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Matt "Positron" Miller prepares his radioactive banhammer against mission architect abusers
Mission architect -- an amazing system that allows a very creative player-base to finally take the reigns of creation and make amazing in-game arcs that feature personalized stories, personalized characters, farming, well made.... wait, what?Yes, you heard that right, people have already began to leverage City of Heroes's architect system into nothing more than powerleveling tool, and the community doesn't find that to be too enjoyable. Luckily, Matt "Positron" Miller, the lead designer, has already stepped up with a post to the community on the City of Heroes message board about how they plan on dealing with these problems.The team wishes to remove the rewards some characters may have gained through powerleveling, all the way up to removing access to characters that were solely leveled up via mission architect exploits. Past working on a player by player bases, some badges will be changed while others may be removed entirely due to the exploiting groups surrounding them. Lastly, but certainly not least, the team will be proactively banning missions that are created to exploit the system.For Matt's full plan, check out his post over on the City of Heroes message board.
The Daily Grind: To banhammer or not to banhammer
One of the things that many people absolutely can't stand about many different MMOs is how slow to respond - and generally how light the punishment - for people getting caught exploiting/botting/or generally being a flaming @#(hat. Botting might nab you only a couple of weeks off for bad behavior - if they even bother to ban you at all. Scamming other players? Smack on the wrist. Of course, on the other side of the road, you have Aventurine who, with Darkfall, have been aggressively ban-hammering anyone who appears to be doing anything fishy. No excuses, no second, third, or fourth chances. If you cheat there and they can verify it, your account gets nuked from orbit. Some players hate this, and claim that due to potential for error, it's way too dangerous. Other players think this is quite possibly one of the best things Aventurine is doing in regards to Darkfall - trying to keep it completely level and dealing with anyone who exploits, macros, etc. harshly. This morning we thought we'd ask what you feel is better - the more hands-off approach, giving people multiple chances to screw up before they're banned more common to many MMOs, or the hard-line Darkfall approach of ban first time, ban often?
Did Square-Enix do the right thing?
The Square-Enix bahnammer recently came down onto the Final Fantasy XI community, permanently banning 550 non-RMT accounts that were involved in performing an exploit that has occurred over a two year time period -- an exploit that some say SE was aware of, but never took steps to correct.The exploit in question was only available to linkshells involved several endgame activities. The basic premise was finish the activity and then before the item drops from a treasure chest or monster the alliance of parties would break into their separate groups. For you Warcraft players, a raid would cease to be a raid and break down to the parties involved. Then each of the 3 parties in the alliance would get a copy of whatever items would drop. So, instead of 1 set of loot, you would grab 3 sets of loot -- including some items that could be sold for millions on the auction house.
EA update: Forum bans do not equal in-game bans
Hey, remember last week when an Electronic Arts community manager announced that being banned from an EA forum would simultaneously ban users from playing their EA games online? Well, it's okay. All of you naughty forum dwellers can turn on the lights and open the shades, because it turns out that the community manager in question, known as eaapoc on the forums, was mistaken. Said eeapoc on the forums, "I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well. This is not correct, my mistake, my bad." He elaborates that being banned from the forums or from a game are separate process, so those banned from one need not fear being banned from the other.So there you have it. You'll have to be some sort of super-jerk in order to be banned from both the forums and a game. Don't worry, internets, we know you're up to the task.
EA goes Big Brother: Banning on forums could lead to game ban?
Apparently the internet police are in full force for people who want to talk out of turn. According to EA forum user 'eeapoc' -- allegedly, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 community manager Aaron Kaufman -- EA forum users who are hit with a banhammer for acting out could see themselves locked out of their own library of purchased EA titles.As stated in the post, EA is implementing a new regulation that forum users must tie their message board account with their EA master account, created during the EA game registration process. A ban of the forum account would then ban players from games tied into their master account and other EA titles. Presumably the ban would restrict online capabilities of a master account's purchased games, only."If we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you'd actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account," the post from user 'eeapoc' told forum goers. "So if you have Spore and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your Spore account would be banned to. It's all one in the same, so I strongly recommend people play nice and act mature."Two things to note, this process only seems to pointed at PC users but EA does run their own servers over Xbox Live and, as Kotaku reported, neither EA's Terms Of Use page or the general Forum Help information list any criteria for behavior that may get you banned, so it may be a moderator's own judgment call.Well EA, Orwell called. He wants his totalitarian society back, please.
