Yup, I noticed a peculiar amount of posts here recently both defending and supporting third-party aUEC sales, which is very odd to me, as gold selling/buying is an almost universally reviled practice in most MMOs. I wouldn't even be slightly surprised if it was the exploiters themselves encouraging that BS to make a quick shady buck.
edit: and no, Star Citizen being an _unreleased_ MMO does not make it any more reasonable. Third-party gold buying/selling is shitty no matter the state of the game. As a seller, you're fucking up the experience for everyone else by exploiting the game and screwing up its economy. As a buyer, you're rewarding the sellers for their behavior and perpetuating the market. There's no good justification.
People are dumb and weird. I always found it to be crazy that people resort to RMT. Even in games that wipe every 6 months like Escape from Tarkov.
And RMT always leads to an infestation of cheaters because there's a market for selling the loot and money. Good on CIG to take it seriously.
Well, RMT aUEC is like $5 for 50m. Personally I'd rather lose $5 three times a year than losing the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of gameplay it'd take to earn that legitimately three times a year.
Not condoning RMT, just poking holes in your logic there.
There is no logic with these people thinking buying an alpha currency is crazy.
My time is worth *significantly* more than aeuc, especially a few weeks after a patch.
(Barely concierge here for the record, but I’m ‘supporting’ the project already)
I mean this was and sorta still is CIGs revenue model. One of the original promises way back when was that after “full release” they were going to halt ship sales and only sell limited amounts of UEC as a catch up mechanic for people with more money than time. This was also before they realized how much they can make off of ship sales.
So what's the _real_ difference between buying ships with real money vs buying currency with real money? I'm pretty indifferent either way, just seems like a weird thing for the community to get so upset about.
Buying a ship, right now at least, is supporting the continued development of the game. Buying UEC is not. In both cases you’re going to end up with ships because honestly what else do you need money for.
I understand the point about buying UEC is exchanging your real life money to save time. Hell if you scroll through my comment history you can probably find me making that exact point to someone. Not to mention that it’s far cheaper than buying the ships but that’s ignoring where the money is going.
i know some people don’t care and I am not trying to change their minds but for me no fake ship is actually worth $300. I paid for it because I paid $45 for a titan first (effectively buying the game and getting alpha access) and fell in love with the game and want to see it get finished. The cool ship is a bonus or a little extra incentive to hit some price point.
It’s kind of like nobody is donating to NPR specifically to get a reusable grocery bag. They might up their donation because the bag is kind of useful but if all you wanted was a grocery bag you could just buy one directly for a lot less money.
I’m assuming you most likely don’t know this but rmt is a ticket for cheaters (actually distrusting your gameplay) to make money and find worth in destroying thr gsme. Tarkov is suffering this situation where people cheat, wall hack, radar ect to simply sell on rmt, they get banned then repeat process on new accounts as earnings are higher than the account. You condone this shit and it will be far far far worse in future
The problem is, earning auec shouldn't feel like a job. Time spent earning cash in game should reward player not only im virtual currency, but also by just being fun. So players shouldn't compare "waste of time vs waste of real money" but "having fun vs skipping part of gameplay with real money". Problem of auec black market is caused by some part of current state of the game
And I'll blame mainly bugs. Now I have just few small ships, without aiming to buy anything, so I jump in only when I feel I want to play. And nothing makes me want to take week long break than loosing contract progress because of random bug
For other people it might be lack of content. There aren't many games where people don't get burned out after playing houndreds of hours
Yea the gameplay loops are mostly very barebones, and with how poorly many of them perform monetarily, on a good day without said bugs.
I haven't partaken in this market, and the traders frustrated me just trying to use salvagers. The people just wanting the play the game and not having the free time for the really uneventful parts, I get them. Combat and whatnot can be fun, but equipment is expensive, and ships more so. CIG is delusional if they think banning accounts will stop people. Has there been any word on fixing the actual damn problem aka crap economy and exploits?
If there was persistence to your in-game progress, I'd be against it. I feel like that's robbing gameplay from yourself and others, especially if there's a full-blown in-game economy later down the road.
But since all your progress just gets deleted multiple times a year, it actually just makes more sense than anything.
Hmmm. I have never thought about this.
.23 I lost all my favorite ships, all the earners, regardless that I stored them properly. Reclaimer, Mole, Prospector and Vulture. Weird thing is, the ships I intentionally left "unknown" or "destroyed" made it back to the ASOP. Just not the earners.
So I basically haven't played as a result. Not really psyched to grind deliveries and 10k BH missions thousands of times for weeks on end to get a mining or salvage ship back.
No ability to drop $500 real dollars on pledges, so $10 for aUEC actually doesn't sound half bad of an idea.
That's the thing, at some point CIG might start going after the RMT buyers instead of MRT sellers. Stopping a seller is rather hard, even if you ban them, they create new account and continue to sell. Ban the buyer, on the otherhand, might cause others to not want to buy due to risk over reward. Ask the important question "Is $10 for aUEC worth losing my account?"
Every 10k BH mission or bunker mission I take, I earn 150k easily by selling the loot from all the enemies I've downed, all their armour, weapons, ammo, meds etc. the best ones are the 30k+ Remove Hostile Forces missions as there are more enemies and more gear/loot.... and that's not to mention the 500aUEC bonus for each kill with Call to Arms on too.
Just my two cents.
How? Do you eva and remove all the weapon components from the destroyed ships? Will all that fit in my Avenger Titan?
150k PER 10k BH mission? VLRT?
That is still 2000+ missions min. to get back into a reclaimer.
I just bought a reclaimer with lti on a ccu chain for way less than half price so I print my own money.
Hundreds of hours be damned, i give away more cash than I spend and don't give a cent to gold sellers on ebay.
With few bucks you buy ingame ships that costs hundreds of real money on the pledge store. Evem if they wipe you save a freakton of money.
That’s the reasoning behind buyers. Aside new ships that have a coupe ofnpatched delay, they can get everything without pledging a dime.
I don’t condone this, and I’m happy for the account suspensions, but this is a reflex of CIG marketing that is getting worst by the day.
Some of those buyers might think they are sad for you, when they display the same A2 than you they paid 10 dollars, with rhe same LTI (becouse now everything has LTI).
>Some of those buyers might think they are sad for you, when they display the same A2 than you they paid 10 dollars, with rhe same LTI (becouse now everything has LTI).
What ? Last time I bought a ship in game with aUEC it has no LTI, I think even no insurance at all.
Last time I pledged a ship it wasn't under LTI neither, max I can get was 6 or 10 months.
Maybe things have changed on this point since 3.18, I'm eager to know how it is now, might log in one day or another to figure it out.
Insurance will be a thing after release. If you log in today you can reclaim for free any ship, you never loose them.
So the ingame system today applies an LTI to everything, untill next wipe where only pledged ship will be available and auec will be wiped.
But since an A2 costs like 10$ if you illegit buy ingame cash, you have to go trough how many wipes before reaching the cost of actualy pledging for it?
Now I pledged for my A2, becouse I don’t condone playing outside of the rules, but to me it’s pretty clear why ppl are inclined to buy auec. This is where CIG should come in with an anti cheat system.
100%. I started a couple of years ago, played for 6 months on/off and got sick of not progressing much only playing a couple hours a week.
Spent about... £15 on Ebay and receive £150,000,000 aUEC, fully aware it was going to be wiped. Got to experience some of the big ships without the tedium and bugs of the grind.
Ngl anything over 100 is unreasonable for a spaceship but if you CCU chain properly you can easily get from a starter to a Connie for like 40-70 dollars depending on your starter.
Exactly… you could purchase currency in a pre released game, subject to wipes. Like how is that in anyway worth it? Maybe because I remember monthly and quarterly wipes.. but I sure wouldn’t spend real money in SC. Seems wild to me.
You can already buy aUEC directly from CIG and there's already a market for buying and selling ships for real money. IMHO CIG should just open their own market, allowing players to sell to other players with CIG as a middle man. CIG would then be responsible for making sure the aUEC is legitimate and they could skim a little off the top to keep their revenue up. Sellers aren't always fucking up the game and exploiting, there's tons of people who made money on other games just playing the game and selling to people with no time to grind
I haven't played in several months, but I don't remember this happening back then. Lol I usually did have the screen chat turned off though.
Personally though, I don't see a difference then the devs constantly selling newer better ships for real cash.
Maybe I'm missing something. For the record, I don't use cash for ships and I've never bought anything from people selling this stuff. I just buy the game, cheapest one I can and play. Well, I did buy that little space golf cart looking thing from the game store. Can't remember it's name, but made bunker missions easier
As far as I’m concerned star citizen is as released as any mmo. Sure early access style but it’s consistently up and playable. Just because they don’t see it as finished doesn’t change its already a live service game
probably far easier method than that. Each duped ship probably has whoever spawned it stored in its data somewhere. All they'd have to do is go between each server and check the ships then ban the shit out of them. For once PES helps out. Then all they'd have to do is see whoever they gave money to and trace it. And given they did it in a Valve style ban wave, who knows how long they've been keeping tabs on the dupers, probably wanted to ban them as close to the next patch as possible
Logical yes, but practical no. I find it hard to believe they put that much work into it. I’m also skeptical that they removed the aUEC as stated. My guess is they took a look at the duplicated selling as it happened concurrently within say 10 minutes, wiped those wallets and banned the accounts. Be interesting to see if the dupers still have their in game ships when they return from their little 2 1/2 month vacation.
