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mutelunatic
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Dearest Beta Testers and Bravest Adventures,
In the dark hours of this Sunday morning an in-game bug was discovered and taken advantage of by a very small group of villainous Nashers intent on exploiting Neverwinter's Open Beta Gateway and Auction House systems for unearned Astral Diamonds.
[Don't RP spin an insanely impactful bug that has been in the game engine before the game was even programmed]
Thanks in no small part to the efforts of our continually amazing Beta community, we were able to quickly identify the exploit and the perpetrators. Once identified, we took immediate action, calling in the entire development and publishing teams to lock down the Neverwinter OBT as we sought out a solution.
Rest assured, the issue has been corrected and we have taken appropriate action against all players who took advantage of the bug, including but not limited to enforcing permanent bans.
[This exploit was known about in closed beta and reported. It was easy to find because it was the same exploit that was used in a previous Cryptic game]
Sadly, the damage to the economy was done.
Rather than let the malicious efforts of a few unsavory players linger and continually impact the game's economy and balance as we progress through these later stages of Open Beta, we have made the extremely difficult decision to rollback Neverwinter to a time shortly before the abuse and exploitation began.
This means that roughly seven hours of progress made between 5:20 AM and 12:20 PM Pacific Time will be lost to all players. For that, we do sincerely apologize.
[Because the exploit was known about since closed beta, people have been making free money off of it since the beginning of open beta. They have then been sending the AD to various alt characters and other methods to launder the AD to hide it. Unless you have done some pretty extensive tracking which is not possible in a days time you have many accounts with trillions of AD hiding in them. The economy will still be ruined, a 7 hour roll back does nothing. The exploit only went public in the last 24 hours but some people and guilds had been using it non stop for 3 weeks.]
Following an extensive QA check, Neverwinter will begin again as soon as possible. We hope to have the servers available again soon, and will continue to post updates on the forums and other channels.
When the servers do come back up, a few systems will not be active: the Auction House and the Astral Diamond exchange. When the servers are back up and running, we will be performing extensive testing to ensure that the issues related to exploitation are completely resolved.
Any attempt to use the Astral Diamond exchange will give an error message. The Auction House, however, wont give an error -- it simply will fail to post the item. This is the known behavior, and we're working to bring these systems back up as soon as possible.
As a token of our appreciation for you, the community, and all that you've done for the game throughout these days of Beta, we will be sending a thank-you gift to players and opening ourselves up on the forums and various other channels to answer any and all questions we can.
[Thank you for whatever gift you think this level mishandling can cover up. Basically anyone who didn't benefit from this exploit will have no chance of purchasing any meaningful items on the AH. Additionally this will keep the Zen/AD ratio heavily in favor of the value of Zen. Meaning more zen purchases and more money for PW. I think I'm beginning to see why this exploit was left in the game.]
In the dark hours of this Sunday morning an in-game bug was discovered and taken advantage of by a very small group of villainous Nashers intent on exploiting Neverwinter's Open Beta Gateway and Auction House systems for unearned Astral Diamonds.
[Don't RP spin an insanely impactful bug that has been in the game engine before the game was even programmed]
Thanks in no small part to the efforts of our continually amazing Beta community, we were able to quickly identify the exploit and the perpetrators. Once identified, we took immediate action, calling in the entire development and publishing teams to lock down the Neverwinter OBT as we sought out a solution.
Rest assured, the issue has been corrected and we have taken appropriate action against all players who took advantage of the bug, including but not limited to enforcing permanent bans.
[This exploit was known about in closed beta and reported. It was easy to find because it was the same exploit that was used in a previous Cryptic game]
Sadly, the damage to the economy was done.
Rather than let the malicious efforts of a few unsavory players linger and continually impact the game's economy and balance as we progress through these later stages of Open Beta, we have made the extremely difficult decision to rollback Neverwinter to a time shortly before the abuse and exploitation began.
This means that roughly seven hours of progress made between 5:20 AM and 12:20 PM Pacific Time will be lost to all players. For that, we do sincerely apologize.
[Because the exploit was known about since closed beta, people have been making free money off of it since the beginning of open beta. They have then been sending the AD to various alt characters and other methods to launder the AD to hide it. Unless you have done some pretty extensive tracking which is not possible in a days time you have many accounts with trillions of AD hiding in them. The economy will still be ruined, a 7 hour roll back does nothing. The exploit only went public in the last 24 hours but some people and guilds had been using it non stop for 3 weeks.]
Following an extensive QA check, Neverwinter will begin again as soon as possible. We hope to have the servers available again soon, and will continue to post updates on the forums and other channels.
When the servers do come back up, a few systems will not be active: the Auction House and the Astral Diamond exchange. When the servers are back up and running, we will be performing extensive testing to ensure that the issues related to exploitation are completely resolved.
Any attempt to use the Astral Diamond exchange will give an error message. The Auction House, however, wont give an error -- it simply will fail to post the item. This is the known behavior, and we're working to bring these systems back up as soon as possible.
As a token of our appreciation for you, the community, and all that you've done for the game throughout these days of Beta, we will be sending a thank-you gift to players and opening ourselves up on the forums and various other channels to answer any and all questions we can.
[Thank you for whatever gift you think this level mishandling can cover up. Basically anyone who didn't benefit from this exploit will have no chance of purchasing any meaningful items on the AH. Additionally this will keep the Zen/AD ratio heavily in favor of the value of Zen. Meaning more zen purchases and more money for PW. I think I'm beginning to see why this exploit was left in the game.]
Post edited by mutelunatic on
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Comments
+1!
Actually the damage has been done already - there are billions of extra AD in circulation.
Those smart enough to use this exploit from day 1 (while keeping it from public view) weren't idiots and knew that buying out the entire ZEN market would have been obvious and they would have been caught.
It most certainly wasn't, considering the exploiting of bosses and also the Guardian Fighter one shotting everything and this having been going on since release. I don't think we have seen a stable market, but instead a heavily saturated one with both ill gained items and millions of exploited AD.
Now if this was an open beta with a wipe at the end, none of this would have mattered as it could have all been fixed in time for release. It happened in another one of their games, exactly the same exploit so it seems they haven't learned at all from the problems that caused. Also with the rollback people still have multiple cats, items, AD and other items still so in effect it did nothing.
In the end doing a rollback will annoy less players, but the economy as a whole will be destroyed for quite a while but should eventually recover if people don't quit before hand. It would have made more sense doing a full wipe and giving anyone their zen/founders packs back to start again. Doing this would have annoyed more people but on a whole it would have made the game a controlled environment rather than one left in ruins by the exploiters.