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FC's policy on exploits and cheaters.
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Member Posts: 245
This is FUNCOMs own words from their policy (from AoC forums):
The investigating of exploits in Age of Conan is based on two sources of information: Reports from players and reading through logs. All reports received through mail and petition is used to get exploits out of the game.
In addition, we are able to find detailed information about characters. This is used to find characters that have disproportionate amounts of credits or are augmenting in level faster than we would expect.
It is important not to spread information about exploits after they have been discovered, as the team needs time to solve the problem. It is dangerous to tell you that we are working on a fix, because this information could lead to more people learning about the exploit and using it. While the team is working on it, please don’t tell anybody about the exploit.
Created 5-20-2008
Modified 7-28-2008
This is their own policy and words. According to them they have very easy ways of tracking cheating. What would it cost them to deal with cheaters? Nothing, meaning they probably are doing it on a low profile basis when reported cases are material. Thanks god for that. It makes me feel much safer that they have a system in place to kill off real cheaters. Imagine some 15 year old punk reporting you for a cheat " I saw him in PvP level 3 yesterday and today you are lvl 5" and that this somehow would get you banned or nerfed. What is your oppinion on this?
Comments
I think this is pretty standard among all MMO developers. They even have code in place to flag activity that is nonlogical on an automatic basis.
This part is a bit out of touch.
It's not like the official FC Forum is the only one on the net.
They would be better to say exactly what the exploit is and say something like "we know what it is and how it's done...we are also watching to see if anyone continues to do it... our GMs have been notified and issued with the Ban Stick..."
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
It seems that Funcom still heavily base their policy on exploits on "security through obscurity"
This strategy works to an extent, but fails when you are unable to patch exploits/security holes in a timely manner. (Especially when you operate in an environment you can NOT control: The Intarwebnet)
Funcom have shown that they CAN patch security flaws relatively fast as they did with some parts of the chat-system. They acted after a lot of publicity of the said security hole but unless the problem is publicised widely their responsetimes are extremely poor.
This "Fix 2% of the known problems and pretend nobody knows about the rest" strategy is apparently also applied to their policy on cheaters. IMO a poor choice but it is their shop...
We dont need casuals in our games!!! Errm... Well we DO need casuals to fund and populate our games - But the games should be all about "hardcore" because: We dont need casuals in our games!!!
(repeat ad infinitum)
http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=2080993&postcount=42
Being adressed
This isnt a knock on them but rather me thinking out loud. When the game launched they had a very big problem with people leveling using "exploits" which should have triggered their own system according to the above explanation of their system. I know that they did "punish" some of those people but some slipped through the cracks as always happens. Now if this system is in place and monitors people leveling too fast wouldnt that apply to the people recenty abusing the pvp leveling?
As said above people reporting people out of hate to get them banned would always be an issue unless you have a system like they claim to have. So now I am really curious why it didnt catch this problem.
If this actually works I will give them their first thumbs up!!!lol Hopefully it does as people who purposely exploit these systems are pathetic basement dwellers
The only problem with FC banning all the exploiters is that the servers will be even more deserted than they are right now. My guess is that a few exploiters will get banned (5%+-), and it will seem like FC did a good job. I have seen the same thing happening in other games, where exploiters where correctly reported and only a few got their account banned. Its a way of making their player base believe they are doing "something", while the truth is far from it. Only time will tell.
I think we can rest assured that this is exactly what will happen in this case. Especially because the population is already small. Going ban crazy will be a financial hardship.
I think we can rest assured that this is exactly what will happen in this case. Especially because the population is already small. Going ban crazy will be a financial hardship.
That is pretty much why they have to just roll everyone back to 0 pvp points. Its the only solution that makes sense.
With their minimal player base, they cannot afford to ban the exploiters. Because every patch they release seems to have an exploitable bug within it.
Numbers would diminish so fast it wouldnt be viable to keep banning people. Wouldnt suprise me looking at official forums if 25% of the player base exploited this bug in 1 way or another.
Looks like they have started removing pvp xp now: forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php
Actually there are several posts in Technical issues forum made by people that had their PvP xp removed , items deleted and banned .
They all claim "violation of their rights"
Funny.
Seems like some people got their PvP xp wiped, but no ban. Like I said, FC cant afford to ban anyone for cheating.. And who knows how many loose their PvP xp compared to all that exploited.
If you read some more, you will see that most of those people made it to the KoS list of other guilds.Guilds that are major culprits lost all of their allies, which on this level of pops makes them free prey.
On PvP servers it's pretty much hunt season on them.So they get rolled back and then hunted down all over the servers. Most of them will probably choose to leave on their own due to that.
