Results 1 to 15 of 85

Thread: Rules, flameout, exploits and bans

Threaded View

  1. #1
    The Vlada Vlada's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    The Vlada
    Posts
    33,034
    Play Stats
    Inactive

    Rules, flameout, exploits and bans

    Rules, flameout, exploits and bans

    August 2012
    The SWGEmu Team



    3.10 The SWGEmu Team encourages the reporting of any and all exploits. You are required to immediately report and discontinue use of all discovered exploits or face disciplinary action listed below.
    • 3.10.1 Exploits include, but are not limited to; all forms of hacking, exploiting and all other actions intended to break, bend or in anyway alter the SWGEmu gameplay experience in favor of one player or against another player.
    • 3.10.2 Report all exploits to the Quality Assurance department at https://www.swgemu.com/bugs using the Exploit category or send to quality@swgemu.com
    • 3.10.3 As a first offense, there will be a warning issued directing the guilty party to the Quality Assurance department. Offenders are required to immediately disclose all known information about the exploit. Failure to comply with this policy will result in an immediate permanent ban from all SWGEmu services. This ban will include the immediate deletion of all known characters, items, disbanding of guilds if guild leader, and removal of all items being sold by the user on the marketplace
    We are all fully aware of what the rules on exploits and exploiting are, but yesterdays events, the agony we went though in our staff channel trying to determine if enforcing those rules is something that will help this project and speed up development in the long run, forced us to revisit some of our rules and after more than 10 hours of going back and forth we did manage to agree on a few things...
    • Rules were made during the Old Nova almost 3 years ago, and though they made sense then (the Old Nova was purely a play server outdated code no longer in development), they dont make much sense now.
    • All exploits and all circumstances are not the same
    • We are still in development and Basilisk is not a production server
    Quote Originally Posted by cRush View Post
    Zero-tolerance is the policy for production servers like SunCrusher will be, but we are still in a phase where we need to find and squash as many of these exploits as possible before SunCrusher is launched (or other communities for that matter). Exploits like this could ruin economies quickly, and in a no-wipe scenario, that simply isn't acceptable; I'm pretty sure that most of you have seen evidence of the affects of that already on Basilisk. The good news is we have squashed many of the worst, most glaring, exploits, and continue improving on that front. Basilisk has way less exploits than old Nova and early Liberator had by a long shot.

    Still, those who exploit and make no effort to come forward will be punished accordingly. Report exploits. Don't try to hide them.

    Because of all this we have decided to change our rules to something more development friendly
    3.10 The SWGEmu Team encourages the reporting of any and all exploits. You are required to immediately report and discontinue use of all discovered exploits or face disciplinary action listed below.
    • 3.10.1 A bug is defined as an unintended result of a game function that is unintentionally encountered and/or cannot be bypassed without altering the intended gameplay experience.
    • 3.10.2 Exploiting is defined as the commission of an action within the game to circumvent or alter the normal functions of said game.
    • 3.10.3 Hacking is defined as altering the client to perform functions outside of its normal operation, altering data transmitted between the client and server, or attempting to gain unauthorized access to SWGEmu servers.
    • 3.10.4 Report all exploits to exploits@swgemu.com, www.swgemu.com/bugs, support.swgemu.com, or drop a PM on forums or IRC to Devs or QA
    • 3.10.5 Offenders are required to immediately disclose all known information about the exploit. Failure to comply with this policy will result in an immediate actions taken against their accounts. Punishment will be determent depending on the severity of the offense and willingness to disclose details of exploit by SWGEmu Staff
    Quote Originally Posted by cRush View Post
    Recently, the Flameout bug has been touted as an exploit. In fact, little was known about the circumstanced revolving around the bug. After thorough investigation, the development team found that Flameout itself was simply bugged, and was not exploited intentionally. Any player who obtained Flameout with +100% mitigation would have experienced this bug, thus unavoidably exploiting it if they eat Flameout at all. This is considered a bug that is not 100% in control of the player. In other words, the player cannot avoid the exploit while playing the game legitimately. They took no nefarious action to generate the exploit.

    I will contrast it against the Clue Quest exploit that was existent about a month ago. The Clue Quest exploit required the user to conciously make an effort outside the parameters of normal game play to exploit the intended mechanic. In this instance, the player had to bring up multiple interface input boxes before entering information into any of them. This would allow them to receive the reward multiple times. The player had complete control over opening the interface boxes multiple times. They had the choice to only bring it up once, and still experience the full intended result.

    In the Flameout bug, however, the player had no control over experiencing the bug. Using the food forced them to experience the bug, regardless of whether they intended to experience it or not. This is akin to the players who have logged in to find phantom buffs applied permanently to their character; they did nothing to pursue this unintended, yet advantageous effect, but are the unsuspecting victims of the phantom buff.

    However, a few players took the Flameout bug to a new level, by using it to continuously farm high-end content, knowing that it was not working as intended, and would make them invulnerable to damage. Furthermore, they engaged in player versus player combat, giving them a completely unfair advantage over their opponents. Without agreement from all parties involved, this behavior is not tolerated. On top of this, they failed to report this bug in a timely manner.

    We define a timely manner as being within 24 hours after being able to readily reproduce a bug.

    As staff, we have to remain objective when considering a circumstance where exploits are being considered. Even if the person is a highly suspected and past offender, we need to treat the individual as though he or she has no history when we are determining guilt. However, past offenses may be considered when determining punishment.

    With all this in mind we have offered our latest offenders a chance to reduce their sentences if they disclose all the details of the exploits/bugs they were using, which of course they did.

    So we gave them a choice:
    1. Two months forums ban + two months Basilisk ban
    2. Two months forums ban + Character caught exploiting permanently confiscated (with all its belongings, credits, structures, etc)
    Their choice is their own and we will not disclose that, but I'm sure you will find out soon enough on your own.



    To avoid situations like these SWGEmu team wants to remind everyone that this is till a development project and that all exploits need to be reported as soon as they are discovered.




    ~ The SWGEmu Staff
    Last edited by Vlada; 08-14-2012 at 11:17 PM.

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 6 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 6 guests)

     

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts