Gem Issue Follow-up

[Xharry005x]

Do you really think they dont have testers and test servers? You really have absolutely no idea how this industry works dont you? You only know they take your money and do nothing. Well you are wrong. There is no game or product that is 100% bug-free. Even games like Assassins Creed that went out for PS had tons of bugs in it, and I know for certain that UbiSoft have larger tester team than dev team. But let me tell you this, the testers are not gamers with 10+ years of experience. Neighter are the devs themselves. Thats why the products are released for the public, tested, have the found bugs fixed and move on to the next patch.

The fact that the test servers didnt find that glitch was sad, but I didnt see many people had the need to open that inventory. The other thing is why the person who found it didnt kept it a secret, get in contact with the devs immediately and get this thing fixed before it did all the damage? Because people are stupid. They see an opening, think its ok to abuse something that is most likely error in code and say "devs put it there for a reason, lets abuse it, its fine". Well, its not. Its not the devs fault that the code is doing random things at times. But you have no idea how this works again since you are not a programmer or a games dev. So I like the branding "HACKER" or "CHEATER" to whoever have items removed or banned. Instead of reporting this issue right away before all this cupcake happened and not get near the gems or things that got bugged, you decided to exploit it, even for a bit, and cry cause you lost everything due to your own greediness.

I SALUTE R2 AND WOULD BUY A DRINK TO THE MANAGER WHO ORDERED THE MASS BANS!

hmmm are u a complete and utter donut ????

i do know how test servers work and how patches are tested lmao

im only saying test the dam patch for longer not few days or 1 week before being released to everyone

and by ur remark u know nothing either

i beta test a few games for websites and of course these sites gives incentives to find patches bugs glitches and get paid for them


as r2 does not do this wen patch comes to test servers u testers run play game as normal and not test the dam thing properly

so before u come back with a remark think realy hard what a beta tester realy does
not a test server wannabe like u

(beta test servers is 1 server based apart from every 1 else character stays at beta test server for testing ) if found glitched and used only beta test toon is stripped and managed by r2 no moaning or crying lol

(r2 test servers are a multiple of servers spread from around server timezones tested by their playable characters ) if found glitched and used ur real character is stripped by r2 then the moaning , crying and whinging starts

now see my point
as i know more than you it seems my fellow player

1 beta test patch on 1 test server
2 after a few weeks of testing and bugs fixed you move it to alpha test stage multiple servers for testing r2 test servers
3 after a few weeks of testing then the final stage stable release mode for all servers

this is wat r2 must do not rush it out to earn a fast buck

now my fellow friend who says i know knothing how a test server works seems i do know more than u

[dennyh]

i love the high moral ground people are taking when they havent had items removed, its a totally different mindset when they do take your items and you werent involved in whatever happened after the patch, because now your being robbed by the people running the game, and so far there is no recourse, so enjoy calling people whatever you like, until it happens to you, which now seems inevitable at some point if you play this game long enough, your br gets to a certain point, and then you make the criteria, and you lose items......

end of story

[Meikura001]

You think that you are still not going to be banned and have gems etc. removed - this means you are either a r2 employee or are very stupid.
95% of people who got banned and had items removed did not have the treasure inventory.
Therefore this has nothing to do with a "bug", "cheating" or "hacking".
It is a witch hunt to get rid of people that they do not want playing anymore.
Non-cashers, low cashers and possibly medium cashers. They are not making money from them - so want them out.

I did not have the treasure inventory - yet they still took my gems.
So they know I did not use the bug - but this makes no difference to them.
As a long term non-casher (started playing March 2013) they obviously want me out as I never recharge.

Your view that its good for people to be labelled "Hackers" or "cheats" shows you have no idea what has gone on.

As you probably can see in my signature, I manage those accounts. I never spend on them. I never bought the treasure inventory (didn't have enough balens at the time). After maint (usually coming online at 9am server time), I would check the forum first to see what bumps I will get into before diving in with my crew. If there are exploits that happened (why is it that I never experience these? maybe because I didn't want my characters to be banned for exploiting bugs), it's often fixed by the time I get in. This is why I never worry on such things since I am always out of range of the blast when it happens.

Now, I had one person asking why they should explain all when they done nothing, the answer is relatively simple: if you value your acct, you would want to be as detailed as possible as well as giving supporting evidence on why they should overturn your ban and/or give your items back. Had this happen to my accts, I would be pulling up an extensive report and ask for details from the support staff. Sometimes, you don't get the answer you wanted that you have to elaborate on such in order to get them to understand.

