How long will the exploits go on?

Don't you quote Edgar Allen Poe in my apartment!

(I'm actually quite surprised by the number of absolutely relevant quotes EAPoe has!)

I assume it's a combination of the spam but, larger than that, the complete ambivalence shown so far by the devs which makes the spam possible. This has been going on for weeks and it's be pushing a month provided it's actually fixed on Tuesday. No one believes that there'll be any crack down or anyone losing levels or anything like that. People can sit and openly spam for exploit teams because there's no indication that anyone actually cares. That's the part that gets disheartening; the spam itself is just a symptom.

Yes more roll backs for exploiters!

Whatever level you started your exaggerated XP climb you'll be rolled back to and your inf, tickets, non event salvage, and recipes will be zeroed out.

No announcement till after though so people can't just trade inf/goodies to save it.

Only thing not lost will be what ever you have in enhancements and slots.

MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(seriously this type of punishment for over exploitation would crack me up to no end)

Already did the opposite, thx.

Fo Sho

Yep. My favorite was the exploit mission filled with "Uncaring NCSoft Employee" NPC's..

That would make it a democratic republic, rather than a true democracy. So really, there's no way this game is a democracy...

*prays for a successful threadjack*

You, and the rest of the complainers, do realize that there are two factors as to why they aren't communicative at this particular time? I mean, you do know right?

A) They've been trying to fix the show-stopper bug for I19 (which has been giving them headaches)
B) It's a Holiday and they too, as fellow human beings (not just slaves to this game), are probably with family and enjoying a vacation.

Just saying.

I agree with this. Yes it needs to be fixed. Until it is I don't think anyone is doing anything wrong by using it.

I don't see how it is an exploit. I would love somebody to explain exactly how it is a rules violation. The fault is with the Dev's, not the player base.

I agree this thing needs to be fixed. I just don't see how it's players fault. I don't have to do anything different to run this mission than I would if I ran a radio mission. You don't need to logout, ghost, or any of the other tricks people did in past exploits.

I know people don't like it, but I just see this as a Devs mistake. I can't blame people for using it.

The mission involves killing creatures of "underling" rank which somehow give rewards as if they were "boss" rank. This is obviously not correct. It is an exploit because it grants too high rewards for too little effort.

The EULA everyone signs when they log in, and the devs themselves on multiple occasions, say that it's against the rules to use exploits.

No, the fault is clearly with the cheaters and their cheating buddies. The correct way to handle these exploits is to report them as bugs and then leave them alone, not talk about them with anyone and never mention them again.

The correct way is not to make several copies of the same mission with slight changes to try to squeeze some more rewards out of it before it gets removed, playing it over and over again as much as possible, knowing what they are doing is wrong and will eventually be stopped.

If people who take advantage of exploits should be punished, as you stated in the thread over in the Suggestions section, then people who explain how exploits work and thereby enable even more exploiters to exploit the exploit should be also punished!

Oh, ho! Hoist on your own petard!

Edited so as not to promulgate the promulgation!

Incorrect.

I can (and have) used a theoretical mob type/mission to explain it in the past. If I said "Well, use map such-and-such, and populate it with these mobs, custom or otherwise, and you'll go from getting 2 XP each like you would normally to getting 200,000 each!" I'd be mentioning the exploit.

However, if I say "If you set up a situation where, for instance, a Hellion minion gave you 200,000 XP *each* instead of their normal XP, that's a bug. If you then created a map populated with just these and ran it over and over, getting to 50 in two runs," - which is not the exploit, of course, but an example - I'm explaining the sort of thing that would BE an exploit, and may be similar, without giving out the info on how to create or duplicate the exploit.

Um, no.

See my Guides and Tutorials

I need to work for NCSoft where they get three weeks off for Thanksgiving!

Just saying. Good point, though!

I don't even know how it works.

But I suppose you are right. If an entire menagerie of cats weren't out of every possible bag by now I wouldn't have gone into all that detail.

It's not cats, it's m--

Well played, sir! Well played, indeed.

...And this is why they need to crack down hard on the people who are using--and especially propagating--this exploit. It sure would be nice if all players were mature enough for the devs to be able to post a message that says, "Hey all, we don't like it when you do this, it's obviously broken, so please don't do it." They've actually tried that many times before, and it's been repeatedly proven that some people think that "because I CAN" gives them the divine right to do whatever they want regardless of explicit weigh-in from the people who run the game.

If you accidentally left your front door unlocked one day when you left for work, does that mean that I have the right to come into your house/apartment/igloo/hovel and take all of your stuff? When you get home, would you just shake your head and say, "Well, I can't blame someone for coming in and robbing me, after all, it was my mistake" and go your merry way? Or would you call the police and want your stuff back and the person responsible punished? What if someone broke your car window while it was parked one day, and the glass guy told you that it would be next Tuesday before they could work you in and get it fixed? Does that give anyone who wants to the right to hop in, hotwire it, and take it for a spin just because they can? I mean, come on, you know that plastic isn't going to stop anyone with minimal effort from being able to get in.

