So I was looking at news and saw this and it made me think of Eric's thread about how gaming kind of sucks in general. Let me explain. On Tuesday a patch puts a chair for sale for 1 credit from a specific vendor, and you can sell the chair back for 100 credit. So obviously this can lead to some pretty wild inflation pretty fast. So Bioware put a large message on their official forum and the official patcher letting everyone know that you can currently buy this chair from the specific vendor and tell everyone to NOT DO IT. It took 3 days before they fix it and then they're currently banning a bunch of people for exploiting.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories but the way this chain of events could possibly make sense is if Bioware was planning on banning a bunch of guys so that they don't have to honor their subscription time. Even if we assume the fix is really tough and took 3 days to test, they can certainly immediately despawn the vendor while they're figuring this stuff out. I'd think this falls under entrapment, as you're literally advertising to everyone how to dupe credit and it's not your fault if some unscruptlous guys decided to give it a shot. Of course, it's going to take a long time for the customer services guy to unwind the transaction since I'm sure anyone with a brain would be say get all the credits on a new account (the game is F2P after all) and then just buy stuff on the AH. You can even make it look legitmate quite easily, like just listing some exotic stuff for large amount of credits. Or you can even put some mundane stuff like say crafting materials and just have the guy with a million credit buy up the entire supply on the market, including whatever might be cheaper than yours (as long as it's not a huge number). Unless Bioware's going to be ban every guy you bought from there's no way they can possibly unwind this. I guess they must figure since they got all these support guys who are normally not doing anything useful this gives them a chance to put them to good use while they make extra money from the suspended/banned accounts.
I think Diablo 3 had similar issues back when RMAH was around since Blizzard makes money on the transactions, and then people would figure out a way to dupe gold which destroyed whatever value people had from gold but Blizzard doesn't seem to care because they already got your money. I remember a guy wrote on this and say that companies seems to have this idea where they figure if you're cheater they'll have your money and still deny service so they don't actually care too much if you cheat because they figure they'll just nail you later. Beyond being pretty stupid in the first place, you usually don't get away with doing that to cheaters. Nobody's going to cheat on a game and get banned and say, "Whoa that was my fault and I deserve to lose everything!" That guy is probably likely to call up his credit card company and do whatever it takes to get his money back and it's not like even a big company like Blizzard have the resources to fight every single little thing, and no 'our log says you're a cheater' is not sufficient to convince a credit card company to take the company's side over the cheater since they value the credit card holder more than the business. That's not to say you should bow to cheaters, but every time I see an article like 'game XYZ banned 200000 players' it makes me wonder can their security really be this bad or did they just purposely turn a blind eye so they can ban that many players later and pocket the money, especially if it's a boxed game not a F2P. Yes I've heard of stories where guys get banned and come back to become a legitmate user but that's got to be very rare. At least, I sure don't know anybody that acted like that. Generally people are either totally clean or totally pirate/cheater at least relative to any particular game. And if someone's going to go from a pirate to a legitmate player that's usually because the game is good, not because you got banned so you decided to throw money at the problem instead.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories but the way this chain of events could possibly make sense is if Bioware was planning on banning a bunch of guys so that they don't have to honor their subscription time. Even if we assume the fix is really tough and took 3 days to test, they can certainly immediately despawn the vendor while they're figuring this stuff out. I'd think this falls under entrapment, as you're literally advertising to everyone how to dupe credit and it's not your fault if some unscruptlous guys decided to give it a shot. Of course, it's going to take a long time for the customer services guy to unwind the transaction since I'm sure anyone with a brain would be say get all the credits on a new account (the game is F2P after all) and then just buy stuff on the AH. You can even make it look legitmate quite easily, like just listing some exotic stuff for large amount of credits. Or you can even put some mundane stuff like say crafting materials and just have the guy with a million credit buy up the entire supply on the market, including whatever might be cheaper than yours (as long as it's not a huge number). Unless Bioware's going to be ban every guy you bought from there's no way they can possibly unwind this. I guess they must figure since they got all these support guys who are normally not doing anything useful this gives them a chance to put them to good use while they make extra money from the suspended/banned accounts.
I think Diablo 3 had similar issues back when RMAH was around since Blizzard makes money on the transactions, and then people would figure out a way to dupe gold which destroyed whatever value people had from gold but Blizzard doesn't seem to care because they already got your money. I remember a guy wrote on this and say that companies seems to have this idea where they figure if you're cheater they'll have your money and still deny service so they don't actually care too much if you cheat because they figure they'll just nail you later. Beyond being pretty stupid in the first place, you usually don't get away with doing that to cheaters. Nobody's going to cheat on a game and get banned and say, "Whoa that was my fault and I deserve to lose everything!" That guy is probably likely to call up his credit card company and do whatever it takes to get his money back and it's not like even a big company like Blizzard have the resources to fight every single little thing, and no 'our log says you're a cheater' is not sufficient to convince a credit card company to take the company's side over the cheater since they value the credit card holder more than the business. That's not to say you should bow to cheaters, but every time I see an article like 'game XYZ banned 200000 players' it makes me wonder can their security really be this bad or did they just purposely turn a blind eye so they can ban that many players later and pocket the money, especially if it's a boxed game not a F2P. Yes I've heard of stories where guys get banned and come back to become a legitmate user but that's got to be very rare. At least, I sure don't know anybody that acted like that. Generally people are either totally clean or totally pirate/cheater at least relative to any particular game. And if someone's going to go from a pirate to a legitmate player that's usually because the game is good, not because you got banned so you decided to throw money at the problem instead.
