally or were they mislead", it no longer became an actually ethical option to just ban everyone and call it a day. Furthermore the larger the problem the less ability staff have to take the time to review every exploitive account’s trade logs, review those trades, determine if they were unfair/free, and reverse the illegitimate trades. With the number of users who exploited leaping by bounds after it was made incredibly public how to do it, undoing anything and everything related to the accounts became impossible because the scope of the error went from a large handful of players to almost everyone who was online at a specific time.

In light of all of this mess it was decided for their actions to have consequences on a completely equal ground that made several hours of their effort a waste because it became impossible to tell who did what and why on a basis that was equal and fair. You yourself are incredibly lucky you are not banned and frankly out of everyone I am the most surprised you were not - had they followed enforcement entirely you definitely would not be here right now either.

Reasons like this are why it is also a rule to not tell others about exploitable bugs as the OP kindly quoted for me, because it makes cleaning up bad situations like this incredibly hard or at the least 10x more painful than was ever necessary. I am aware people are angry and somewhat expected it when I heard, but the situation was in incredibly sticky waters by the time we were even made aware. There was no winning with anyone - and I guarantee if staff had banned, it would have gone from "you are too lenient" to "how dare you ban our friends for this on the holidays when this was your error to begin with" and bonus points for those who would have and will call bias in any situation even if we only know them by their username.

The only harm done here was with public relations, harm that was unavoidable due to the context of the community - the game itself, however, will be absolutely fine.

 

[Jinga]

You guys only removed the vouchers, but the guys who bought and sold those items got away with it getting rich from abusing the bug...

These were also removed. I sat back and watched as any voucher-related items, including eggs that had already been put in the daycare, were removed from players. Unfortunately this took a much longer time to reverse than necessary because people were telling everyone on earth how to do it; that meant we had to remove things for the better part of a day instead of for just a few hours. It also complicated who did what and why, making this a total mess. It was not OK in the slightest to tell everyone how to do this. At all. I know you feel strongly about it but seriously, it made the situation much much worse for everyone involved.

I know you were staff a while back, but we have much improved tools compared to then and had complete ability to reverse nearly everything that wasn't already traded away fairly. (Key word - fairly.) The accounts that abused lost everything related to the issue. 90% of the exploited items are out of the game. The other 10% aren't going to hurt the market in any major way and are not on accounts that abused the error or related to abusive accounts. Most of the voucher-related items have similar prices pre-exploit as well; I’ve been ingame watching the trade chats and the marts to see how this might have affected the game; the actual prices have not varied much if at all. (Edit: mostly watching omas/kabus, 7 voucher items and pokemon, focus blast, etc since those seem to be sold more often past few days. I expect any small dips to recover quickly enough, granted.)

The reason staff decided to not straight up ban users is because of the huge pressure from being mislead into thinking this would be OK and even the only fair option to take. There is also the fact that some users who do not speak English as their first language came under the impression that the sidequest was intentionally repeatable. Honestly your and others' contributions made this go from an easy "ban the abusers who knew they were in the wrong and remove everything linked to their account” into a much more complicated situation.

Furthermore dindin, I explained to you and others on the chat pretty much the exact same thing Fonty said here, and you only cherrypicked my completely non-serious, silly note of "consider it Christmas mercy" after I had already gone through most everything. We don't know many these users and it is daring of you to assume we are so deeply biased about several dozen people most of staff haven't even met before. If I had known this was how you and others would have reacted to my being honest fairly transparent about the situation with the playerbase, I wouldn't have said a word. =/ Having an issue with what I actually said? Sure. Making one, lighthearted and actually almost non-related comment the basis of your entire post? No.