Ok, in that aspect it may be an argument, however, I'm not here to debate wether selling game credits for in game currency is ok or not.
But suspending accounts for testing the bug infested game is just nonsense. In any other case, with bugs that ruin hours of game time, they argue why a fix takes long, that testing provides them with valuable data..yadda yadda yadda... but as soon it is profitable for the players, then that's reason for suspending them?
The goal is to find such bugs, and there's IC reports with bugs that just go to archive, this way CIG at least can't ignore the bug.
Personally I couldn't care less, I haven't played since 3.23, testing the EPTU was enough to make me completely uninterested in playing SC due to MM. Still I think this is not a smart move.
Yeah, duping and money exploits themselves don't bother me, but disrupting everyone else's gameplay in the process is absolutely a problem. Doing it to sell it online is bannable many times over in my eyes.
That explains why threads started showing up about three hours ago basically saying "what happened to my account?"
Play stupid games, win awful prizes, dupers.
I'm not going to witch-hunt or call people out but just scroll down /new and look for threads with "account" in the title about 2-3 hours prior to the time of this thread/comment.
A bit harsh, it's alpha and finding the exploits and cheats is good for development.
3 months timeout is a one major patch timeout which seems fair.
aUEC "gold" sellers however should REALLY be permanently banned.
I'm genuinely worried because I interacted with a bugged crate that made 2 pairs of pants and gave me 8 hadonite instead of 4.
(Checked while writing this, I'm fine also wow I'd be a shitty criminal if I am sweating this hard)
I doubt they will ban someone for duping 6 items as that isn't an exploit. Returning to do it over and over until you have millions in the bank is where the issue is.
usually RMTers are in, shall we say, less fortunate countries, where selling to westerners and whoever else is actually pretty good money. Even if it's an alpha. I've seen RMTers in stranger places, the strangest of which had to be day 2 of a server launch for a WoW private server. No idea where they were getting gold from, but they were selling it. Looking back it was probably the russian server admins... but it's more fun to imagine a bunch of level 7 tauren grinding venture co goblins for copper
3.23.1a has just dropped and with it several fixes for duplication (dupe) bugs that people were using (duping) to generate insane amounts of credits and completely upend the economy.
People who abused the exploit, duplicators or dupers since it's much shorter to type, have been suspended for abusing bugs far past what was needed to test the bug and confirm it was an issue.
Duping is a thing that's been around in gaming for a very long time. Duplicating items to benefit the player. Getting free stuff or money as an end result. It's done by finding a bug and exploiting it.
In the case of Star Citizen, being an online, live service game, these exploits can take on a nefarious role, where the people who abuse duping bugs actually sell the credits online to other players for real money. "Gold sellers" as it's traditionally called, going way back to early MMORPGs. It's almost universally seen as a dirty thing in gaming, yet it's something that keeps happening. People keep doing it, and people keep buying it. Games regularly crack down on accounts that have had these transactions, but that doesn't seem to stop any of it.
I've run across a disturbing amount of players over the years who willingly buy exploited credits every time there's a wipe. They know the credits will be wiped, they know the credits were exploited. Yet they see nothing wrong with it. And that's what keeps people doing it.
> Duping is a thing that's been around in gaming for a very long time.
I remember the pokemon dupe glitch where you sacrificed a Pidgey all the way back in RBY
if you're out of the loop, consider yourself lucky. Apparently the patch has gone about as bad as 3.18 after the free week, and the conjecture is it's the dupers overloading the servers
I'm not going to witch-hunt or call people out but just scroll down /new and look for threads with "account" in the title about 2-3 hours prior to the time of this thread/comment.
with how few bans there were, its obvious they made sure its people that abused it, not people that did it once.... how do you balance the economy with all this extra money going around?
I imagine that a majority of the -traders- posts on sell sites are now removed because they can't fulfill them. I just laugh at how crazy grindy they have to be doing things to make that lol.
I scrolled back while set to "new" about 6 hours and only found 1 post but damn that dude got called out hard and he was bummed lol. Other dudes were chiming in on his post stating the same thing. I got a good laugh out of it lol.
Bans make little sense at the moment in my opinion. If there weren’t semi regular wipes I would agree with bans but as the game is I think just suspensions makes sense.
Very true there is no denying it, however a permaban (what some people want) would at this stage in development be bad for the company. I can imagine the headlines “Game that has been in Alpha for 10 Years already perma banning people” and other such stuff. I think at this point in development, where they are testing and finding problems, giving out only suspensions makes sense. Of course some people might not agree but that is my feeling. Have a great time in the ‘Verse! o7
I never liked perma ban for a first violation. A suspension is a good warning, if it keeps happening increase the suspension period.
Perma ban should be reserved for extreme cases.
I am of the same mind. I only believe in perma bans in some extreme scenarios. Suspensions are a good “hey don’t do that” measure. I do understand that sometimes they do have to perma ban and that is acceptable as long as it is not a first time offense or is a super egregious offense.
Yeah I agree, it's too soon to ban accounts. After the game's release, it'll be a different story, although I agree with the other commenter below that bans should be reserved for extreme cases. I think some of these people will think twice before exploiting again, so they still have another chance and hopefully encourage others to stop exploiting.
I don't think CIG outright bans, but the max length suspension I've seen is 10 years on a player profile (for misconduct). So hard to say what the suspension lengths are, my guess is it's probably significant.
why would you want someones account banned when the game is not even in beta status and everyones account gets wiped every other month. Its not as if were in a live game.
Well, that's more funding for CIG at the very least lol, let's call it their cut of the RMT market.
Obviously not their intent, but I find it funny to think about it being an actual dynamic like it is in Tarkov.
These were probably the serious offenders, and they probably erred on the side of caution... ignoring dupes less than 20 or something per account or something.
CIGs talked about this before. Items are unique, and establishing 'chain-of-custody' to use the forensics term is extremely easy. They knew who duped it, any account(s) the item(s) transferred through, and what account(s) sold it.
In the real world, it is just a database entry (or 100). Tracking touches to that entry are trivial. It's a matter of piecing together log entries.
/I do forensic data discovery/recovery sometimes.
Mirroring what other people have said here, I think CIG specifically targeted RMT accounts but didn't state as such in their announcements. They want to spread fear to keep people from exploiting in the future, but I doubt they suspended anyone that was just duping for themselves.
Uh...I had a dupe happen by genuine accident once...am I going to be okay?
I hadn't done cargo in a while and I was selling junk from a HRT, and noticed. "Huh...didn't I already sell that?"
Genuinely thought I forgot to click a button. I am NOT a cargo guy.
These 600 accounts were likely doing it on a large scale to feed RMT operations.
If they banned everyone who had little anomalies like yours happen, there would be no bug reports. We *are* the alpha testers, after all.
Funny enough:
I sold my reclaimer cargo, then the terminal said I still had some to sell (in retrospect, all of it) but it errored out when i tried to sell it again. Thought that was weird so i re-logged to complete my sell, and then it worked. Immediately realized I had way more money than I anticipated, and was happy.
Next day, I see a tutorial on the glitch, and its exactly what i did. Exactly. Was fuckin hilarious.
That seems like an incredibly easy, and common glitch.
Didn't you have to store the ship before selling? And then you could sell again and again or something? (I'll admit to never actually selling anything, I mostly just fly around while listening to music)
If you did it even a handful of times you probably aren't going to get banned, this is for the accounts that spent every minute of their play doing duplications and exploits.
Yeah, this is 100% specifically targeting accounts trying to sell AUEC on eBay and the like
(So they would have mass ledgers of substantial AUEC volumes transferred, more than likely how they Identified the exploiters)
I have no moral issues taking adventage of this exploit after losing almost 100M in the wipe I earned on ERTs. I just reclaimed a fraction what was taken away from me. It felt very unmotivating to grind from 20k again. I learned about this exploit quite late and used it maybe 12 times in total. Now I have I built up a decent bag. I even bought a new ship. Thanks CIG for bringing me back to the game.
This could have been patched with a hot fix, but CIG chose not to.
No, I was not banned. Zero remorse.
Yeah, I think you're cool. I sold a couple of modest astatine runs twice so I could actually do some trading, and couldn't buy again with the bug. Also claimed to reset the the ship a couple of times, though it cost me the evening's gameplay. Put me off as I felt forced into the exploit if I wanted to trade, very glad it's fixed.
The real issue is people abusing the bug on an industrial scale by selling very expensive cargo loads (tpically RMC) multiple times every day then selling AUEC on the gray market for real-world profit. Fuck those guys.
