So, it seems FC took no action against players who exploited their way to PvP XP lvl 5. All they did was fix the exploit and allow every single exploiter keep wearing the gear.

Pretty horrible decision to make in a PvP game when you can get a huge advantage over honest players by exploiting.

It really seems that exploiting is never punished by FC, maybe because of low subscription numbers so they can't afford to lose anymore?

This is it for me, I will now not ever play Age of Conan or any funcom game again, it's completly unacceptable not to permantly ban the pvp level 5 people when it's not possible to be that level without exploiting.

Any game where the developer prefers to take money from cheaters than give a fair gameplay experience deserves to completly fail.

Of course it's not possible to idenfity everyone that cheated like this but all pvp level 5 and probably all level 4's should either be permantly banned or a 2 week ban + character deletion. Punishments need to be strong otherwise next time there is an exploit everyone will know it's the right thing to do to exploit it, many already knew that from funcoms discraceful handling of the gem dupe, it would have been harder to identify the cheaters in that case though but this time people are basically wearing big signs saying I'm a cheating low life but you don't dare ban me becuase you need my money.

I just hope the remaining players voice their opinions with their wallet and the game gets what it deserves.

Of course if funcom suddunly annouce the banning of 2000 people I'll take all of this back and apologise.

I've noticed the moderators deleteing perfectly reasonable threads about this issue over the past couple of days, of course if someone posts how to exploit their post should be deleted and the account warned/banned but there is no reason to take down threads talking about one of the most serious issues relateing to age of conan. If this thread dissapears then I guess mmorpg.com isn't the site I thought it was.

lool they are going to let the exploiters get away with it? Unreal. Guess they cant afford to lose the members. Saying that they are going to lose a hell of a lot more if they dont rollback.

Avery any idea where the thread has gone which linked the official EU forums moan post about the pvp exploiters. Can not understand why that thread was deleted....All it showed was 100's of peed of players threatening to quit, not sure why it has been deleted from these forums again or is anything remotely negative being removed from these forums too.

When are you guys gonna wake up and see who youre dealing with? ITS FUNCOM! What makes you think they would do anything about this exploit when they didnt do anything about the gem duping exploit? For those of you who stuck it out playing AoC I feel bad for yah. I would feel cheated too.

Funcom has to be the worste gaming company I have ever seen. They never cease to amaze me on the mistakes they make with their games and continue to make mistakes over and over again. The writing is on the wall. Funcom is goin down and its gonna go down big.

Originally posted by Lobbyboy69

lool they are going to let the exploiters get away with it? Unreal. Guess they cant afford to lose the members. Saying that they are going to lose a hell of a lot more if they dont rollback.

Avery any idea where the thread has gone which linked the official EU forums moan post about the pvp exploiters. Can not understand why that thread was deleted....All it showed was 100's of peed of players threatening to quit, not sure why it has been deleted from these forums again or is anything remotely negative being removed from these forums too.

There was at least 2 threads on the subject here deleted, neither of which explained how to do the exploit so there was no reason to delete them and even if someone did post the exploit then you delete thier post not the entire thread, I can't really articulate how disapointed I am in the moderation here by deleteing those threads, it meant the moderation was even more pro funcom on that issue than the funcom moderaters on the actual aoc forums.

I had always concidered the moderation here to be fair but I can't see where they are coming from on this issue at all.

Funcom never punished people in the past for exploiting, why would they start now? Why is THIS incident suddenly a big deal, when there are countless incidents of exploiting in the past that have gone equally as unpunished?

Is the current playerbase just completely unaware of how often this has occured with funcom, or do they just cling to a false hope that it will be dealt with the NEXT time?

Such a lot of noise over something people should be used to by now. Its not even worth posting about anymore.

I firmly believe they don't know right from wrong at Funcom. I mean not morally, what is morally right about taking people's money for something you promise, but never deliver, LOL. But even ethically.