Drvirus - you and others who told everyone to do the exploit made the situation a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not because staff would not have normally just banned the main users and reversed any and all of the trades, but because when the number of abusive players goes from 30-40 to over 100 with a mix of "did they do this intentionally or were they mislead", it no longer became an actually ethical option to just ban everyone and call it a day. Furthermore the larger the problem the less ability staff have to take the time to review every exploitive account’s trade logs, review those trades, determine if they were unfair/free, and reverse the illegitimate trades. With the number of users who exploited leaping by bounds after it was made incredibly public how to do it, undoing anything and everything related to the accounts became impossible because the scope of the error went from a large handful of players to almost everyone who was online at a specific time.

In light of all of this mess it was decided for their actions to have consequences on a completely equal ground that made several hours of their effort a waste because it became impossible to tell who did what and why on a basis that was equal and fair. You yourself are incredibly lucky you are not banned and frankly out of everyone I am the most surprised you were not - had they followed enforcement entirely you definitely would not be here right now either.

Reasons like this are why it is also a rule to not tell others about exploitable bugs as the OP kindly quoted for me, because it makes cleaning up bad situations like this incredibly hard or at the least 10x more painful than was ever necessary. I am aware people are angry and somewhat expected it when I heard, but the situation was in incredibly sticky waters by the time we were even made aware. There was no winning with anyone - and I guarantee if staff had banned, it would have gone from "you are too lenient" to "how dare you ban our friends for this on the holidays when this was your error to begin with" and bonus points for those who would have and will call bias in any situation even if we only know them by their username.

The only harm done here was with public relations, harm that was unavoidable due to the context of the community - the game itself, however, will be absolutely fine.

It was your fault to begin with. If you had tested the event beforehand properly nothing like a situation like this would have arrived. But if the bug was abused by some players they should be banned no new player or old player just ban coz rules are broken. If someone knew about the bug he should inform the staff about it but if they dint like in this case they should be banned straight away. If you think some players were under influence and dint know what was happening then ban the self - fulling prophecy ones. We dont need rewards like what OP suggested just ban the abusers or just ban the self - fulfilling prophecy ones and give some sorta punishment to the ones those who were influenced.

 

[drvirus]

You guys only removed the vouchers, but the guys who bought and sold those items got away with it getting rich from abusing the bug...

These were also removed. I sat back and watched as any voucher-related items, including eggs that had already been put in the daycare, were removed from players. Unfortunately this took a much longer time to reverse than necessary because people were telling everyone on earth how to do it; that meant we had to remove things for the better part of a day instead of for just a few hours. It also complicated who did what and why, making this a total mess. It was not OK in the slightest to tell everyone how to do this. At all. I know you feel strongly about it but seriously, it made the situation much much worse for everyone involved.

I know you were staff a while back, but we have much improved tools compared to then and had complete ability to reverse nearly everything that wasn't already traded away fairly. (Key word - fairly.) The accounts that abused lost everything related to the issue. 90% of the exploited items are out of the game. The other 10% aren't going to hurt the market in any major way and are not on accounts that abused the error or related to abusive accounts. Most of the voucher-related items have similar prices pre-exploit as well; I’ve been ingame watching the trade chats and the marts to see how this might have affected the game; the actual prices have not varied much if at all. (Edit: mostly watching omas/kabus, 7 voucher items and pokemon, focus blast, etc since those seem to be sold more often past few days. I expect any small dips to recover quickly enough, granted.)

The reason staff decided to not straight up ban users is because of the huge pressure from being mislead into thinking this would be OK and even the only fair option to take. There is also the fact that some users who do not speak English as their first language came under the impression that the sidequest was intentionally repeatable. Honestly your and others' contributions made this go from an easy "ban the abusers who knew they were in the wrong and remove everything linked to their account” into a much more complicated situation.

Furthermore dindin, I explained to you and others on the chat pretty much the exact same thing Fonty said here, and you only cherrypicked my completely non-serious, silly note of "consider it Christmas mercy" after I had already gone through most everything. We don't know many these users and it is daring of you to assume we are so deeply biased about several dozen people most of staff haven't even met before. If I had known this was how you and others would have reacted to my being honest fairly transparent about the situation with the playerbase, I wouldn't have said a word. =/ Having an issue with what I actually said? Sure. Making one, lighthearted and actually almost non-related comment the basis of your entire post? No.