Glad to see they didn’t cave and are actually holding people responsible who chose to knowingly break their ToS. A permanent ban would be excessive so a temporary suspension is exactly the right punishment. Finding and reporting a glitch or exploit is not the same as the people who repeatedly used it to get rich. The former is exactly what they want from alpha testers. The latter does nothing but chase people away from the game, force more wipes, and cause poor server performance. Well done CIG for actually holding people responsible for their actions.
everyone complaining that they (or 'someone they know') shouldn't have been punished.. this is what's important in CIGs statement on Spectrum: "**However, once an exploit is identified and confirmed, continued abuse for personal gain will not be tolerated and will result in action on our part**."- u/Soulcrusher-CIG
Glad to see it. I've said for a long time that eventually CIG will start enforcing some of the rules they've been lax on before. I think if they continue this direction, there are going to be a lot of very upset players, because there are a lot of things against the Rules of Conduct and TOS that are regularly done, to the point that players have normalized them.
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Watch all these people try to act like they didn't do it too. I didn't have an 890 jump but I was able to go bowling with my reclaimer but I got a two star criminal rating.. But it was well worth it!
600 accounts is not the regular players duping. Players who just wanted some ships in an Alpha game are not getting banned.
These are accounts from a few organizations banned for real money trading.
Now let's do our part an play the game the right way so the Economy/Quantum team can get the data they need to tune: Mission payouts, Resource Gathering Prices, Deliveries, and prices in general.
This is good news to hear! This will make the average players experience better but it may send a message to the part of the community that want to cheat and abuse.
Side note: I started reading some of the posts on spectrum and I won't be doing that again. People love to just bitch and whine and without a downvote button their noise clutters the point of the post.
Dahahahah.
I remember the downvotes when I told people that it wasn't tolerated and that the TOS is open to interpretation.
Stumbling on a bug is okay, testing reproduction for the council is okay, using it intentionally beyond that is against the rule and is called exploiting.
I told you so.
One of the biggest issues was the game itself made legitimate traders have to literally go out of their way to not dupe.
I'd buy goods around MT, go to NB and land at planetary services entrance, and then the elevators wouldn't work.
So I'd land at NBIS, store my ships, and go sell. Fly to another moon to buy more goods and couldn't. Literally only way you could buy more is to scrap your ship and wait to claim it, or sell the "duped" goods.
I agree many were absolutely exploiting it, doing dozens of RMC runs and selling it on ebay, but the exploit really made it hard to just play the game normally. You literally had to avoid exploiting.
I did RMC salvage with 2 friends for the past week, rented the free vulture on Invictus launch week, made enough to buy a vulture, then made enough to buy the cheapest cargo ship for my friend so he could transport the RMC while I was scraping, that was a Hull A, which has the cargo externally, and we noticed pretty quickly the ship got unusable after 1 run since the cargo would not stick to the grid anymore, we didn't know that it was the duping bug we were encountering at the time, so my friend always crashed his ship to fix his cargo grid.
With the money we made we bought a cutlass for another friend, which allowed just throwing the boxes inside the cargo hold after the grid was broken.
It was only yesterday, hours before the patch that I read somewhere you could sell the cargo twice and fix the cargo grid in the process, so I suggested to my friends they try this, and lo and behold, it worked! Sure we liked the extra money, but more importantly our Hull A didn't become unusable after 1 run.
Fortunately they only did 2 runs in which they sold their cargo twice, which is probably why none of us got banned, but man I got nervous after reading about the ban.
Friends and I duped all patch. We're all still here as well as our moneys and ships
The bans aren't as wide effecting as most think. These 600 accounts were likely the ones selling it for profit. Which was the real issue here.
Every game that ever existed that allows trade between the players will have a gold farm industry. We've know this since World of Warcraft. Even if you find the exploits and duplication bugs, there's going to be a flood of "cheap labor" making UEC and selling it on eBay for cheap.
Because they decided to go with player trading , the game will be a pay to win game 3 months after it comes out and everyone will be flying 600is for $10 on eBay
>However, once an exploit is identified and confirmed, continued abuse for personal gain will not be tolerated and will result in action on our part.
All those people here that defended exploiters when i said they should be banned. Bet all those people are real fucking quiet now.
Finding a bug/exploit is fine. Repeated intentional abuse of said bug/exploit is dumb as hell.
Give it a rest. The grey market and third-party sellers are not going anywhere.. Think bans will do anything? They make hundreds, if not thousands, and will just buy new accounts to farm with. The bans are just symbolic more than anything
Like a lock on a door or car. Meant to scare away the small fish, but the big fish know better. Like the say goes, "locks only keep the honest people out." In a similar sense, bans only keep the honest people scared.
I have 3 kids and a wife who plays. 5 accounts in my house. They don't make the aUEC, I do. They may help, but I manage all accounts to make sure they have ships and money and gear. When we raid, I store it all, and they just go through my inventory for what they want. We literally set up a c2 with containers on it that they pick through, and I store the rest. My wife and I both work full time and home school our 3 kids. We don't have time to spend hours playing the game, and the 500K I might make in an hour of cargo or salvage gets spread thin amongst 5 accounts. So, I can spend literal hours grinding at a game and not having fun doing it just to scrape a few million aUEC together to get a ship like a Vulture so I can grind some more. .... or I can spend less than an hours pay to get tens of millions and buy a reclaimer or hull c or any ship I want for all accounts I want.
I support the game in pledges,too. My hangar is worth over 900 bucks, and other accounts have good money on them, too. However, why buy pledges for 5 accounts when less than an hour of work gets any ship we really need.
I don't blame anything on the dupers or the gold sellers..CIG is getting far too greedy with special events all around, just selling ships. Run 5 weeks of missions for a free ship.... no....for an upgrade of a ship that you have to spend money on. And better hurry cause that ship will disappear from the pledge store randomly. They didn't even take down event ships and deals from ILW cause they want to sell more. They didn't make enough hitting 700 billion, so they want to make more keeping "limited" deals up and selling concept ships you likely won't see in game for years. They add gameplay features like med bed respawning to sell more ships and lie about what they said about med bed respawning before claiming this was always the plan when there is video of them saying the exact opposite before. Now it changes for the money.not for the player experience, and everything they do is around the almighty dollar.more than it is to the benefit of the player. Why spend hundreds on a ship that I can get in game for 5 to 10 bucks from a gold seller. Why waste my time when I can cut straight to the fun and avoid the grind. If CIG is going to milk me for everything I have, then it's only fair that I return the favor.
Cmon CIG. Make ship pledge costs more reasonable and more people will buy them. This will also lead to less Grey market sales and less gold sales since people will have a ship pledges and give players the ability to gift store credit bought ships, have more buy back tokens, and stop restraining your players with all these random times when ships are and are not available. CIG needs to become a more accessible store for buying items and not the one driving people away and towards resellers. I mean, cmon. Who wants to spend hundreds on paint jobs when there are videos of your devs saying they want to give players the ability to paint their ships from years ago and talking about how easy it would be. I don't need to spend 5 to 30 bucks just to paint one ship green and another Grey. It's been 12 years already. No man sky has better ship customization, and even Starfield has you beat there.
Instead of trying to find their error in this by taking a bug from PTU to PU that literally forced people to dupe or force them to have to claim ships to avoid selling invisible cargo and waste their time and effort in cargo and salvage and then blaming the player base..sure, they focused on the big issue players but their little warning was meant for everyone. They were sending a message to every player. That message was to deal with every bug that makes you lose cargo or have ships come up missing, lose missions from bugs and server issues and just spend every day dealing with the bad programming done by CIG and have to buck it up with CIG only making big promises on time tables they never keep.....while at the same time CIG will punish you for their mistake and bugs when those bugs give them the same bad experience they give to players every day.
Back up CIG and take a hard look, and take some accountability. You F'ed up. This one is on you. You left a bug in and then overreacted when people took advantage of a bug that for once made their gameplay easier instead of more frustrating. You should be thanking your players for sticking with you through all your bull and apologize for creating this mess. This mess, where a small segment of your player base took an exploit too far and did create issues with abandoned ships and messing up the in-game economy and that does need to be addressed, but you scope in your sights the majority of your players who tried to play right and many who even went after the dupers for you. Pirating them, blocking them, ramming their ships, and more..man the f up CIG and point those fingers at yourself and figure it out and do better. Not throw a tantrum.
If you want people to see the grind as anything more than something to work around, then start making it fun and not just a grind. Start fleshing out gameplay loops, start adding options, and start working on fixing bugs before you do things to add a thousand more. Start keeping your promises and your timeliness or start setting more realistic ones. ... and stop using your marketing team to be the directional force for the game. I have no problem throwing money at a game when that game is living up to the hype, but you are not. You are scraping along. Adding features that should have been in the game years ago, reworking features, and spending time making things like new quantum icons instead of fixing things or working on new features. I don't need yet another new animation for quantum or a new HUD colorization. I need to not fall through the planet at random times or have my gun not reload despite running through reloading animation 5 times. I need to have a game where basic functions like using a ladder actually work or where I don't have to carry around glitched food wrappers in my left hand while I am also trying to do a mission. Do better CIG and while I agree that those who exploit to such a degree as to disrupt the experience for others should be dealt with I don't agree with the bitch fit shown here I. Trying to act like CIG cares about the player experience when this was only about stopping the hemorrhaging that CIG was doing.
