The Recent Pet Scare

[Robmo]

Hey Mortals,

First off we appreciate your patience with us coming forward. We wanted to have an action plan for handling the situation before we said anything concrete.

All types of exploitation, cheating and similar activity is investigated and dealt with as we discover them. This is an ongoing battle we fight to make sure that the players get the best and **fair** experience that can be provided by the game.

First, the recreation of this particular event is known to us and we are working on ensuring this cannot be replicated in the future.

Second, the player/players who were involved in the most recent public incident **are** being dealt with. This will include temporary bans with complete inventory wipes. If the severity of the exploitation is extremely high, it will likely result in a permanent ban.

We are currently compiling a list who may have abused this issue and investigate to take action against those accounts as well. This includes players not involved with the video that has been posted around.

**DO NOT REPLICATE THESE ISSUES**

It will lead to disciplinary action. In general, we do not publicly allow for accusations inside our Discord Channels to protect those who may be innocent. This is a rule that applies to all cases, not just the most recent one. We ask that with this issue, and any future issues, we follow this rule. Refer to #rules (in Discord). Please allow the Dev and GM team to handle these issues.

The team is talking about a future "Wall of Shame" to be implemented in some way in the future. This is not a confirmation.

Our last request is to remember to treat your fellow players with respect. Personal disputes and arguments will not be tolerated. The game gives you to tools to "hash" it out with your enemies. We encourage some friendly fights in game.

Thank you for your time Mortals.

 

[Tzone]

Please just stop the censorship. That's were most of the players trust has been lost. It was terribly bad PR to censor.
People still don't think the right thing will be done with starvaults track record and how controlling the mod staff is.

Need to clean up the moderators and get new moderator leadership. No bias'd grudge filled ones we currently have with horrible track records.

There is a high lack of transparency and many times have people reported issues but nothing happen. The faith in the system is a all time low as it should be because SV has not done anything to untaint their name after every bad thing they did in mo1.

 

[mydadnvm]

Seems like SV needs to review their policy. Obviously it's a dupe right? For both gold and materials? Should be an instant perma ban, none of this inventory wipe and slap on the wrist shit. Pretty weakspined reaction for someone ruining your game.

 

[Tzone]

I just realize that they said temp bans for duping. What a travesty. This was not no accident, it was purposeful. So what Im hearing is that you wont get perma banned for duping so the risk is worth the reward type of thing.

Slap on a wrist situation after a attempted cover up. SV will just claim that it was not a big issue. The player admitted on discord that he duped at least 62 stacks of reptile carcass.

If SV wants people to respect them after two months of dealing with constant RMT speed hackers in dungeons, then they should go all out on this issue.

 

[Myta]

I second this.
Purposeful duping clearly has to be a perm ban, anything else is just absurd.

 

[Raknor]

Ridiculous to even consider a temp ban

 

[ElPerro]

So turning your shadows off = ban

but duping = temp ban

kek

 

[gluglok]

Oh no, all these Venezuelans we won't have time to say good bye to

 

[ArcaneConsular]

Eh public humiliation tactics remind me too much of communist china

 

[The Real Jeff Goldblum]

Absolutely wild. Should be a perma ban no questions asked.

 

[Teknique]

Any duping should be perma ban.

GMs should investigate any account they feel necessary

and dukenukem did nothing wrong.

 

[Tzone]

Eh public humiliation tactics remind me too much of communist china

I dont like public humiliation. It does wonders for the masses to make them feel better. But the issue is that we cant trust SV to ban people and do the right thing with out watching them do it.

 

[Emdash]

it's not public humiliation. It's like a sex offender registration. BLE. Guess I gotta watch forums after all. That's why doods should pay FOR FUN and stop being so try-hardy. This is THE GAME. Have fun!

Edit: duping is the worst thing you can do in a full loot game, the highest offense. Deliberate duping. Stop PLAYIN wit us

 

[Robmo]

it's not public humiliation. It's like a sex offender registration. BLE. Guess I gotta watch forums after all. That's why doods should pay FOR FUN and stop being so try-hardy. This is THE GAME. Have fun!

Edit: duping is the worst thing you can do in a full loot game, the highest offense. Deliberate duping. Stop PLAYIN wit us

I'm personally in favor of a public wall of shame for bans and temp bans

 

[ArcaneConsular]

it's not public humiliation. It's like a sex offender registration. BLE. Guess I gotta watch forums after all. That's why doods should pay FOR FUN and stop being so try-hardy. This is THE GAME. Have fun!

Edit: duping is the worst thing you can do in a full loot game, the highest offense. Deliberate duping. Stop PLAYIN wit us

Eh. Seems sort of petty. Childish. And toxic to me. And we really don't need more of that in this community least alone the moderators

 

[undeadfred]

I'm personally in favor of a public wall of shame for bans and temp bans

If people break the rules they should be banned. We know the rules, this ought to be an even playing field.

