Item Stack Resale Exploit

While Bioware can of course issue perm bans, that is a really harsh step that has to be tempered against two points:

1. It is a game, with pretend money
2. These are paying customers

Maybe the most extreme cases should get it, but most should not. Perhaps the top 5% of the abusers, the ones who did it for hours at a time, for weeks on end.

3 months? You might as well ban them, the odds of them coming back after that time are thin and you just have a hanging chad out there of a pissed off customer who has every reason to rant about it.

14 days is probably the longest you can suspend someone without banning them outright. Too much longer and it becomes an ongoing issue.

That strikes me as a reasonable solution, for the majority of people who would have done this, along with removing the items gained.

You're giving them WAY too much credit, they had plenty of time to nerf companions, then rebuff companions in that time, and they made that change in 1 week after massive player feedback.

It doesn't take remotely close to 6 weeks to patch this.

Only people who did benefit from this, and I do mean benefit, since affection, gear and trinkets I don't even consider as gain as all are bound to the system that is running them, are gold sellers. I canno't imagine amount of credits that went out from the game to them to re-sell them back for real life money. You know money that you spend for subscription for this game, not some virtual affection of your "ZOMG NOW AWESOMELY FIXED COMPANIONS!!!1", or statue that will stand in your stronghold.

That is the real issue about the exploit. People got vendored gear! Big deal, that gear is crap to start with. People gained comp affection! Big deal, now they craft you wont be able to sell them your overpriced GTN trinkets. What really matters is that probably unimaginable amount of money left the game only to be re-sold back to plebs that are willing to dish out 50$ for 20 mil ingame currency. That is the problem here. For some reason, people preaching here for bans and witchcraft hunt, fail to realize that impact on some random dude's comp being level 50 is insignificant to the fact that you will have cash flow in from third party directly into the game.

Either, way, its Temple chair, Nefra bug, Cora bug, Illum power leveling bug, <add favorite bug/exploit here> all over again, and will be dealt probably the same as it were with all of them previously.

However, if devs will spend now a month to do endless SELECT * FROM ... and trying to figure out who did what, instead of, you know, developing the game, we can expect to have new raids somewhere near 2017. But if that is their incentive to do something when community ask them, then maybe we should all stop paying subs, and actually MAKE them do some new opses and you know... bring back MMO back in this Single Player MMO game which it become slowly...

If you accidentally did it once, you should get the benefit of the doubt. Play a game enough, move enough stuff around, and there will be random mistakes. Twice, maybe.

All companions at rank 50 from that? Oops, we accidentally your account - the mods.

It's a game with a service provided by BioWare and EA, there are terms to this service.

They've probably already sold their accounts to gold sellers.

Not really, it depends on how much they exploited and what they've gained out of it. To have that much of a jump on other players though, including getting gear for "free" instead of working for that? No, it's justified in this case (the same as the Ravagers exploit).

For the ones that have lightly done this, certainly.

You've quoted out of context, read the paragraph above that part, to understand why I'm prepared to actually give BioWare the benefit of the doubt. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from defending BioWare on anything they've done recently, because to be quite frank about it, they've lost pretty much all and any of my respect for them as a developer and this particular studio has tarnished the good work done by other studios.

In full expectation of the game not having a good future and knowing a ban is likely, yes, people have, but not accounts, credits in the billions.

Bioware managed to sit on their hands at the same time as disillusioning players by telling them PVE was going to be utter trash at endgame while a credit generating bug was available.

Great job at prioritising the cartel market, deliberately not hotfixing the exploit but instead putting a fix on low priority and planning to ban paying customers in the meantime then telling the endgame PVE community to go do themselves with a cactus if they thought there was going to be an endgame worth having.

So yes, the winners here are the credit sellers who will continue plying their trade to the casual gaming masses.

Funny that some guys here like to play together with cheaters

I think it's funny when people have no idea how shallow that thinking is and that includes the development team.

Why bother doing it when the last "exploit" people were given bans?

Because it doesn't deter a goddam thing when the worst thing that can happen is account suspension and you're getting sick of how things are going.

When the game has no future many people just do it because **** it, why not, they're in a fatalistic mood anyway when it comes to their time in the game and can see nothing they want to save their account for.

Or they could take the high road and just bow out instead of looting the neighborhood and burning the place down because of perceived injustice like petulant thugs...

And... what about the crafters who exploited the bug to RE the 220 rating valuable stuff?

I KNOW there's at least one on my server, because selling multiple 20~30x packs of grade 6 gifts isn't very clever to hide yourself and the same toon sells 220 rating hilts/canons. There was one particular item which allowed to dupe all three crystals at once, so there could be a connection.

I also think this RE-ing process gives you exotic materials from time to time (I've had some slicing stuff from 208 rating, none from 216 still and I haven't even tried 220 at all).

Anyway, does the 2-hours timer have vanished altogether? I've tried to see if the bug was still there, but it seems this is the answer... well, for an emergency bandaid it's OK, but, after so long, seriously?

When your getting sh*t on the last thing your gonna do is take up the arse

Let it burn!