The reason it would slip by testing would be because it isnât just clicking two buttons. Itâs a situation that a specific kind of mail message, sent a specific way caused this bug to happen, when the player claims it, then goes back to claim it again, at the very least. There may also be more factors since I donât know how the bug functions. Such as, did it occur in all cases? Just when claimed on itâs own? Only when âclaim allâ was pressed? Itâs a series of specific circumstances that may have slipped by normal testing, because the testing could have ended after claiming the message properly, without realizing that it was possible that this particular type of message, would unlike all other messages, not clear properly.
1 Like
You, sir, definitely know coding. 
@Thevc
Btw⊠Iâve decided Iâm going to be a Unicorn today because itâs the internet and we get to be whatever we say we are.
Just please donât test me on it. 
3 Likes
I really donât see any benefit in discussing this further. As someone who works in a similar role, I know what mechanisms and protocols are utilised to prevent and eliminate hardware and software anomalies. You say that adding code can introduce unforseen bugs and that is true, mainly due to easily remedied oversight. The fact of the matter is, if you donât know whatâs going to happen by incorporating a change, you leave the source code well alone until you do. Good day to you.
2 Likes
Some amount of bugs can be caught with oversight, and routinely are. But never 100%. I dare you to find a game of this complexity which had never had a single bug ever slip past testing.
Just because the bug seems easy to catch in retrospect does not mean that no testing was done or that the testing was necessarily particularly poor.
To expect that no bugs will ever happen because programmers should all be flawless code machines is utterly ludicrus.
2 Likes
I donât have an interest white-knighting for any company, but the attempt to defend and justify those who were banned is absurd to the extreme. They make a mistake (which anyone who knows jack about programming realizes how easy one is to make), you take advantage of that and now you want to cry foul?
Earlier, someone equated it to getting in trouble for picking up a $100 off the ground that was dropped. Not even close. You want an honest metaphor? An armored truck is being loaded and you grab a bag of cash when the guardsâ backs are turned, AFTER one of them spots you a $10 just for the fun of it, and now youâre deciding to pitch a fit about it being unfair that you get stuck in the back of a cop car.
You really think that because they made a mistake that you are free from any moral responsibility for your actions? How screwed does your brain have to be to even come up with logic that perverted?
If it was a few times, somebody checking to see if what they were seeing was real, I could see them getting a pass on that. Someone very clearly taking advantage of it? Good riddance, no one wants you here. You want to be sleazy like that? Move to China, where that kind of garbage is embraced.
4 Likes
Wow you really wonât let up lol. Firstly I never said bugs donât happen, Nor did I say that all will be caught in testing, even though in theory they should be. You are now saying how complex this game is. Is it? Its not exactly the witcher 3 or COD is it? Complex games such as COD and gears actively engage players in beta testing prior to launch to iron out bugs/improve mechanics etc as I am sure you are aware. You are still maintaining the position that the ban apocalypse was almost unavoidable because testing an email delivery script was such a complex proposition. Thatâs preposterous. I wasnât affected by the ban in case you were wondering. Your closing gambit that software guys donât get it right every time is correct but even you must have noticed higher bug frequency of late? No doubt you will either disregard this fact like the devs have disregarded exploiters prior to this issue, or you will just fail to acknowledge or accept any other persons contribution as you have done throughout this thread. It matters not, I am happy to agree to disagree and take my leave. Who you disagree with next is up to you.
1 Like
I can totally understand this bug getting missed. Who would think to test what happens if you leave game running through reset? Some other bugs however like spelling errors or spells not working correctly etc boggles my mind how these make it through.
You may have wanted to read over the discussion before chiming in if you didnât want to say that, because thatâs the side you picked. The topic you are arguing on started from the disagreement over âIs it reasonable to expect no exploitable bugs to ever happen, vs is it reasonable to expect a player not to deliberately exploit a bugâ
Itâs never a good thing for a bug to happen, but it is inevitable. If not this, then something else might slip by. Because the game is being programmed and tested by human beings capable of error, and with limited time and energy to spend on testing the myriad of ways that new code could go wrong.
Itâs easy to say âThis could have been avoided if you tested for this specific bug ahead of timeâ when you have the benefit of hindsight telling you that this bug exists in the first place, but in the present, you have no idea what bugs may or may not exist or how to find them. They may easily have tested for countless other potential problems and just missed this one. It happens. It is inevitable that it will happen.