Case and point this issue, also I'll cite the exprience I had on Tyranny. I informed my guild of about 250 players (we came from another dying server) maybe 150-175 were still active at the time that we needed to seek a stable populated server and that we should go to Tyranny because they were a stable active bastion. This was in the last month I played AOC. We invted members from our guild and invited new members. Members were promoted to the level that they could access the bank and also promote new members. Everybody was expected to work together to help build that guild. Within 2 weeks, that guild has been destroyed by a member.

Upon contacting a GM, I was told by the GM the name of the player, who was last to leave, and that all members, (100+) had left within several seconds. So I asked them to investigate and ban the individual who left last. They would not. Nor have they enabled guild rights by guild masters, so that we can intelligently establish a guild so this could not happen. Just like hundreds of other exploits they don't bother to manage.

This is an exercise in fucking their customers over. Pure and simple.

Back in June, when people were posting about everyone quitting.. One of the responses was "who cares how many people quit, I'm having fun".

This is exactly what happens with low population games.  You have no QA to test content, you have no GM's to monitor the exploits, and you have a financial incentive NOT to ban anyone.

If this had been a game with a high populations

1. QA would have caught the bug before it made it into the game
2. GMs would have been in the game to catch exploiters
3.  Players that did exploit would have gotten banned.

Dying games die fast.  Its a fact of the industry.

Originally posted by Hamrtime2

When are you guys gonna wake up and see who youre dealing with? ITS FUNCOM! What makes you think they would do anything about this exploit when they didnt do anything about the gem duping exploit? For those of you who stuck it out playing AoC I feel bad for yah. I would feel cheated too.

Funcom has to be the worste gaming company I have ever seen. They never cease to amaze me on the mistakes they make with their games and continue to make mistakes over and over again. The writing is on the wall. Funcom is goin down and its gonna go down big.

Anyone who endured through AO's release AND the shadowlands debacle knows enough to stay well clear of any funcom sh*t. They keep repeating their mistakes with shoddy programming and clearly Lying to the playerbase. The shadowlands thing was the best ive ever seen - released a year+ too soon and then they inserted bugs to stop people from progressing through the content because the next content in line wasnt even on the damn cd they sent.

- Oh are you only getting 1 xp from every mob? oops

- Oh is the quest-mob you have been looking for not spawning at all? oops

- Oh do all the mobs in this dungeon have 10 times their normal HP so you cant finish it and move on? oops

- Ah there we patched and now its working, incidentally now the server database contains data on mobs in higher level areas than elysium. oops did that give us away?

1 xp per kill seems particularly conspicious. I mean how can that even slip? Single player and grouping would have to have been tested. Nobody noticed that a lot of differnt group combinations, in fact the majority of them, yielded 1 xp per kill for the group.

Yeah right. WTG FC you losers. .

Jesus way to shoot yourself in the foot Funcom. Never mind the players that will leave. What about thoes that might have come back due to the PVP patches?

I was burnt by AOC when it was launched and left after my first month.

But ive been reading through the last 2 patch notes and thought things might have changed, especially with the new director. And i liked what i was reading... i decided that i was going to give AOC another chance. Before anyone points this out i know what my avatar currently is, but that's Funcoms fault and would have been changed if my opinion of the game had changed after playing it again.

That wont happen anytime soon. I see that the same old attitude, decision making and poor communication still reins supreme. I had the client reinstalled 3 days ago and was prepared to fire it up this weekend after my exams are over.

Ive uninstalled it today.

Originally posted by noggy1980

This is it for me, I will now not ever play Age of Conan or any funcom game again, it's completly unacceptable not to permantly ban the pvp level 5 people when it's not possible to be that level without exploiting.

Any game where the developer prefers to take money from cheaters than give a fair gameplay experience deserves to completly fail.

Of course it's not possible to idenfity everyone that cheated like this but all pvp level 5 and probably all level 4's should either be permantly banned or a 2 week ban + character deletion. Punishments need to be strong otherwise next time there is an exploit everyone will know it's the right thing to do to exploit it, many already knew that from funcoms discraceful handling of the gem dupe, it would have been harder to identify the cheaters in that case though but this time people are basically wearing big signs saying I'm a cheating low life but you don't dare ban me becuase you need my money.