It is a dev mistake, but unlike you, I most certainly DO blame people for using it. Those people are immature, they don't have the best interest of the game at heart, and as I've said before, if being able to exploit the game without consequence is a condition for someone to remain a subscriber, it makes good business sense to not have them around.

Where did this even come from? This shows colossal ignorance.

They aren't off for three weeks. At best, they're probably off for two days. But they very likely did not want to release I19 on Tuesday when they would then be off two days later, with a bunch of people playing and possibly getting PO'd when XYZ turned out to be broken with no devs around to even look into it for four days.

They missed the target of Tuesday last week. The holiday this week means they have to move it to Tuesday next week. There's no three-week vacation involved.

Your analogy simply does not hold.

The devs have (in theory) completely created this world, all the physics and interactions in it. IMPLICITY - and we can debate the accuracy of the assumption or not, but it's not an unreasonable assumption - what you can do matches what you're allowed to do.

It's implied - albeit, untrue, but certainly implied - that you can't actually do anything that they devs didn't (ultimately, in one form or another) set in place.

And, even if the current events are an exploit - and I don't disagree that they are - it's entirely UNreasonable to expect nobody to use them, on a "good faith" argument. The devs set the reward scale, intentionally or otherwise. The game intentionally rewards finding the highest rungs of the reward scale. The players are not subverting, corrupting, or modifying the code - they're just using the code the devs provided, in exactly the manner the devs provided, and getting the results the devs did not expect.

I think your anger at the people who have "done this" is gravely misplaced and out of scale.

(I'm not suggesting you be mad at the devs, either. This amounts to a "whoops", a patch, and everyone carrying on about their day.)

A parallel situation - Imagine, though a not-entirely-dissimilar error, Brawl was causing immensely more damage than ever intended, along the rate of a factor of a thousand or more.

Is it an "exploit" to use Brawl, now? I suspect you'd say yes, and I suspect I'd agree. In fact, I don't think anyone would genuinely think Brawl was supposed to do that much damage.

But you seem to suggest that you'd expect players not to use Brawl until it was repaired, because the devs clearly didn't mean for it to do that. I'd expect everyone to use Brawl until it was repaired.

One of those positions would bear more resemblance to what would happen than the other one does.

Maybe you missed the quoted section where someone was "Just saying" that this was a holiday. My three week vacation remark was sarcasm.

The exploit's been known about for weeks. For someone else to self-righteously inform me that this is a holiday and so I shouldn't think it was disappointing that this exploit still hasn't been fixed (or maybe I just think they're all "slaves"!) showed "colossal ignorance" on his part. Feel free to let him know. Thanks!

...And then if the devs nuked the experience, influence, prestige, and/or other rewards that were gained from people going through the game simply brawling everything, not only would I not mind, but I'd cheer them on. Why? Because maybe next time when such an exploit is discovered and publicized, people would think twice about wasting their time and energy using it.

That all sounds well & good, but that would only work in a world where the dev team actually reacted in a timely fashion to exploits like this, rather than allowing them to go on for weeks like this one. Sure, you can blame the players, but that is the simplistic way out, and completely ignores the root of the problem. In the end, ALL responsibility for the continual stream of AE exploits rests with the dev & GM teams. They have repeatedly failed to react to these problems.

Don't tell me these arcs haven't been reported dozens of times over the last few weeks. Yet they are still there. It's a very simple question: Why aren't the GM's pulling these arcs and locking the players who publish them out of AE? If they took prompt action against the abuses quickly, we wouldn't have situations like we have now.

It's been like this since day one with AE. Personally, at this point, I've come to the conclusion that the devs really don't care about it. They'll patch it eventually, when they get around to it, but they're simply too apathetic to do more. Which is a terrible mistake, because I can think of few things more harmful to the long term health of an MMO, than to allow it become dominated by a never-ending stream of exploits.

Or...

The normal Blissful Meal at O'Donalds is an O'Burger, small fries, and a small soft drink. One fateful day, a bunch of new employees are working and give out a whole bunch of Blissful Meals with O'Burgers with cheese, large fries, and large soft drinks. As the manager, do you:

1. Go around the restaurant taking food away from the customers and even going so far as to shove your finger down the throats of those who have already eaten most of it so they puke up their ill-gotten gains (oh, they knew, they KNEW they were getting too much! Cheating bastiges!), or...

2. Suck it up and take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Remember if you plan to stay
Those who give can take away
Don't bite the hand that feeds you.

How did you reach this shocking conclusion?

BTW - you keep using Real Life CRIMES for examples. I don't think someone gaining a lotta levels hella fast in an MMO is remotely comparable to actual property damage, grand theft auto, or unlawful entry.

Do you?