Cheaters unbanned?

[Theocles]

I advise you exploiters to associeate in an Exploiter Society.
Some of you already do.
Why hiding? For easier recognition you can use the Exploiter Society name, i do not claim any rights to this name, since you exploiters lack any respect to anyone, anything, anywhere, anyways...
You deserve to surround yourself only with your kind.



@My|MindArk :
Remove exploited gains, remove exploiter's access to all competitions.
Why do you piss off the 98% rule abider's turnover for the 2% exploiter's turnover?
From a business' point of view this makes no sense to me.

In 20 years i learned over and over again that MindArk always sells all trust, honor and reputation for the little extra turnover, be it from cheaters, exploiters or any other fishy interaction. It is as it is. This is the way you do your business. This is all well and long known. So be it.

Certainly a permaban costs you some $$$. So i suggest to at least stigmatize Exploiters with a red player name for lifetime (which is visible to everyone, always, everywhere), so the more reputable, honorable and trusted players can choose, if they want to associate and interact with such a blain.
Because not all players are like MindArk or the Exploiters.

I like the idea for the name to be displayed in red. Have to ask though, which soc is the "some of you already do" statement directed at.

 

[Rocket192]

I like the idea for the name to be displayed in red. Have to ask though, which soc is the "some of you already do" statement directed at.

i have a really really revolutionary idea for a punishment here that doesn't involve perma-bans because those just lead to lawsuits.


ban them from all future competitive events. Strip FMV of rewards from their pedcards or simply handicap their TT returns until FMV is recouped. that's it. all MA has to do is come out and say:

"The exploiters are banned from all future competitive events and will have FMV of rewards recouped either immediately or over time."


one simple sentence lmao.

 

[wizz]

Isn't the solution just very simple?

Just "boycot" the next mayhem.
If nobody spends a single ped on mayhem, MA will start to panic and will fix things.

But as long as you only complain and then keep on grinding, MA couldnt care less.

 

[TheOneOmega]

does this mean we can all use any exploit without being punished?

thank you

No, it doesn't. It means policy enforcement is multifaceted and difficult, requiring considerations beyond infraction deterrence in isolation. It also means that, although we do need more transparency with regard to the policy enforcement process, specific cases will almost always involve private information known only by MindArk and the player(s) suspected of committing the infraction, so third parties (including an ostensibly democratic forum consensus) are in an inferior position to MindArk in judging how to apply policy to specific cases.

 

[TheOneOmega]

Sulje has point. Cheating affect us all. Stricter sanctions should be made than banning for 6 months.(or maybe there are but we dont know)

It is true that at least some forms of cheating (such as in zero-sum game hunting events) negatively affect us all, but it is also the case that stricter sanctions negatively affect us all. Everyone who plays Entropia is subject to certain low-probability but high-impact risks, including MindArk going bust, hyperactive gambling regulations ruining the game, or being banned for reasons that the banned player did not foresee/interprets as unjust. Harsher sanctions, especially at early stages of policy enforcement where a player has not yet received the instructive signifiers that warnings/light penalties provide, increase the burden of this "it could all go away for me at any time" family of risks.

Don't get me wrong, cheating in Entropia concerns me. It is unfair to have rules which dishonest players benefit from breaking while honest players lose by following. However, I think the prevalent, idealized attitude toward multiple aspects of policy enforcement which are in practice quite messy is even more concerning. The idea that there is no need to build fail-safe measures into your policy enforcement structure, because 1) You will always be able to discern infraction from non-infraction with negligible imprecision, 2) You will always be able to discern cheating from unintentional infraction with negligible imprecision, 3) The policy documents are sufficiently applicable and unambiguous that every honest player has a clear and shared mental model of what constitutes crossing the line between fair play and infraction, 4) No matter how much subjective latitude MindArk takes on with respect to penalty issuance, and no matter how the incentive structure governing interactions between the players and MindArk is designed, there will never be cause for honest players to be concerned that MindArk might take punitive action in light of its business interests rather than solely on the basis of sound policy enforcement (i.e., in a manner similar to how Twitch made "a business decision" to ban Foxyzilla despite not even claiming that she violated TOS, and after explicitly communicating to her that her actions were fine), is a positive hindrance to the real conversations the community needs to have. I would go into more detail if the conversation was about the pros and cons of different policy enforcement options, but sadly I feel that a huge portion of the community is not yet at that level of discourse, and thus my burden is only to argue that important tradeoffs exist, saving debate over how to actually manage those tradeoffs for future discussion.

