Engineers FD's Show of Force cracks me up

Chongo

C
This show of force is a day late and a dollar short. For months this was reported. Several wings found out in stages that others had been using it. They reported it as well. They looked around at the other wings and realized all the guys with 141+ DD5's that they were fighting every night had been getting away with that ages. So more and more ended up using it as they watched FD ignore it. Wrong, but I don't blame them that much. It was becoming part of the game and FD refused to address it.

Funny thing though - I know guys that found out about this thing 2 weeks before FD made their statement, went and tried it but didn't keep any rolls - just to see what all the ahk fuss was about. I mean, it's been 6 months they've been having to fight the same guys with all god rolls, FD isn't doing anything about it, they went and read the bug reports, and holy cow, this has really been a part of the game for that long?? Guys with over 1000 legit DD5 rolls to begin with that just couldn't figure out how all these others had 142's while they had grinded their 138's to the max. I know other guys that immediately stopped once FD finally made a statement on it the other week. Or guys that took one roll, got a bad taste on the method, never used it again. I also know 1 poor guy that used it once, sounded like he went hands off with the ahk for a couple minutes just to watch how it worked and then came onto the discord and said - whoa, definitely cheating, not going to do that, can't believe FD hasn't done anything about this yet. They all woke up this morning and every single thruster etc mod they ever had rolled was wiped. Right, wrong? It's absolutely fair play by FD, once you click that ahk prompt and watch the mouse move for you... you kinda know what territory you've strayed into.

It just seems to lack... I don't know - any sort of skill or quality.
All this seems to confirm to me is that FD lacks the ability to track things effectively. At all. The punishments were dealt out in even measure to all. Same result for the guy that had 1000 player kills with every mod completely hacked as the guy who ran the ahk once just to look. With such poor tracking, cheating likely is and will continue to be ridiculously easy. I just saw a list of current exploits and it's the same crap I saw 4 months ago - only this one and premium have been fixed... wait, premium lasers - gotta go out and fight someone with that now.

People aren't going to quit because they lost their 142's, they're going to quit because they have no faith that they'll ever have a fair game.
 

Shields Offline

S
One thing that concerns me is the chilling effect this could introduce: people who find exploits are going to be much less inclined to report them, since by finding them they must have used them at least once (or more, if they want to be able to submit a good bug report), which can lead to rather severe punishment.
 

bitstorm

bitstorm
Yes.

Don't want to dwell too much, we are in a positive place now.

But I sincerely hope Frontier take stock and take a close look in the mirror.

The focus today is on the exploiters getting comeuppance yes but for me Frontier are equally (probably more) at fault.

I hope in 6 months we (the community) are not put back in the same position and having to do this again.


FWIW from what I hear, the premium ammo bug has NOT been fixed.
 
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Stigbob

Stigbob
On a really positive note the community manager has noticed the number of legit players calling for full account resets for the naughty cheaters, and says they'll consider a more draconian approach if needed in the future as it's obviously popular with the playerbase.
 

goemon

goemon
ChongoBongoMongo said:
They all woke up this morning and every single thruster etc mod they ever had rolled was wiped.
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this is not how it is working.

if you used the exploit on, let's say, a G5 kinetic resistant shield generator blueprint, all G5 kinetic resistant shield generator mods are gone, but not all your modding you have ever done, and not even all shield generator mods - your low power enhanced shield generators, for exampel, would be unaffected.

so, those who are loosing "their whole modding" will have used the exploit on every blueprint they ever used.

which wasn't required for testing the exploit at all, or for bug reporting it, even not for trying whether it really works.
 

Foo

F
Very thankful I just tried this out on my power distributor. Had maybe 3-4 ships with legit 40+ recharge rates, now all gone cause I messed around the day this was announced. Very thankful I didn't try it on any other modules and can keep my rightfully earned god rolls on everything else. Little frustrating that I got modules that I spent days grinding for wiped. Not sure I agree that legitimately earned modules should of been wiped too, but I guess I played with fire and got burned and I'll accept that. I know with a little hard work I'll get it all back again no problem. Glad they actually did something about all this too.

That being said Fdevs whole handling of this has been kinda pathetic. From this going on for a year after reported, to them staying dead silent and not communicating with the community, to them not saying anything about the community's hate for all the RNG bull, to their apparent lack of knowing which modules were cheated for. Sad their needs to be this much uproar in the community for them to get off their asses to do something. Don't have much faith in them as developers anymore.
 