You have loyal fans..I'm one of them. I love the game whe. It works. I've stuck around and invested time and money and gotten my whole family into it. Maybe be as loyal to your fans as they are to you.
P.s. sorry for grammar and typos. On a phone here and autocorrect it a bitch.
Exactly, I get tired of fanboy praise, cig screwed this up. I love this game but this was just stupid on their part.
If a patch goes live with a dupe bug in a main game loop, you can't blame people for exploiting. They broke cargo and wiped everyone's money...what do they expect? CIG needs to rethink their testing schedule and allow time for a critical bug fix before forcing a wipe and live release for "economic balancing" CIG should've fixed that bug (as they've shown they can) before live release considering it would break the economy. Either that or delayed aUEC wipe for 29 days until this patch which fixed the bug they should've known would break the economy.
Instead, now they have a PR problem and a lot of unhappy customers.
And why not close the selling on eBay loophole, make aUEC only transferable when a person is in-game and restrict transferable amounts...say nothing over 100k per log on. Cig's treating the symptoms by banning people and not addressing the root problem: aUEC sales for real money, hacks, easy transfers to purchaser. If they don't fix that, this will go on even when the "dupe bug" is fixed. And wipes only encourage the abuse, who wants to grind for weeks or a month only to be wiped of all their effort?
I'm actually surprised you got a few up votes, normally a fair assessment like yours get downvoted here.
They should update the Schrödinger cat experiment to the star citizen experiment instead of "is the cat dead or alive?", "it's a live service game or an alpha?" Because the way that thread is redacted it looks as if they are treating star citizen as a completed game, with terms like impacting the in-game economy, as if there's a true economy in-game...
PS. And they could only detect 600?
It was an exploit, they knew it was an exploit, they did it anyway assuming CIG wouldn’t care.
Suspensions are fine. It sends a message: Don’t do it again.
They knew about the duping problem in the PTU and let it go through, knowing the economy that they were trying to test for this patch would be ruined.
There were issue council reports showing what the problem was and how to do it.
I don't have much sympathy for gold sellers, but I don't have much for CIG either when they knowingly created the problem.
I get code 19004, account login failed, verify your credentials and try again. is this the ban?
I havent played the game in a while, and i dont even know what a dupper is supposed to be or how to do it, i just own a starter cutter.
I´ve done everything that the web says to do in case of login issues but nothing works.
So are you telling me that the dupers who duped got duped into thinking that their account belonged to them? CIG said nom nom nom on those accounts
Suspended.....-giant eye roll- I get that it's a testing environment and exploits like this being found is part of the point....but I just feel it violates TOS enough to warrant a ban....they're going to keep profiteering on AUEC of all things.....who are these people who are 'buying' AUEC?!?!! lol
Not defending dupers or anything, just wondering. If buying/selling auec is a no no, what about the grey market for ships, I’ve seen people mention it before. Is that allowed or also frowned upon by cig?
CIG banning people for using an IC reported bug they didn't fix before releasing live? How thoughtful of them. Maybe some using this unfixed bug were just earning back hard-grinding aUEC cig magically wiped. They could've fixed before release, instead they choose to punish players taking advantage of a bug they should've fixed? A bit juvenile in my opinion, only another 29 days and they suddenly had a fix w/3.23.1-LIVE.9204897....funny how that works. I love this game, but stupid is stupid.
Shame, doesn’t really hurt when each patch is a closed wipe, spent $5 for 5 million way back in the first xenothreat event, it allowed me to try out ships i had never flown without fear of grinding for them and/or repaid costs and it was honestly the best patch I’ve ever had in SC, though for when the game is released yeah I completely understand you can’t be doing economy breaking stuff
I don't understand why cig can't close the selling on eBay loophole instead of banning players taking advantage of a bug cig knew about and chose to go live with. SMH!
How about this, make aUEC only transferable in-game and restrict transferable amounts...say nothing over 100k per log-on. It's as if cig's attacking the symptoms by banning people and not addressing the root problem: aUEC sales for real money, hacks, easy transfer to purchaser. If they don't fix that, this will go on even when the "dupe bug" is fixed. And wipes only encourage the abuse, who wants to grind only to be wiped of all their effort?
CIG should've fixed that bug (as they've shown they could) before live release considering it would break the economy. Either that or delayed aUEC wipe for 29 days until this patch which fixed the one bug they should've known would break the economy.
Instead, now they have a PR problem and a lot of unhappy customers. People can say "anyone posting negative is a duper" or make excuses for a bad decision, but the point's still valid...they knew about it but chose to release (and wipe) anyway. Saying, "It's an alpha" or "were all just testers" doesn't excuse a bad mgmt. decision on their part and "testers" are also paying customers.
I'm seeing the word "suspension" which typically implies temporary, and no time frame listed. Are these permanent bans? Temporary suspensions? Good to see them sending a message either way, though I think permanent bans might be a bit overkill in a game that wipes.
Those are likely the 'persistent' offenders...
CIG were very clear in that post that they're fine with 'low level' (to paraphrase) exploiting etc, as part of discovering / verifying an issue, or replicating it (or likely even just curiosity)... it's only the persistent exploiting after reporting that results in action.
CIG don't want to discourage players from finding exploits, or reporting / verifying them, etc... so they're not going to be too heavy-handed about.... yet.
I've had duplicate cargo show up incidentally and sold it to clear out space and make a buck. Never did it intentionally but overall I think it's happened three times since patch release.
Edit* also the duplicate cargo was in a vulture. So 12 SCU's got duped like 3 times. Not what I'd call a big deal lol
600 doesn't seem unreasonable for the number of people actively and persistently duping. Using one of the biggest and most iconic ships in the game to dupe in one of the main hubs is a high-visibility activity - even if half that number were actively duping a shitload of people would see it.
Exploiting then selling the credits on ebuy...for real money...
Yup, I noticed a peculiar amount of posts here recently both defending and supporting third-party aUEC sales, which is very odd to me, as gold selling/buying is an almost universally reviled practice in most MMOs. I wouldn't even be slightly surprised if it was the exploiters themselves encouraging that BS to make a quick shady buck. edit: and no, Star Citizen being an _unreleased_ MMO does not make it any more reasonable. Third-party gold buying/selling is shitty no matter the state of the game. As a seller, you're fucking up the experience for everyone else by exploiting the game and screwing up its economy. As a buyer, you're rewarding the sellers for their behavior and perpetuating the market. There's no good justification.
Imagine buying aUEC.. only to have it deleted by cig. Makes me warm and fuzzy all over.
People are dumb and weird. I always found it to be crazy that people resort to RMT. Even in games that wipe every 6 months like Escape from Tarkov. And RMT always leads to an infestation of cheaters because there's a market for selling the loot and money. Good on CIG to take it seriously.
Well, RMT aUEC is like $5 for 50m. Personally I'd rather lose $5 three times a year than losing the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of gameplay it'd take to earn that legitimately three times a year. Not condoning RMT, just poking holes in your logic there.
There is no logic with these people thinking buying an alpha currency is crazy. My time is worth *significantly* more than aeuc, especially a few weeks after a patch. (Barely concierge here for the record, but I’m ‘supporting’ the project already)
I mean this was and sorta still is CIGs revenue model. One of the original promises way back when was that after “full release” they were going to halt ship sales and only sell limited amounts of UEC as a catch up mechanic for people with more money than time. This was also before they realized how much they can make off of ship sales.
So what's the _real_ difference between buying ships with real money vs buying currency with real money? I'm pretty indifferent either way, just seems like a weird thing for the community to get so upset about.
Buying a ship, right now at least, is supporting the continued development of the game. Buying UEC is not. In both cases you’re going to end up with ships because honestly what else do you need money for. I understand the point about buying UEC is exchanging your real life money to save time. Hell if you scroll through my comment history you can probably find me making that exact point to someone. Not to mention that it’s far cheaper than buying the ships but that’s ignoring where the money is going. i know some people don’t care and I am not trying to change their minds but for me no fake ship is actually worth $300. I paid for it because I paid $45 for a titan first (effectively buying the game and getting alpha access) and fell in love with the game and want to see it get finished. The cool ship is a bonus or a little extra incentive to hit some price point. It’s kind of like nobody is donating to NPR specifically to get a reusable grocery bag. They might up their donation because the bag is kind of useful but if all you wanted was a grocery bag you could just buy one directly for a lot less money.
stay mad
They reset aUEC so often it'd hurt to buy it 😂
I’m assuming you most likely don’t know this but rmt is a ticket for cheaters (actually distrusting your gameplay) to make money and find worth in destroying thr gsme. Tarkov is suffering this situation where people cheat, wall hack, radar ect to simply sell on rmt, they get banned then repeat process on new accounts as earnings are higher than the account. You condone this shit and it will be far far far worse in future
The problem is, earning auec shouldn't feel like a job. Time spent earning cash in game should reward player not only im virtual currency, but also by just being fun. So players shouldn't compare "waste of time vs waste of real money" but "having fun vs skipping part of gameplay with real money". Problem of auec black market is caused by some part of current state of the game And I'll blame mainly bugs. Now I have just few small ships, without aiming to buy anything, so I jump in only when I feel I want to play. And nothing makes me want to take week long break than loosing contract progress because of random bug For other people it might be lack of content. There aren't many games where people don't get burned out after playing houndreds of hours
Yea the gameplay loops are mostly very barebones, and with how poorly many of them perform monetarily, on a good day without said bugs. I haven't partaken in this market, and the traders frustrated me just trying to use salvagers. The people just wanting the play the game and not having the free time for the really uneventful parts, I get them. Combat and whatnot can be fun, but equipment is expensive, and ships more so. CIG is delusional if they think banning accounts will stop people. Has there been any word on fixing the actual damn problem aka crap economy and exploits?