 

[Bamb00cha]

It is true that at least some forms of cheating (such as in zero-sum game hunting events) negatively affect us all, but it is also the case that stricter sanctions negatively affect us all. Everyone who plays Entropia is subject to certain low-probability but high-impact risks, including MindArk going bust, hyperactive gambling regulations ruining the game, or being banned for reasons that the banned player did not foresee/interprets as unjust. Harsher sanctions, especially at early stages of policy enforcement where a player has not yet received the instructive signifiers that warnings/light penalties provide, increase the burden of this "it could all go away for me at any time" family of risks.

Don't get me wrong, cheating in Entropia concerns me. It is unfair to have rules which dishonest players benefit from breaking while honest players lose by following. However, I think the prevalent, idealized attitude toward multiple aspects of policy enforcement which are in practice quite messy is even more concerning. The idea that there is no need to build fail-safe measures into your policy enforcement structure, because 1) You will always be able to discern infraction from non-infraction with negligible imprecision, 2) You will always be able to discern cheating from unintentional infraction with negligible imprecision, 3) The policy documents are sufficiently applicable and unambiguous that every honest player has a clear and shared mental model of what constitutes crossing the line between fair play and infraction, 4) No matter how much subjective latitude MindArk takes on with respect to penalty issuance, and no matter how the incentive structure governing interactions between the players and MindArk is designed, there will never be cause for honest players to be concerned that MindArk might take punitive action in light of its business interests rather than solely on the basis of sound policy enforcement (i.e., in a manner similar to how Twitch made "a business decision" to ban Foxyzilla despite not even claiming that she violated TOS, and after explicitly communicating to her that her actions were fine), is a positive hindrance to the real conversations the community needs to have. I would go into more detail if the conversation was about the pros and cons of different policy enforcement options, but sadly I feel that a huge portion of the community is not yet at that level of discourse, and thus my burden is only to argue that important tradeoffs exist, saving debate over how to actually manage those tradeoffs for future discussion.

First thank you for fruitful post. Was very interesting to read.

In first place I disagree that stricter sanctions negatively affect us all. I do not care about sanctions if I play in accordance with rules but If I cheat I might consider what are sanctions.

We do not speak here about accidently mistakes or reasons that players did not foresee. In this case you have clear situation, game was exploited very hardly and sanction was very weak.


As we speak about real cash economy game there must be clear policy enforcement especially in practice and I do not see here need for build fail safe measures rather I do see need for clear written sanctions. As I mentioned before it is clear when something is exploited in this game.
In accordance with above, I do see that sanctions should be clearly prescribed as you have it in real life. For those who play regularly in accordance with rules, they don't care but for cheaters they might think twice before using exploit.

There will be always players who abuse system and especially in this case where no clear policy is made. e.g. if here they made profit 500K peds and they get only with 6 months ban that not adequate sanction. Also in real life if you rob bank and get only warning or ban for access to bank you will rob it again and again.

I do see potential about discussions about policy enforcement options but anyhow that another topic.

Best regards,

 

[Rocket192]

you guys are all going waaaayyyyy too deep into this.


there were rules, they were broken, knowingly, and the punishment was a slap on the wrist with zero remediation to harmed parties.


those handing down the punishments could care less because you're all degenerate gamblers and you're going to keep cycling ped and forget about this in 3 weeks.