I am not sure that only banning them would be that much of the punishment.
Heres a GM telling the current exploting is not presently considered an exploit.
radikal.ru/F/i081.radikal.ru/0811/1b/94b756fdfd8b.jpg.html
So if it was legal at that time, how come people are getting their pvp xp wiped? hmm
FUNCOM take action and the players celebrate (in mature and not so mature ways)
forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php
forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php
First of all you are talking about FC moderator, which equals amateurs. That is known fact and they are rubbish.
On the other hand that picture is dated after 2.0 patch, as what you can read from same post. But you still chose it to try making look like it's present thing. After previous comment didn't hold any weight.
I am seriously curious why are you so much trying to create the issue. If you don't like game or FC then move on.Don't make yourself miserable with it.Plus it's beyond my understanding why in the world you would browse thru forums of the game that you don't like for extended time.
Or maybe you would like to play it but you are not old enough for it?
I don't like some other games (WoW for example ) but i do not post anything on there . Why ? Because some people do like it and it's their preference that i respect.
This game is not that "awsome" (far from it) like some people would like to present it and it doesn't have some huge replay value (at least for me ), but i still don't mind it because i don't have RL time to play anything more serious and real (like EQ2, EvE ... you know real and demanding MMO's), so my choice is only this or WoW.
Heh I think you better check official policy
About exploits...
Greetings all Hyborian adventures,
Launching a game like Age of Conan is always a very interesting experience. Seeing how the players endorsing the game and giving it life in a new way is thrilling and exciting. Unfortunately, there is one thing which is always a big challenge when shipping an MMO, and that's what we want to address today. You know it as exploits, we know it as “destroying the game balance”. Today I therefore wanted to update the community on what Funcom is doing in regards to addressing and removing exploit as fast as possible.
As you know MMO games are huge, and catching exploits before they reach our live servers is always a challenge. Sometimes they slip through our systems. We deem it extremely important to address these issues immediately, but sometimes players are able to take advantage of exploits before we are able to publish fixes. This is especially true if the fix is considered a high risk, for instance where the fix introduces new bugs, and thereby risking “breaking” the game. If we rush out new versions to fix something, it can potentially make the situation a lot worse, and we naturally want to avoid that by all means.
Seeing we are not able to instantly fix, or even know about, all exploits, it is imperative to let you know that exploiting in Age of Conan is a violation to the EULA, and something we take seriously. If the offense is grave we will not hesitate to ban players, and even entire guilds. We have a dedicated team analyzing all the data from the game, and when anomalies occur we will react. We have and will continue to have a ZERO tolerance to exploiters. This may sound harsh, but it is essential to maintain the balance in the game.
We believe our community does not want cheaters in the game, but there are of course exceptions. We need your aid on finding those exceptions!
Seeing we have just launched we are now prone to find issues we did not discover during Beta. Over the last few days we have therefore found guilds and players who systematically use exploits to get benefits or to reach higher levels in the game. This is unacceptable, and whenever we get reports, information or discover such behavior we will do our uttermost to address this.
As a part of discovering players who have exploited the game on purpose we often hear the exploiters excuse their behavior by saying they thought it was “working as intended”. We are normally able to see through this, and we would like players to think twice and rather ask should they discover things which are “too good to be true”.
As a result of the focus on catching exploiters, and finding the bugs which trigger them, we are working on improving our test server. This is where we test all versions prior to sending them out on the live servers.
We are now working on establishing a test community on this essential server, which will be open for everyone who wants to test new versions before they go out to the public. We will release more information on this shortly.
Still, even though we apply the best testing routines we can, there may be issues we did not discover. Therefore please be vigilant, and aid us in making Conan as exploit free as it can by asking or reporting. If you think you found an exploit or have any questions regarding this topic, report it by using /petition or send us an e-mail at exploit@ageofconan.com. We appreciate any feedback we can get on this.
Remember, it's not against our EULA to report exploits or to ask questions!
All doom and gloom aside, for almost everyone playing Age of Conan this is not an issue, and most seem to just want to play the game as we intended it. I therefore hope everyone will have a great experience playing, but, don’t cheat, and respect the need to have a balanced game.
Regards,
Mathis
Customer Service & QA Manager
Funcom
Source
Well they started really great I remember in pre launch when there were few exploits and people got baned, a month or two after release they allowed some things to pass but it seems now they are back in business.
Personally I would prefer they would just perm ban everyone who exploited, but reverting them to level 1 is probably more reasonable choice due the fact they let few things slide in the past.
This is really the step into right direction and I hope next time penalty will be perm ban.
Futilez[Do You Have What It Takes ?]