FDev, you just upset a *lot* of people.

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Yaffle

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What is this "5 for 1" thing exactly and has it been shut down?

Yes it's been shut down.

You could fool the game into accepting abundant grade 1 upgrade materials to do a grade 5 upgrade, which should require very rare materials. As a result multiple tries at grade 5 became very easy, allowing maximisation of outcomes for trivial material cost.
 
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Yes it's been shut down.

You could fool the game into accepting abundant grade 1 upgrade materials to do a grade 5 upgrade, which should require very rare materials. As a result multiple tries at grade 5 became very easy, allowing maximisation of outcomes for trivial material cost.

Yeah, sorry, just me being slow. G5 for G1. lol. A bit tired. So used to it being referred to as "engineering exploit" that I was afraid they'd find the next way to work around gameplay mechanics.
 
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OP, Speak for yourself pal! FDs punishment was Just and deserved! Any other game developer would've done the same or worse. They are lucky they didn't get their account wiped.
 
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So the people using the exploit had their engineered mods wiped, but their accounts haven't been reset, and they haven't been banned. The exploited mods significantly unbalanced the gameplay in any pvp interaction, and pushed folks out of open making the game ultimately less appealing to many players. What does one actually have to do to get an account banned in Elite?
 
So the people using the exploit had their engineered mods wiped, but their accounts haven't been reset, and they haven't been banned. The exploited mods significantly unbalanced the gameplay in any pvp interaction, and pushed folks out of open making the game ultimately less appealing to many players. What does one actually have to do to get an account banned in Elite?

Google people complaining about their bans if you want to read them, they are out there.
 
How great would it be if the engineers themselves were to tell any player who had cheated them to do one when asked to perform any further modifications, now that would be punishment :)

Or maybe re-lock the engineer to that player making the unlock requirement to provide all the G5 mats that they diddled out of them by exploiting.
 
Seriously i am happy FDev did id and in what way they did it.
And i have hope they will patch all other exploits and take care of exploiters.
 
and pushed folks out of open making the game ultimately less appealing to many players

Actually, the whole unbalancing of PvP with the introduction of the engineers themselves keeps me away. The fact that some had found a way to get around the engineering RNG nonsense was laudable, but further unbalanced PvP for those 'not in the know'.

Not advocating what these folks did, but it was FD's fault for introducing this ill-conceived construct (engineers) in the first place. This whole mess doesn't affect me one way or another, playing in Solo. But if FD ever wants me to dip a toe into Open they'd have to balance it such that the player with little time to invest in ED has the same chance in a face-to-face as those who have no life other than ED.

Disparity between ships is one thing. Giving the maniacal few the upper hand with hard-to-get upgrades simply because they have no life is an entirely different matter.

IMO of course. :D
 
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Some cheats have been talked about for years. This exploit took a few weeks after one video was posted on the forum. Shame the dozens of logging videos created are not allowed to be posted here

Problem is that these videos are no proof, they just show someone leaving the game. You don't know if it's due to a bug, network error, legitimate menu log, etc., or pulling the plug. It looks like they had some pretty solid telemetry for this exploit.
 
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From what I'm gathering so far, the manner in which you've conducted your exploit punishment have been nothing less than extremely clumsy. Instead of only removing the rolls which were exploited, you've also elected to remove anything that might have been a legitimate roll. What you're literally telling us is "We know you cheated, but since we can't tell which module you cheated to upgrade, we're taking this sledgehammer to everything we think might have been exploited." I'm seeing a lot of people having lost their legitimately upgraded modules... and some performed the exploit once out of curiosity.

You're losing players pulling this stuff, guys. It's bad enough you guys took said sledgehammer to anything that looked suspicious, but according to reddit posts some people still have their exploited modules.

I'm really glad I didn't let my curiosity get the better of me... I probably would have had my FAS wiped from existence if I had from ONE module.

[EDIT] Since some people would rather not actually read the thread and see that I attempted to clarify, I might as well add this in. I jumped the gun and posted this believing that any roll viewed as "suspect" would be targeted. I didn't spend a month dedicated to engineering my FAS in all aspects to have it dedicated over a false positive, you know. But obviously as more information has come out it seems FDev have a way of actually tracking these things, so... I tried admitting to the mistake, but nobody's actually READING the thread.

Y'all really like to resort to immediate derision and vitriol to any opinion you don't like though, do you? What a nice bunch you are. :p

No tears. Consider it a life lesson.
 
These cheats clearly don't realize how lightly they've gotten off. A lot of MMOs would have perma-banned them, instead they just need to grind their modules the same the rest of us did.

Can't really stress that enough. One of the moans we hear a lot from pvp-focused players (not entirely without justification to be honest) is that some players who play in open don't seem to grasp (or would prefer to ignore) some of the core concepts of the MMO experience, such as not being able to dictate other player's behaviour within the rules of the game and so on.

Thing is, it cuts both ways and in most MMOs you would have an entirely reasonable expectation of just getting your account deleted for flagrant abuse of an exploit which allowed you to obtain top-tier gear and the resulting pvp advantages without paying the required in-game resources to do so. It's as textbook a case as you're likely to see.

FDev have in my opinion been pretty lenient here, not to mention that from what a few players have said in passing comment it took some 'encouragement' even to bring them to the point of doing what they did.

I actually think that if FDev treated this as a high water mark for people being able to get away with things and began to be more robust in applying sanctions to some of the things the more pvp-focused players have complained about during the time I've played (combat logging being the obvious one) the game may move forward in a more positive way for everybody from this.