 

[K_rupT]

Isn't the solution just very simple?

Just "boycot" the next mayhem.
If nobody spends a single ped on mayhem, MA will start to panic and will fix things.

But as long as you only complain and then keep on grinding, MA couldnt care less.

Also to add. Just don't involve any trading with or through the cheaters so that they would only be able to TT their items. Rendering them completely worthless

 

[Deleted member 58836]

I don't see cheaters as a community problem even though we're all affected by it.

MindArk doesn't have the manpower to either take more time in development than they already require and they also lack the manpower to police the platform.

I would not doubt if they only employ 1 person per position where an entire department would be needed.

They need more money to hire more people to do the things properly. They could trim the fat at the top and start cutting salaries and bonuses for the executives and roll those savings into development and support. Ya right. They could increase their share from our in game activities... YA RIGHT. They could hire me at a very fair market rate and give me the authority to fix things. Ya right. They could implement my previous idea and let us crowdfund these types of things...

Suggestion: - Allow Participants to Submit Project Proposals as Deeds on the Entropia Exchange

Hi! I have a lot of ideas and I just can't figure out where or how to properly communicate them. Perhaps this is me learning. Not long ago, I had a number of ideas about how to improve Entropia Universe and reached out wanting to touch base with someone at MindArk to float a few of them as they...

www.planetcalypsoforum.com

Cheers,
The Great Adventurer

 

[unufain8]

Reduce their stats to 0 like you did to Danny'O!

 

[mastermesh]

there were rules, they were broken, knowingly, and the punishment was a slap on the wrist with zero remediation to harmed parties.

as far as I remember the rules didn't say don't do this or that, but later it was found that a feature was really an exploit since it was not programmed correctly by Mindark, which is typcially how this type of thing happens. They should do better bug checking, but that'll never happen.

They are getting ready to implement a new game engine update so more bugs will be found before long that will make this look like nothing... Used to be something I'd get worked up about, but it's just not worth it. Same thing will happn in the future that happened in the past just on different scale.

 

[Alina]

[Stoica Alina Alina] killed [Yog exploiter] using a [Genesis Sparkbite, E.L.M Edition (L)]



Thats in lootable btw

 

[raulpon]

The sad part is, that you can't even leave the game. Sure you can stop depositing, but they made 99.999% sure, you can't cash out all the skill/time you invested.

Boycotting mayhems just makes it simpler for cheaters to win - they might actually not cheat and can win

 

[lethal]

looks like each new year has new cheats in instances...maybe the game should push the testing of their instances a bit more before publishing it ?
or maybe the game can start offering valuable compensation in PED to players that find and share how certain cheats work...

This actually is a real thing. I exposed an Easter Defense exploit a few years ago that led to a fix and me getting a 500 PED reward. The problem with this is that it's unrealistic for Mindark to pay out the same sort of sum that somebody can gain from consistently winning events just for exposing an exploit. For instance, these players made tens of thousands of dollars by using these exploits. It's simply not feasible for Mindark to offer that level of compensation for revealing exploits. I think 500 PED was pretty generous for something of that nature, but compared to hundreds of thousands of PED, of course there will be people who instead take the risk of breaking the rules and don't care about the rewards that Mindark can reasonably pay out. It can be very frustrating to deal with at times, especially as a player when you have strong suspicions that someone is cheating, but they are locked in a private instance, so you can't show how.

 

[wizz]

Even though your

idea sounds fantastic, there is a problem. Communication, coordination and orgenization. GL trying to garner the entire EU community to go along with this. Its nya impossible. Try getting 100 000 persons Worldwide, to go along with this. ( Just an example and arbituary number.) Cant be done man. May cost you a small fortune in advertizing alone. Or time, a very long time to get the message across. How does one make sure, each person, sticks to a plan? A huge plan. I dont hold it against you for thinking big though. I aplaud it ( Back to the drawing board.)