Drvirus - you and others who told everyone to do the exploit made the situation a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not because staff would not have normally just banned the main users and reversed any and all of the trades, but because when the number of abusive players goes from 30-40 to over 100 with a mix of "did they do this intentionally or were they mislead", it no longer became an actually ethical option to just ban everyone and call it a day. Furthermore the larger the problem the less ability staff have to take the time to review every exploitive account’s trade logs, review those trades, determine if they were unfair/free, and reverse the illegitimate trades. With the number of users who exploited leaping by bounds after it was made incredibly public how to do it, undoing anything and everything related to the accounts became impossible because the scope of the error went from a large handful of players to almost everyone who was online at a specific time.

In light of all of this mess it was decided for their actions to have consequences on a completely equal ground that made several hours of their effort a waste because it became impossible to tell who did what and why on a basis that was equal and fair. You yourself are incredibly lucky you are not banned and frankly out of everyone I am the most surprised you were not - had they followed enforcement entirely you definitely would not be here right now either.

Reasons like this are why it is also a rule to not tell others about exploitable bugs as the OP kindly quoted for me, because it makes cleaning up bad situations like this incredibly hard or at the least 10x more painful than was ever necessary. I am aware people are angry and somewhat expected it when I heard, but the situation was in incredibly sticky waters by the time we were even made aware. There was no winning with anyone - and I guarantee if staff had banned, it would have gone from "you are too lenient" to "how dare you ban our friends for this on the holidays when this was your error to begin with" and bonus points for those who would have and will call bias in any situation even if we only know them by their username.

The only harm done here was with public relations, harm that was unavoidable due to the context of the community - the game itself, however, will be absolutely fine.

Hey Rig, Thank you for your reply.

Over the past 7 years ive seen it all with PWO, if it was 30 or was 100, i knew either way you would of not reverse or ban those accounts by tracing back, let me give you an axample, 1 of the main abusers "trixx" after a few hours he started selling voucher items, and buying magmar at the same time, he sold some of the items, and evolved others, then sold the evolved forms as well, at the same time he changed his name, and started buying with the sold "voucher items" tokens and new pokemons from other players, and reselling them. that "1" person issue became more than "15", who knows what those guys did with their items/money etc... i knew you guys would ignore him since its too complicated to reverse it.

And lets take an example of this very moment, go right now to the pokemart go to the items someone that isnt even hiding it, he is selling Shiny Stone AND Magmirizer ofc before there were even more but it seems they were sold..., how do you explain this since you said in your reply most of the items have been removed, if this guy is in the open infront of everyone and you still didnt take action of it, that only makes me even more sure that more than 50% havent been changed...

So instead of keeping it small i tried my best to make everyone have an equal chance with it, sadly it was for less then 1 hour, while the main abusers had 15 hour advantage over it, "you either tread all equally or you deal with the small group" i knew you wouldnt deal with the small group of 40-50 players, so i made it mass anyway and i said online i dont care if i get banned for this or not as long as all had the equal rights. you could of searched for who abused the bug and excluded in your search the people who abused it 1 hour before it was fixed, but still you havent done that either.

Again, the main abusers are enjoying their free MILLIONS while the HONEST players sitting back regretting they have not abused the bug, im surprised you guys did not reward the people who have not abused the bug, since it would of been a very simple fix for those abusers....

Regards,
Drvirus

 

[Jinga]

You guys only removed the vouchers, but the guys who bought and sold those items got away with it getting rich from abusing the bug...

These were also removed. I sat back and watched as any voucher-related items, including eggs that had already been put in the daycare, were removed from players. Unfortunately this took a much longer time to reverse than necessary because people were telling everyone on earth how to do it; that meant we had to remove things for the better part of a day instead of for just a few hours. It also complicated who did what and why, making this a total mess. It was not OK in the slightest to tell everyone how to do this. At all. I know you feel strongly about it but seriously, it made the situation much much worse for everyone involved.

I know you were staff a while back, but we have much improved tools compared to then and had complete ability to reverse nearly everything that wasn't already traded away fairly. (Key word - fairly.) The accounts that abused lost everything related to the issue. 90% of the exploited items are out of the game. The other 10% aren't going to hurt the market in any major way and are not on accounts that abused the error or related to abusive accounts. Most of the voucher-related items have similar prices pre-exploit as well; I’ve been ingame watching the trade chats and the marts to see how this might have affected the game; the actual prices have not varied much if at all. (Edit: mostly watching omas/kabus, 7 voucher items and pokemon, focus blast, etc since those seem to be sold more often past few days. I expect any small dips to recover quickly enough, granted.)

The reason staff decided to not straight up ban users is because of the huge pressure from being mislead into thinking this would be OK and even the only fair option to take. There is also the fact that some users who do not speak English as their first language came under the impression that the sidequest was intentionally repeatable. Honestly your and others' contributions made this go from an easy "ban the abusers who knew they were in the wrong and remove everything linked to their account” into a much more complicated situation.

Furthermore dindin, I explained to you and others on the chat pretty much the exact same thing Fonty said here, and you only cherrypicked my completely non-serious, silly note of "consider it Christmas mercy" after I had already gone through most everything. We don't know many these users and it is daring of you to assume we are so deeply biased about several dozen people most of staff haven't even met before. If I had known this was how you and others would have reacted to my being honest fairly transparent about the situation with the playerbase, I wouldn't have said a word. =/ Having an issue with what I actually said? Sure. Making one, lighthearted and actually almost non-related comment the basis of your entire post? No.

Drvirus - you and others who told everyone to do the exploit made the situation a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not because staff would not have normally just banned the main users and reversed any and all of the trades, but because when the number of abusive players goes from 30-40 to over 100 with a mix of "did they do this intentionally or were they mislead", it no longer became an actually ethical option to just ban everyone and call it a day. Furthermore the larger the problem the less ability staff have to take the time to review every exploitive account’s trade logs, review those trades, determine if they were unfair/free, and reverse the illegitimate trades. With the number of users who exploited leaping by bounds after it was made incredibly public how to do it, undoing anything and everything related to the accounts became impossible because the scope of the error went from a large handful of players to almost everyone who was online at a specific time.

In light of all of this mess it was decided for their actions to have consequences on a completely equal ground that made several hours of their effort a waste because it became impossible to tell who did what and why on a basis that was equal and fair. You yourself are incredibly lucky you are not banned and frankly out of everyone I am the most surprised you were not - had they followed enforcement entirely you definitely would not be here right now either.

Reasons like this are why it is also a rule to not tell others about exploitable bugs as the OP kindly quoted for me, because it makes cleaning up bad situations like this incredibly hard or at the least 10x more painful than was ever necessary. I am aware people are angry and somewhat expected it when I heard, but the situation was in incredibly sticky waters by the time we were even made aware. There was no winning with anyone - and I guarantee if staff had banned, it would have gone from "you are too lenient" to "how dare you ban our friends for this on the holidays when this was your error to begin with" and bonus points for those who would have and will call bias in any situation even if we only know them by their username.

The only harm done here was with public relations, harm that was unavoidable due to the context of the community - the game itself, however, will be absolutely fine.

Hey Rig, Thank you for your reply.

Over the past 7 years ive seen it all with PWO, if it was 30 or was 100, i knew either way you would of not reverse or ban those accounts by tracing back, let me give you an axample, 1 of the main abusers "trixx" after a few hours he started selling voucher items, and buying magmar at the same time, he sold some of the items, and evolved others, then sold the evolved forms as well, at the same time he changed his name, and started buying with the sold "voucher items" tokens and new pokemons from other players, and reselling them. that "1" person issue became more than "15", who knows what those guys did with their items/money etc... i knew you guys would ignore him since its too complicated to reverse it.