So where do we go from here is up to those who are wronged, not in the wrong. And if people are telling you they haven't lost items or gotten banned, maybe it's because they CTA (cover their a.ss) to ensure they didn't fall into that zone.

[AdaJames]

As you probably can see in my signature, I manage those accounts. I never spend on them. I never bought the treasure inventory (didn't have enough balens at the time). After maint (usually coming online at 9am server time), I would check the forum first to see what bumps I will get into before diving in with my crew. If there are exploits that happened (why is it that I never experience these? maybe because I didn't want my characters to be banned for exploiting bugs), it's often fixed by the time I get in. This is why I never worry on such things since I am always out of range of the blast when it happens.

Now, I had one person asking why they should explain all when they done nothing, the answer is relatively simple: if you value your acct, you would want to be as detailed as possible as well as giving supporting evidence on why they should overturn your ban and/or give your items back. Had this happen to my accts, I would be pulling up an extensive report and ask for details from the support staff. Sometimes, you don't get the answer you wanted that you have to elaborate on such in order to get them to understand.

So where do we go from here is up to those who are wronged, not in the wrong. And if people are telling you they haven't lost items or gotten banned, maybe it's because they CTA (cover their a.ss) to ensure they didn't fall into that zone.

I disagree with that. There have been people who have openly admitted to cheating who feel that the stripping of all their gem too harsh a punishment. I have even had one IN WRITING where he claimed he did it in order to "stay competitive". Want a screenshot?

It is not only the non-cheaters who a screaming. I suspect, given the irrationality of some of the people crying, from blaming it is an anti-West communist plot to even stranger notions (like how being in the winning Titan War team makes all his actions holy and above censure), that some of the most strident ones are the worst offenders.

[dennyh]

see the problem with a troll is they take what you tell them and distort it

If i have to spell it out for you troll its like this, you said you had been playing for one year and had level 5 divinity souls (and therefore anyone who had higher ones than you was cheating, cuz your the benchmark...) my point was i was on the winning titan war team, but had my divinity souls removed three weeks later for unknown reasons. Anyone on a winning titan wars team is not using level 3 divinity gems, so few teams have even won one, they are usually the top players banded together from a server and they dam sure are not using level 3 divinity gems, they have put in their team and used their resources to build all their assets. I never said i was holy and beyond censure, that was your troll like way of interpreting it. I welcomed them going after the people that cheated, but since i didnt cheat, and had gems removed, i got caught up in some sort of witch hunt and all i want is to have my stuff back that i paid for with either time or money.

in my understanding of what the exploit did, was there was some combination of refreshing (which i do frequently because im on the game alot) and sorting (which i rarely do, because i prefer an arranged inventory). I did buy the treasure page which i cannot use to get my gems in the treasure page, because i wont sort my inventory, it takes too much time to arrange it again. I have no idea of the criteria used on how and who they banned. There seems to be no reason to it whatsoever. The people that did not get banned and lost items seem to think this vindicates them from cheating and everyone else who was banned and lost items cheated. But that is not the case. It was admitted they did things wrongly and i was caught up in this airheaded scheme along with many others, so go back to your bridge, or cave and let us sort this out without having your convoluted sense of fairness interfere.

[jabbery]

In a weird sorta watching the big picture way, this is getting really funny. Hilarious actually. (that otta sturr some reactions). Sit outside the box and take a deep breath and enjoy the roller coaster! So to be clear I lost stuff too. In one breath I'm not so concerned about the loss and in another sense I am very concerned wartune choose to devalue my time (who cares about money at this point).

So they started out with some type of clear concept on how to pick off the "dumb" exploiters, of course caught some tops (including me) in that first pass. That pass made sense..

Then it looked like they started searching for a way to find the smarter or lesser exploiters.. Ah here is where it gets funny... Now add to it there are a couple of worlds of development and game developers are constantly spoke of as folks that forget to follow all the established norms and practices in development (couldn't say if that has a true basis but it is a stereotype).

Pass 2 - clearly they started widening their search to catch some of the smarter ones.. makes sense, has to be.
Pass 3 - widens the list further.
Pass 4 - punch happy? Did they forget to get some sleep?
Pass 5 - whooa, who is in control?? lol Fire that dude, I think he has been drinking for a week strait!

