Banned For Making Too Much Silver

[SorcGoods101]

The powers that be at Simutronics have seen it fit to permanently ban me for making too much silver (implied: without them make enough money). I am posting this so that everyone knows the truth of the situation. For months, I have been fighting in REIM, I've probably said hello to some of you in the last node, where I spent most of my time. I was, as the GMs have now called it, cycling the Emperor and Empress. I bought thousands of dollars worth of REIM orbs and died hundreds of times in the process. All told, I made 1-2B silver in roughly 6 months (heavily tail weighted as I got better at it). After implementing the loot cap in April (which I honestly knew nothing about until I saw a random thought on LNET), they removed over 800M silver from my accounts and implemented a 90 day AFK penalty across them. When I contacted support to argue that nothing I did was against any published rules or implied game mechanics, they spent a week looking through logs. In the end, they determined that after the loot cap was implemented in April, one of my eight characters earned over the cap by abusing a game mechanic (they assigned every silver made to one character... the value was under the collective loot cap for my group). NOTE: This is not the penalty they originally stated. Despite my saying on multiple occasions that I would be honest and return whatever they thought was obtained "against policy", they decided my 25+ years in the game were not enough to substantiate my history of positive actions and interactions.

I would like to again thank all the GMs and GHs that made this game what it was/is for so long. Thank you to the many players that I have interacted with the years as well.

Sincerely,
Soleren

[beldar17]

Doesn’t seem like enough silver to ban someone at all. Maybe they want to make prime look like platinum. 5 people

[Tgo01]

Well that's not right.

How exactly did you supposedly earn more silvers than the loot cap allows by abusing a game mechanic? I thought the loot cap was, well, a loot cap. If people are somehow earning more silvers than the loot cap allows then it sounds like a bug they should just fix and move on. I mean 1-2 billion over 6 months? It's not like you were somehow creating a billion silvers a day or something, then that would be another story.

[Rjex]

What was the official ban reason? Scripting or silver gen?

[SorcGoods101]

This will be my last response to you on this matter given your last two sentences on your email from 6:33pm CT. No one searched for a week to come up with something. You performed game mechanics abuse in our system, something covered by POLICY. I went over months of logs to make sure it was justified. It was. There is no collective here, you earned all of this on XXX. But given your last email, I will be assigning this to permanent lockout.


Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 7:36 PM wrote:
I will also add how sad it is that almost 30 years of playing (accepting of some long breaks) will end like this. The amount referenced below is well over $10,000. I’m sure your accounting department keeps good records.

From:
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2023 7:33 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Cc:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

As I said, the issue is that Simu did not earn enough cash for the silver I generated. I have proven that the situation that led to this was both known and within normal game mechanics. You have searched for a week to come up with something to “charge me” with. I don't know the workings of the loot cap and have 8 characters. I did not earn more than the collective cap on those characters. If you think that this penalty is befitting of "that" situation, my playing is clearly over. For the sake of principal, I will fight your company for every dollar I have ever paid you. If you choose to refund it now, I will stop at that.
________________________________________
From: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2023 7:17:12 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

You went beyond the cap on Soleren of 35mil. And continued to do so after April 3rd. That is the fact. And that is the final decision here. You also were doing this before April 3rd to a degree which was earning billions of silvers. We did not permanently ban your accounts from this, but we did confiscate all the silver because it was not earned within the normal game mechanics. We also placed a large penalty on all of your accounts. Typically we permanently ban this level of POLICY infraction. This decision will not be changing. This was reviewed by over a dozen GameMasters, two Product Managers, and myself.


Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 7:13 PM wrote:
To be clear, you imposed a penalty for breaking game mechanics by cycling the emperor and empress of REIM. With me proving that to be mostly false, you have changed it to a trumped up penalty for breaking the loot cap, which was sloppily implemented with REIM. Even than, I did not break it across my 8 characters.
________________________________________
From:
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2023 7:00:52 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Cc:
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Vine,

As far as I know, the loot cap was enforced on April 1st (which I had no idea about until after it happened). I did not go “behind the cap” and never earned more than the cap given my 8 characters. I earned less than 240M during the month of April. Even if I did (which I did not), the proper response would be to remove the silver earned above the cap (not everything that I worked for over the course of months). If I believed that I had breached the cap, given my character count (you do not release the actual workings of the cap as far as I know), I would have notified you of such a bug. I’m sorry, but “you” (Simu) are trying to find some to way to justify this penalty. The issue is not that I earned silver, it is that you believe Simu wasn’t compensated properly for it. You are choosing corporate greed over customer service and player rights.

