they caught it pretty early in the game, relatively speaking. i remember when eve online had a duplicating item exploit that fueled the most powerful of alliances. it was a good day when they were caught, but it was too late for the money they generated was already too embedded in the economic system to be removed.

while some damage has been done to the economy with slicing prenerf, and this exploit, given that it's still very early in the game, i think we can recover.

I am debating quitting now... I really enjoyed the game so far; however, making money and merching has always been my favorite part of any game. I played Runescape and merched for years but i quit that game too when people got money unfairly. I am not going to spend hours and hours learning how to buy and sell items efficiently when such a leak has already occurred. SWTOR is now a bad game for merchers and it isn't recoverable. I have played for 3 weeks and dedicated much of my vacation to SWTOR/merching and I hear that people have 500 million gold from cheating? I would never be able to catch up unless i dedicate my life to my mom's basement for an entire year... and if i did i would just be called a cheater.

I wanted to start a fresh game where no one was super rich and become a rich player through legitimate means. That is no longer possible. **** YOU cheaters for ruining a great game.. Seriously **** you.

Economy exploits, gold farming, real world for ingame currency peddling, character sales, these are all *proven* MMO killers with ample cases and learnings go go by. In Everquest, character sales and currency selling spiraled out of control as people would simply power level characters up (by camping everything in sight so nobody else could ever complete quests) and then sell them on Ebay.

Eventually you couldn't even compelete the higher level stuff because half your group would be people controlling epic level characters with absolutely no clue what they were doing - they just dropped 30-50 bucks on Ebay and passed everyone behind.

Gold farming/selling in WoW, as many of us know, crushed any usefulness in an already limited crafting system, dumbed down any shot in hell at role playing because half the players in a zone were bots, and the other half only spoke Chinese.

Eve Online ended up having to cave to currency farming and selling issues, much to the dismay of the lions share of players - but with a completely player driven economy, they faced the collapse of the entire game if they didn't get into the business of legalizing the sale of ISK.

I can go on, and on, and on. It is not an easy situation for any company to handle, not even Bioware who I have to say has done an amazing job out of the gate with this game.

Ultimately, when in game economies fail, systems that rely on them fail. The value of activities is diminished, and this effects core gaming theories - if you don't have to work to get something, it isn't valuable once you attain it.

I'm lucky in a sense that i do not have enough time to play at a level where i would be affected by this problem. . .

I used to enjoy controlling item markets on other various MMOs, this was rather time consuming though. It was not an issue when i was in high school as i had plenty of time.

Now that i have graduated college and work a full time job, I have enough time to pvp a bit, quest a bit, craft a bit, and run 1-2 instances per day.

If i was still trying to maintain a stranglehold on various items in the aution house, i would be concerned as i would not be getting the prices i believe i deserved for my wares. As i mentioned before, however, i do not have the time, or really care, to be competitive in the market any more. I have been more than able to equipe my character with sufficient items, and credits, to be competitive with my peers.

So in summation; Bioware, Fix the problem (as im sure you are/have) and i got no problem with you. let the morons ruin their experience with the game by manufacturing credits, sounds like something a board 13 year old would do anyway, they got the time and want afterall. this is an expoit that would have never caught my eye, as i prefer to earn my way in MMOs, thats what makes the fun for me.

Great work Bioware. As always i think your doing a wonderful job on a new MMO, cant wait to see what the future holds for this game.

Where does it say the exploiters have been taken care off?

They cannot discuss actions they take against players accounts. They would be violating their own privacy agreement.

I hope they have a method of reversing the illegit credits and punishing the most egregious abusers.

*edit: Allison posted while I was writing my post. Thanks for looking into this.

We're aware of your concerns regarding this issue, and are conducting a full investigation of the impact. Please rest assured that anyone found to be in violation of our Terms of Service will have appropriate action taken against them. We will provide more information as it becomes available. Thank you!

Awesome BW. You guys are the greatest company ever! Have a happy sun-shiney day!

Your logic doesn't belong here

Quiet, you!

The exploit spoken of allowed people (using vendors/stacks) to earn unlimited amounts of credits at stupidly-fast rates. Notice an influx of super-speeders on your server, yet?

