Funny, that. I used to post exactly like you did. I mean almost verbatim. I had an image macro I used to post in just such occasions, to indulge in schadenfreude. I'm not kidding. But as they say, what comes around goes around.
If you wanted to do testing why didn't you do it in the VR room or a controlled area (have a few people switch to TR/VS/NC which ever faction your not, alt's and test it on them). Why use the exploit against unsuspecting players?
Fortunately none. I've heard mixed opinions about SOE's enforcement policy - some claiming their response times are the slowest in the industry and cheaters are common. Some claim they're the wild wild west cowboys, issuing bans for anything suspicious while not taking the effort to catch the people who cheat skillfully. Though I believe not paying smedbucks is a factor here. Once you've invested some considerable time into the game and you're not willing to pay SOE recognizes you as a liability - you keep mooching off of their bandwidth and resources without stuffing their wallets. Other contributions such as reporting bugs, developing 3rd party apps (inb4 hax) or platoon leading (which we have a shortage of) isn't taken into the equation. As such free players who are unlikely to pay are a liability and the threshold of permanent banning is very, very low. I get the impression SOE purposely wants to eliminate such players.
After the hex crash exploit, what did you think was going to happen. SOE is pretty much setting an example for other glitch abusers. A few hours? more like a few DAYS, I saw people using it in the VR room, but didn't witness anyone in the 3 continents using it except once in the warpgate.
I'm sure you remember Higby asking us to submit steps how to reproduce the bug: You can't get the steps to reproduce without invoking the glitch, I'm afraid. This was the case with the sunderer exploit bug, which I duly reported, as is the case with this one. We don't have a test server yet, so if SOE botches a new feature the only way for us to help in fixing it is test it and submit a thorough bug report with steps to reproduce. A test server is coming and I'm disappointed that SOE doesn't want to let me in on the testing. You probably didn't see it much because it involved libs turning invisible.
Invoking a glitch to report it is one thing. Accidently triggering a glitch, OK. Actively using a glitch in combat to 'only get shot down by a scythe while having the most fun in a lib' is exploiting the glitch. I doubt there's going to be that much sympathy.
I did the first, and I can't really help if I had fun testing it. I did as much testing as was necessary - one lib run. I would consider that to be a realistic test case.
it's necessary and essential to reproduce a bug for a better ticket that's true, if you found a bug while shooting pixel xyz on specific location and everyone within a base or the like dies, it's maybe essential to use it some times in a row, to reproduce it, only specific angles, special weapon, only class xzz ... shooting people from a cloaked lib is not essential for that bug or it's reproduction ... turning the lib invisible several times a row is reproducing the bug, using the bug then to slay several players is abusing it, plain and simple like that so even if i had chosen a suspension for some days as punishmend then permaban, it's still bug abusing
Overreaction is overreaction. Next up: 90% of PS2 population banned for using tank mines against non-moving vehicles.
If you all check YouTube you will see plenty of people gathering in warp gates, spawning many liberators, making them invisible and saying " let's kill as many people as possible until they fix the bug". They knew it was a bug, they knew they Shouldn't take advantage of it, yet they did. To all of them i say GOOD RIDDENS.
It was a FUN test case, realistic and fair would have been: 1) Did the liberator cloak to me and is 'cloaked' to a friendly on the ground? 2) Can the lib move and shoot and still be cloaked? 3) When firing on a friend, does it do damage? After the self-repairing vehicle bug, the dev's have said abuse of these exploits (12 kills from an invisible lib I'm sure some players WOULD call 'abuse') would lead to a ban. On the bright side though, no SOE cash lost right?
Turns out I wasn't banned for reporting the lib glitch. Before last patch everybody was experiencing mad performance losses, so I tried to figure out what was causing it. I needed some data to worked with, so I used a profiler to see what was the reason. Customer Support says I tried to hack the game. Impossible I tell them, the software I used, Vtune Amplifier, can't possibly be used to cheat in any concievable way, but so far I've been unable to convince them.
Sure , you just don't need to do it everyday in combat. You can do it in ways that don't grief and after once shot at it you know how it works....in about 10 seconds.
1 thing that concerns me about the reply you got from support though is "cheating because of lag" uhm, I think I was going around for a few minutes one time lagged out/desynced where nobody could see me because to everyone else my body was somewhere else. I didn't know it (and eventually quit anyways as the lag was driving me bananas) but kinda figured it out when reading forums about the desync (and went "ooooh, that's why I was able to run up to peoples face that one time") I'd have been hella pissed to get banned for "cheating" because some random lag glitch desynced me.
