Item Stack Resale Exploit

Here you go Sathid.. *hug*..

and with the record for the most meaningless non-punishment was set today

Those things take forever and are quite costly to get to 50 now.

That doesn't matter. It does nothing to add to the temporarily banned state of the account. It's one thing to take away their game time. That's the thing closely associated with an exploit. You should also remove those credits and the influence which was gained by fraudulent activity.

However...

is simply too much. No other MMO developer in history will ever go this far, they know it hurts them way too much. You cannot take away legitimately gotten stuff from an account without feeling major consequences to your image. The issue here is that the steps mentioned above do nothing at all to add to an already lengthened ban.

You can remove all ill-gotten items and ban them for a period of two months. That's enough time to ponder their behaviour. The ill-gotten influence has been removed, resulting in no gain, while at the same time giving the person the opportunity to come back and play it right this time. I'm not saying some damage hasn't been done, but that's it. Just like our justice system. At least here in Europe. Our system isn't mean to condemn criminals and lock them away forever, it is a system targeted to rehabilitate criminals into society.

You'll just create a paranoid climate around this game if there's always a chance for all your stuff to be removed when accidentally stumbling upon an exploit. Yes, this has been proposed by some.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiE4CJ7D0C8

Bioware is essentially doing the 4th sketch here. They are, once again, applying punishment completely disporportional to the crime.

People here are complaining that this is just a slap on the wrist. That is what a temporal ban should be. A simple reminder not to do it again. Do it again? Then you perma-ban them. This is a sledgehammer approach once again. Bioware has no idea about moderation.

eric, is it possible to answer a question? Someone is sending me and others in my guild exploited items from characters that are named similar to ours. This person has sent stacks so far to more than one person. CS isn't being helpful so far, can you assure us that this won't affect us? So far we deleted the mails containing the items, but this person or persons seems rather adamant on getting us banned.

I didn't care, or even know, for that matter. I have had no incentive to play this game outside of my team's scheduled weekend raids.

Honestly, what are people still doing in this game?

Nah, it's fine. Not everyone will get hit that hard:Nowhere does it mention getting the whole list dumped on them is a certainty, and frankly, loosing all your stuff seems a much better deterrent than a ban. Nobody that gets hit hard, like this, exploited "by accident".

As always, I hope to hear some real reports from banned players before I have a opinion on this but I hope this was handled more severely than previous exploits. Especially players who exploited a lot or took part in previous exploits should be permanently banned. And the good thing is that this will get rid of a few credit farming bots along the way.

Hope this includes unlocked decorations because those are one of the more expensive items affected by the exploit and it would be unfair if players got to keep their decorations once their suspension time is over.

I disagree, there needs to be a strong punishment to dissuade players from exploiting. Players could get infinite credits and items with this exploit, and just a few days suspensions won't mean much for them.

You may not know this as you may have never unsubbed but you get an area to put quite detailed feedback when you unsub.

More often than not those unsubbing will go to the trouble of putting in exactly why they are quitting ... of course it doesn't take up people who just plain don't renew their sub but it's something at least.

Not sure if people would purely quit over the lack of punishment ... honestly I don't give a crap myself because those that ruin the economy around these sorts of bugs ( those that do it so much it generates just ridiculous amounts of income ) are going to be pretty sure of themselves in how they launder the credits and based on just some quick thought process you can see really simple ways to do it that Bioware aren't going to risk bans etc. over incase they get innocent players ( again ). In short - they aren't going to be punished to begin with because they won't get caught.

I am adding this to the list of my reasons for unsubbing is how it was handled ... left so long, they spent more time policing people saying "I think something fishy is going on here" than they did policing the damn exploit itself. EVen though it was all over the net and in game chat later on for anyone to see.

I did have another interesting thought though that might at least not ruin the economy so much as it will hurt gold farmers etc. who didn't exploit and that's that anyone hoarding credits from this to sell are going to keep the gold selling prices super low thereby hurting gold sellers which is a bonus. It will probably also hurt BW as more people buy credits as opposed to packs but that's their own damn fault.
My point being if that's the case then there wouldn't be quite the huge impact upon GTN pricing as one might think from this sort of exploit ... time will tell I guess.

Oh and also anyone think thy are outright lieing when they said the gold etc. packs were removed because of this new pack? Sounds like utter b.s. to me and I believe the removal is more in light of this exploit ( why hurt your purchasing market by removing popular products after all and attempting to "force" people to buy other times ? )
I can only assume because of the skyrocketing prices of these packs and buying them, opening them and hoarding their contents was a great way to launder those credits. Tin foil hat perhaps but meh.

I can't believe how poorly some people are at reading comprehension.

In my post you quoted, I clearly stated exploiters should be actioned, and only suggested that EA / Bioware would need to consider the value of an account against the exploit in determining what action to take, not that they should take no actions.

If as you stat, the only people who exploited were those that do not contribute to this game's revenue, they will most likely ban them permanently.

However, if some of the people who exploited are subscribers and CM customers and thus contribute to this game's revenue, then suspensions from the game are more likely as EA / Bioware will want to retain them as paying customers.

Simple business logic - totally baffling I'm sure for those incapable of grasping EA is a for-profit company which earns money by providing SWTOR as a paid service, and thus filters decisions against impacts to their finances.