Chongo

C
Shields Offline said:
One thing that concerns me is the chilling effect this could introduce: people who find exploits are going to be much less inclined to report them, since by finding them they must have used them at least once (or more, if they want to be able to submit a good bug report), which can lead to rather severe punishment.
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This. I just saw a discord conversation about available cheats, and potential workarounds on engi's still.

FD can't regulate their game. So anyone engaged in open play is always going to question if the other guy is running legit or not. Meanwhile FD's past performance will shed more doubt, as this exact example was ignored entirely for so long. Just heard the count on one of the examples above. That one guy that tried it to see what it even did, and never took any of the rolls lost 16 legit DD5's. FD fully reserves this right, I totally get it. But they basically ignored the problem, with multiple bug reports of 'hey, people are doing this and I'm kinda forced to deal with it since I play in open, what do I do - can you fix it?', reinforced the behavior by ignoring all the reports, and then dealt out punitive action in equal measure regardless of whether they had been abusing 13,000 hacked rolls over 6 months or were the guy above.

Again, it just screams lack of capability. This isn't a right or wrong on the hacking, it's that it appears FD can't handle their own game.

Poorly designed and poorly managed. FD *had* to do something. It was critical. But they botched this. I am anticipating even more cheating, and a worse environment in open.
 

sovapid

sovapid
goemon said:
this is not how it is working.

if you used the exploit on, let's say, a G5 kinetic resistant shield generator blueprint, all G5 kinetic resistant shield generator mods are gone, but not all your modding you have ever done, and not even all shield generator mods - your low power enhanced shield generators, for exampel, would be unaffected.

so, those who are loosing "their whole modding" will have used the exploit on every blueprint they ever used.

which wasn't required for testing the exploit at all, or for bug reporting it, even not for trying whether it really works.
Click to expand...

Except there are only one or two useful blueprints per module. Most of the blueprints are not worth using.
 

Chongo

C
goemon said:
this is not how it is working.

if you used the exploit on, let's say, a G5 kinetic resistant shield generator blueprint, all G5 kinetic resistant shield generator mods are gone, but not all your modding you have ever done, and not even all shield generator mods - your low power enhanced shield generators, for exampel, would be unaffected.

so, those who are loosing "their whole modding" will have used the exploit on every blueprint they ever used.

which wasn't required for testing the exploit at all, or for bug reporting it, even not for trying whether it really works.
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I partially misspoke. I assumed nobody rolls anything but DD5's. If you used the AHK on a DD5, even if you discarded all of the rolls, all DD5's of all grades from all ships are removed.
 

[Diplomacy] Carnegie

[Diplomacy] Carnegie
Shields Offline said:
One thing that concerns me is the chilling effect this could introduce: people who find exploits are going to be much less inclined to report them, since by finding them they must have used them at least once (or more, if they want to be able to submit a good bug report), which can lead to rather severe punishment.
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If you file a bug report then FDev aren't going to punish you - or if they do, you just file a report and they'll give you the stuff back.
Obviously, that assumes you haven't exploited the carp out of it before filing the bug report.

Try looking on the bright side once in a while - life is so much for fun.
 

bigity

bigity
bitstorm said:
Yes.

Don't want to dwell too much, we are in a positive place now.

But I sincerely hope Frontier take stock and take a close look in the mirror.

The focus today is on the exploiters getting comeuppance yes but for me Frontier are equally (probably more) at fault.

I hope in 6 months we (the community) are not put back in the same position and having to do this again.


FWIW from what I hear, the premium ammo bug has NOT been fixed.
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Nor has the heat cannon bug/omission* (they were never nerfed when other heat weapons were), and combat logging still exists.
 

Schmack

Schmack
Navigare Necesse Est said:
Auto Hotkey?
Click to expand...
they do it so much and has its own acronym. To this I say hahahahahahahahahaha and you can usually tell the ones that were doing it because they want to know why other exploits weren't targeted and then they name off all of the exploits because they've done all the research. Personally I've never heard of about 90% of these exploits because I don't go looking for that stuff. I think it's hilarious.
 

Gunnet

G
If Frontier can detect who cheated, they can surely tell how often each individual cheated. There's nothing wrong with the tracking, they just made the (correct) decision to treat every cheater equally. "I was just testing to see if/how it worked" is the oldest excuse in the book.

It's possible to cheat in almost every game one way or another. Fairness isn't achieved by chasing the all but impossible dream of making it technically impossible to cheat. It's achieved by identifying and removing the small minority of players who want to cheat. Which is why I'm hoping that the next time Frontier is looking at a list of players who have cheated, they will consider anybody also on today's list to have already received fair warning.
 
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