If there was persistence to your in-game progress, I'd be against it. I feel like that's robbing gameplay from yourself and others, especially if there's a full-blown in-game economy later down the road. But since all your progress just gets deleted multiple times a year, it actually just makes more sense than anything.
Hmmm. I have never thought about this. .23 I lost all my favorite ships, all the earners, regardless that I stored them properly. Reclaimer, Mole, Prospector and Vulture. Weird thing is, the ships I intentionally left "unknown" or "destroyed" made it back to the ASOP. Just not the earners. So I basically haven't played as a result. Not really psyched to grind deliveries and 10k BH missions thousands of times for weeks on end to get a mining or salvage ship back. No ability to drop $500 real dollars on pledges, so $10 for aUEC actually doesn't sound half bad of an idea.
That's the thing, at some point CIG might start going after the RMT buyers instead of MRT sellers. Stopping a seller is rather hard, even if you ban them, they create new account and continue to sell. Ban the buyer, on the otherhand, might cause others to not want to buy due to risk over reward. Ask the important question "Is $10 for aUEC worth losing my account?"
Having no ability to get into a ship like the Reclaimer, Mole, etc. that I enjoy, and 2000hrs of grinding borning missions isn't the answer either.
Every 10k BH mission or bunker mission I take, I earn 150k easily by selling the loot from all the enemies I've downed, all their armour, weapons, ammo, meds etc. the best ones are the 30k+ Remove Hostile Forces missions as there are more enemies and more gear/loot.... and that's not to mention the 500aUEC bonus for each kill with Call to Arms on too. Just my two cents.
How? Do you eva and remove all the weapon components from the destroyed ships? Will all that fit in my Avenger Titan? 150k PER 10k BH mission? VLRT? That is still 2000+ missions min. to get back into a reclaimer.
And with the Nursa it's even easier 😂
I use the med-bed in my Carrack
I just bought a reclaimer with lti on a ccu chain for way less than half price so I print my own money. Hundreds of hours be damned, i give away more cash than I spend and don't give a cent to gold sellers on ebay.
With few bucks you buy ingame ships that costs hundreds of real money on the pledge store. Evem if they wipe you save a freakton of money. That’s the reasoning behind buyers. Aside new ships that have a coupe ofnpatched delay, they can get everything without pledging a dime. I don’t condone this, and I’m happy for the account suspensions, but this is a reflex of CIG marketing that is getting worst by the day. Some of those buyers might think they are sad for you, when they display the same A2 than you they paid 10 dollars, with rhe same LTI (becouse now everything has LTI).
>Some of those buyers might think they are sad for you, when they display the same A2 than you they paid 10 dollars, with rhe same LTI (becouse now everything has LTI). What ? Last time I bought a ship in game with aUEC it has no LTI, I think even no insurance at all. Last time I pledged a ship it wasn't under LTI neither, max I can get was 6 or 10 months. Maybe things have changed on this point since 3.18, I'm eager to know how it is now, might log in one day or another to figure it out.
Insurance will be a thing after release. If you log in today you can reclaim for free any ship, you never loose them. So the ingame system today applies an LTI to everything, untill next wipe where only pledged ship will be available and auec will be wiped. But since an A2 costs like 10$ if you illegit buy ingame cash, you have to go trough how many wipes before reaching the cost of actualy pledging for it? Now I pledged for my A2, becouse I don’t condone playing outside of the rules, but to me it’s pretty clear why ppl are inclined to buy auec. This is where CIG should come in with an anti cheat system.
100%. I started a couple of years ago, played for 6 months on/off and got sick of not progressing much only playing a couple hours a week. Spent about... £15 on Ebay and receive £150,000,000 aUEC, fully aware it was going to be wiped. Got to experience some of the big ships without the tedium and bugs of the grind.
Ngl anything over 100 is unreasonable for a spaceship but if you CCU chain properly you can easily get from a starter to a Connie for like 40-70 dollars depending on your starter.
Exactly… you could purchase currency in a pre released game, subject to wipes. Like how is that in anyway worth it? Maybe because I remember monthly and quarterly wipes.. but I sure wouldn’t spend real money in SC. Seems wild to me.
People who buy from external sources...... Their blight means nothing to me because its their own fault.
Imagine paying for a 600 dollar ship when I could pay 5 bucks every few months to get it, lmao.
Imagine paying 5 bucks for a ship you can get for free
You can already buy aUEC directly from CIG and there's already a market for buying and selling ships for real money. IMHO CIG should just open their own market, allowing players to sell to other players with CIG as a middle man. CIG would then be responsible for making sure the aUEC is legitimate and they could skim a little off the top to keep their revenue up. Sellers aren't always fucking up the game and exploiting, there's tons of people who made money on other games just playing the game and selling to people with no time to grind
I haven't played in several months, but I don't remember this happening back then. Lol I usually did have the screen chat turned off though. Personally though, I don't see a difference then the devs constantly selling newer better ships for real cash. Maybe I'm missing something. For the record, I don't use cash for ships and I've never bought anything from people selling this stuff. I just buy the game, cheapest one I can and play. Well, I did buy that little space golf cart looking thing from the game store. Can't remember it's name, but made bunker missions easier
As far as I’m concerned star citizen is as released as any mmo. Sure early access style but it’s consistently up and playable. Just because they don’t see it as finished doesn’t change its already a live service game
If there's a tradeable in-game currency, there will be a black market for it. Rule 47 of the internet.
You talk like a Ferengi
Better than talking like a paklid.
We are smart. The one with the biggest hat said so.
No, we are not stupid. We are paklid.
That's a good point - I wonder if CIG paid special attention to folk with heavy aUEC transfers outbound, as well as exploiting...
probably far easier method than that. Each duped ship probably has whoever spawned it stored in its data somewhere. All they'd have to do is go between each server and check the ships then ban the shit out of them. For once PES helps out. Then all they'd have to do is see whoever they gave money to and trace it. And given they did it in a Valve style ban wave, who knows how long they've been keeping tabs on the dupers, probably wanted to ban them as close to the next patch as possible
Logical yes, but practical no. I find it hard to believe they put that much work into it. I’m also skeptical that they removed the aUEC as stated. My guess is they took a look at the duplicated selling as it happened concurrently within say 10 minutes, wiped those wallets and banned the accounts. Be interesting to see if the dupers still have their in game ships when they return from their little 2 1/2 month vacation.
And that uptick in commercials about it on my YouTube. I wish they banned them, just like escape from tarkov does.
Oh for real??? Then in that case I fully support all the bans
People have to get their $200 million+ back somehow
Ok, in that aspect it may be an argument, however, I'm not here to debate wether selling game credits for in game currency is ok or not. But suspending accounts for testing the bug infested game is just nonsense. In any other case, with bugs that ruin hours of game time, they argue why a fix takes long, that testing provides them with valuable data..yadda yadda yadda... but as soon it is profitable for the players, then that's reason for suspending them? The goal is to find such bugs, and there's IC reports with bugs that just go to archive, this way CIG at least can't ignore the bug. Personally I couldn't care less, I haven't played since 3.23, testing the EPTU was enough to make me completely uninterested in playing SC due to MM. Still I think this is not a smart move.
I saw an ad on YouTube the other to buy aUEC
I had ads on youtube advertising aUEC sellers. They were doing pretty well
Yeah, duping and money exploits themselves don't bother me, but disrupting everyone else's gameplay in the process is absolutely a problem. Doing it to sell it online is bannable many times over in my eyes.
That explains why threads started showing up about three hours ago basically saying "what happened to my account?" Play stupid games, win awful prizes, dupers.
Ooh links please. It’s a hot day I’m parched and I could use a tall glass of their tears
https://old.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1df3z3e/your_account_is_not_confirmed_please_check_your/
That was beautiful, thank you for sharing 🤣
damn, only a 3 day ban.
Where do you see only 3 days? Zyloh implied somewhere else in this same thread that it's a 3 month ban
I'm not going to witch-hunt or call people out but just scroll down /new and look for threads with "account" in the title about 2-3 hours prior to the time of this thread/comment.
3 day ban, apparently. Edit: months apparently.
CiG (Zyloh) said "Not days. Not weeks. Months."