I just hope the remaining players voice their opinions with their wallet and the game gets what it deserves.

Of course if funcom suddunly annouce the banning of 2000 people I'll take all of this back and apologise.

I've noticed the moderators deleteing perfectly reasonable threads about this issue over the past couple of days, of course if someone posts how to exploit their post should be deleted and the account warned/banned but there is no reason to take down threads talking about one of the most serious issues relateing to age of conan. If this thread dissapears then I guess mmorpg.com isn't the site I thought it was.

Seems that things havent changed much. This is why FC and Sony ( not just SOE but anything made by Sony or its spin offs) are off of my Christmas list barring pigs flying or hell freezing over

Originally posted by Azrile

Back in June, when people were posting about everyone quitting.. One of the responses was "who cares how many people quit, I'm having fun".

This is exactly what happens with low population games.  You have no QA to test content, you have no GM's to monitor the exploits, and you have a financial incentive NOT to ban anyone.

If this had been a game with a high populations

1. QA would have caught the bug before it made it into the game
2. GMs would have been in the game to catch exploiters
3.  Players that did exploit would have gotten banned.

Dying games die fast.  Its a fact of the industry.

"Who cares who quits" in an MMO is right up there with "well things couldnt get worse" in RL, lol

Everyone reactivate your AoC account and exploit your way glory!!!

Its almost how it feels when exploiters are not punished.  When in Rome..

Originally posted by norvak

Everyone reactivate your AoC account and exploit your way glory!!!

 

Its almost how it feels when exploiters are not punished.  When in Rome..

The problem is they fixed the exploit.   So the people who did exploit now basically have a permanent advantage.   

And what it tells players is that when the next exploit comes along, you better exploit that one and not wait for something fair to be done about it.

Be interesting to see what our Correspondants thoughts are on this subject. Its ok advertising all the *proposed* upcomming patches and saynig how wonderful everything is in Hyboria. But you have to take the rough with the smooth.

As Avery is pretty close to Funcom be interesting to see if he knows or can find out what FC's stance on this topic is. Are they going to let the exploiters get away with this? Are they thinking about a rollback? Is Funcom not banning expoiters accounts because theres simply not enough of them left to ban?

This is their official word and stance:

After reading the forums for the past 30 mins or so, Both EU and US, it seems there are more legitimate people posting who don't want to loose their XP with a roll back. There are also many people who are in favour of a roll back too both people who have obtained levels and mainly those that haven't played since the main update.

If we remember back a few months FC was pretty harsh with exploiters and these were dealt with on a more one to one basis.

They do say that they are investigating single cases and taking action. I have even read GM responses to encourage this.

I think it's a tough choice for them, it's not about loosing people by getting the banhammer out. Population woes are often exaggerated when you consider the bigger picture for all servers, I got 6 guys on 6 different servers now and see the difference big time. It's my opinion population has nothing to do with it.

Remember when people were obtaining gold / city materials etc in an exploiting fashion. There is no reason not to think that FC will deal with "reported" exploiters any other way then they have done previously, and that is harshly. They are looking at reported issues and taking action..

It's a cop out of the highest order, of course it's not possible to punish everyone but it is possible to punish a large segment of the people who cheated. Every single 1 of the people who are pvp level 5 cheated, it's not possible to have done it so quickly, the same is pretty much true of the level 4's too so you ban all level 4 and level 5 people, be ready to look into any of the level 4's who complain quickly just in case it was legit.

perfection shouldn't be the enemy of the good, just because they can't get everyone who cheated doesn't mean they shouldn't punish all of the obvious ones.

I feel the exact same contempt for funcom after that post as before, it's just spin.

On the Euro boards Tarib stated they aren't going to do a rollback but they are looking back through logs to find people that used scripts and other methods to cheat the system.

Taribs comment was about scripts that could locate exploiters, if they have any kind of loggin in theyr game , it should be pretty trivial to locate the exploiters through a query , if they dont log things tough , they are majorly screwed and for all future exploits , ill give it some days before i give my final vote on this game. extremely sad if they dont fix this because i was really enjoying my last couple of months in this game.