When comparing the two things, it is far more reasonable to say that a player DELIBERATELY exploiting a bug thousands of times then getting banned had it coming, than it is to say that the developers should never have had a bug happen in the first place.
I also did not say this game is the most complex game in the world. I specified âat this level of complexityâ to exclude pong clones and other games so simple in design that they simply donât have room for bugs to occur in them, not to claim that this is a title on par with a 60 dollar AAA game. My point is, and has always been, that you canât reasonably expect a game to just never have a bug slip through testing, but you can reasonably expect a player to not go out of their way to cheat.
1 Like
I read the entire thread before chiming in as you putâŠyet another incorrect assumption made by you. You also (during this thread) attempted to disrespect awryan by claiming a higher level of software knowledge and capability that you clearly donât have. You refuse to accept any other opinion as having more than a modicum of credibility and refuse to acknowledge that the devs dangled a carrot that others were foolish enough to repeatedly take because they failed to adequately test their product. Its that simple. The devs are responsible and so are the spenders and did not spenders that exploited the coding error more than a 100 times. Thatâs my point of view on the matter. Ban all or ban none; what message is being sent by this course of action? We donât mind you cheating as long as it doesnât affect our profits! In a nutshell. Now please stop trolling this thread and go read up on software development systems, SAT, FAT et al before defending the devs any further for the schoolboy error that has contributed SIGNIFICANTLY to this thread ever coming into being.
1 Like
âDangled a carrotâ is dangerously close to saying that the devs put the bug in there on purpose to trick people into getting themselves banned. Also, you want to claim itâs disrespectful for me to CORRECTLY point out Awryanâs lack of experience with coding, but gloss over how disrespectful it was for him to repeatedly accuse me and my guild of cheating. Bias much?
Your ignorance shows more every time you try to belittle, by the way. No programmer worth their salt would ever make the claim that simple errors never happen. Often, itâs simple things that tend to sneak by. Mistakes happen. To imply a level of malice to it that makes it even remotely on par with a person deliberately exploiting a bug in the game hundreds or thousands of times is ludicrous.
The reason for the split on bans is simply due to the possibility that it may have been exploited by accident by some people. It would have been a huge pain in the ass to sort out who deliberately exploited the bug without spending any gems, vs who just claimed the mail several times while claiming guild rewards throughout the day without thinking about it.
The people who got banned were those who exploited the bug countless times AND spent them all. It shows that they were not ignorant, because they KNEW they had obtained an unusual number of gems. Their actions proved that they knew. Thatâs why they got banned.
I have no sympathy for someone who sat there for a few hours exploiting a bug over and over and over again getting banned. The fact that you think itâs excusable because âit was possible for them to do itâ shows a severe lack of integrity on your part.
1 Like
1 Like
Thereâs no point in arguing anymore Thevc, Iâve said the same thing from a noncoders stand point
But for some reason, when we say the devs made a mistake, have always made mistakes, and will continue to make mistakes with no commitment to change,
So many of these people change the focus back to this one specific example and literally player-hate Lol
Hard to move forward to real positive changes, when people canât let go of a conversation that is over.
2 Likes
âThe people who got banned were those who exploited the bug countless times AND spent them all. It shows that they were not ignorant, because they KNEW they had obtained an unusual number of gems. Their actions proved that they knew. Thatâs why they got bannedâ
I would be willing to bet money those who didnât spend the gems right away would have in the next few events that came up. So I donât think you can say those who didnât spend them were ignorant and those that did knew what they were doing. Some people spend gems right away and some people horde them. Seems to me they only perma banned those they couldnât get the gems back because they were spent. Versus not banning those who were going to spend them just not all at once. I am sure those who didnât spend them knew about them but wanted to use them for a bounty, or ToD, or any other event that you normally spend gems on in this game.
Good thing I never got banned for using the pvp testing team to complete the daily tasks. Back when you got credit for winning against your pvp deck in the pvp testing mode.
All I will add at this point is that I know of one player who accumulated over 30k in gems but did not spend them. Result; no action taken other than gem recovery. I fail to see how that is not ban worthy?
@Changer. You are assuming and misinterpreting almost every written word and now resort to direct personal unpleasantness lol. I never said the dangled carrot was intentional, thatâs just you trying to drag this on and on so you can feed on whatever it is sates you. The DSM IV may help you understand.