The original criteria was clear but as they did more and more passes searching for exploiters it would seem it became one of 2 things; toon roulette or the Laural and Hardy approach to salvation (did I miss anything?)! Neither of which has any visible scientific basis! But I bet it was a tough situation to resolve. Ahh the game developer stereotype shows up! Did they forget to record enough history to be able to do a basic profile?

In a way it is like watching an old Laural and Hardy movie! I can't say the pink panther cause in the end Clouseau did it (although the path was a mess lol).

I am sure they caught some of the exploiters, I would highly bet a number of them slipped through and are laughing right now! I know all the toons on the roulette wheel are in various stages of the "gone postal" syndrome (sorry folks for that, I feel for you). I'm sure some of the exploiters on the roulette wheel spun up the "free pass" sliver.

So now that it seems it is over and I hear they announced they finished from what some players were emailed! Time to let it all out! (take a deep breath here it comes!)

I know some toons and alts that got stripped. I play with them daily, I know their growth against mine or my alt. I know we were toe to toe. So therefor I know I did not exploit even by accident so therefor I know these ones did not either but they were stripped last night.

Personally, I would have taken a much more scientific approach but I also have no idea to what data is available to them. Surely they have complete daily backups for at least 30 days for disaster recovery. Maybe we should have asked before piling in tens of thousands of dollars! I would also hope they maintain historical purchases history and recharge gifts. Maybe no? (ahh the game developer stereotype again, true? build the system to run but ignore the disaster recovery or disaster recovery is a little bit more complicated than a simple restoration of a backup? Like a bug like this?). Clearly the calamity and facts we each know to be true and false of who exploited draws a clearer picture as to how our investments have been considered by wartune. Clearly due to the number of honest folks caught and stripped means they have no idea at all or at the very least have no idea what happened during the bug.

A more scientific approach might have been.
Step 1 - form a baseline. Take the oldest backup, assign each gem type a value to get a single total value (lvl 1 gems = 1 point, lvl 2 = 3 or 4 points depending on synth for that item) This creates 5 totals for each toon at that point in time (one total for each gem type gems/divinity/diamonds/res/will).
Step 2 - form a growth line, take a 2nd backup, do the same as above, then take into account events assuming completely done for worst case or avg done (takes more thought there), subtract out the events to get a daily growth factor on each type, daily growth is the difference divided by the number of days.
Step 3 - (since most toons play on a stable basis(??? I know I do), creatures of habit type thinking) forward project to the bug removal date what each toon should have in points including events this time.
Step 4 - calculate a error factor allowed (these are computers, gotta take black and white out of the process and make it grey, eliminating random things like old jewel hunt, VIP wheel etc, likely low factors)
Step 5 - do Step 1 on the current data, compare the result with step 4's projected values, any variation outside of the error factor is put on a list for further investigation.

That leaves new toons out, so in step 3, calculate an average player growth, any toon with no step 1 baseline this is applied over time, any toon exceeding that growth is flagged for further investigation. Or profile a new server for growth of a new toon acceptable norms (min/max).

The more historical backups, the more accurate the data! It helps calculate variations on part time toons or changes in game play priorities (i.e. did expert dims for awhile but then switched to advanced), calculates a variation factor based on each toon over time.

So now you have a variation list, dump it with all the history for manual handling. Manual handling is only good if "feeling" is taken out of it, has to be hard facts. If dim rewards were part of the historical data great put it in the hard facts, if not great (uggg) use the players norms as factors.

The above steps make assumptions based on the very little knowledge I have on the exploitation of the bug and possible data they retain over time, all treasure inventory doubled every time the bug was triggered. If that is the case the profiling about would have substantial factors increased all of a sudden even if the event was triggered only once never mind multiple times. Purchases or recharge gifts could also increase factors substantially but naturally and have to be eliminated from the profile for accuracy.

Typical investigations, do the above, look at the result, is the list accurate enough?, if not why isn't it?, re-run with the new learned information to reduce the list until you have eliminated everything you can. Once you have the list you deem acceptable start processing it.

Net result, I would guess this should have been able to be handled better with far less honest players effected, there was likely no way to not effect some honest players but the level of effected players is very high it seems..

