Global Mail Exploit (Banpocalypse đŸ”„)

On this case the initial fault is from the devs. Its not a hacking. So a permanent ban is exaggerated. But in this story, what is unacceptable is to see a difference of treatment between the players who exploited the devs error without spending then the gems and the ones who did spend them. Both did exactly the same, that is exploiting the initial devs mistake and therefore should be treated exactly the same.

All should have the gems and the troops aquired with the exploit removed from their inventory.
Now about banning all these players? maybe 1 week? I dont know. But certainly not a permanent ban from not a hacking problem but a initial devs mistake!
A one week ban and all gems and troops removed is more than enough to make them learn their lesson to not do it again. lol
Removing all troops and gems aquired with exploit will give work to devs, of course, but without their initial mistake, nothing of that would have happened anyway so its fair both players and devs share the fault imo.
But no way to treat differently the ones who used their gems and the ones who didnt. And obviously if its a 1 week ban, no way to let these players keep all the mythics they obtained with the exploit when they come back after the ban.

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Totally get that and don’t disagree! I was merely commenting to UK who arbitrarily said “5 times is a safe number. More than that you’re being naughty”. As in 
 the concept of there being a “limit” per se to how many times you’re “allowed” to exploit something before it becomes wrong. Clicking on mail an extra time or 2 is not a conscious “let’s see how many times I can get away with this” 
it’s more of a “yeah yeah mail. Collect. Done.” :wink:

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

Isn’t that the truth?! :rofl:

Unfortunately I don’t know the specifics of the gw exploit myself as the first I’d heard of it was when I recieved mail from the devs stating “gw rewards were corrected due to several players using exploits during gw affecting the rankings” (that’s a loose quote by the way)

To my knowledge. Only 2 guilds in the top 2 brackets received said email so at minimum it affected both brackets 1 and 2 thus 10-20 guilds minimally. The exploit involved something to do with being able to “cheat” the system to allow you to substitute a team from a different game mode in place of your opponents team during gw match. I still know nothing more than that about the exploit itself.

But what it communicates to me is that there was a clear intent by multiple players to cheat the game. Again there was no clarification from the devs as to what action was taken with individual players but it does not appear any bans were exacted nor penalties to the guilds involved. I don’t ask to know which guilds or players specifically
 I don’t need to know, but a simple forums post like this one advising the player base of the exploit and actions taken would have been and still would be appreciated. It would be nice to have been advised of adjusted gw ranks following last gw. There are many questions that remain unanswered about what steps were taken to “rectify” the issue of cheating. Transparency with that situation would have set a precedent and communicated that the devs do consider use of an exploit as cheating and something that will not be tolerated.

The individuals in question “stole” the same type of currency from other guilds/players as those who “stole” gems from the devs with this exploit. I get that it happened on a much larger scale with the latter scenario but the fact remains that it is the same in game currency. The fact also remains that it communicates that doing something like this to the devs will not be tolerated while doing it to other players is something they can simply overlook. Not cool. Not cool at all. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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Do not confuse hacking and bug. Hacking - direct intent. Using an uncorrected, but published by the developers bug - also direct intent. If the bug is not published, the player cannot know that this is a bug, not a feature. Understanding that this bug may appear immediately, and maybe through a fairly large number of iterations. In my case, there were a lot of iterations before I realized that something was wrong. I did not consider iterations, because I did not think it was a bug. At a certain point, it became clear that this is either a ban, or a rollback of a transaction, and it no longer matters how many iterations there are, so it only remained to check if this bug has a bottom. It is foolish to think that developers will be able to investigate the consequences of the bug. For them, everything is transparent. But hacking is not massive, so it is more difficult to track it, especially if the player does not seek to the top.

Five isn’t arbitrary, it’s the number Sirrian let people get away with last time.

I’m not confusing hacking and a “bug”. The devs specifically stated in the correction email that it was an “exploit” used by several players. It was not hacking or botting. They discovered a bug within the game that allowed them to cheat so they continued to use it for multiple (if not all) gw matches and shared it with others for them to exploit as well. Still cheating.

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Anyone who has played this game for any length of time knows that “gift” mails are either tied to a calendar or are a “one-off” freebie.

If someone spam-clicked through their mail a few times, fine.

If someone saw the EXACT SAME MAIL 100+ times (which is the ban threshold given by the devs) and didn’t consider it to be suspicious, I call BS. A claim of ignorance can fly for 5 clicks
maybe even 10 if you’re exceptionally good at not even looking at your mail in order to claim it, and therefore don’t see the same subject line repeated over and over
but 100? No. You messed up.

That said, I think everyone who fell under what the devs considered the threshold for exploiting should be banned. Removing the gems and letting the players off the hook is like saying it’s okay to exploit as long as you don’t spend any of your ill-gotten gains. The only possible exception to this that I would go along with is for any player(s) who did this, didn’t spend the gems, and reported the bug.

I also sincerely hope VIP level will have zero effect on ban enforcement/appeal, and that’s said as a VIP player myself. Everyone should be playing by the same rules, period.

