How to tell if its an exploit?
well, you cant.
Its absolutely impossible foresee what cryptic suddenly claims to be an exploit.
You will only notice it when they start punishing players again.
And when cryptic is announcing that earning dilithium is an exploit then you will have to live with it. They can even decide to claim that Zen is an exploit and take it all away from you.
They dont even need to justify their decision.
As of this week they showed that pretty much everything in this game can be instantly called exploit.
the way i see it, if you playing the same thing over & over & over & over & over in the same day because it gives a massive amount of points/dil/ec/marks then it is an exploit.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Well it should have been obvious since the enemies didn't correctly match level.
By that working going to any area that forces you down to a specific level to level is exploiting, I mean how are people supposed to tell any particular content is supposed to be level locked or not dare I ask?
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
(Yes, I've filed a ticket. I hope to get a response... but I'm not counting on it.)
The point is- there are dozens of people here who are reporting losing spec points- and they never ran the Tau Dewa missions. We're not all lying. Some of us have just been grinding- totally legitimately- like mad men.
I am transitioning between jobs this month. I left my old job in late September, and will not start my new job until November 3rd. I've been enjoying a lot of time off. Aside from one short weekend hunting trip, I've been at home with very little to do beside grind grind grind.
In the past week, I've pulled two all-nighters grinding XP for spec points. I've only focused one ONE of my toons... I haven't touched my alts since DR launched. I've just been pounding pavement on my main toon. I've been working very hard to gain XP.
I never used the Tau Dewa exploit. I've just been running like mad.
Yet when Cryptic decided to pull back the XP from the exploiters- I (and many like me) have been caught up in the crossfire. Just because we've run like mad, doesn't mean we're exploiters!
Yeah, it's rubbish and it is their mistake, but: 23 specialisation points is around 1,219,000 skill points, after topping level 60 (which is in itself 395k skill points). Assuming you've not lost ALL your specialisation points, earning more than 1.2 million skill points at about 5k an hour (if you play constantly for 240 hours, 24 hours a day without sleep) since DR was released........
There was summat wrong with the awarding of skill points. It's obvious.
Now, the main problem is: no-one in authority has explained this, and no-one in authority has advised what was going to be done before it was done regarding the roll-back.
That is what's really bad.
Essentially, what they've done is roll us back to where we should be right now if they hadn't ballsed up the skill point allocation in the first place as far as I can tell.
But not explaining that to us, it looks like they just took us back to 0. Hence the rage.
battlezone enemies dont scale, does that mean I'm still exploiting???
Of course ... "Fix" incoming ... just wait till Tuesday, till they remove all of your Dilithium ... in the meantime go have fun in the BZ, because it's Dilithium Weekend and it's what Cryptic wants you to do :P
Schizophrenic ? ... Nah you should have known it's an exploit ...
Patch Notes : Resolved an Issue, where people would accidently experience Fun.
It's within their right to do so. Whether or not it's a good idea to do so is another discussion.
That's actually being tested in other countries as to whether it is in their rights to do such a thing without due cause.
It's funny how far mad gamers will take it, some even have lawyers as friends, others are lawyers...
Thing is I can't seem to be able to tell an exploit from a developer TRIBBLE up. I mean if the game is released and they have bug reports from months ago, repeated ones over those months, and choose not to fix that bug, then it's still a bug not an exploit. Even the people who used that bug to bypass their stupid concept of enforced slow leveling (immediately after a double XP fortnight no less...) aren't in the wrong. It's still the dev team and their trained QA monkeys who should have done something about it before release.
You don't release a buggy mess and expect it to clean itself up.
As I've said before, the Story is pretty good and relatively long compared to Breen/Borg/Dyson missions, better written for the most part too. The bad bit is that it's 1% story and 99% grinding on hull sponges unless you happened to luck out and not get the ban hammer for getting to 60 too fast. Then you can play the content back to back and it feels good. The Kobali zone should have been 1 or 2 levels max, not strung out to potentially 8 levels. Had I played it the intended way, I would never have remembered any of the story in the slightest. Which in turn would have given me an even worse taste in my wallet.
Chris Robert's on SC:
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
If you feel any fun from playing any part of this game, then it's obviously an exploit.
I'm happy to announce new "Exploit" stickers available now in ZEN Store for a low price of 100 000 Zen. You can't win in PvP? Stick it to ship of your foe and he will get demoted to level 1. You thing Dilithium Exchange is unfair? Stick a sticker on it. Making exploits from in-game content have never been this easy.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
The beast at Tanagra.
Kadir beneath Mo Moteh. Kiteo, his eyes closed. Chenza at court, the court of silence. Darmok on the ocean.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
It may be difficult. The way to tell is simple --- common sense --- but the vast majority of humanity has lost this rare trait.