This could only work, if you have a list of all the Mayhem paticipants beforehand, who depo frequent and can convince them all, to go along. Difficult endeavour. Not so "simple" brother.

nah, it's not that difficult.
You overestimate the difficulty.

Why organize? It's just a personal matter.

If you don't like mayhem and it's abuse, just don't participate. Simple as that.
If you do participate, fine, but just don't complain then. Appearantly, you accept it. Otherwise you would have taken action.
We all know that mayhems are being cheated. And we all know MA's lame attitude towards it.
But still most still keep putting money in the machine, knowing the machine couldn't care less.

PCF is actually a quite funny place. Constant complaining here, but no one takes any action.
Everybody threatens to cash out, but nobody does.

Or is it the FOMO attitude?
You think that you HAVE to participate in mayhem?
Why? What will you miss in life if you don't?


Same as somebody suggested not to buy from the cheaters.
Nice idea, but as soon as somebody sees a bargain, they will buy, from a cheater or not.
And they will probably sell for more if they get a chance.

Money corrupts. Always has, always will.


I'm not saying this is all good, for sure it isn't!
But knowing it happens and MA does nothing about it, well, why keep throwing more money at MA?

Your loss. Not theirs.

 

[Spacejanitor]

.....

 

[wizz]

Im waaay ahead on this. Ever seen me do Mayhem? Nope? Bingo! Sold all my stuff and cashing out. Waiting on a buyer, to gather ESIs to empty my skills. You preaching to the choir bro, Well just one. Have you noticed how many big players have already phazed out? When did you see Fryer online recently? I havent. As people leave, others come in. Eventualy they too, will learn. The hard way.

Exactly!
As I said, it's personal.

You took action.
But then again, you're still here

I've rage quieted a dozen times already! But then, I'm also still here.
But I just make sure MA is not taking my money and stay far far away from mayhems!
I don't believe in MA's carrots anymore.

Btw, I shouldn't preach this because I actually need more players to participate in mayhems.
I always like the CLD returns during these events.

So, please don't boycott and keep in grinding!
Thanks! Much appreciated!

 

[Spacejanitor]

...........

 

[Failivrin]

Yea, lets all walk away and stop compete in mayhems exept for the cheaters. Then the cheaters can claim all loot 2.0 weapons, that everyone else wants for their daily casual none competetive grinding outside of Mayhems, and sell them for even more peds.

Everyone is affected by Mayhems one way or a nother, even those that dont participate.

 

[wizz]

Yea, lets all walk away and stop compete in mayhems exept for the cheaters. Then the cheaters can claim all loot 2.0 weapons, that everyone else wants for their daily casual none competetive grinding outside of Mayhems, and sell them for even more peds.

Everyone is affected by Mayhems one way or a nother, even those that dont participate.

Sure. That might happen

But I can guarantee you that if you ALL do that, MA WILL act. Because this will directly hurt their wallets.

This is the FOMO attitude that I spoke off.
You fear missing out a weapon that you think you need, which most will not ever win anyways even if they compete each time.

Knowing MA doesn't give a shit about who wins by doing what. what else are your options?

 

[TheAlchemist]

Maybe get rid of the competitions and have them in regular loot?
And maybe have some unique mob spawns instead and a bit of storyline?

Are Mayhems really that fun? I never saw the appeal.

 

[TheOneOmega]

First thank you for fruitful post. Was very interesting to read.

In first place I disagree that stricter sanctions negatively affect us all. I do not care about sanctions if I play in accordance with rules but If I cheat I might consider what are sanctions.

We do not speak here about accidently mistakes or reasons that players did not foresee. In this case you have clear situation, game was exploited very hardly and sanction was very weak.


As we speak about real cash economy game there must be clear policy enforcement especially in practice and I do not see here need for build fail safe measures rather I do see need for clear written sanctions. As I mentioned before it is clear when something is exploited in this game.
In accordance with above, I do see that sanctions should be clearly prescribed as you have it in real life. For those who play regularly in accordance with rules, they don't care but for cheaters they might think twice before using exploit.

