Powerleveling exploit? Why is it...

[______________Nietya]

Why is it that Funcom doesn't crack down on something that's clearly an exploit until enough people use it that it becomes a problem? To me, that doesn't scream of designers concerned with the game they're working on, but rather, that screams of businessmen wanting to make the most money they can off the most people, and allowing some people to poison the "integrity" of their game world for the sake of keeping the money these other accounts generate.

From what I heard/read, whatever this exploit was let some people go from 1-40 in like under 3 or 4 hours or something, etc. Not labeled an exploit from the outset?

How... interesting.

[_____________Abunari]

You hit the nail on the head that time. The exploit team is made up of customer service people, not programmers. This makes no sense to me, as it doesn't get exploits fixed, it just gets people banned, since that's all the customer service people can do.

This is a poor business decision (well, duh), since you are purposefully excluding customers.

FC needs to learn from Microsoft (maybe not totally, but at least somewhat), and FIX exploits first, and reserve banning for people who are doing very disruptive things, like crashing playfields, etc.

What we have now is customer service run by people who are too close to the game, like the volunteer admins on the old bungie.net who were able to blam (suspend for 24 hours) anyone they wanted to. Bungie was very worried about this getting out of hand and reviewed each blam. They never gave their admins perma-ban powers. And while reviewing each blam, the bungie folks (programmers) would find out as best they could how the problem could be avoided in the future.

FC's customer support people seem to be on their own, and they have total control over the playerbase. If they are the only ones bringing information to the programmers, then how can the programmers really get a handle on what's a problem and what's not?

Anyhow, sorry to add more to your thoughts. I agree with you. FC should have fixed this exploit a long time ago, and partly they tried, but ended up making the game less consistent.

Perhaps they should just make it so that players can team with anyone at any level, but that the exp/level ratio that is calculated based on who is in the team when the mob dies, and preset it to the exp/level ratio when combat was enters (mob/player aggro/attack started), this way it doesn't matter what happens later on (purposely vague here on purpose, don't want to get banned while trying to fix something that has been broken forever).

Just like with uniques, FC will ban people for this, policing their players instead of fixing the game. This is a game, not life, wake up customer-service-people-raised-on-EQ!!! We're here b/c we don't want to play EQ and don't want to be treated like EQ players. If we did, we'd just play EQ.

Make fixing the game a priority, not removing players from it. Yeah yeah, some players should be banned, but get off the high horse, you can fix bugs and roll-back exploited characters and play on.

Besides, once you know who the exploiters are, you just roll them back often and parse their logs consistently and get the best bug-hunting information around. heheh, talk about free testing services.