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“Marketplace Heist” Response


NQ-Naerais

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Here are my 2 cents:

 

We can all find excuses and exceptions to try to justify this, but at the end, the abusers knew they were destroying an important admin construct. They knew.

 

We have seen ppl testing the limits of NQ for months now. We have seen NQ giving a final warning to those ppl testing the limits. 

 

Should it be a perma ban? Maybe not. But someone had to be the example for players to understand that this is beta. Bugs and exploits are still common and beta testers need to know the boundaries of what they can and should be doing. 

 

 

Want to be on the safe side? Dont overexploit a bug.... 

Capture a recording of a small use of the exploit, upload it to YouTube, set it as "not listed" and open a support ticket with it. 

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3 minutes ago, joaocordeiro said:

an important admin construct.

It was only so 'important' because of dev incompetence. Nothing more.

 

In a sanely designed game, destroying a market would've had no effect on the market orders, and replacing it and getting it functional again would take maybe 5 to 10 minutes at most.

 

Instead, the devs decided to tie the market orders to the existence of certain elements in the market, and we have this snafu.

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2 minutes ago, Emptiness said:

It was only so 'important' because of dev incompetence. Nothing more.

 

In a sanely designed game, destroying a market would've had no effect on the market orders, and replacing it and getting it functional again would take maybe 5 to 10 minutes at most.

 

Instead, the devs decided to tie the market orders to the existence of certain elements in the market, and we have this snafu.

I mean, It was the car owners incompetence.  He left the keys in his car and the car running as he went into the gas station.  If he would have taken his keys with him and locked his car I wouldnt have stolen his car.

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2 minutes ago, JohnnyTazer said:

I mean, It was the car owners incompetence.  He left the keys in his car and the car running as he went into the gas station.  If he would have taken his keys with him and locked his car I wouldnt have stolen his car.

That IRL scenario you mention has zero relevance for what happened in the game.

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1 minute ago, Emptiness said:

That IRL scenario you mention has zero relevance for what happened in the game.

It does. They knew they were doing something against terms. Even put a sign up that said "pls no ban".  That means if you find a bug/exploit/anything you REPORT it, not abuse it for gain.  Pretty fucking simple for people who have a working brain.  

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So when the issues players have been experiencing starts hitting the devs they cry about it?

How about fixing the issues and not just ban people for it?


(if you want to unsubscribe, search for your original sign up email and hit unsubscribe.)

 

Good bye and grow up. I'm going back to Eve online.

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5 minutes ago, bragnar said:

So when the issues players have been experiencing starts hitting the devs they cry about it?

How about fixing the issues and not just ban people for it?


(if you want to unsubscribe, search for your original sign up email and hit unsubscribe.)

 

Good bye and grow up. I'm going back to Eve online.

I come from 10 years of EvE online but its funny acting like eve is any better (its not) in regards to devs and decisions.  One of my friends regularly RMT's and the devs never ban him because he spends so much money per month on plex.  Ive also personally reported a carebare miner we ganked for calling me the N-Word in local.  We saw him still mining weeks later.  So ya, this is the hill you die on. 

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2 minutes ago, bragnar said:

So when the issues players have been experiencing starts hitting the devs they cry about it?

How about fixing the issues and not just ban people for it?

They are not "just banning ppl for it" 

They banned ppl and programmers are looking for away to fix it. 

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2 minutes ago, Emptiness said:

You know that was intended to be silly, right?

 

Regardless. The dev response was completely disproportionate. 

You do realize, even if it was intended to be silly, putting "pls no ban" has no context unless what they are doing could possibly lead to a ban right? right? you do understand that right?  

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8 minutes ago, Emptiness said:

Regardless. The dev response was completely disproportionate. 

We dont know the full context. 

 

In how many previous explois have those same players participated? 

 

Have all of them been banned? If not, what was the criteria? 

 

All we have seen was NQ saying they have seen 100% intention againt rules and reacted, and some ppl saying "poor me, im banned" 

But does that count as context? 

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i think banning players over delvelopment problems and issues should be dealt with by a roll back of the server not banning players .

what ever grief you see it as . go to war with them . you have a base .

 

unless they directly interfered with the game by using a external program no players should be banned 

 

Like Sony  says to its developers . the problems lie within your game code ! FIix your code  not the players . you build the world around the players not the other away around .. . what does raise a eyebrow even more than

 

many players had stuff stolen from RDMS . . . someone doing something  stupid  ----------------------------------it was only a matter of time

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Quite a few people have attempted to compare this marketplace destruction to real life examples, but none have seemed very relevant.