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I agree with @Tingle_Toys that players appreciate and deserve transparency when it comes to issues like this. I respect and thank the devs for their swift response and all of the information they’ve provided. That being said, and I hate to engage in “whataboutism”, but I know that several players are concerned with a ban that was handed to a cheater and then rescinded a couple of days later. (??). To the best of my knowledge, their trophy penalty stayed and I’m wondering if people who exploited the latest bug and got 70k gems will get the same type of reprieve and be back to find a new cheat or exploit—call it what you want—within a few days or even a week. Also, It seems that there is an actual discrepancy with the way some players are handled, whether it be cheating the leaderboards, things said in global chat that are acceptable for some but bannable offenses for others, changing gw teams or whatever. Having players be treated in the same manner is clutch within the GoW community. Just my (maybe not so) humble opinion. :wink:

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Yes please no unbanning. If they did, next time everyone might as well abuse it

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Yes the devs messed up .please accept responsibility for not testing anything as usual and move on. All the times the devs screwed up with bad updates I think they should be banned.

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I didn’t catch the glitch but I can’t say that if I had I wouldn’t have exploited it and I’ll tell you why. In the 1,121 days I’ve been playing there have been MANY times coding has ripped off the player and not the devs. No matter how bad the “oops” email from the devs has never been actual compensation (which in their defense, wasn’t always measurable) but 10 gems or 5 keys or something silly. There was over a year (and 505 has the tickets to prove it) where I had to submit a ticket every time I bought something (and I’m VIP 12 so it was often) because I would not get my purchase. Submitting a ticket to them with proof of purchase becomes a pain and often if it was for a weekly weapon I just wouldn’t bother which is on me but in that time I submitted MANY tickets about the problem itself and asking for it to be resolved and the answer I got was while we know some people do have this issue we don’t know what’s causing it. So taking my money and me having to submit a ticket to get the glitch fixed and no developers getting fired (and since this happened for over a year I would say they definitely exploited this glitch) is how it works when the coding issue only affects the player. In reverse what should have happened is the players realize there was a glitch, they exploite it, somebody submits a ticket, they fix the issue by taking back whatever and everybody moves on.

And I certainly don’t play this game to make sure that nobody else has any advantage over me. if somebody caught it and took the time to exploit it for an immense amount of free resources good on them. Every endgame player I know already has every single mythic and every single troop ascended to mythic. Stop being so petty and worried about what other people have and just hope next time you’re lucky enough to catch it. And developers hope next time you’re better at your job. But the only people that should be punished there are the coders not the players. and for all of you that are thinking it’s not fair to other players that some players got the glitch I hope you know that there is absolutely no truth in saying that the developers banned those people because of the unfairness to other players. There is no reason for somebody with 50,000 gems to spend any money on the game and that is why they got banned.

TL;DR you are presumably grown and should have a better attention span and it’s two paragraphs go back and read the post.

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Simple solution
Stop screwing up and test your stuff, most people learn from their mistakes, yet the devs continuously make them, including repeating ones like new class weapons

I hope it’s a temporary punishment for those who exploited the devs 976th mistake, no one deserves to lose all of their progress
Maybe hire someone who does actual work on this game, instead of acting like a bunch of teenagers on social media

For shame devs
for shame

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Time to mute this thread. You cheat and get caught then you’re punished, deal with it :+1:

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This reminds me of the glory bug. I was just doing PvP mindlessly in the zone. I didn’t even know I’d been effected by it until someone told me about it and I had probably more glory than the rest of the players in the game combined. Thankfully, the devs were able to remove all the extra glory less than an hour later.

So it’s easy to exploit these things on accident. At the same time, once I saw what happened, I froze and stopped using my account until a dev could fix it. gloryBug

Looking at these stats makes me miss the old legendary tasks that had gems.

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Agreed. I personally fall into the “no tolerance for cheating” camp and believe any punishment doled out should be at the discretion of the developers. That is not to say valid arguments and analogies have not been presented by both sides. However, at some point, it becomes a complete retread that leads to nothing more than elevated vitriol and ill will. I will never agree with everything the developers do but it is their game and they have the right to act in accordance with what they believe is in the best interest of it’s overall health.

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koromac are you dev or game police trying to compare this to real life is just silly its not it was their mistake period.I just really hope than none of the banned people come back even if ban is lifted I really hope that this cost them some real money from people not playing the game anymore I’m done no matter what this wasn’t even really that big of a deal I was already near end anyway I didn’t gain any great advantage was still using teams I already had it is just the devs incompetence on the bug happening and the ban you can’t attack your customers for your mistake.

Woah. Please show me anywhere in this thread where I said cheating was okay? I’m not affected by these bans, nor is my guild.
Instead of worrying about my compass or children.
You should worry about your own reading comprehension.

[Lyya: Removed for ad hominem attacks]

Yeah
This should be less about cheating, and more about the repeated incompetence of the developers
When salty is your poster child and these live “game” streams are what they are, I picture the behind the scenes being even worse
This is a game where cheating affects so little, I’m always shocked that so many people pay any attention to it

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I’d take your fan boy attitude as sincere. But I don’t.
Again, no one in my guild was banned.
It’s the inconsistent behavior of the devs that I have an issue with. Exploits used to help during guild wars doesn’t get players banned. But using an Exploit that has nothing to do with GW gets people banned during guild wars. With absolutely zero reason not to ban them a few days from now.
Yes, be sure to support the devs on making mistakes and how they take no fault in the players getting banned from that mistake.
If I leave my keys in my car and someone steals my car. Yes the thief is still guilty as hell. But I’m still going to take partial blame for being the dumbass who left my keys in the car.

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It’s about time the devs did something right!

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