*Edit* I absolutely did not know about the exploit until I just read about it on Reddit a moment ago ... I didn't earn a penny, but all those fools need to be banned/credits revoked.

The exploit spoken of allowed people (using vendors/stacks) to earn unlimited amounts of credits at stupidly-fast rates. Notice an influx of super-speeders on your server, yet?

Hmmm.. now that you mention in.. YES!

If they exploited it, erase their characters and throw a ban their way.

As for the economy, lets give Bioware some time to investigate. It may have cause greater problems already but judge the response when it comes; don't hypothesise about the potential implications.

In my humble opinion, many people (me included), upon realising inequity of this "little" problem, will be "in thought", to say the least.

When we talking about some kind of PVP exploiting, or even little PVE exploiting (like recent /getdown bug), this is tolerable, because "main stream" of players is unaffected. But when we talking about MMORPG server's economy, this poses a very huge threat to all its inhabitants, because it is bread and butter of the game. Those who think otherwise may want to ignore this post and do something else instead.

So you're saying that the major part of gameplay, PvE and PvP are not the bread and butter of the game? I play the game to enjoy the story and combat not to play the AH. PvP and especially PvE are the bread and butter of the game, not the auction house. The auction house is just there to support the other aspects of gameplay. Therefor, I'd much rather see them fix the things that hurt the real gameplay rather than waste time worrying about an economy that is just getting started. A few players with a ridiculous amount of money in the hatchling stage of the game isn't going to kill the market. Not as long as Bioware fixes the problems to prevent future exploits, which they have. I hope they do something to penalize the players who took advantage, but I won't lose any sleep over it if they don't.

Very simple....develope a system that checks timed played on every charactor. Have a money amount attributed to everything, and I do mean everything.

Then place a ceiling and remove everything that goes over that ceiling....yes some may lose some unfairly if their entire existance while playing was earning money fairly, but it would save the economy for a hell of a lot more.

or we could RL string up the cheaters and let them rot in the sun as an example to gamers everywhere.

Yes but you have to agree, being in IT yourself (Mine is Info Sec), BW, more likely than not, has everything stored on Oracle/Juniper size databases. A db admin can easily go in and via SQL queries manipulate the tables and see who was doing what when. But they can't even fix the simplest of bugs or glitches - I have never seen such incompetency...

That was what I was getting at...but admittedly, I was sugar coating. I've found it's best to go easy on other IT teams when you don't know the scope of what is going on and what situation they are working in.

Like I was saying, it would take me no time slap a procedure, Oracle Job, and audit and log table into the system but they may have some rigid process that prevents such things from happening quickly. Or they could be so over tasked with other things that doing this has fell down on the list of important things to do. Then again, I can't help but think that is overly generous.

select a.char_id, credit_count, server_name

from some_credit_table a inner join character_table b on a.char_id = b.char_id

where credit_count > round(sysdate - char_create_date) * 10000

order by credit_count, server_name

...one would think. Of course you have to come up with a good number for the "where" clause based on what you think a player could accumulate but that should be easy as exploiters are going to blow away any theoretical max that you can come up with based on legit play.

/I love hunting down data just a bit too much..

We're aware of your concerns regarding this issue, and are conducting a full investigation of the impact. Please rest assured that anyone found to be in violation of our Terms of Service will have appropriate action taken against them. We will provide more information as it becomes available. Thank you!

hopefully a proper announcement is made on the website when the offendors have been punished,

hopefully a proper announcement is made on the website when the offendors have been punished,

Maybe they will have a ceremony on Tatooine where their characters are tossed into the Sarlacc pit.

Maybe they will have a ceremony on Tatooine where their characters are tossed into the Sarlacc pit.

awesome, just plain awesome!

Bioware has the technology to find all the illegal credits, and remove the people responsible.

I hope they do that, and remove all of the tainted currency. If there are people with multiple hundreds of millions or billions of credits at this stage of the game, the economy will never be functional.

Ban them. Remove the money. Try to keep a better eye on a single person accumulating a few hundred million over an impossibly short period of time.