I mean, it should be obvious. For example, lets say that you discover that you can buy a white item for 10k credits and sell it back to the same vendor for 1 million credits because someone screwed up the code somewhere. You discover this and immediately buy and sell all day long until you have more money than everyone else in the game combined.
Your common sense should tell you that this sort of thing is not intended.
Basically, when you encounter some content that seems to be enormously profitable on a repeatable basis, far outside similar rewards from other similar content, and you do that nonstop to earn tons of something, its probably you exploiting a bug. If you do it a couple of times, less than 5 or so, to verify that it can be repeated and indeed seems to be outside of normal gameplay reward for effort standards, and you report it as a bug and stop doing it and do not share the method online etc, ... you did not exploit it. If cryptic fails to fix this within 2 weeks, and you go back to repeat the profitable thing a few million times, that is not an exploit -- they were told of a possible bug and ignored it, so it must not be a bug.
Well it should have been obvious since the enemies didn't correctly match level.
You know, there are likely quite a few folks (myself included) who don't pay attention to that. Why? Because we're playing to have fun or, never gave it any though for whatever reason.
Well it should have been obvious since the enemies didn't correctly match level.
How should some one know that enemies do not CORRECT match level. The way, the mechanisme how they level is already in since the beginning. I expect if content is released the way ships level or not level is correct, because its a fundamental functionality. So i was first very surprised how Cryptic responded, now I feel sad and exploited as player.
You know, there are likely quite a few folks (myself included) who don't pay attention to that. Why? Because we're playing to have fun or, never gave it any though for whatever reason.
I never paid attention, either. Last time I leveled was like 2 years ago, doing Mirror Events (something they *also* took away). Since making VA, I raked up 27,000,000+ EXP points by now (not counting the untold millions that went into Fleet projects). Ergo, XP never meant diddly to me. Until DR. And now they expect me to guess what number of XP per NPC was supposed to be reasonable?!
You know, there are likely quite a few folks (myself included) who don't pay attention to that. Why? Because we're playing to have fun or, never gave it any though for whatever reason.
You do not have to look at the numbers for their level. You failed to notice that you were rickrolling the mobs far easier than usual?
And you did the *same boring mission with strangely easy enemy* over and over and over and over.... ???
I don't buy it. WHY did you do that mission (if you did) over and over? Because the rewards were higher than the difficulty involved. Period. Which goes back to my common sense comment.
I suppose someone with a very, very, bad case of backsidehattery could be doing it over and over and over because everyone else was doing it over, and over, and over without asking "why we doing that again". If you are that, erm, unobservant and consider doing the same thing over and over and over to be "normal play" then I suppose YOU can have a pass for being clueless.
I never paid attention, either. Last time I leveled was like 2 years ago, doing Mirror Events (something they *also* took away). Since making VA, I raked up 27,000,000+ EXP points by now (not counting the untold millions that went into Fleet projects). Ergo, XP never meant diddly to me. Until DR. And now they expect me to guess what number of XP per NPC was supposed to be reasonable?!
here's a hint....if your leveling up twice every hour, chances are its not reasonable :P
It may be difficult. The way to tell is simple --- common sense --- but the vast majority of humanity has lost this rare trait.
I mean, it should be obvious. For example, lets say that you discover that you can buy a white item for 10k credits and sell it back to the same vendor for 1 million credits because someone screwed up the code somewhere. You discover this and immediately buy and sell all day long until you have more money than everyone else in the game combined.
Your common sense should tell you that this sort of thing is not intended.
Basically, when you encounter some content that seems to be enormously profitable on a repeatable basis, far outside similar rewards from other similar content, and you do that nonstop to earn tons of something, its probably you exploiting a bug. If you do it a couple of times, less than 5 or so, to verify that it can be repeated and indeed seems to be outside of normal gameplay reward for effort standards, and you report it as a bug and stop doing it and do not share the method online etc, ... you did not exploit it. If cryptic fails to fix this within 2 weeks, and you go back to repeat the profitable thing a few million times, that is not an exploit -- they were told of a possible bug and ignored it, so it must not be a bug.
The way, the mechanics how ships level was in from the beginning. Also that this allows faster leveling was already communicated many times past years. People have been leveling toons in a day already for years now.
What Cryptic now did was robbing players of skillpoints, items, dilli, reputaion, marks, specialization points, and calling fast leveling unintentionaly. And blaming players, naming and shaming players calling them exploiters.
Instead Cryptic should not have touched player toons items etc, and make sure when they release content, fundamental mechanics are playtesten en free of mayor or gamebreaking bugs.
I don't buy it. WHY did you do that mission (if you did) over and over? Because the rewards were higher than the difficulty involved. Period. Which goes back to my common sense comment.