2 Likes
This is why I simply asked him if he used the Exploit.
I could totally understand the bias it would cause if he simply had his gems removed and wasnât banned from the game.
And before he cries about my âleading Questionâ again.
I canât insinuate that he cheated. Because the devs donât consider it cheating. They ban cheaters. They consider those who used the Exploit, but then made it difficult to remove the gems, a cheater.
It was 200 comments ago, so Iâll restate this hereâŠ
If I rob a bank. I wonât go unpunished if I simply give the money back when the cops find me.
As @Thevc pointed out earlier (I believe) no one used the Exploit without the eventual intent to use those gems.
Everyone that egregiously Exploited the Exploit is guilty of douchebaggery. Some just get to continue to play GoW on that account. While others donât. The only difference being Patience. Impatient douchebags were banned. Patient douchebags were not.
4 Likes
Iâm not âdragging this onâ. Iâm replying to direct replies to me, and have been for a while. The reason I feel strongly about this is because I dislike cheaters, and a lot of the arguments being made seem to amount to crying that cheaters got punished simply because the devs were LENIENT towards people who exploited the bug, for the sake of avoiding banning people who may have inadvertently triggered it.
It seems to me like a false dichotomy. âEither ban all of them or none of themâ seems like offering a choice, but it sounds to me more like âI know they canât ban EVERYONE who triggered the bug, intentionally or not so they would HAVE to pick the other extreme and let the cheaters off without punishmentâ.
As I said earlier, a few times. My best guess as to why they used spending the gems as the barometer for intent is that it is prohibitively difficult to otherwise tell which people used the bug maliciously, vs who accidentally exploited the bug without realizing it. They undid the damage where they could, and issued bans to the most extreme cases only.
Also, Thevc, accusing people of mental disorders is not an appropriate way to respond to a disagreement in a thread on a forum. You really should know better than that.
3 Likes
@Changer is correct. Most issues are not completely black or white, and shades of grey and intent must be taken into account.
If everything we ever did (or anyone ever did) was beholden to a strict ârightâ or âwrongâ binary I would be very scared to live in our world. There is room for forgiveness and for leniency in specific circumstances. When we made the decision to ban these players, we made sure that we werenât being too harsh, and we still saw significant backlash. We decided to draw the line at excessively abusing the exploit and showing malicious intent not in the spirit of the game by spending said exploited resources.
9 Likes
And +2 honor to you too salty!!!
1 Like
I didnât accuse you of anything. Just offered you some bedtime reading. But of course your perception tells you otherwise. You mention inadvertently triggering the bug; okay, are you also suggesting the same 100 activations required to cross the dev ordained threshold is also something that could be inadvertently triggered? Thatâs plain ridiculous. I highlighted in my last post about a non spending exploiter who accumulated over 30k gems. Is that also inadvertent triggering of the bug or a concerted effort to get a stash of gems by default with the INTENTION of cashing in when the coast is clear? I consider that as reprehensible as the guys who cashed in, the discerning factor here is the complexity for the divs in repairing the impact of the exploiters. Non spenders? Easy so we will let them off the hook scot free. Spenders? Hmm thatâs gonna take a bit of work so letâs save ourselves the effort, declare them as âcheatersâ and ban them.
@saltypetraâŠthatâs whatâs happened here. Thatâs how youâve categorised your players as cheaters or not and its an outrage. Your claim that malicious intent is the discerning factor doesnât cut it. You donât know someoneâs intent by assumption, because 30k gems exploited by a bug is done for only one reason, cashing in at some point. Why else would you do it? The intent is the same whether you spent or not. An 11 year old was permabanned because he bought armour with his illicitly gained stash. Perhaps he genuinely didnât know any better but as far as you are concerned it was malicious. Therefore, spending is malicious and not spending is absolutely fine. It doesnât get more binary than that.
@changerâŠI am dumbfounded by your attitude and opinions within this thread and your defence of the non spenders, or inadvertent triggerers as you describe them. The only conclusion I can imagine for this is that you dodged a bullet by escaping a ban despite accumulating significant gems from the mail bug. Luckily for you, you didnât spend them eh so you are in the clear as far as being branded as a cheat as far as the devs are concerned. Obviously, I donât want you to be offended by thinking this is an accusation, so I will alleviate that by asking you a direct question. Are you an inadvertent triggerer?
2 Likes