While I have been respectful during your “research”, I will not allow you to operate in such a manner or penalize me without actual facts. I will ask one last time to reconsider given the facts above.

After tomorrow, I will proceed with action against Simutronics.

Regards,


From: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2023 6:44 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

After fully reviewing the situation, the logs, talking with staff members, and looking over your activity, the penalty will be staying in place.

I think you missed an announcement.

> Starting on Monday, April 3rd, 2023, we're going to remove Reim orb entries from the SimuCoin Store. Premium characters will continue to earn one free entry per day. In addition, at that time, we're going to start enforcing the treasure cap for treasure generated in Reim.
> As previously announced, the treasure cap is now enforced in Reim. Entry orbs will continue to be available in the SimuCoins Store.

You had been pulling out more silver from Reim than what was actually possible, but when they switched Reim over to be loot capped, you continued to go behind the cap. You were also summoning the royals multiple times, which was a bug and was stated as such by GM Retser. No punishments were pushed through until after April 3rd, when you continued doing everything. It is the players responsibility to keep up on all announcements.

Generating silver via unintentional measures is an example in POLICY and game mechanics abuse. Typically this is a permanent lockout, but instead, they simply took your silver and put a penalty on all of your accounts. You mentioned you did not do this to profit from, however, you pulled out over a billion silver and we were not able to recover all that silver, so we are still trying to discover where the missing silver is if you didn't hand it off.

If you wish to close your accounts during the treasure and experience penalties, you may.

Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 4:29 PM wrote:
Hi Vine,

May I please ask for an update on this? We are approaching the second (self-imposed) “deadline”, and to date, I have received no significant feedback. It would be one thing if this process was done prior to imposing well over $3K in penalties (as I stated originally), but it was not. Additionally, I continue to pay for 8 accounts that are effectively banned.

Thanks,

From:
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2023 3:13 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Hi Vine,

If this is not resolved today, are you able to elaborate on “more involved”?

Thanks,

From:
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2023 9:33 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Hi Vine,

Thank you for the update, and I continue to appreciate the time you are spending on this. I will be respectful of you and the process (as I have been throughout my history in this game), but please remember that my accounts were all effectively banned prior to this. Perhaps that is not part of your review, but I continue to believe that this judgement was made with incomplete facts.

Regards,


From: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2023 8:23 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

The situation is a little more involved than I initially thought. We had a meeting about it today, but I likely won't have a response until tomorrow or Thursday.


Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 4:19 PM wrote:
Hi Vine,

Are you still on target to provide an update on this?

Thanks,

From:
Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2023 8:17 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Hi Vine,

I’m not sure that a discussion with me will happen about this, so I’d like to take a few minutes to respond to some the things that Quilic said when we met in-game. I hope it will give you some discussion points when you meet with senior staff:

Quilic says, So, as I said, this is pretty clear GMA, unfortunately. The levels of loot were way, way above what was intended, and you farmed it pretty impressively for quite a while. Nothing in any of the documentation or announcements should have led you to think that this was "the way it worked.

In 25 years, I have never understood how people had billions of silver. Even today, I don’t understand how people hit the loot cap outside of paid areas. But clearly it is done, because Simu felt the need to implement such a cap. Obtaining more silver than was intended is an extremely subjective comment. If people can obtain a billion silver (in addition to the event currency) from DR or RW in 3 weeks, why is this “paid quest” different?

By documentation, I assume this means the Wiki – I don’t know what announcement are being referred to. The Wiki is extremely light on details for REIM. The only reference to the Emperor/Empress is this:

“An exception are the Emperor and Empress in the Throne Room: they are on an in-game ten minute timer instead…”

It seemed obvious to me that the timer was a mechanism to limit the number of times the Emperor/Empress could be spawned and killed. What other purpose does this serve?

Everywhere else in the game, if a player doesn’t hit a target, they don’t get exp/credit for killing it (bandits, rare spawns earlier in REIM, etc). Why should the mechanic here be any different?


Quilic says, You didn't find it odd that everyone wasn't doing the same thing?

I spent over $5K on characters and countless hours refining my skills to execute what you are calling a breach of policy. At no point was this easy or risk free. I didn’t find some way to alter an object and sell it for a 1M silver over and over. I compiled a team of 8 2-7x cap characters the were specifically trained to “compete” in the REIM environment. Even then, the 2x cap characters were very susceptible to maneuver attacks and groups which quickly resulted in their deaths many times. So is it easier to be active and deal with level 120 characters to obtain 4-6M per run or use whatever post cap characters you have and “sleep” through two hours of mobs to obtain 2-3M per run (I’m going by posts– I didn’t do enough testing to see what the limits were here). Further, I spent 7 months teaching myself Ruby to be more efficient. Anyone can turn on Bigshot and sit in a corner.