[NightFer]

Your theory is good but it will take weeks if not months to finish a complete investigation. You have basic servers not supercomputers that can do billions of operations per milisecond. What if they have data from 2 months ago or a month ago? What if I tell you I havent done dimentions for 4 months but I have enough res crystals to make all my shields full with lvl12s but Im running around with lvl11s because Im waiting for events for lvl12s? What if I suddenly decided to make them all at once during this calamity of events? What if I tell you I have enough gems to make most of not all my gems in my equipment lvl12 but Im keeping them for when an event comes? What if I suddenly decided to make everything I had lvl12 during the calamity and suddenly get banned for absolutely no reason aswell. Programmers are competent enough to make searches in the database in certain criteria. You dont need an older record of the database to know who suddenly gained advantage over the others. Its not just gems and divinity stones and diamonds and res crystals you can gain from that glitch. You can do lots of things with the newly gained gems. So your step 1 is practically not enough information and too low variables. The more variables, the more time it takes to search the database. Lets take the fact that there are thousands of accounts search in, tens of thousands. What they did I think it was the right thing otherwise the other logical thing to do was to pull the plug on the server and investigate every single account. Wouldve that be a better solution? I think not. Banning some people in the first filter was the right thing, the first filter is usually the most accurate and catches most if not all the people who exploited something during the time frame.

[BEtiNaJalang]

I was not cheating but why my jewels are all missing is still in gear!

[AdaJames]

Net result, I would guess this should have been able to be handled better with far less honest players effected, there was likely no way to not effect some honest players but the level of effected players is very high it seems..

The operative word is "seems". The problem with the Internet is the anonymity. There is nothing to prevent cheaters from claiming innocence and come up with all sorts of "proof" in order to bolster their claims.

Conversely, let us assume that all claims of innocence here are true. How many are there? We have the same few posting their innocence time and again, crying over and over again about it. So, how many discrete individuals are there? 10? 20? Out of how many affected? If R2 claims are true and there are over 1million players, and let's say only 1% are involved in this debacle, that is still 10,000 players. 20 out of 10,000 is not "high" by any stretch of the imagination. Even the Facebook page set up SPECIFICALLY to gather support for a class action suit against R2 for this debacle has gathered 58 people at last count, and we know for CERTAIN at least 3 of them are cheaters from their own admission. Another 6-10 seem to be nothing more than nosey parkers who popped up just to say they wanted to support the suit but were not affected (i.e., they have no case for damages of any kind; in other words, oxygen thieves). Assuming they are all discrete people and we take out the nosey parkers and the admitted cheaters, we have 20+58-3-6=69. Let's call it 70. 70 out of 10,000? Still not a high number at all.

Yet these are all conjecture. We simply do NOT know the total number of people affected and how many of those are innocent. There is too much white noise from the usual professional outrage rent-a-crowd, one of the reasons why I have so much contempt for them. They drown out any good analysis of the situation with their strident and repeat squeals. Take a look at the post above from BetinaJalang. Repeated posts of the same nature over multiple threads with no useful information given, just the same old incoherent nonsense. I won't even go into the posts by the arabs claiming racism against them in English best described as maimed, mangled, assaulted, drawn, quartered and pounded with a piledriver. NOT helpful.

Personally, I have been asking around my server cluster. Not a single top player was affected. I only know of ONE person who is affected in the entire cluster, and I know she is innocent. No BR jumps, no L12 of anything, and she is someone I speak to on a daily basis.

I cannot see, from my investigations within my server cluster, how the level of affected players can even remotely be described as "high". However, I can conclude (with a sample of ONE; yeah, I can hear the statisticians wailing in agony in the corner) that the false positive rate is incredible

[Alsatia01]

The operative word is "seems". The problem with the Internet is the anonymity. There is nothing to prevent cheaters from claiming innocence and come up with all sorts of "proof" in order to bolster their claims.

Conversely, let us assume that all claims of innocence here are true. How many are there? We have the same few posting their innocence time and again, crying over and over again about it. So, how many discrete individuals are there? 10? 20? Out of how many affected? If R2 claims are true and there are over 1million players, and let's say only 1% are involved in this debacle, that is still 10,000 players. 20 out of 10,000 is not "high" by any stretch of the imagination. Even the Facebook page set up SPECIFICALLY to gather support for a class action suit against R2 for this debacle has gathered 58 people at last count, and we know for CERTAIN at least 3 of them are cheaters from their own admission. Another 6-10 seem to be nothing more than nosey parkers who popped up just to say they wanted to support the suit but were not affected (i.e., they have no case for damages of any kind; in other words, oxygen thieves). Assuming they are all discrete people and we take out the nosey parkers and the admitted cheaters, we have 20+58-3-6=69. Let's call it 70. 70 out of 10,000? Still not a high number at all.

