Oedipus_Tex

I agree with you, but this is why adverse actions are usually taken only after a review of the circumstances, including the history of the account. One size doesn't fit all.

Again, I'm not angry at anyone who used this bug, but I would recommend that you stop. I don't know what's going to happen, but there is a possibility you could be reprimanded. It seems to upset some posters greatly that I am telling you this instead of saying nothing will happen. I have no idea why. You're taking a chance. At least let it be an informed one.

[EDIT: Corrected link]

I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you.

I have no control over what developers do and don't do. I also have no idea what their reaction is going to be. I just know that anyone who thinks they are immune to the possibility of repercussions needs to rethink their position, because this exploit is so ridiculous and so obviously a bug that pretending that you didn't know it was broken is not going to fly.

Loss of AE slots is a definite possibility. So is a temporary ban. Whether that actually happens or not is irrelevant to the very real risk that it will, which is why the best I can do is advise people to delete these missions immediately. IMO that is much more honest position than allowing people to think they're free and clear just because that was the "historic response." Abusing bugs is NEVER a good idea, because you have no idea what the response is going to be. Why even put yourself in that position?

I'm not the person you need to convince.

Probably not quite that extreme, but it wouldn't surprise me if the people who built the mission and exploited it rather than report the issue lose their AE slots and receive a temporary lockout. I don't know City of Heroes' policies for dealing with these situations, but anyone who thinks they can do whatever they want just because the game doesn't instantly stop them is going to be disapointed eventually. God knows I've temp-locked plenty of players in my time for exactly this kind of thing, in a game world with a player base much smaller than this.

Some contributing factors:
- It is immediately obvious that this is a bug to anyone with some game experience
- Rather than report the bug, the players decided to exploit it for all it was worth
- The players shared the mission so other players could exploit it as well

The die are definitely being rolled. Anyone who still has this mission hosted in an AE slot would do well to remove it, so they can at least try to plead the case that they didn't know it was a bug when/if they are contacted.

There is no -ToHit in Terrify. The ability to slot -ToHit enhancers is a longstanding error.

You may have to settle for the tears of whoever discovered this, failed to report it, and spread the mission around so others could exploit it. I doubt if folks running the mission have much to worry about; lost levels at the worst. But whoever actually built these arcs should probably be worried, because this would absolutely get you a 30 or 90 day lockout from many other games. Time will tell if City of Heroes is one of them. And I hope their AE slots make their Saving Throw versus Death Ray.

I'm confused by this. Ranged powers pass straight through enemies between you and the target, phased or not. Enemies can't be "hidden behind invincible ones." Do you mean that they are hard to see and click?

The real question is what do you want to play?

But either Plant or Earth would be a good starting base, as they are probably the easiest. Don't try to solo as low level Earther, tho.

So the OP is going to be shot on national TV?!

I don't have any insight into that, since I've never worked for COH, and only have limited experience working with commercial online games in any case (and text-based ones at that). I would assume you are fine. I didn't mean to worry you.

What I was really talking about are cases where someone does something questionable, the GMs mull over what their response should be, and the answer comes out to, "just put a note in their account log." I can only guess the kinds of things account logs might hold. But it's my assumption that they exist, and track exactly this sort of thing, along with any time a GM interacts with or modifies our characters, even in positive ways. One of the first things a support GM does, at least in my experience, is look at those logs when deciding whether to take action.

For example, did someone report you for "harassment"? If the GM responds, they're likely to look at the account's history. Do you have numerous TOC violations? Have other players reported about you before? A history of cursing on public channels? All of that could effect the outcome. Since every GM is an individual, every situation unique, and every game has unique policies, there is no way for sure to know what happens. But you should never assume that because nothing obvious happened that they are completely unaware of your account activity. It is also my experience that problem-children accounts sometimes get flagged to broadcast messages to all active GMs when they are spoken or /tell'ed and contain certain flag words. This can lead to some really embaressing situations. And is why I happen to know way too much about dwarf-on-lizardperson cyber chats (hazard of the job).

What's the magic word?

Again it depends.

I used to be a small-time GM for a text based game. We occasionally had to make calls like this. Item duplication was an actual occurrence on one memorable occasion. My supervisor ended up handling that case in a very unorthodox way; he looked up the offending character's IP address, traced it back to a person, and called the guy at home while he was in the act of duplicating unique items. I doubt if that would fly in CoH but it was kind of hilarious when it happened back in my old game.

In another case, at one point in the game we released exactly 10 very powerful copies of a certain sword. A few years later we did an inventory of powerful items and found that there were now 15! Needless to say there were questions to be asked (it turned out most of the duplicates had been created by players lying to support staff about having "lost" the sword due to a bug, and the support person doing an insufficient check of item logs before cloning a new copy).

Anyway, anyone who thinks every single account in this game doesn't have a comment log tied to it might want to open their eyes. You will never know what it says about you. And I can almost 100% assure you that if you've got numerous notes showing you to be a problem child that that factors into how support staff interact with you when you make a Petition, and how seriously the staff take your claims about bug reports, etc. If this game is anything like other games, that also controls how actively online GMs monitor your /tells and /chats. GMs may even have actual avatars they can use to go invisible, and mark our accounts with 1-star ratings!

Point being, even if it seems like no one was punished, they could have been. And they may never know it, or why the GMs are so much more savvy about their newest exploits.

It depends. I don't know anything about this particular AE situation. But if you, say, discover a bug that lets you duplicate IOs, and use the "if you didn't want this to happen you shouldn't have let it into your game" argument, chances are the best you could hope for is that the IOs only get removed from your inventory. Whether that will happen to these folks depends on what the nature of exploit is, and whether it is only a case of unbalanced enemies or hardcore bug abuse.

Ok.

There was. To AoE holds. Years ago.