Quilic says, That loophole's been closed, and we'll definitely be looking back to see if there were any other violations, but there wasn't anything near on your level as far as scale goes.

Scale does not make something against policy. There is either a reasonable belief that this a game mechanic or not.

Quilic says, My hands are a little bit tied, as this is pretty much textbook GMA. I get what you're saying, but if this was how things were supposed to be working, it would be far, far more widely known. The numbers you were pulling were extremely impressive.

Per my earlier email, this was known – apparently to both players and staff. I didn’t learn about timing the emperor and empress by doing it (I started REIM with one, maybe two, characters). I watched people and how they handled the final room, specifically the timing of entry. Maybe people knew about some earlier communication (as Melivn referred to), but I was certainly not aware of it.

You say, "Game mechanics are very subjective here."
Quilic says, "Perhaps, perhaps not. But certainly if someone found a way to take something that was worth X, by general accepted knowledge, and make it worth X times a whole bunch, the expectation is that that person would do some research, and ask a few questions.

As I noted both above and earlier, my knowledge was that REIM was a very profitable area for some people. From what I could tell, the same people that “farm” DR, RW, and others. If people were pulling enough loot out of REIM to cause you to enforce a loot cap, why would it be reasonable for me to assume this level of loot was excessive?

Quilic says, "You pulled over a billion silvers out, and that's being very general. There's nothing in the game that even approaches that level of profit, and finding a way to do it should have been a pretty clear sign that something was amiss."

I spent thousands of dollars to generate 2-3M Bloodscrip during the last DR in 3 weeks time. I bought over 1M Bloodscrip during the prior event. All of this, with very little skill (and none with the new sewers). I bought the equivalent of thousands of dollars of REIM orbs. Granted, it was in-game – but the misvaluing of objects is not a policy violation. How, in this context, is 1B silver in a paid area, given the level of characters and effort involved much different? My point is that not just some, but every paid event is this lucrative. Perhaps the economics were more in my favor in REIM, but there was also way more effort and investment.


Thank you again for taking the extra time to review this. I hope my comments above provide at least some points of discussion for you.

Regards,



From:
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2023 5:50 PM
To: 'GemStone Feedback' <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Thank you for the response. I appreciate the extra time and would welcome a discussion (as opposed to an official response) if that is ever possible. I will reiterate that based on evidence; this “bug” was known to exist. Further, a 10 minute timer was put on the spawning of the bosses, before I ever stepped foot in REIM (possibly before I returned to the game). This effectively capped the number of times you could farm them – which itself was not always an easy task. I can’t count the number of times I died or the number of hours I spent playing to accomplish what has been deemed a violation of policy. Why was there a 10 minute timer if they were not meant to be able to respawn?

From: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2023 5:37 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

This has been received, we usually take 24 to 72 hours to respond to feedback. I plan to go through the logs and meet with the senior staff. I won't have a formal response until Monday or Tuesday.


Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 1:40 PM wrote:
Hi Team,

I appreciate that you may be reviewing this internally, and respect that that process may take some time. Given the severity of the penalty you have implemented, I would appreciate some form of confirmation that you have received this.

Sincerely,

From:
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2023 9:19 PM
To: gsfeedback@simutronics.com
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

I don’t me to “bombard” you emails, but I would also like to point out a post from this week:

Melivn — 04/11/2023 1:15 PM
could for sure be this, we were told at one point the emps weren't really meant to be cycled like people cycle them, and were supposed to be a one per group thing iirc so could be something changing with that.

I have found no reference to this is any of the wiki material (that fact that we were not supposed to cycle emps (what’s an emp?). The fact is that people, and apparently you, knew about the process. So I will again question, how this is then a “bug” that was exploited.


From:
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2023 6:04 PM
To: gsfeedback@simutronics.com
Subject: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

To Whom It May Concern,

I received multiple account violations today for silver farming in REIM. Having had a brief discussion with Quilic, I am writing to “appeal” the decision that you have made. I was gone from the game for the better part of a decade (two decades if you discount a brief return in 2010) and came back to a game that was less recognizable than the one I had left. I had to relearn almost all aspect of the game – mechanics, quests, paid-events, and scripting were all radically different from when I left. I also discovered that there were basically two classes of players, those with large groups that farmed paid events and those that didn’t – my first experience being DR a year ago or so. Whether it was farming the arena, sewers or jousts, the results were all the same – farming to raise silver and sell valuable “found” game items. I think I bought over $4K in bloodscrip (secondary marklet) that year to fund my first Sigil staff and spell books. My enjoyment of this game has never been an issue, and over the last 1-2 years I have spent well over $10K in the Simu store alone.