And lets take an example of this very moment, go right now to the pokemart go to the items someone that isnt even hiding it, he is selling Shiny Stone AND Magmirizer ofc before there were even more but it seems they were sold..., how do you explain this since you said in your reply most of the items have been removed, if this guy is in the open infront of everyone and you still didnt take action of it, that only makes me even more sure that more than 50% havent been changed...

So instead of keeping it small i tried my best to make everyone have an equal chance with it, sadly it was for less then 1 hour, while the main abusers had 15 hour advantage over it, "you either tread all equally or you deal with the small group" i knew you wouldnt deal with the small group of 40-50 players, so i made it mass anyway and i said online i dont care if i get banned for this or not as long as all had the equal rights. you could of searched for who abused the bug and excluded in your search the people who abused it 1 hour before it was fixed, but still you havent done that either.

Again, the main abusers are enjoying their free MILLIONS while the HONEST players sitting back regretting they have not abused the bug, im surprised you guys did not reward the people who have not abused the bug, since it would of been a very simple fix for those abusers....

Regards,
Drvirus

Its not about ban its about equality so i understand what you are trying to say but wouldnt it mean that you are one of them by doing this without reporting them.
As for the matter at hand i want a ban those who abused it with or without the knowledge because its you have to read the rules carefully before agreeing to pwo's terms.As they are playing they have agreed to play under your rules you guys should ban them no if's no buts.

Trixx you say if he is really selling those abused goods staff should ban him. It should be your first priority or just give us compensation.

 

[Rigaudon]

(@ Jinga: In regards to comments of fault, as is my job I went and found out how this issue got through to make sure it doesn't happen again. It is our fault for letting it be possible and I would never feign differently. However, people do have an individual responsibility to do good in the situations presented to them, and that rule codifies such inherent responsibilities all people should have in situations like this.)

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Drvirus -

A very civil post, thank you. I actually don't get those very often.

Side note: The user you were referring to was investigated and is one of the users who ended up trading fairly for the objects in question from the playerdex mart and holds a majority of the things. Otherwise the problem items are spread out among only some users who also traded fairly for them.

Anyhow, onto the thick of it. I'm not going to sit back and pretend the game has no problems, and with that in mind the event vouchers are one of the last holds of reliable/healthy incentives we have left for the likes of small events for a variety of reasons. The system was established for the sake of not having to sit down for an hour or more each time trying to find balanced prizes for odd or short events (harder than it sounds), and a "point" system worked nicely for those in-between festivities. Thus, vouchers were born.

If it were that everyone could suddenly skip months and months of events, even to the point of not caring about vouchers at all because they have so many, it puts a major wrench into the factor of the system's longevity. It's not like I want hacked vouchers/items in the game either, because as one of the people who helps design and plan things, it's a very major problem when an entire system like that threatens to crumble over such an oversight and so quickly. Having these types of prizes devalue in an unintentional manner is like being a starving artist who just got mugged for most of his money. It sucks. It is also in the best interest of the entire content section to not lackadaisically/apathetically let exploited vouchers and prizes seep or stay into the system. However, flooding more vouchers into the system as a reward for those who were honest (or perhaps just ignorant but may have taken up the opportunity had they known) is also not quite the answer. We did something else instead.

The exploitative users had everything ripped from them and honest players were allowed to get the Razor Claw, allowing them to get ahead in their own way. This is an item the playerbase will actually not be seeing for years (yes, plural), as opposed to the vouchers which will spread out to be obtained at least once a month. No, they did not get rich. Possibly honest people who just thought they were getting a good deal did, but those users did not. Those related to the exploit not only had their short-term grabs nullified but also lost out on something that will be very rare in PWO's future.

Honestly from all this I think it would be worth it in the future for us as staff to have more options for use in issues like this, and I'll be bringing that up to them soon as a suggestion. Would have made everything a lot faster and there would have been *no* damage with the system I have in mind, but hindsight stings.