Square/Enix cracks down on Final Fantasy XI RMT
The folks at Square/Enix have had a rough time with in-game money sellers, commonly known as gold or gil-farmers. Over the last few years they've taken some drastic steps to curtail the activities of RMT vendors inside the world of Final Fantasy XI. At the Austin Game Developer's Conference last year, they spent the majority of a keynote session talking about their efforts to stamp out the farming menace. Through the tireless work of the anti-RMT squad onstaff, they've greatly reduced the instances of gold selling in Vana'diel.Still, the sellers never rest. The official FFXI site has up details on a fresh new round of bans the company has handed down. Interestingly, they break down the numbers so we can see who was banned for what. We can seen, then, that about 1500 people have been removed from the game since February 17th for gil-selling in-game. Since January 27th about 1000 people have been kicked for using movement hacks, while about half that have been removed for 'monopolizing monsters or areas'. Interesting stuff, and fascinating to see it broken out like that. Keep fighting the good fight, Vana'diel soliders!
Microsoft wields the Xbox Live banhammer again
Just in time for the holidays, Microsoft decided to dust of the good old Xbox Live banhammer and has swung swiftly and promptly. According to the forum goers over at Xbox-Scene, members are reporting being banned initially thought to be due to modded 360 firmware versions. But that wasn't the exact case and now we know Microsoft dropped the banhammer on those who are using "bad discs" (burnt game copies in modded drives). So, be careful console modding kittens, because when the hammer drops ... it hurts.
Halo 3 'early adopter' banned for many lifetimes
An Xbox 360 user by the gamertag Scar allegedly obtained a copy of Halo 3 Epsilon, the near-final build of the game, and went online with the title. Busted. According to this picture at Homicidal Insomniac, the name Scar won't be able to post his Geometry Wars high scores until a time where the universe is actually threatened by power-hungry polygons. You can read a response allegedly from Scar here. We've contacted Major Nelson to find out if there is a planned server maintenance scheduled for January 1, 10000 AD. (Which, not to concern anyone, is January 1 7990 AR, or After the Robot Revolution.) [Via Xbox 360 Fanboy]
Blizzard banning players in game for forum stupidity?
You may have missed the ruckus on the General forums this weekend-- and if you did, consider yourself lucky. Some idiot (at least we're pretty sure it was just one guy on his many alts) posted a lot of junk on Saturday about a story right here at WoW Insider. We won't bore you with everything they said, but the gist of it is exactly the kind of harassment that Ezra's father was trying to avoid-- players complaining that they weren't cool enough (even with a house that hadn't burnt down, and, you know, their health) to get the epic mount that Ezra did. Yes, it seems Penny Arcade's theory came into effect yet again.Fortunately, it's gone now-- the fever pitch hit on Saturday morning, and it wasn't till early Saturday afternoon that a CM finally showed up on the boards and deleted that junk. We can only suppose that if they had hired someone to take Tseric's place yet, it might have been taken care of sooner.But here's the best part-- while this weekend's incident was far from the first shameful occurrence on the official forums, it might be the first in which a player got penalized not just with a forums ban, but with the loss of an in game account. Iroc says his brother jumped in to make an Ezra troll post this weekend and found his account in game disconnected.Frankly, if anyone deserves it, these losers on Saturday did. But given the way that Blizzard's rep replies in the thread, it doesn't seem likely that they're banning in game for idiocy on the forums just yet-- more likely that Iroc's brother had an unrelated technical problem. Considering the way the forums are, however, it just might be a possibility worth considering.
