When I was getting rank for a corvette I got bored and took a load of chained ground scan missions just for a break, I turned up scanned the first outpost and competed every pending mission I had. Some people were exploiting that for data at the time, but not being a cheat I didn't know and lost most of the data due to not having storage room.
There's a difference between stumbling across a bug and active cheating.
Leaving aside that you've still gained through an exploit (because you've just gained 10 missions worth of rank for doing one mission) how would Frontier determine that, particularly when they leave exploits unmolested till they reach a critical mass of rage with the chosen few, so we get to the point where people either assume it's working as intended,
My tl/dr is this: If you're using an exploit before it's deemed cheating, you're exploiting. If you use an exploit after its deemed a cheat, then you're cheating. If you're used an exploit till it was deemed cheating, but stopped, then you're not a cheater.
People clog to avoid a rebuy, ie they cheat to save money. That's no different to cheating to get money, which has always been rampant.
I don't do either, they are effectively the same from my perspective.
Which is, cheating, right?
Heads up Stig, for some reason half your text is being formatted into grey.
I have several people say they would like to play but they're scared of an Eve like gank as soon as they launch.
Even though Sandro has said that according to their statistics it doesn't happen as often as people thing. I would add that the Griefing that the SDC have a reputation of doing (See the mobius group invasion, no warnings or stand or deliver calls there, just plain griefing) is far more damaging to the game than the Clogging.
Well of course it isn't. We've just had years of nonsense propaganda from the Mobius types declaring how horrible open is (usually without having stepped foot into it) to try to draw more to the group and further the self-importance of it's owner. As to those infiltrations being more damaging to the game? It depends on what you play. I'd suggest combat logging is more damaging to the game if you play as a pirate, whereas Powerplay fans generally lean towards the idea that the 'easy mode' that solo/private groups provide damaged their game a lot more than a few yahoo's going into a private group and violating it's gentleman's agreement rules to explode a few pixels.
You know you have to take a realistic view of this, any FDEV action against cheaters for clogging has to be consistent with action against cheaters in the past, or they are just randomly picking on people.
Now the biggest cheating scandal the games ever had was the 5-1 engineers exploit, for which people were not punished they just had their cheaty modules removed that sets the precedent. So cloggers can realistically expect exactly the same level of punishment, ie nothing.
Which is where we are already.
Not true. Precedent was set WAY back in the day with the original credit exploit, when people were buying ships in the founders world, jumping next door and selling them for a markup.
People just had their credits earned by doing this taken off them. They didn't even confiscate the ships that they sunk their credits into to try to hide the fact.
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