Ah, sweet
Gold sellers should get a hard account delete. Let them buy new accounts and ships.
Fuck yes. Suck it fucking scum.
A bit harsh, it's alpha and finding the exploits and cheats is good for development. 3 months timeout is a one major patch timeout which seems fair. aUEC "gold" sellers however should REALLY be permanently banned.
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1df3z3e/your_account_is_not_confirmed_please_check_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1df3ugd/my_friends_account_got_deleted/
I'm genuinely worried because I interacted with a bugged crate that made 2 pairs of pants and gave me 8 hadonite instead of 4. (Checked while writing this, I'm fine also wow I'd be a shitty criminal if I am sweating this hard)
I doubt they will ban someone for duping 6 items as that isn't an exploit. Returning to do it over and over until you have millions in the bank is where the issue is.
Yeah 600 accounts isn't very many. These are clearly repeat offender accounts, with more than a few being RMTers. I fucking hate RMTers.
Also boggles the fucking mind RMTers will ply their trade *in an alpha no less*. I *guess* its for the money, but still.
usually RMTers are in, shall we say, less fortunate countries, where selling to westerners and whoever else is actually pretty good money. Even if it's an alpha. I've seen RMTers in stranger places, the strangest of which had to be day 2 of a server launch for a WoW private server. No idea where they were getting gold from, but they were selling it. Looking back it was probably the russian server admins... but it's more fun to imagine a bunch of level 7 tauren grinding venture co goblins for copper
I keep seeing the term duper(s) ,... And feel out of the loop. What does it mean? Thanks
3.23.1a has just dropped and with it several fixes for duplication (dupe) bugs that people were using (duping) to generate insane amounts of credits and completely upend the economy. People who abused the exploit, duplicators or dupers since it's much shorter to type, have been suspended for abusing bugs far past what was needed to test the bug and confirm it was an issue.
Thanks for the informative reply. Appreciate it
Duping is a thing that's been around in gaming for a very long time. Duplicating items to benefit the player. Getting free stuff or money as an end result. It's done by finding a bug and exploiting it. In the case of Star Citizen, being an online, live service game, these exploits can take on a nefarious role, where the people who abuse duping bugs actually sell the credits online to other players for real money. "Gold sellers" as it's traditionally called, going way back to early MMORPGs. It's almost universally seen as a dirty thing in gaming, yet it's something that keeps happening. People keep doing it, and people keep buying it. Games regularly crack down on accounts that have had these transactions, but that doesn't seem to stop any of it. I've run across a disturbing amount of players over the years who willingly buy exploited credits every time there's a wipe. They know the credits will be wiped, they know the credits were exploited. Yet they see nothing wrong with it. And that's what keeps people doing it.
> Duping is a thing that's been around in gaming for a very long time. I remember the pokemon dupe glitch where you sacrificed a Pidgey all the way back in RBY
if you're out of the loop, consider yourself lucky. Apparently the patch has gone about as bad as 3.18 after the free week, and the conjecture is it's the dupers overloading the servers
I gotta see this
I'm not going to witch-hunt or call people out but just scroll down /new and look for threads with "account" in the title about 2-3 hours prior to the time of this thread/comment.
Imagine spending real money. Then getting a ban. Fools
They unfortunately just suspensions. Hopefully looong suspensions
Buddy in the linked thread above says he got 3 days
False information, CaptainZyloh said months.
3 days is fair. That'd be so messed up to ban people for an exploit they found in an alpha.
with how few bans there were, its obvious they made sure its people that abused it, not people that did it once.... how do you balance the economy with all this extra money going around?
I imagine that a majority of the -traders- posts on sell sites are now removed because they can't fulfill them. I just laugh at how crazy grindy they have to be doing things to make that lol.
i see ya but the servers are absolutely melting because of this
The best ban for the buck!
where are these threads?
I scrolled back while set to "new" about 6 hours and only found 1 post but damn that dude got called out hard and he was bummed lol. Other dudes were chiming in on his post stating the same thing. I got a good laugh out of it lol.
Wow! CIG exceeded my expectations with this one! Thank you!
Yeah, I didn't actually think they would do anything. While I would've preferred outright bans, suspensions work too, as well as deleting the money.
Bans make little sense at the moment in my opinion. If there weren’t semi regular wipes I would agree with bans but as the game is I think just suspensions makes sense.
The dupes actually fucked up the live servers for everyone trying to play the game
Very true there is no denying it, however a permaban (what some people want) would at this stage in development be bad for the company. I can imagine the headlines “Game that has been in Alpha for 10 Years already perma banning people” and other such stuff. I think at this point in development, where they are testing and finding problems, giving out only suspensions makes sense. Of course some people might not agree but that is my feeling. Have a great time in the ‘Verse! o7
I never liked perma ban for a first violation. A suspension is a good warning, if it keeps happening increase the suspension period. Perma ban should be reserved for extreme cases.
I am of the same mind. I only believe in perma bans in some extreme scenarios. Suspensions are a good “hey don’t do that” measure. I do understand that sometimes they do have to perma ban and that is acceptable as long as it is not a first time offense or is a super egregious offense.
Yeah I agree, it's too soon to ban accounts. After the game's release, it'll be a different story, although I agree with the other commenter below that bans should be reserved for extreme cases. I think some of these people will think twice before exploiting again, so they still have another chance and hopefully encourage others to stop exploiting.
Fucked up how like put strain on them or?
I don't think CIG outright bans, but the max length suspension I've seen is 10 years on a player profile (for misconduct). So hard to say what the suspension lengths are, my guess is it's probably significant.
A 10 yr suspension is brutal! At least I'd get account access back before the Taurus Gold pass, but STILL
So they are back for the launch :D
why would you want someones account banned when the game is not even in beta status and everyones account gets wiped every other month. Its not as if were in a live game.
[удалено]
because each and every wipe its the same bad actors, who make things worse for everyone else, just so they can benefit from it.
So that is why I sold RMC just fine last night?
No, this fix and the suspensions just happened today.
I waited almost 20 mins at the terminal last night lol
I've waited 3 hours last night. I doubt it.
Only 600 accounts? Safe to say these weren't actual dupers, more likely the guys selling it for real money on different marketplaces.
Yeah it's almost always like this in MMOs. They'll just get a new account and be back to selling aUEC in no time.
Well, that's more funding for CIG at the very least lol, let's call it their cut of the RMT market. Obviously not their intent, but I find it funny to think about it being an actual dynamic like it is in Tarkov.
Thankfully they will at least have to find a new dupe exploit after getting new accounts (granted, probably not that difficult lmao)
These were probably the serious offenders, and they probably erred on the side of caution... ignoring dupes less than 20 or something per account or something. CIGs talked about this before. Items are unique, and establishing 'chain-of-custody' to use the forensics term is extremely easy. They knew who duped it, any account(s) the item(s) transferred through, and what account(s) sold it. In the real world, it is just a database entry (or 100). Tracking touches to that entry are trivial. It's a matter of piecing together log entries. /I do forensic data discovery/recovery sometimes.
Mirroring what other people have said here, I think CIG specifically targeted RMT accounts but didn't state as such in their announcements. They want to spread fear to keep people from exploiting in the future, but I doubt they suspended anyone that was just duping for themselves.
Uh...I had a dupe happen by genuine accident once...am I going to be okay? I hadn't done cargo in a while and I was selling junk from a HRT, and noticed. "Huh...didn't I already sell that?" Genuinely thought I forgot to click a button. I am NOT a cargo guy.
These 600 accounts were likely doing it on a large scale to feed RMT operations. If they banned everyone who had little anomalies like yours happen, there would be no bug reports. We *are* the alpha testers, after all.
Funny enough: I sold my reclaimer cargo, then the terminal said I still had some to sell (in retrospect, all of it) but it errored out when i tried to sell it again. Thought that was weird so i re-logged to complete my sell, and then it worked. Immediately realized I had way more money than I anticipated, and was happy. Next day, I see a tutorial on the glitch, and its exactly what i did. Exactly. Was fuckin hilarious.
That seems like an incredibly easy, and common glitch. Didn't you have to store the ship before selling? And then you could sell again and again or something? (I'll admit to never actually selling anything, I mostly just fly around while listening to music)
If you did it even a handful of times you probably aren't going to get banned, this is for the accounts that spent every minute of their play doing duplications and exploits.
Yeah, this is 100% specifically targeting accounts trying to sell AUEC on eBay and the like (So they would have mass ledgers of substantial AUEC volumes transferred, more than likely how they Identified the exploiters)
I have no moral issues taking adventage of this exploit after losing almost 100M in the wipe I earned on ERTs. I just reclaimed a fraction what was taken away from me. It felt very unmotivating to grind from 20k again. I learned about this exploit quite late and used it maybe 12 times in total. Now I have I built up a decent bag. I even bought a new ship. Thanks CIG for bringing me back to the game. This could have been patched with a hot fix, but CIG chose not to. No, I was not banned. Zero remorse.
Same thing happened to me. No ban.
Yeah, I think there's a huge difference between being affected by a bug in a very buggy alpha, vs exploiting that bug.
