Summary
Taking advantage of the trade or COD window bugs to scam people is classified as an exploit as defined in our EULA, and any players who do this will be penalized in accordance with our ban policy.
We cannot possibly address and revert all cases of these exploits that have occurred in the past. Only the ones that we can 100% confirm without a doubt, such as these more recent high value ones, will be reverted based on our logs of the trades in question.
For a more in depth explanation, please read below.
Greetings Mortals,
We at Star Vault endeavor to take great care when approaching any situations that will affect the game and community significantly, and make sure we do our due diligence before making any decisions.
We do apologize for the delay in this investigation, as we know many in the community have been eagerly awaiting answers and a conclusion to this most recent affair.
As this is a particularly sensitive and public topic, we are making this announcement to hopefully clear up some of the confusion around this subject and ensure everyone is well informed.
In order to make sure we all understand the terms being used, in section 9 of our End User License Agreement we define an exploit as the following:
“intentionally engaging with a bug, game mechanic or system in a way unintended by the game designers in order to gain a competitive advantage.”
Our trade window has been unfinished for a long time, which results in items often not displaying their correct names and icons, as well as the detailed information about those items usually being incorrect or completely missing.
Although these bugs have been a low priority on our internal tracker and have yet to be addressed for a long time, they are still bugs nonetheless.
As the nature of these recent trade scams involves heavily relying on the existing bugs of the trade and COD windows to make them possible, in following our policies we must treat such activities as exploiting and take the appropriate actions as defined in our ban policy.
This does indeed mean that all previous occurrences of such trade scams performed in this way are also exploits.
However, as we mentioned in a previous announcement on our official Discord channel, unfortunately we simply aren’t able to cover all previous cases of this retroactively. As such, we do advise all players to only trade with those you trust, or use the broker system to ensure you are receiving what you intend to purchase until we address this issue with a fix.
We have bumped up the priority of fixing the trade window so that it shows all the correct information, and we should hopefully see these fixes in the patch after the next one which is set to be ready this month. We would have liked to include it in the upcoming patch, however it has already moved into the QA stage where no new changes can be made to ensure stability.
Hopefully this announcement has served to clear up this recent topic, and again we apologize for the delay in addressing this.
See you in Nave,
The Star Vault Team