Much of the salt being thrown around at the moment is due to players feeling that certain actions are being punished whilst others aren't and I have to be honest and say the overall impression I have of FDev's approach to punishing exploiters, notwithstanding their excellent response to this particular incident, is not really that positive.

I'm sure someone will ask how I can say that with no evidence and that FDev do in fact punish loads of people, it's just that mysteriously none of them ever then complain on reddit or other gaming forums about those punishments unliike with pretty much every game out there, also that all the anecdotal evidence of people repeatedly reporting people and yet still seeing them in game ban-free are fictitious, which is fine but know what? I just don't believe it. Sorry and all that.

I would actually like to see FDev publish the numbers of bans and other sanctions they hand out by broad category, enough to give an idea of the type of transgression at least. It's not a big job to do it say once a month or every couple of months, it doesn't breach any data handling requirements because they're not giving out personal information, or even player account information, just numbers. What it would help with is addressing the perception that they are soft on cheating because really, if you look around the internet you will see that said about this game and that's honestly not a look that any game company should want. Especially not one which is about to launch an expansion onto a new platform.

Going along with that, we could do with a bit less hand-sitting and trying to please everybody in terms of whether certain actions are bannable or otherwise punishable. You can't please everybody and trying to do it is the best way to ensure you please nobody.

I struggle to think of another game where it's almost impossible to get a simple straight answer to 'is X an exploit' for example, with the best we get sometimes being a member of the dev team giving a personal opinion, which is nice from an engagement point of view for sure but worthless in terms of defining what people can and cannot do.

If the expansions after 2.4 are intended to flesh out the existing content, that is a critical aspect of it that shouldn't be ignored - flesh out your rules, remove ambiguity, provide clarity. That way, you give yourselves a clearer mandate to take action and remove much of the bickering about those topics on the forums.

If I'm wrong and there are in fact players getting banned all the time for transgressions, show us that's the case. If I'm not wrong though, I'd challenge FDev to learn the very important lesson that this thread should provide - you can't be too harsh on cheats because they poison games and taking action against them (all of them) is something that the vast majority of your players will always support, as long as the rules themselves are clearly defined first.
 
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Problem is that these videos are no proof, they just show someone leaving the game. You don't know if it's due to a bug, network error, legitimate menu log, etc., or pulling the plug. It looks like they had some pretty solid telemetry for this exploit.


Thing is, you can do this on the balance of probability. People seem to forget we're not in a court here trying to meet the evidence burden for a criminal prosecution. If a player only ever drops connection when they're about to go below 5% hull in a pvp encounter, sorry but that is enough and if someone doesn't like it and decides to start spouting internet law as usually happens the answer is simple. 1. They shut up. 2. They get legal representation. 3. They file. Then the courts can test the likelihood of their explanation in a civil case.

At some point during that process though, they will probably work out that although banging on about how people can't do this and can't do that makes them sound really righteous in their head, legal representation costs money.

Seriously I find the people who hide behind this 'oh but it might just be my connection honestly dropping 15 times just as I'm about to die' nonsense at least as bad as the ones who exploited the engineers, it's such a load of glib crap.
 
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Thing is, you can do this on the balance of probability. People seem to forget we're not in a court here trying to meet the evidence burden for a criminal prosecution. If a player only ever drops connection when they're about to go below 5% hull in a pvp encounter, sorry but that is enough and if someone doesn't like it and decides to start spouting internet law as usually happens the answer is simple. 1. They shut up. 2. They get legal representation. 3. They file. Then the courts can test the likelihood of their explanation in a civil case.

At some point during that process though, they will probably work out that although banging on about how people can't do this and can't do that makes them sound really righteous in their head, legal representation costs money.

Seriously I find the people who hide behind this 'oh but it might just be my connection honestly dropping 15 times just as I'm about to die' nonsense at least as bad as the ones who exploited the engineers, it's such a load of glib crap.

Quoted for truth, the odd disco' no problem, but repeatedly during combat that you're losing then it's a CL; this stuff can be tracked and FD have the right to do as they wish with their client i.e. ban/shadowban you.
 
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Thing is, you can do this on the balance of probability. People seem to forget we're not in a court here trying to meet the evidence burden for a criminal prosecution. If a player only ever drops connection when they're about to go below 5% hull in a pvp encounter, sorry but that is enough and if someone doesn't like it and decides to start spouting internet law as usually happens the answer is simple. 1. They shut up. 2. They get legal representation. 3. They file. Then the courts can test the likelihood of their explanation in a civil case.

At some point during that process though, they will probably work out that although banging on about how people can't do this and can't do that makes them sound really righteous in their head, legal representation costs money.

Seriously I find the people who hide behind this 'oh but it might just be my connection honestly dropping 15 times just as I'm about to die' nonsense at least as bad as the ones who exploited the engineers, it's such a load of glib crap.

No one wants to hear 'Balance of Probability' when they get hit with a false positive. Look at the ire that developed when cheaters lost something they didn't cheat on. I would have to utterly disagree with you on this one. FD knows they will have to be justified in anything they do, punishment wise. The '5 for 1' cheat is separate and completely different from any other cheat/exploit. We, as players, don't get to decide what rises to a cheat, and what is an annoying (to some) unexpected result of a mechanics.

This whole cry is intended to make those caught up in the recently exposed cheat feel better, because they have fingers that can be pointed elsewhere. I give them, and their 'arguments of justification'. no moment at all.
 
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