 

Allow me to provide one of my own.

 

Redundancy as a form of Disaster Mitigation.

 

Imagine that you work for a well known bank situated near the bank of a river that is known for 100 year floods. Everything goes as normal until one day, a rainstorm of unprecedented size causes the river to swell considerably beyond its normal size, flooding the nearby town and destroying all of the computers in the bank.

 

But surely, you think, the bank was not where all the banking data was stored? Surely there were remote servers and multiple offsite redundant backups?

 

Alas, the situation is far more grave. The bank's directors in their naivety thought that such a disaster could never occur, and they had no backups at all. All transaction and account histories were lost.

  

8 minutes ago, Jackblackplays said:

dealt with by a roll back of the server

Rollbacks of a server imply that backups are kept. I'm not sure NQ does. See the example described in this post.

 

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So, while I agree that some kind of reaction was necessary, a perma-ban takes it much too far, IMO. Especially as this is a beta and similar problems have been reported for a long time now, with no reaction other than "set up RDMS right".

The way this whole mess was handled by NQ so far (among some other things) shows me that NQ seems to totally lack experience and understanding when it comes to MMOs, how to deal with your testers (yes, we are testers until the game is officially released) and especially how to deal with the black sheeps in your community. Usually you only jump straight to a perma-ban for really grave misuse, and since this is a beta, only something like intentionally messing with the game database and therefore affecting all players (or something along that line) should end in a perma-ban.

 

So, let's do a quick check:

  • Did those betatesters something wrong? YES
  • Did they know it was not right? YES
  • Was it some kind of hack or bugusing? Apparently NO, pressing B and being able to edit looks, smells, and feels like bad RDMS
  • Was a reaction warranted? Debatable, thanks to RDMS, but most likely YES
  • Did messing around with the marketplace elements lead to unintended problems (= orders lost)? YES, but neither could those betatesters have known this nor should messing around have led to these problems. So in reality another bug/problem of the game has been found and will hopefully be fixed.
  • Did they get some kind of warning for other bad behavior before? NO (as no one got something like that so far)
  • Does all of the above considered warrant a perma-ban? NO

In my opinion, this was handled in the worst possible manner and I can say that as a consequence, I will leave the game for now after my paid time has run out, as I currently have no more confidence in the game (this topic is just a part of it, but an important part). I have seen a lot of beta tests over the years, I have seen a lot of launches and I am a developer myself (although not a game developer), so I see where all of this is going. I may come back in some months to see if I was wrong, but as it is right now, I don't think I am.

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4 minutes ago, Sephiroth000 said:

Did messing around with the marketplace elements lead to unintended problems (= orders lost)? YES, but neither could those betatesters have known this nor should messing around have led to these problems. So in reality another bug/problem of the game has been found and will hopefully be fixed.

I'd like your post for this, but it seems I have no more that I can give, for now.

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13 hours ago, NQ-Naerais said:

 

"it appears to be an issue that was created when we moved the markets, making it editable by players. 

 

The intention behind this destruction is very clear to us. The players involved did not report this bug to us

 

Let us be clear, we will not tolerate this kind of behaviour during any phase of the development of Dual Universe."

Please be honest with us here - was this something they did by pressing B due to bad RDMS, or did they do something else to cause a glitch (we don't need to know what)?

 

Right now it looks to many observers that you have said theft through bad RDMS is fine, not an exploit, and you can't/won't get involved in that, but when these players did exactly that they should have known that you (NQ) did not intend for them to be able to steal a game asset or be annoyed because you have changed the rules on them. 

 

Well, guess what, all those players who had constructs stolen didn't intend for them to get stolen either.

 

Your clause about reporting and not abusing bug exploits has been written into game rules since anti-cheat was published August 27th, but you have not even banned anyone (to my knowledge) that was involved in bug related ship-jacking, or base-jacking. 

 

You have not even responded to my question about why a Youtuber is telling people on his channel that NQ have told him it's ok to ignore one of the anti-cheat rules forbidding simultaneous two-boxing. 

 

If you want testers to stay and have any respect for your endeavours, you need to be consistent, not playing favourites at the expense of paying testers.

 

I love what you're trying to achieve here, but right now, you're Nero, not Neo, fiddling while Rome burns, not saving anyone.   

