As a few of you know, when we sent out a global mail last night there was a way to claim the rewards contained multiple times.
This issue happened due to some changes we made to how our mailboxes work. In a perfect world, this exploit wouldn’t be possible, and the changes were made in the interest of stopping mailboxes from filling so quickly, especially when a guild completes a lot of legendary tasks. (This was done to mitigate the potential loss of more important rewards, as we saw some issues regarding this over the holiday period.)
However, there was an unforeseen possibility to exploit the global mail we recently sent, as mentioned earlier. Only a few hundred players took advantage of the exploit, of which roughly a hundred did so hard.
Many of the expoilters didn’t spend the Gems they collected, and in this case we have automatically removed them from their accounts.
The small remaining number of players who abused this exploit AND spent the gems, have now been banned.
Unless a player is deliberately cheating. I really wish y’all would stop banning players during guild wars. Yes, the player is in the wrong. But you shouldn’t punish their guild for your game being bugged.
Banning players that exploit our game has to take priority over guilds and Guild Wars. The people that are actively punishing the guild’s affected are the players actively choosing the cheat.
I’m watching this thread unfold. As soon as Salty posts, all the devs instantly like her comment. Shouldn’t y’all be working out how to give us older weapons instead of liking comments? xD just saying.
You seem to take a very different view when the bugs in the game affect the players(which is often)…I did not benefit from the bug, but i totally disagree with your decision to ban players…The fault lies with you…Surely you can look at the logs of the players who used the exploit and remove all the things they got from the exploit(troops,armor etc).
It may be difficult to prove that a player is using a bot or a trainer to make the game easier. This one was super cut and dry, and so quite easy to determine who was cheating the system.
Edit: v 7000 times?! That is a whole lot of gems to have collected! v
Just as a frame of reference here, and to put things into perspective, pretty much everybody who got banned spammed “Claim All” between 100 and 7000 times, then dumped the Gems straight into Keys and Events… definitely not cool, and they knew precisely they were exploiting the issue hard.
There’s absolutely no reason you can’t enforce the ban after guild wars if all they did was Exploit a bugged mail system. They didn’t hack a code. They didn’t use software to gain an edge.
They got greedy. That’s all. I don’t even know if this effects my guild or not at this point.
You can’t control what players do. Neither can guild managers.
And by the time you’re able to unban players. Guild wars will be over and they won’t be able to do their matches.
TL:DR… You left the bath water running. So you threw it out with the baby. And then blamed the baby.
And they are douchebags for doing so. But enforce their sentencing after guild wars. If the mail system is fixed. They should be no threat for the next 3 days.
In fact, ban them before weekly reset to make sure they don’t get a single Guild Wars reward.
I have seen glitches in the past that were not a big deal. This one is not one of them. The banned people can at least plead their case and that’s fair IMO.
I’m rescinding this post. I’ve changed my mind. See below for what I think now.
[I think taking advantage of bugs is definitely a grey area. There is a strong argument that anything which is possible to do within the game (without hacking the files or using external software) is fair enough. One could even argue that *not* taking advantage of a bug is a deliberate decision to let other players gain an edge.]
Of course, there is always a human element. As Sirrian pointed out, spamming the exploit hundreds of times cannot be excused as mere ignorance.
[Ultimately, I do not believe that any players deserve to be banned for taking advantage of this bug. I do believe they should be deprived of their gains, insofar as that is possible. In this example, if there isn’t a way to determine what cards were received from the extra Gems, unfortunately that is on the developers for not logging it.]
[That said, I think the appropriate overall punishment should be: 1) an official warning; 2) removal of the extra gems, if possible. For those who spent their extra Gems: 1 and 3) removal of extra troops gained with the extra gems. If that’s not possible: 1 and 4) prevention from logging in to the game until an agreement has been reached (a lock-out, NOT a ban); 5) an agreement from the player to either a) forfeit a reasonable amount of troops; OR b) push their Gem total into a negative balance, which may prevent them from participating in a few events.]
To me its not anything like finding money someone dropped. Its like going to and atm and finding out it screwed up and gave you 20 dollars. But instead of just keeping the 20, you keep doing the same thing over and over 100s or 1000s of times and think that its ok
The devs are about to be off of work for the weekend.
So they won’t hear any appeals until they get back to work. And then they’ll be busy pushing the patch out. So I’d say 3-5 days at the earliest before accounts get reinstated.
I’ve always heard. If you Exploit the game. Your account can get rolled back. I’ve never heard of a ban officially from the devs until now.
Once upon a time, I asked about people getting banned because of the Gnome Exploit. I couldn’t get an official statement about it. But from what I understand…
It’s okay to speed a little, but if you speed too much. Death penalty to your account.