There will be always players who abuse system and especially in this case where no clear policy is made. e.g. if here they made profit 500K peds and they get only with 6 months ban that not adequate sanction. Also in real life if you rob bank and get only warning or ban for access to bank you will rob it again and again.

I do see potential about discussions about policy enforcement options but anyhow that another topic.

Best regards,

Aye, always happy to respectfully iron out a productive disagreement.

I would respond by cautioning that some of your statements gloss over complex policy enforcement challenges. For example, you say that "we do not speak here about accidently mistakes or reasons that players did not foresee," but if we do not speak about these then the thread is a nonstarter. The thread creator both loads assumptions of intentionality into his/her terminology choices ("cheaters," "stole," "certain avatars were doing X so they could Y," etc.) and ties his/her assertions to specific instances of putative infraction (so moving to an abstract discussion bound by stipulation to the intentional case would be a retreat). Thus the thread creator, or any volunteering proxy, accepts a burden of proof to establish intent. This burden might often be achievable given access to all of MindArk's resources (an avatar's full public and private chat logs, the ability to interactively communicate with the avatar during investigation, a window into the nuts and bolts of the bugged code, etc.), but I don't envy it for entities without such means.

Even more idealistically, the thread creator seems to treat intentionality as a property of a bug, rather than as a property of an individual's utilization of that bug, apparently implying that all individuals involved act with identical motive. This might occasionally work for bugs with unusually complicated execution, but if the bug is something as simple as "spawn a Yog while in an instance," player intent is going to be all over the map. Some individuals will have spawned the Yog to intentionally gain an unfair advantage in the event, some to gain an advantage they perceived as fair, some because they saw a Twitch streamer using a Yog or their friend told them they should without an understanding of the mechanical reason, some by unlikely coincidence, and so forth. The best information an improperly-equipped forum community could even hope to construct is a probability distribution of player intent with regard to a given bug, but this is both insufficient to prescribe appropriate penalties to individuals, and likely based on dubious guesswork rather than being data driven in any sense.

As for the notion that increasingly aggressive penalty issuance poses no risk to honest players, I have to wonder how you think policy enforcement actually plays out in practice. I think you'll find it obvious upon further reflection that avatars are never presented to MindArk labeled "good guy" or "bad guy;" MindArk has to gather as much information about a situation as they possibly can, and make judgments as to whether they are convinced beyond some predefined likelihood standard that an infraction(s) has occurred, whether they are convinced beyond some predefined likelihood standard that any discovered infraction(s) were committed intentionally, to what extent it is reasonable to expect an honest player to have engaged in the behavior in question (i.e., "everyone else was doing it" doesn't excuse the infraction but in some circumstances might be a mitigating factor), the consequences any committed infraction(s) has produced or was likely to produce, etc. It is a matter of collectively judging the quality and content of the information they can obtain, and it is a very general truth that human judgment is inherently subject to occasional error. Furthermore, analogies from domains as widely varied as radar design, predator-prey modeling, airport security, and medicine confirm that while "in an ideal world, we want to ensure that whatever test we're using to measure something has both a low false positive and low false negative rate, so that it's maximally accurate...in reality that can be very hard to do; often there's a direct tradeoff between these two things...so depending on the situation, we typically prefer to maximize one over the other, depending on which outcome is worse." Because of this inexorable tradeoff between false positive and false negative investigation outcomes, if we agree even with Benjamin Franklin's formulation that "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer," and that's still more black swan risk than I suspect most honest players desire given their time and possibly-monetary investment into Entropia, I suspect there are wiser courses of actions than posting the kind of cookie cutter, anger-baiting rhetoric we see in this thread, consisting not of arguments over how to best manage the tradeoffs between pros and cons of different policy enforcement strategies, but of a gross misframing of the relevant tradeoffs in an attempt to make opposing perspectives appear optically indefensible. This is how an incredibly complex subject gets bastardized into a false dichotomy between MindArk taking maximal possible punitive action and their being "too lazy" or "too greedy" to do so.

