Lots of Tunare Server Suspensions this morning. anyone else?

As somebody who was affected, and now has reflected on the situation, I find my opinion hasn't changed much, but my suggestions are now more specific.

Was a suspension wave necessary? Yes, I think keeping the bags of platinum out of the system was important. Rollbacks would have negatively affected more people, so a targeted suspension wave was the best course of action.

Could the suspension wave have been more targeted? Yes, of course. The question really is how targeted was it, and could things be improved for the next time something like this happens? If they didn't suspend everybody who used the loyalty vendor, they didn't limit much, because I bought 4 Perfected Augmentation Distillers and caught the suspension. Not bags of plat, not more than 2000 LP's worth of stuff. Was the limit 1000? Was it more than 1 item? Was it specific items? We don't know.

Unless there is something besides bags of plat, or spending more LP's than you had, that they were worried about, they could have tightened the constraints of the suspension. I'm not saying they had the time to do that this time, I'm saying it's something to think about for next time. They didn't know this specific issue would happen. Now they know that some additional control in their reporting system, or some additional though into their parameters could be beneficial. Smaller waves = less impact, if you plan properly to avoid false negatives.

Could the communication have been handled better? Yes, absolutely. So they had a choice, they could do this quick and quiet and hope most people don't notice, or they could be upfront and prompt with their notifications and hope people appreciate that. We know what they chose, and I don't think that went over well. Not everybody may know at this point, but enough people do and enough are upset, that this wasn't the right choice.

In this case they should have emailed the affected accounts as soon as they were suspended, noting the situation and that people who didn't exploit would be unsuspended as soon as possible. As much as hoping people don't notice can work for those that don't, logging in to an "account suspended" message is so much worse for those that do. If I had gotten an email the night before, I would have understood. I wouldn't have been happy, but I would have understood. I think I would have been less unhappy than I was when I saw the "account suspended" message, because I wouldn't have been surprised or confused when experiencing the negative emotions.

Once again, this is for next time. Maybe the mass suspension system doesn't have an option for an automated email to go out. It should, and I think that's an important feature to have if these kinds of temporary suspensions are possible in the future.

So TL;DR = More targeted, better communicated, would be a benefit in the future.

Allegedly, there are people who benefited from the bug, but never got suspended. That's a problem with any excuse to suspend people who did nothing wrong. In my opinion, this decision was made to reduce cost to DP, not necessarily the best decision for customers.

The suspension wave was NOT necessary, it did nothing to stop plat bags or anything else 'entering the system'.

Removing the loyalty vendor made suspending any innocent people completely un-needed.

-Remove loyalty vendor
-Investigate the criteria for a more precise suspension 'wave' or suck it up (their mistake), and investigate each person that touched the loyalty vendor manually.

That still doesn't solve whatever items may still be on characters, or plat not yet offloaded. They'd (RMTers) be running a bigger risk trying to offload mass plat right now though.

Individuals who exploited are just gonna hunker down and spend that slowly.

Nobody (with any intelligence) is going to flood the market after they removed the Loyalty vendor, sending up a red flag, "hey exploiter over here!"

Any concerns about remaining plat or items could have been easily dealt with by a rollback. Bye bye ill gotten gains for everyone, no investigation required.

No matter what though, the damage to the economy, be it large or small, was done before DPG even knew there was a problem.

The RMTers are prepared with characters to exploit and offload cash to, mules to distribute cash to players buying on the black market, then sell the exploit character or just burn it. And start all over again.

RMTer payday happened, suspensions didn't change that. Removing the Loyalty vendor was the clue to those that know "They're on to us."

They never needed to suspend innocent people, and they never should have. It gained them nothing.

Allegedly, the moon is made out of Swiss cheese.

There is zero evidence to back up the allegation. There are no screenshots or reports (petitions) of the purported cheaters bragging in General. There has been no statements by Darkpaw to suggest any of that occurring.

The slander of "incompetence" continues. This thread holds baseless claims (conclusions drawn by outsider assumptions).

I had been hoping you would just mention it. I did read the whole thread but not all at once.

I don't think it's a problem for us to disagree on whether the suspension was necessary, but it's a problem that you think a rollback would have been better. I noticed the Loyalty Currency showing up again between 4:00 and 5:00pm Eastern, and made my purchases. Reports of the suspensions start later that evening. So we're talking at least a few hours worth of time that would have to be rolled back.

Next you have to look at the scope. A rollback affects everybody who did anything during that time period, the suspension only affected people who interacted at some level with the loyalty vendor. Considering they were trying to keep this whole thing quiet, a multi-hour rollback for all servers would not be quiet.

The entire purpose of the suspension was to freeze potentially exploiting accounts so nothing more could change while they investigated. Could some people have already laundered their stuff? Maybe, I don't know what level of detail DPG has to work with on this stuff. They had to do something to stop the bleeding. Pulling the NPC and suspending some accounts was the least invasive option, while still being fairly invasive.

IMO the problem was communication, and the scope of the suspensions. I think both could have been better, or at least should be better in the future. Involving more people in their corrective action would not have made the situation any better.

It's occurring to me now that you may have meant rolling back the individual characters involved, like those who were suspended. I don't know if they can do that, maybe that would have been better if it was possible. I tried to have CS roll a character back the other day and they said they couldn't do it.

Removing the loyalty vendor did nothing to remove the bags of plat that had already entered the system and letting know the the exploit had been spotted by removing the vendor allows the to launder the money into the rest of the server. Unless it was stopped from spreading the damage wouldn't be reversible without a lot of rollbacks that would have been worse than what happened.

Also why are you so gung-ho about about them delaying their response to this? Did you have something to gain by having more time to deal with laundering the gains from the exploit?

People in Gen chat claim all sorts of things that have no basis in reality.

It doesn't matter to the RMTer the level they can track it to.

Once RMTer has converted in-game things to real world dollars the character/s they used are expendable. Any legitimate player that interacted with them and may, subsequently, have action taken against them, doesn't matter. They already got their money.

DBG already sends me checks. Why would I need to RMT?

By forums I cannot post names and such.

I get paid for my job why would I need to get a raise? Win the lottery? Whatever? That has zero to do with whether you are RMTing.

I appreciate your neutral tone today. Even though I may not fully agree with Nisikin's or your interpretation, it is civilly sharing your points of view. I would be in the wrong to attack.

It is best to acknowledge that "Hey, this is speculation but this and that could be done better." What was happening yesterday was "The majority of players believe Daybreak is totally incompetent" (mostly pushed by Kraken).

Everyone deserves a fair shake (including Darkpaw). I don't think you would appreciate it if someone launched baseless allegations against you: MasterMagnus probably copied another person's artwork - it looks similar to other artwork online. Or, MasterMagnus' robes look really shoddy - he took some shortcuts. I would call it out. We have to acknowledge the limits of our arguments.

You can take a screenshot of General Chat and blur out their names. You can screenshot your petition and blur out their names.

CS or Dreamweaver can then follow up with you.

I think this discussion has run it's course. I'll be reviewing the thread.