Utter bullocks! The mission I did, over and over again, was far from easy on Elite. The constant Feedback Pulses really sting at that level (to where you can lose half your hull within seconds). They reward a couple of thousand of XP, pretty much like any other storyline on Elite.
You do not have to look at the numbers for their level. You failed to notice that you were rickrolling the mobs far easier than usual?
And you did the *same boring mission with strangely easy enemy* over and over and over and over.... ???
I don't buy it. WHY did you do that mission (if you did) over and over? Because the rewards were higher than the difficulty involved. Period. Which goes back to my common sense comment.
I suppose someone with a very, very, bad case of backsidehattery could be doing it over and over and over because everyone else was doing it over, and over, and over without asking "why we doing that again". If you are that, erm, unobservant and consider doing the same thing over and over and over to be "normal play" then I suppose YOU can have a pass for being clueless.
Play mmos much? You've pretty much described group grinding or power leveling which in ANY OTHER GAME is expected and encouraged because it's more multi-player and social.
Play mmos much? You've pretty much described group grinding or power leveling which in ANY OTHER GAME is expected and encouraged because it's more multi-player and social.
Fail post.
As someone else said, somewhere else, if this had been the EvE Online forums, the devs would have commended people for banding together, and finally putting the 'multiplayer' in MMO!
If you're doing anything that's not related to the new content, it's an exploit.
This^
the other test to check if it is exploit, check the ships you are fighting, if they do not have 100000000HP auto regen shields x10 then you are exploiting the game.
As someone else said, somewhere else, if this had been the EvE Online forums, the devs would have commended people for banding together, and finally putting the 'multiplayer' in MMO!
lol, if this was EVE the offending players would have had their accounts perma-banned with no recourse available
As someone else said, somewhere else, if this had been the EvE Online forums, the devs would have commended people for banding together, and finally putting the 'multiplayer' in MMO!
Well, I'd be happy if STO's developers took the opposite stance as EvE's developers on pretty much everything, every time.
Comments
well, you cant.
Its absolutely impossible foresee what cryptic suddenly claims to be an exploit.
You will only notice it when they start punishing players again.
And when cryptic is announcing that earning dilithium is an exploit then you will have to live with it. They can even decide to claim that Zen is an exploit and take it all away from you.
They dont even need to justify their decision.
As of this week they showed that pretty much everything in this game can be instantly called exploit.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
By that working going to any area that forces you down to a specific level to level is exploiting, I mean how are people supposed to tell any particular content is supposed to be level locked or not dare I ask?
Yeah, it's rubbish and it is their mistake, but: 23 specialisation points is around 1,219,000 skill points, after topping level 60 (which is in itself 395k skill points). Assuming you've not lost ALL your specialisation points, earning more than 1.2 million skill points at about 5k an hour (if you play constantly for 240 hours, 24 hours a day without sleep) since DR was released........
There was summat wrong with the awarding of skill points. It's obvious.
Now, the main problem is: no-one in authority has explained this, and no-one in authority has advised what was going to be done before it was done regarding the roll-back.
That is what's really bad.
Essentially, what they've done is roll us back to where we should be right now if they hadn't ballsed up the skill point allocation in the first place as far as I can tell.
But not explaining that to us, it looks like they just took us back to 0. Hence the rage.
If you feel any fun from playing any part of this game, then it's obviously an exploit.
Were people really enjoying uber-grinding the same damn fight over and over again in rapid succession for hours at a time?
Or were they just enjoying watching their xp bar fly upwards at a crazy rate? (gee, might that be the "if it seems too good to be true" part......)
battlezone enemies dont scale, does that mean I'm still exploiting???
sig
http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/5451/om71.jpg
It is a peculiar phenomenon that we can imagine events that defy the laws of the universe.
Is it in the C Store? YES/NO
If Yes... then it isn't.
If No... then it is.
Exactly right.
Exactly right....after they roll you back and take a dozen points.
Well, SOMEONE has to pay for their mistakes.
And it certainly can't be them, now, can it? That's just crazy talk.
Of course ... "Fix" incoming ... just wait till Tuesday, till they remove all of your Dilithium ... in the meantime go have fun in the BZ, because it's Dilithium Weekend and it's what Cryptic wants you to do :P
Schizophrenic ? ... Nah you should have known it's an exploit ...
That's actually being tested in other countries as to whether it is in their rights to do such a thing without due cause.
It's funny how far mad gamers will take it, some even have lawyers as friends, others are lawyers...
Thing is I can't seem to be able to tell an exploit from a developer TRIBBLE up. I mean if the game is released and they have bug reports from months ago, repeated ones over those months, and choose not to fix that bug, then it's still a bug not an exploit. Even the people who used that bug to bypass their stupid concept of enforced slow leveling (immediately after a double XP fortnight no less...) aren't in the wrong. It's still the dev team and their trained QA monkeys who should have done something about it before release.
You don't release a buggy mess and expect it to clean itself up.
As I've said before, the Story is pretty good and relatively long compared to Breen/Borg/Dyson missions, better written for the most part too. The bad bit is that it's 1% story and 99% grinding on hull sponges unless you happened to luck out and not get the ban hammer for getting to 60 too fast. Then you can play the content back to back and it feels good. The Kobali zone should have been 1 or 2 levels max, not strung out to potentially 8 levels. Had I played it the intended way, I would never have remembered any of the story in the slightest. Which in turn would have given me an even worse taste in my wallet.
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
I'm happy to announce new "Exploit" stickers available now in ZEN Store for a low price of 100 000 Zen. You can't win in PvP? Stick it to ship of your foe and he will get demoted to level 1. You thing Dilithium Exchange is unfair? Stick a sticker on it. Making exploits from in-game content have never been this easy.
Kadir beneath Mo Moteh. Kiteo, his eyes closed. Chenza at court, the court of silence. Darmok on the ocean.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
The only thing obvious about that is the button they INCLUDE in the game to change level up or down....
"Anyone going slower than you is a moron; anyone going faster than you is... an exploiter!"
I mean, it should be obvious. For example, lets say that you discover that you can buy a white item for 10k credits and sell it back to the same vendor for 1 million credits because someone screwed up the code somewhere. You discover this and immediately buy and sell all day long until you have more money than everyone else in the game combined.
Your common sense should tell you that this sort of thing is not intended.
Basically, when you encounter some content that seems to be enormously profitable on a repeatable basis, far outside similar rewards from other similar content, and you do that nonstop to earn tons of something, its probably you exploiting a bug. If you do it a couple of times, less than 5 or so, to verify that it can be repeated and indeed seems to be outside of normal gameplay reward for effort standards, and you report it as a bug and stop doing it and do not share the method online etc, ... you did not exploit it. If cryptic fails to fix this within 2 weeks, and you go back to repeat the profitable thing a few million times, that is not an exploit -- they were told of a possible bug and ignored it, so it must not be a bug.
You know, there are likely quite a few folks (myself included) who don't pay attention to that. Why? Because we're playing to have fun or, never gave it any though for whatever reason.
Sarah Knightly - Co-leader; Frontier Explorers - U.S.S. Witchblade
Rias Gremory - Leader; Frontier Marauders - I.K.S. B'ullwinkle
I never paid attention, either. Last time I leveled was like 2 years ago, doing Mirror Events (something they *also* took away). Since making VA, I raked up 27,000,000+ EXP points by now (not counting the untold millions that went into Fleet projects). Ergo, XP never meant diddly to me. Until DR. And now they expect me to guess what number of XP per NPC was supposed to be reasonable?!
You do not have to look at the numbers for their level. You failed to notice that you were rickrolling the mobs far easier than usual?
And you did the *same boring mission with strangely easy enemy* over and over and over and over.... ???
I don't buy it. WHY did you do that mission (if you did) over and over? Because the rewards were higher than the difficulty involved. Period. Which goes back to my common sense comment.
I suppose someone with a very, very, bad case of backsidehattery could be doing it over and over and over because everyone else was doing it over, and over, and over without asking "why we doing that again". If you are that, erm, unobservant and consider doing the same thing over and over and over to be "normal play" then I suppose YOU can have a pass for being clueless.
here's a hint....if your leveling up twice every hour, chances are its not reasonable :P
The way, the mechanics how ships level was in from the beginning. Also that this allows faster leveling was already communicated many times past years. People have been leveling toons in a day already for years now.
What Cryptic now did was robbing players of skillpoints, items, dilli, reputaion, marks, specialization points, and calling fast leveling unintentionaly. And blaming players, naming and shaming players calling them exploiters.
Instead Cryptic should not have touched player toons items etc, and make sure when they release content, fundamental mechanics are playtesten en free of mayor or gamebreaking bugs.
Utter bullocks! The mission I did, over and over again, was far from easy on Elite. The constant Feedback Pulses really sting at that level (to where you can lose half your hull within seconds). They reward a couple of thousand of XP, pretty much like any other storyline on Elite.
Play mmos much? You've pretty much described group grinding or power leveling which in ANY OTHER GAME is expected and encouraged because it's more multi-player and social.
Fail post.
As someone else said, somewhere else, if this had been the EvE Online forums, the devs would have commended people for banding together, and finally putting the 'multiplayer' in MMO!
This^
the other test to check if it is exploit, check the ships you are fighting, if they do not have 100000000HP auto regen shields x10 then you are exploiting the game.
lol, if this was EVE the offending players would have had their accounts perma-banned with no recourse available
Well, I'd be happy if STO's developers took the opposite stance as EvE's developers on pretty much everything, every time.