I also reserve a great deal of skepticism over the bank robbery analogy. By definition, robbery involves threat of force, which raises concerns not even in the ballpark of multiplayer game infraction. In fact when we remove this element and shift the analogy to white collar theft, the data are not clear that formal penalty issuance even provides a significant deterrent effect. Moreover, in areas of criminology where there is such a deterrent effect, it is often not a nice, monotonically increasing function of punishment severity. Finally, the value proposition of storing wealth in Entropia is a lot different than the value proposition of storing wealth in a bank. A bank is utilized for secure storage or risk-modified access to financial markets. Entropia is a giant sort-of-casino-like-but-not-really black box, where players input time and/or money, and receive fun and/or some other amount of money as output. It certainly is some sort of violation of their rights if part of that black box algorithm involves cheating, but it is more qualitatively similar to an opponent cheating you out of a prize by making an illegal play in a Magic the Gathering tournament than it is to transferring money out of your bank account.

I could probably double or triple the number of points I've raised here, but everyone would tl;dr. Hopefully this is enough to at least get people thinking about the higher order effects of policy enforcement decisions, and maybe come to better, more nuanced conclusions.

 

[Raffaele Meiers]

You talk abpout robbery, why it is good to let cheaters go unhamed and so on.
The fact is that certain people shared their pet with this unwanted buff which when not bugged would be of no use in the mayhem instances.

If we stay with your real live robbery or better say stealing we have a person who has items to break into a house in his posession, he shared with his buddys the information how to circumvent the security system. He exchanged the item to circumvent the system with his buddys. He took the item with him even though he does not need it for his normal profession. The police found the stolen goods in his posession and he was every time at the place of the stealing when it happend. They even found the fingerprints from him at the location. His explanation is that he did not knew that stealing when the security system is flawed is forbidden.
This translates to persons using the pet with the unwanted buffs in a instance where the pet, if not bugged, would be of no usage, when they finished their run they gave the pet to a friend to do the same then received it back to continue using it and so on.

This is like a person where the police finds, while controling their car, items used in breaking into houses, the GPS showed that they where allways at the locations where the stealing was happening with the items to break into houses active, they even have the stolen items in their possesion and talked to their friends how to use it. When the police catched them they reasoned that why would they sell a item that next to its intended usage can also be used to do illegal things. In real live if someone uses a knife to hurt someone else he can not say it is the fault of the person that produced the knive so I'm not guilty of using it not in the intended way, slice a piece of bread, and should go unharmed.

In real live the person would be guilty, not because they catched thim red handed but because of the chain of circumstantial evidence.

ignorance of law excuses no one

Ignorantia juris non excusat or ignorantia legis neminem excusat is a legal principle holding that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely by being unaware of its content.

 

[Alina]

Rick u are wrong about returns, on your stream u said "eff doesnt matter". Well it does for me it made a difference from 95 or 98% return

 

[tBANNA]

Rick u are wrong about returns, on your stream u said "eff doesnt matter". Well it does for me it made a difference from 95 or 98% return

and for me from 98 to 99.5

 

[Orion]

In real live the person would be guilty, not because they catched thim red handed but because of the chain of circumstantial evidence.

In a free democracy under the law, you would be right.
But what makes you think transparent western democratic rules would be in effect here?

PE is ruled by MA.
Per definition PE is an autocracy.

Best real life match would probably be Russia:

Where the autocrats protect their buddies.
Where the "government" cares a shit for what the population on the street wants or needs, as long as they pay taxes.
Where the media is "moderated".
Where criticism, dangerous for the system, gets banned.
Where... Extend the list at your will.

Can you spot the pattern?