Yet these are all conjecture. We simply do NOT know the total number of people affected and how many of those are innocent. There is too much white noise from the usual professional outrage rent-a-crowd, one of the reasons why I have so much contempt for them. They drown out any good analysis of the situation with their strident and repeat squeals. Take a look at the post above from BetinaJalang. Repeated posts of the same nature over multiple threads with no useful information given, just the same old incoherent nonsense. I won't even go into the posts by the arabs claiming racism against them in English best described as maimed, mangled, assaulted, drawn, quartered and pounded with a piledriver. NOT helpful.

Personally, I have been asking around my server cluster. Not a single top player was affected. I only know of ONE person who is affected in the entire cluster, and I know she is innocent. No BR jumps, no L12 of anything, and she is someone I speak to on a daily basis.

I cannot see, from my investigations within my server cluster, how the level of affected players can even remotely be described as "high". However, I can conclude (with a sample of ONE; yeah, I can hear the statisticians wailing in agony in the corner) that the false positive rate is incredible

I don't know that anyone other than myself didn't exploit the system. To my knowledge I am 1 of 2 who were effected by missing items on my server; not exactly a lot of us. This other person logged in for the first time a few days ago for the first time in over a month; so he's obviously innocent as well. You want to talk about numbers and percentages; that's a 100% failure rate. Your friend whom you are so obviously are biased for, could have also exploited the system as far as everyone else knows. But you're right, its all conjecture.

There are four possibilities.
1) You cheated - and you had items taken/banned.
2) You cheated - and you didn't have items taken/banned.
3) You didn't cheat - and you had items taken/banned.
4) You didn't cheat - and didn't have items taken/banned.

You can argue all day about which one is more accurate or which category has more people. But from where I'm at - what's that old saying?

Better one hundred guilty people be let go, than one innocent person convicted.

[AdaJames]

Actually, the argument is "How many people were affected compared to the TOTAL number of players in the game". People are claiming that it is "high". I think that is **.

And no. 1 innocent for 100 guilty is acceptable collateral damage.

[Alsatia01]

Actually, the argument is "How many people were affected compared to the TOTAL number of players in the game". People are claiming that it is "high". I think that is **.

And no. 1 innocent for 100 guilty is acceptable collateral damage.

That's fair, though it is a bit harder for me to accept when I'm one of the 1%.

[AdaJames]

You do have my sympathies, if you are truly innocent. I don't know if that is the case or not, and you can thank the cheaters for that. Their fraudulent cries of innocence when they know they cheated is what makes it difficult for me to accept ANY claims of innocence from anyone, except from people I know personally.

[Meikura001]

I don't know, folks. I still maintain to this day that nothing has happened to my accts and I didn't do any of the exploiting (or buying of the treasure inv. for that matter). All my gems are in places where they should be at. Should I be thanking my lucky stars? Maybe and probably (in the same sentence). And I did ask around in my server cluster as well, and no one alive on chat didn't make a statement that they were missing items/gems or gotten banned. Hell, more than half didn't even know that there was a bug exploit that happened until I told them there was a situation where players were exploiting such on other servers and gotten banned as a result.

Of course you will have to thank R2 for even making this bug existent, and moreover, you have to thank the countless number of cheats that exploited that not only got themselves banned, but some of you in the cross fire as well in the form of either banned or losing gems or even both.

[AdaJames]

Well, I was thinking of the whole thing.

It is obvious that it will take forever for R2 to manually go through each toon one by one to restore stuff that were taken. Archive diving would be a complete pain, and given the past performance of R2, there is a greater chance of them putting it in the too hard basket, just giving up and basically telling the players to "get stuffed" and "like it or lump it". The constant screaming by loudmouths would make that even more likely as R2's arrogance and truculence will be triggered constantly by the nagging shouts.

An easier compromise might be to just give out a bunch of chests of each of the different types involved. Heck, L1-5 gem chests are a dime a dozen these days anyway, so that will be no big loss to even give 1k of; L3 diamonds are literally a dime a dozen from kid bounties (at least at my level). Give the same amount to everyone and then bring back all events to start at L3 of each type (gem, div soul, crystals, diamonds). Then, let luck dictate where you end up.

It won't make up for everything, but it would certainly be better than what was given, and it being random, well, you can't blame R2 for that, can you? The top guys won't be affected much by this because they would have maxed stuff in many cases anyway (except will crystals) or has already hit the stage of massive diminishing returns (they may get part of a L9 will crystal, whereas those people starting from scratch might get a set of L7s), and it would help those who lost stuff catch up.

Just a thought.