13 hours ago, NQ-Naerais said:

 

 

 

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NQ only communicates through the media of third party interviews and banhammer.

 

Wish t'weren't so...

 

Put me in the "punish them yes, this punishment no" gang.

 

Also put me in the "nobody is going to do or try anything tricksy or ingenious for fear of banning" gang.

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Just remember that they alledgedly reported it (if it was discord in a dm to NQ thats a bad excuse, because discord rules clearly states dms get ignored) 

This means they knew it wasnt intended, why report otherwise? 

 

I doubt NQ permad solely based on the rulebreak. Im betting they looked at chat logs too. And in my mind it goes: Hey org, I found out market can be modified, yall wanna come over and mess with it? Maybe someone says it might lead to ban / problems, someone else says, who cares, they never punished anyways, lets do it. 

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At the end of the day someone is ALWAYS going to do this if you improperly set up rdms. This is the internet, this is why we have mechanics to prevent this. You acknowledge this by saying you expect and allow it for random player constructs "Not every player has your best interest at heart."  No matter how much time they spend it's 'well they didn't set up rdms properly, too bad so sad'. Which I'm fine with personally, if you mess up your permissions it's highly likely someone will come by and rob it. You have to own your mistake, learn and move on.

 

Multiple people seemed to take part over a period of time, some may have taken a few terminals and left the rest. More people came and took more pointless things. Even the person who took the last terminal likely had no clue that it would completely wipe the market from existence. If someone had modified their client in order to do this, sure permanently ban them. In this case some sort of suspension and potential inconvenience at non-player owned markets in the distant future would be more reasonable. Also if this was to happen to a player owned market in the future, I'm sure both parties would be getting a fairly equal amount of hate from anyone who lost resources. 

 

Anyway I'm not sure if player-markets are meant to be robbed as a mechanic, if so the terminals should at least give the thief the current market inventory as opposed to just wiping everything. Preferably (as that would be extremely op), markets should save data, transport unsold goods to the nearest market for pickup by players. Or some sort of mail system in the unlikely event, or just leave a ghost terminal with access to market container after the last terminal has been stolen. 

Also if this is a huge issue, structures placed by any staff should always have a flag that overrides rdms and disallows any player from ever picking it up/modifying the construct, why take the risk. A patch for rdms could break something that allows everything to be open season and markets have the most foot traffic. Rdms issues are bound to happen to anyone as we've seen.

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What I have enjoyed most about this is the tears and whining coming from the kind of people who get off on ruining the game for others but can't deal with it themselves.

 

That said, NQ should definitely be more consistent in banning these asshats. 

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I'm surprised by the amount of ppl saying NQ have done the wrong thing in banning the players in question. I for one think they have done the right thing. The idea of the beta is to play the game and help to iron out any bugs. Not to find a bug then abuse it for their own personal gain!

 

Well done NQ, totally the right course of action taken!

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5 minutes ago, Lookdaddy said:

I'm surprised by the amount of ppl saying NQ have done the wrong thing in banning the players in question. I for one think they have done the right thing. The idea of the beta is to play the game and help to iron out any bugs. Not to find a bug then abuse it for their own personal gain!

 

Well done NQ, totally the right course of action taken!

NQ probably makes the trains run on time.

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That the EULA/TOS is written poorly is true but the biggest problem here is that NQ is inadequately staffed (either in numbers or in quality) to handle a live service game like DU.

 

The total lack of engagement on the forums aside, the "No Ping" policy on Discord is understandable but players should be able to send DMs to NQ staff and expect them to be read in a timely fashion even if by default one should not DM NQ staff. You can set yourself to "do not disturb" if you do not want to be and that should show anyone that DMing that person may fall on deaf ears. Rule #1 for a professional application of a tool like Discord is you use the notification system both ways as it is provided.

 

The players who did this certainly are accountable for their actions and should "suffer" consequences buit NQ is pretty much bypassing their own mistakes and ignorance as when someone DMs you about an issue like this, such is the case here, you either act on it or forward it to someone who can. Even when DM is a no go, this was clearly an exception to the rule.

 

Personally, and recognizing it is their prerogative to handle their business as they see fit, I dislike the overall managing and moderating style NQ uses and for the places I worked, QA of these interactions would generally lead to a fail or a low score due to a lack of empathy, politeness, friendliness and general customer focused approach. Obviously rules need to be set and enforced, but NQ is not in a position to gain the impression of a knee jerk insecure and overly harsh company towards their user base.

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