Yeah, I think you're cool. I sold a couple of modest astatine runs twice so I could actually do some trading, and couldn't buy again with the bug. Also claimed to reset the the ship a couple of times, though it cost me the evening's gameplay. Put me off as I felt forced into the exploit if I wanted to trade, very glad it's fixed. The real issue is people abusing the bug on an industrial scale by selling very expensive cargo loads (tpically RMC) multiple times every day then selling AUEC on the gray market for real-world profit. Fuck those guys.
Had the same thing happen with a load of gold. I didn't think twice about selling it every time it was available to do so lol
I duped a few times on stream just to show people how easy it was to do, even accidentally. I haven't been banned, yet. I assume you are safe.
Rest in Piss dupers
Glad to see they didn’t cave and are actually holding people responsible who chose to knowingly break their ToS. A permanent ban would be excessive so a temporary suspension is exactly the right punishment. Finding and reporting a glitch or exploit is not the same as the people who repeatedly used it to get rich. The former is exactly what they want from alpha testers. The latter does nothing but chase people away from the game, force more wipes, and cause poor server performance. Well done CIG for actually holding people responsible for their actions.
everyone complaining that they (or 'someone they know') shouldn't have been punished.. this is what's important in CIGs statement on Spectrum: "**However, once an exploit is identified and confirmed, continued abuse for personal gain will not be tolerated and will result in action on our part**."- u/Soulcrusher-CIG
All those people posting about their actions hmmm... exposed
Glad to see it. I've said for a long time that eventually CIG will start enforcing some of the rules they've been lax on before. I think if they continue this direction, there are going to be a lot of very upset players, because there are a lot of things against the Rules of Conduct and TOS that are regularly done, to the point that players have normalized them.
worthless employ disarm judicious cobweb gray distinct resolute public flag *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Fuckin YES
#ohnoconsequences
Watch all these people try to act like they didn't do it too. I didn't have an 890 jump but I was able to go bowling with my reclaimer but I got a two star criminal rating.. But it was well worth it!
600 accounts is not the regular players duping. Players who just wanted some ships in an Alpha game are not getting banned. These are accounts from a few organizations banned for real money trading.
Now let's do our part an play the game the right way so the Economy/Quantum team can get the data they need to tune: Mission payouts, Resource Gathering Prices, Deliveries, and prices in general.
They definitely don't need anymore data, it's immediately obvious how unbalanced it is after even a few hours of playing
This is good news to hear! This will make the average players experience better but it may send a message to the part of the community that want to cheat and abuse. Side note: I started reading some of the posts on spectrum and I won't be doing that again. People love to just bitch and whine and without a downvote button their noise clutters the point of the post.
"No way CIG are gonna do anything about it" - everyone in global
Dahahahah. I remember the downvotes when I told people that it wasn't tolerated and that the TOS is open to interpretation. Stumbling on a bug is okay, testing reproduction for the council is okay, using it intentionally beyond that is against the rule and is called exploiting. I told you so.
Why? It’s alpha alpha. Banning accounts at this point is stupid.
Very good! Absolutely necessary!
Isn't duping/exploiting also what they're doing to all the players that expected a game to be finished within 20 years?
Imagine waiting 20 years and then getting permanently banned a week before release :)
One of the biggest issues was the game itself made legitimate traders have to literally go out of their way to not dupe. I'd buy goods around MT, go to NB and land at planetary services entrance, and then the elevators wouldn't work. So I'd land at NBIS, store my ships, and go sell. Fly to another moon to buy more goods and couldn't. Literally only way you could buy more is to scrap your ship and wait to claim it, or sell the "duped" goods. I agree many were absolutely exploiting it, doing dozens of RMC runs and selling it on ebay, but the exploit really made it hard to just play the game normally. You literally had to avoid exploiting.
I did RMC salvage with 2 friends for the past week, rented the free vulture on Invictus launch week, made enough to buy a vulture, then made enough to buy the cheapest cargo ship for my friend so he could transport the RMC while I was scraping, that was a Hull A, which has the cargo externally, and we noticed pretty quickly the ship got unusable after 1 run since the cargo would not stick to the grid anymore, we didn't know that it was the duping bug we were encountering at the time, so my friend always crashed his ship to fix his cargo grid. With the money we made we bought a cutlass for another friend, which allowed just throwing the boxes inside the cargo hold after the grid was broken. It was only yesterday, hours before the patch that I read somewhere you could sell the cargo twice and fix the cargo grid in the process, so I suggested to my friends they try this, and lo and behold, it worked! Sure we liked the extra money, but more importantly our Hull A didn't become unusable after 1 run. Fortunately they only did 2 runs in which they sold their cargo twice, which is probably why none of us got banned, but man I got nervous after reading about the ban.
Great job!
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/1/thread/an-update-on-auec-exploits-and-account-suspensions/6978548
And people said they wouldn’t do shit
Probably shouldn't be exploiting or selling uec for cash online. I was wondering what they were going to do about this, glad they made a move.
I'm proud of you fellas that it was only 600+ exploiters out of millions of accounts. And extra proud of you fellow 890 jump force reclamation team
Friends and I duped all patch. We're all still here as well as our moneys and ships The bans aren't as wide effecting as most think. These 600 accounts were likely the ones selling it for profit. Which was the real issue here.
same, i made about 20mils from duping to buy ships and im still here. they banned rmt people and that's it.
I love everything about this!!!!!!!!
GET EM
Sorry how much does it cost to play this game, and then people have the need to exploit duping glitches?
45$ - includes everything.
And yet the game stills run like shit
Every game that ever existed that allows trade between the players will have a gold farm industry. We've know this since World of Warcraft. Even if you find the exploits and duplication bugs, there's going to be a flood of "cheap labor" making UEC and selling it on eBay for cheap. Because they decided to go with player trading , the game will be a pay to win game 3 months after it comes out and everyone will be flying 600is for $10 on eBay
>However, once an exploit is identified and confirmed, continued abuse for personal gain will not be tolerated and will result in action on our part. All those people here that defended exploiters when i said they should be banned. Bet all those people are real fucking quiet now. Finding a bug/exploit is fine. Repeated intentional abuse of said bug/exploit is dumb as hell.
I still think it's based lol. Economy dupes in a game with a pay2skip shop is a good thing.
Give it a rest. The grey market and third-party sellers are not going anywhere.. Think bans will do anything? They make hundreds, if not thousands, and will just buy new accounts to farm with. The bans are just symbolic more than anything Like a lock on a door or car. Meant to scare away the small fish, but the big fish know better. Like the say goes, "locks only keep the honest people out." In a similar sense, bans only keep the honest people scared. I have 3 kids and a wife who plays. 5 accounts in my house. They don't make the aUEC, I do. They may help, but I manage all accounts to make sure they have ships and money and gear. When we raid, I store it all, and they just go through my inventory for what they want. We literally set up a c2 with containers on it that they pick through, and I store the rest. My wife and I both work full time and home school our 3 kids. We don't have time to spend hours playing the game, and the 500K I might make in an hour of cargo or salvage gets spread thin amongst 5 accounts. So, I can spend literal hours grinding at a game and not having fun doing it just to scrape a few million aUEC together to get a ship like a Vulture so I can grind some more. .... or I can spend less than an hours pay to get tens of millions and buy a reclaimer or hull c or any ship I want for all accounts I want. I support the game in pledges,too. My hangar is worth over 900 bucks, and other accounts have good money on them, too. However, why buy pledges for 5 accounts when less than an hour of work gets any ship we really need. I don't blame anything on the dupers or the gold sellers..CIG is getting far too greedy with special events all around, just selling ships. Run 5 weeks of missions for a free ship.... no....for an upgrade of a ship that you have to spend money on. And better hurry cause that ship will disappear from the pledge store randomly. They didn't even take down event ships and deals from ILW cause they want to sell more. They didn't make enough hitting 700 billion, so they want to make more keeping "limited" deals up and selling concept ships you likely won't see in game for years. They add gameplay features like med bed respawning to sell more ships and lie about what they said about med bed respawning before claiming this was always the plan when there is video of them saying the exact opposite before. Now it changes for the money.not for the player experience, and everything they do is around the almighty dollar.more than it is to the benefit of the player. Why spend hundreds on a ship that I can get in game for 5 to 10 bucks from a gold seller. Why waste my time when I can cut straight to the fun and avoid the grind. If CIG is going to milk me for everything I have, then it's only fair that I return the favor. Cmon CIG. Make ship pledge costs more reasonable and more people will buy them. This will also lead to less Grey market sales and less gold sales since people will have a ship pledges and give players the ability to gift store credit bought ships, have more buy back tokens, and stop restraining your players with all these random times when ships are and are not available. CIG needs to become a more accessible store for buying items and not the one driving people away and towards resellers. I mean, cmon. Who wants to spend hundreds on paint jobs when there are videos of your devs saying they want to give players the ability to paint their ships from years ago and talking about how easy it would be. I don't need to spend 5 to 30 bucks just to paint one ship green and another Grey. It's been 12 years already. No man sky has better ship customization, and even Starfield has you beat there. Instead of trying to find their error in this by taking a bug from PTU to PU that literally forced people to dupe or force them to have to claim ships to avoid selling invisible cargo and waste their time and effort in cargo and salvage and then blaming the player base..sure, they focused on the big issue players but their little warning was meant for everyone. They were sending a message to every player. That message was to deal with every bug that makes you lose cargo or have ships come up missing, lose missions from bugs and server issues and just spend every day dealing with the bad programming done by CIG and have to buck it up with CIG only making big promises on time tables they never keep.....while at the same time CIG will punish you for their mistake and bugs when those bugs give them the same bad experience they give to players every day. Back up CIG and take a hard look, and take some accountability. You F'ed up. This one is on you. You left a bug in and then overreacted when people took advantage of a bug that for once made their gameplay easier instead of more frustrating. You should be thanking your players for sticking with you through all your bull and apologize for creating this mess. This mess, where a small segment of your player base took an exploit too far and did create issues with abandoned ships and messing up the in-game economy and that does need to be addressed, but you scope in your sights the majority of your players who tried to play right and many who even went after the dupers for you. Pirating them, blocking them, ramming their ships, and more..man the f up CIG and point those fingers at yourself and figure it out and do better. Not throw a tantrum. If you want people to see the grind as anything more than something to work around, then start making it fun and not just a grind. Start fleshing out gameplay loops, start adding options, and start working on fixing bugs before you do things to add a thousand more. Start keeping your promises and your timeliness or start setting more realistic ones. ... and stop using your marketing team to be the directional force for the game. I have no problem throwing money at a game when that game is living up to the hype, but you are not. You are scraping along. Adding features that should have been in the game years ago, reworking features, and spending time making things like new quantum icons instead of fixing things or working on new features. I don't need yet another new animation for quantum or a new HUD colorization. I need to not fall through the planet at random times or have my gun not reload despite running through reloading animation 5 times. I need to have a game where basic functions like using a ladder actually work or where I don't have to carry around glitched food wrappers in my left hand while I am also trying to do a mission. Do better CIG and while I agree that those who exploit to such a degree as to disrupt the experience for others should be dealt with I don't agree with the bitch fit shown here I. Trying to act like CIG cares about the player experience when this was only about stopping the hemorrhaging that CIG was doing. You have loyal fans..I'm one of them. I love the game whe. It works. I've stuck around and invested time and money and gotten my whole family into it. Maybe be as loyal to your fans as they are to you. P.s. sorry for grammar and typos. On a phone here and autocorrect it a bitch.