 

[TheOneOmega]

You talk abpout robbery, why it is good to let cheaters go unhamed and so on.
The fact is that certain people shared their pet with this unwanted buff which when not bugged would be of no use in the mayhem instances.

If we stay with your real live robbery or better say stealing we have a person who has items to break into a house in his posession, he shared with his buddys the information how to circumvent the security system. He exchanged the item to circumvent the system with his buddys. He took the item with him even though he does not need it for his normal profession. The police found the stolen goods in his posession and he was every time at the place of the stealing when it happend. They even found the fingerprints from him at the location. His explanation is that he did not knew that stealing when the security system is flawed is forbidden.
This translates to persons using the pet with the unwanted buffs in a instance where the pet, if not bugged, would be of no usage, when they finished their run they gave the pet to a friend to do the same then received it back to continue using it and so on.

This is like a person where the police finds, while controling their car, items used in breaking into houses, the GPS showed that they where allways at the locations where the stealing was happening with the items to break into houses active, they even have the stolen items in their possesion and talked to their friends how to use it. When the police catched them they reasoned that why would they sell a item that next to its intended usage can also be used to do illegal things. In real live if someone uses a knife to hurt someone else he can not say it is the fault of the person that produced the knive so I'm not guilty of using it not in the intended way, slice a piece of bread, and should go unharmed.

In real live the person would be guilty, not because they catched thim red handed but because of the chain of circumstantial evidence.

ignorance of law excuses no one

Ignorantia juris non excusat or ignorantia legis neminem excusat is a legal principle holding that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely by being unaware of its content.

I'm growing increasingly skeptical over these types of legal analogies, partially because real world legal systems have some pretty disgusting track records for punishing the innocent (so while they may be doing the best they can given their scope, I think localized policy enforcement can do much better), and partially because the extreme conditions which people are introducing attempting to make their analogies strong are making them disanalogous instead. For most blue collar crime (breaking and entering, stabbing, etc.), it is often true that we can infer intent from the action itself. For most white collar crime, intentions are more complex and require careful, case-by-case investigation.

I don't deny that circumstantial evidence can be sufficient to determine guilt, and even intent. I only maintain that the circumstantial evidence presented by forum mobs tends to be paper thin, leagues short of what is needed for responsible and sound policy enforcement. Take the "evidence" that it would be useless to spawn a Yog in an instance if there was no bug; no one has claimed that the spawning of Yogs is independent of the bug, only that ascribing intent to gain an unfair advantage to any individual without actually communicating with them or conducting the appropriate investigation is far too hasty. For many individuals, there may be a less direct causal chain between the two, i.e., the existence of the bug causes Player A to cheat by intentionally using a Yog to gain an unfair advantage, then Player A tells Player B to use a Yog, and Player B spawns the Yog without understanding why. You just can't make blanket assumptions about the causal link between the bug and its use prima facie. You have to actually investigate.

 

[Raffaele Meiers]

For many individuals, there may be a less direct causal chain between the two, i.e., the existence of the bug causes Player A to cheat by intentionally using a Yog to gain an unfair advantage, then Player A tells Player B to use a Yog, and Player B spawns the Yog without understanding why. You just can't make blanket assumptions about the causal link between the bug and its use prima facie. You have to actually investigate.

You talk like you are a laywer who defends his client by saying "your honor this person is so stupid do you really think he could have noticed this while doing the instance?"

The fact is that cheaters are not stupid, sadly, they are most of the time clever otherwise they would not go out to find this cheats in the first place.
They only like to get to their target faster if it involves using illegal shortcuts to gain their rewards they happily take them and share them with the buddys who do the same likewise.
The certainly also noticed that because of the Yog the mobs who reached them befor are now dead befor they reched them or had much less HP's left.
About investigation, MA certainly has a logfile of all private trades or when a avatar entered a instance so they certainly could trace the swapping of pets f.x.

