Anti-Aliased: When you can't hack it legitimately, cheat instead pt. 2

Eh.

You'll never convince me you should punish players that find where programmers screwed up. At least give a warning once something like this is found. Its very easy to make a pop up on log in say "hey don't do this, we will ban all that do it from NOW ON. Oh and by the way, we're fixing it."

What's next? Programmers put in a sword that's screwed up and overpowered, and ban all those that equip it? Where do you draw the line if the developers don't? How are players supposed to know which programming screw ups are acceptable and which ones aren't. As the article already said, there was a questionable "strategy" during the Odin fight, and no communication from the Developers let them know if it was an exploit or not.

There should always be some sort of warning and a cut off date for something so drastic in my opinion.

I always follow the rule "glitch or be glitched" when playing in public servers.

These people may have thought "if I dont take advantage of this, other people will and I will be left in the dust".

Which, actually, is fair. Why should a few cheating assholes have all the fun?

I'm sure 90% of the people who did this wouldn't have, had they known it would be eventually fixed & get them banned. If not, then they are stupid & deserved it.

Completely wrong. I am a programmer, so I somewhat know the insides of a program. Its the company duty to test and debug their programs. Also mmos are client server app - so unless the client was modified by prohibited way - everything that the servers allow you to do it completely "legal". you are not obliged to report unusual game behavior unless they pay you for that. You exploited - well fix the exploit, case closed. Even better - don't close - make it do something nasty - like wipe the party on split or whatever. They will learn.

I'm just wondering, Colin, how long did you exactly play FFXI? Obviously, not long enough.

Has it also come to your attention that this exploit has been around for well over a year, known only to the Japanese community most of the time, and SE didn't step in? They just let it go, doing nothing. And surely, as a "veteran" player of FFXI, you would surely know the blatant cultural favors SE has, now wouldn't you?

The playerbase is not as stupid as you think. SE reads our forums. Hell, most of the big name forums are in direct contact with SE, have had interviews with people like Sage Sundi. (Do you even know who he is?)

Point being, if you don't know enough about something, don't write about it. It's clear your biased against FFXI, and its apparent you didn't get all of your ducks in a row before writing this article.

This problem has to do with information, communication and consistency. You have stated that SE was inconsistent with its bans so no need to spend any more time on that.

Before going into the other areas, I just want to touch on the comment made about the EULA/TOS (Terms of Service). These are both legal documents designed to give all the power to the company. After all the text in there, the bottom line is that they allow SE to terminate your account for any reason, at any time, without any explanation. There is no mention of how certain parts of the game should function, so you can't find out if something is an exploit by reading it. And yes everyone that logs on has agreed to it, so lets put that aside.

Information:
If you go to SE and FFXI site and search for Salvage, you get no or very little information. All they provided was a general idea of what the event is, and what the rewards are. Anything beyond that was found by users trying out different things and sharing it. Not all users shared everything because its voluntary and this is a competitive environment. SE provided no information on how the activity is supposed to work, so there is no way to determine if something is functioning as it is supposed to.

Of course people should realize that duplicating items is an exploit and not a function. But wait, there actually is a "legit" way to duplicate items in Salvage. If you trade cells to a spot on the floor, a monster spawns and when you kill it, you get double the items you traded. I say "legit" because SE is silent, so through silence you assume it is working as intended. Its public knowledge both on the NA/EU and JP sides.

There is another monster in salvage where you spawn it by logging out and back in. SE later said this was an exploit and changed it. This was discovered by users trying different things. At the same time SE posted a victory over another monster on their main page where the key to winning was logging out at the right time. Somehow this is not an exploit.

Communication
I am a programmer and have to code and debug my own programs. I know that in large applications, bugs can be hidden in hard to find places, so I rely on my users to tell me when something is not functioning. Just because I created an application, does not mean that I use it on a daily basis. If you want your users to report bugs to you, you need some place where they can submit them. Until after this incident, there was no place on SE's site to submit bug reports. The only option people had was to contact an GM while online, or to post a topic on one of the forums.

This issue was reported more than a year ago through both the GM and forum posting. Unfortunately SE does not read forums, and the reports to GMs were not addressed. I work in a big company and know that things fall through the cracks unless you have a dedicated and higher priority system for reporting/addressing them. The delay you mentioned was not between the time they reported they fixed it and the time of the bannings. Rather it was between the time it was reported to SE and the bannings. If you don't give details on how something works, and don't do anything about a problem for over a year, turning around and terminating accounts a year later is too severe.

As far as fixing it in November. It turns out that the glitch wasn't fixed. Someone reported that you can still dup items, and that he was scared to report the problem because he might get his account terminated for it.

Now as far as the entitlement comment that some feel, let me shed some light on it. Even after going through all the machinations to spawn monsters, some have drop rates on the order of 1/200. So .5% of the time you get an item. If you consider that there are 4 zones, and within one zone you select one monster by skipping others. A 1/200 drop rate means that it might take you over 1000 runs to get a drop if you cycle through all the zones and monsters, and you're limited to 1 run a day. The ability to triplicate the drop allows you to make the event worthwhile for those involved.

That was the logic people used. After the fact, it turns out to be unacceptable by SE. Also SE takes no responsibility for the problem in any way and has remained silent on the whole issue.