Shaming tactics from a for profit company though moves from the realm of an impersonal "This is the conclusion of our investigation, We believe this happen"
Into an emotionally charged accusation to the character of the individual.

How certain are you that you're correct? It's a good thing false positives never happen, or that some junior gm doesn't misinterpret some sql quarry someone took all of 2 seconds to carefully write up. All of this would be forgivable. No system is perfect, we're all humans here, it's only a game. Except when you choose to make it personal.

What if SV really does its due Diligence here and is right 99% of the time, and only 1% of the people on the wall of shame have been slandered.
What if one of the falsely libeled finds that their reputation is more important then some stupid game.

 

[Stundorn]

Gamers gaming systems.
There are just a few players who play in a relaxed manner without having to exploit and max out everything ad nauseam. Abusing starts early, hardly anyone plays as intended and approaches the game in a playful way. It always has to be the best, the most optimized, the most efficient, etc. How far the limits and rules are then exceeded is fluid. For me it starts with multi accounting, circumventing given skill restrictions, reputation trade offs etc.
It continues with using glitches to kill Mobs and the next one is fine using a glitch to port over the map or dupe something. The list continues, the boarders are fluent.
And all because everyone is overly "competetive" rather than playing and immersing into a games fantasy world roleplaying.
Its an online Roleplaying Game, just to remind everyone^^
Not an exploiters Sandbox, but who do i tell this? Exel Warriors who long time have forgotten to play only but know best to be efficient and squeeze everything out of a game to compete and shine with pixels. Gamers gaming Systems, rather than players play a game.
It breaks the game for all those who just want to play by the rules and stick to playing the game the way it's meant to be played.

Good Luck Starvault and all have fun even If your way to have fun is based on the costs of how others have fun.
It's normal these days.

This is not a complain, its just facts.

 

[Amadman]

I'm personally in favor of a public wall of shame for bans and temp bans

I think shaming temp bans would be overkill. There seem to be some pretty minor things that get people temp bands and they are just a slap on the wrist to try and let players know it is wrong.

But if someone does something severe enough to get them permanently kicked out of the game then I think having their character name put on a wall of shame is justifiable.

 

[Kuthara]

This should be pretty clear - Someone knowingly exploits the system in order to profit = Ban.

There SHOULD be a wall of shame. We see the same people come back time and time against after a ban. We have active people within the community who have done much worse than this and they just come back on new characters and slip back into the same Guilds. The issue is that for the most part SV are extremely poor at validating what action has been taken against them and also being open about what they did. This gives the person a chance to just drop straight back into the community.

If you do not like being known as a pathetic cheating loser, then do not do it. Most of these guys who cheat thrive of ego and rep, hit them where it hurts. Which is not a £5 account purchased from another country via a fake steam profile.

The main issue I see at the moment is it does not benefit to follow the rules. You work hard, put the time in, grind the resources.... On the other hand someone cheats, get's 100x what you do, palms it off onto alt accounts or into a guild, gets that account deleted and then makes a new one.

We had this issue time and time again in MO1 and one of the largest problems with it was during Sieges. Most sieges were mired by some form of dodgy exploit. From instantly moving boulders across the map to DDOSing and crashing entire enemy forces. This would be done by a single person in a guild and then that person would be banned only to make a new account. £5 to change the outcome of a siege seems pretty cheap.

Unless there is a HARD stance that actually tackles cheating at its core and SV is very transparent about the action it will end up like MO1 where your legitimate players leave because the game is no longer at all competitive.

 

[Myta]

The shaming is really not the important part in my opinion.
What is important is that we can see that there has actually been action taken and hopefully that this action is sufficient, that this is taken seriously.

If the end result of this will be that there is like 10 stacks of items deleted and a few characters get a tempban, then the whole duping operation will have been a HUGE success. Even after getting caught it will have been incredible profitable. We can only guess how much has been duped of course, but given that the chance that this streamer happened to find a single isolated incident that just started is basically zero, its a pretty safe bet that the total amount is pretty significant.

Cheating must never be profitable. If it turns out that the net result of large scale duping is positive even after getting caught, then duping is only forbidden on paper effectively everyone is encouraged to do it. And this is a terrible situation for a game, especially a sandbox mmo. Even just creating the impression that this is the case is terrible.

So why do we really need a wall of shame? Because it is my impression that currently the trust that there will be sufficient action taken is pretty low. Just the fact that temp bans are even mentioned is a bad sign. Currently I am convinced that the involved guild will come out of this with a huge profit, and I am sure I am not the only one. To restore trust you need to show us that this is not the case.