Like Al Capone etc. this typ of persons most of the time have the best laywers money can buy to use any loophole they can to wiggle out of it. Maybe that happend here too and MA decided to take the fire as they already have taken many times befor for other things they failed big time over the years this Service exists.

 

[TheOneOmega]

You talk like you are a laywer who defends his client by saying "your honor this person is so stupid do you really think he could have noticed this while doing the instance?"

The fact is that cheaters are not stupid, sadly, they are most of the time clever otherwise they would not go out to find this cheats in the first place.
They only like to get to their target faster if it involves using illegal shortcuts to gain their rewards they happily take them and share them with the buddys who do the same likewise.
The certainly also noticed that because of the Yog the mobs who reached them befor are now dead befor they reched them or had much less HP's left.
About investigation, MA certainly has a logfile of all private trades or when a avatar entered a instance so they certainly could trace the swapping of pets f.x.

Like Al Capone etc. this typ of persons most of the time have the best laywers money can buy to use any loophole they can to wiggle out of it. Maybe that happend here too and MA decided to take the fire as they already have taken many times befor for other things they failed big time over the years this Service exists.

I guess I just believe in due process, however it is that might be fleshed out in the context of game policy enforcement. You seem to decide on a person's unquestionable guilt from the first moment of suspicion, and judge the investigatory process based on whether it conforms to your initial verdict, rather than reducing confidence in your initial verdict based on the results of the investigation. This strikes me as arrogant and error-prone. That putative cheaters are "most of the time clever" rather than being in any flavor of unfortunate circumstance is irrelevant, if it is even true (I think you just made it up). We don't need (and can't make much use of) a probability distribution of aggregated player intent for a given bug to prescribe appropriate penalties to individuals; we need to be able to ascertain that individual's intent. And each individual does not operate with the same intent. People are complex, so the investigatory process needs to be robust enough to account for that complexity. A pet swapping log could be a small part of the process. Private and private chat logs, interactive communication with the suspect, analysis of the bug details, history of the avatar's past infractions, and much more would be involved also.

 

[Granny Rowan]

I have watched this thread for some time, and would ask this.
If a person is caught cheating whether in an instance of some other way in game, then the investigation surely determines the severity of the 'crime', and issues a sentence in accordance with that.
Therefore not all persons would get the same sentence. Some may simply lose the ill gotten gains, and get banned from instances for say 1 year. others may get full game ban for a specified duration, and only the very worst get a complete ban.
It is not in MAs interest to perma-ban except where persons has repeatedly offended and perhaps had previous bans and not learned from that.

Some years ago certain players were using exploits in space, they were duly warned, but persisted. They were banned for a day, a week then 6 months, only after they went out of their way to bad mouth MA and the game was one of them perma-banned. Most gave up and revised their behaviours after only the 1 week ban. Should MA have perma-banned them all.. no better to educate.
I know of other cases where there was financial impropriety, again there was bans of various lengths, removal of that which they gained, in some cases in effect a fine levied also.

Now according to some f you here, all persons that scam, cheat, exploit should be perma-banned, regardless of whether they are a first time offender, minor offender or the Al Capone of EU.
Worst of all you seem to feel that there is no such thing as return to game once they are 'time served'.
That's a lot like saying all thieves whether they steal a chocolate bar at age of 6 or have robbed banks repeatedly for years should be locked up and throw away the key.
We don't know the circumstances of every case, we don't know how MA reached their sentence, we don't even know what the actual offence was in detail, let alone the severity of the sentence, we can only guess.
Assumptions based on guesswork are the worst kind of arrogance as they are made by people who believe that they know more than those that investigated.
Please don't become the ASS in assumption.
If you don't trust MA to do a proper job, then that opinion is yours and yours alone, and you have the right to walk away as if you can't trust MA, then frankly why are you here ?
But at least show some humanity and where a person has paid their 'fine' served their ban, then lets hope they learned and let them try to show they have no intention of repeat offending.
we are players in a game not a kangaroo court