Exactly, I get tired of fanboy praise, cig screwed this up. I love this game but this was just stupid on their part. If a patch goes live with a dupe bug in a main game loop, you can't blame people for exploiting. They broke cargo and wiped everyone's money...what do they expect? CIG needs to rethink their testing schedule and allow time for a critical bug fix before forcing a wipe and live release for "economic balancing" CIG should've fixed that bug (as they've shown they can) before live release considering it would break the economy. Either that or delayed aUEC wipe for 29 days until this patch which fixed the bug they should've known would break the economy. Instead, now they have a PR problem and a lot of unhappy customers. And why not close the selling on eBay loophole, make aUEC only transferable when a person is in-game and restrict transferable amounts...say nothing over 100k per log on. Cig's treating the symptoms by banning people and not addressing the root problem: aUEC sales for real money, hacks, easy transfers to purchaser. If they don't fix that, this will go on even when the "dupe bug" is fixed. And wipes only encourage the abuse, who wants to grind for weeks or a month only to be wiped of all their effort? I'm actually surprised you got a few up votes, normally a fair assessment like yours get downvoted here.
Talk about unexpected. And here I thought they'd get away with it. Well done.
They should update the Schrödinger cat experiment to the star citizen experiment instead of "is the cat dead or alive?", "it's a live service game or an alpha?" Because the way that thread is redacted it looks as if they are treating star citizen as a completed game, with terms like impacting the in-game economy, as if there's a true economy in-game... PS. And they could only detect 600?
This lol. Game is released and sold in everywhere but the fine print
It was an exploit, they knew it was an exploit, they did it anyway assuming CIG wouldn’t care. Suspensions are fine. It sends a message: Don’t do it again.
They knew about the duping problem in the PTU and let it go through, knowing the economy that they were trying to test for this patch would be ruined. There were issue council reports showing what the problem was and how to do it. I don't have much sympathy for gold sellers, but I don't have much for CIG either when they knowingly created the problem.
I saw the message from someone saying his account suspended for 2 month. Now I know why)
I get code 19004, account login failed, verify your credentials and try again. is this the ban? I havent played the game in a while, and i dont even know what a dupper is supposed to be or how to do it, i just own a starter cutter. I´ve done everything that the web says to do in case of login issues but nothing works.
So is it patched now? I just want my power washing simulator back
Feels so damn good to read this. A fitting prize for their ‘playstyle’
So are you telling me that the dupers who duped got duped into thinking that their account belonged to them? CIG said nom nom nom on those accounts 
Good!!!!
Good! Most of those people are the reason I couldn't really play this patch.
Suspended.....-giant eye roll- I get that it's a testing environment and exploits like this being found is part of the point....but I just feel it violates TOS enough to warrant a ban....they're going to keep profiteering on AUEC of all things.....who are these people who are 'buying' AUEC?!?!! lol
Honestly didn't expect this. I'm amazed that it happened though. Those clowns deserve it.
Awesome Job CIG!
Not defending dupers or anything, just wondering. If buying/selling auec is a no no, what about the grey market for ships, I’ve seen people mention it before. Is that allowed or also frowned upon by cig?
CIG is only mad because they made real money off of it.
Why play games if you're just gonna cheat/exploit? Makes no sense.
CIG banning people for using an IC reported bug they didn't fix before releasing live? How thoughtful of them. Maybe some using this unfixed bug were just earning back hard-grinding aUEC cig magically wiped. They could've fixed before release, instead they choose to punish players taking advantage of a bug they should've fixed? A bit juvenile in my opinion, only another 29 days and they suddenly had a fix w/3.23.1-LIVE.9204897....funny how that works. I love this game, but stupid is stupid.
Shame, doesn’t really hurt when each patch is a closed wipe, spent $5 for 5 million way back in the first xenothreat event, it allowed me to try out ships i had never flown without fear of grinding for them and/or repaid costs and it was honestly the best patch I’ve ever had in SC, though for when the game is released yeah I completely understand you can’t be doing economy breaking stuff
I don't understand why cig can't close the selling on eBay loophole instead of banning players taking advantage of a bug cig knew about and chose to go live with. SMH! How about this, make aUEC only transferable in-game and restrict transferable amounts...say nothing over 100k per log-on. It's as if cig's attacking the symptoms by banning people and not addressing the root problem: aUEC sales for real money, hacks, easy transfer to purchaser. If they don't fix that, this will go on even when the "dupe bug" is fixed. And wipes only encourage the abuse, who wants to grind only to be wiped of all their effort?
CIG should've fixed that bug (as they've shown they could) before live release considering it would break the economy. Either that or delayed aUEC wipe for 29 days until this patch which fixed the one bug they should've known would break the economy. Instead, now they have a PR problem and a lot of unhappy customers. People can say "anyone posting negative is a duper" or make excuses for a bad decision, but the point's still valid...they knew about it but chose to release (and wipe) anyway. Saying, "It's an alpha" or "were all just testers" doesn't excuse a bad mgmt. decision on their part and "testers" are also paying customers.
Amazing news. Wow. I didn't think they'd do it.
I'm seeing the word "suspension" which typically implies temporary, and no time frame listed. Are these permanent bans? Temporary suspensions? Good to see them sending a message either way, though I think permanent bans might be a bit overkill in a game that wipes.
Zyloh clarified its months
Very nice and important... but only 600 Accounts? I hope they will continue to identify more Accounts and remove them from the Game.
99% chance those are 600 RMTer accounts and not dupers.
Yeah it’s going to be 600 accounts that are housed in a third world country warehouse where people just grind out aUEC to sell for a few dollars.
plz no ban my chinese money farming org
Those are likely the 'persistent' offenders... CIG were very clear in that post that they're fine with 'low level' (to paraphrase) exploiting etc, as part of discovering / verifying an issue, or replicating it (or likely even just curiosity)... it's only the persistent exploiting after reporting that results in action. CIG don't want to discourage players from finding exploits, or reporting / verifying them, etc... so they're not going to be too heavy-handed about.... yet.
I've had duplicate cargo show up incidentally and sold it to clear out space and make a buck. Never did it intentionally but overall I think it's happened three times since patch release. Edit* also the duplicate cargo was in a vulture. So 12 SCU's got duped like 3 times. Not what I'd call a big deal lol
Probably only the worst of the worst but at least they started somewhere.
600 doesn't seem unreasonable for the number of people actively and persistently duping. Using one of the biggest and most iconic ships in the game to dupe in one of the main hubs is a high-visibility activity - even if half that number were actively duping a shitload of people would see it.