Over this period, I assembled a team capable of fighting in the DR arena with the best around (at least I think so). While playing the game, I became aware of large groups playing REIM for the purpose of silver farming. Over some period of time, I dabbled with REIM… generally watching people and their tactics – both to survive and make it lucrative. I certainly didn’t “come up” with farming the bosses and I viewed it similar to the constant farming of DR to sell items – which people do for hundreds of millions, even a billion silver if you believe the message boards. REIM was a “paid” event and therefore described as isolated from the loot caps (something else that was new to me) in the rest of the game. I did nothing to hide my activities and was present for all of it. I engaged with almost everyone that rested with me and raised my characters every time they died (which was a lot). Further, REIM was around for years before I came back. Couple this with my experience of the DR arena, and I did not see this as a “bug”.

To suggest that my actions are somehow more detrimental to the game or dishonest than the hordes of people AFK scripting 18 hours a day is hard for me to believe. I actively play the game, across 6 32” monitors – watching all my characters. I help people, offer advice, and almost never sell things for actual money (and never silver). I can appreciate that you would view my actions as against policy, but coming back to the game that exists today and watching people bid millions/billions for items, I assumed that the silvers were coming from someplace. People can openly talk about farming millions from REIM mobs – to which your response was a loot cap – but because of my efficiency in farming a different part of REIM, I get all my silvers removed and 3 months of “ban” across 8 accounts (which also cost over $100/month).

The situation, in my opinion, warranted a discussion at the least. Hopefully you can see at least some portion of my point-of-view and will engage me on the topic.

Sincerely,

[SorcGoods101]

entire transcript posted

[Rjex]

Quilic says, You didn't find it odd that everyone wasn't doing the same thing?

Eh... I don't buy that argument. However many people are doing something should have nothing to do with whether it's against policy or not. They seem be throwing accusations hoping something would stick to justify what they elected to do. Going over 35m is a particularly odd one, are we supposed to hire accountants? I couldn't even begin to guess how much silvers I earn per month.

[SorcGoods101]

So I was punished for "breaking" the loot cap that they failed to implement properly... as far as I can tell.

[Tgo01]

Assuming you didn't alter the transcripts (which I have no reason to believe you did), this is all kinds of bullshit on Simu's part.


> Starting on Monday, April 3rd, 2023, we're going to remove Reim orb entries from the SimuCoin Store. Premium characters will continue to earn one free entry per day. In addition, at that time, we're going to start enforcing the treasure cap for treasure generated in Reim.
> As previously announced, the treasure cap is now enforced in Reim. Entry orbs will continue to be available in the SimuCoins Store.

So, wait, all this time there was a loot cap but Reim was exempt from this loot cap? Holy shit. Man those people in the Hand of Reim or whatever it's called truly are the favored sons aren't they.


You had been pulling out more silver from Reim than what was actually possible

This doesn't even make sense. If it wasn't possible to pull more silver out of Reim, then how were you pulling more out? Unless there was some sort of secondary loot cap specifically for Reim and you were going beyond that, which sounds like a bug if that's the case.


but when they switched Reim over to be loot capped, you continued to go behind the cap. You were also summoning the royals multiple times, which was a bug and was stated as such by GM Retser. No punishments were pushed through until after April 3rd, when you continued doing everything. It is the players responsibility to keep up on all announcements.

Again, absolute bullshit. So much shit changes in this game on a constant basis and there is NO easy way to access these changes. I don't even know what is changing until days, weeks, or sometimes months later and I usually hear it second hand from someone here on the PC. Like literally just now I am learning that loot generated in Reim apparently didn't count towards the loot cap, and again just now I am learning that this was changed just 3 weeks ago. But yet somehow someone is supposed to just know that something is a bug that the GMs apparently never got around to fixing, and announced it was a bug and still hadn't fixed it, and that you were not suppose to take advantage of said bug, that you didn't even know was a bug. The GMs should have just personally pulled you aside and explained it was a bug and told you to stop, not start throwing around punishments and saying it's your fault for not keeping up with their ever changing rules.


you pulled out over a billion silver and we were not able to recover all that silver, so we are still trying to discover where the missing silver is if you didn't hand it off.

You also were doing this before April 3rd to a degree which was earning billions of silvers.

Wait, was it "over a billion" or "billions" of silvers? I know technically it's the same thing, but saying "over a billion" makes it sound like just a little bit over a billion, where as "billions" makes it sound like multiple billions.

Also assuming you're telling the truth about having 8 accounts and this all took place over a span of 6 months, and you generated at most 2 billion silvers during that time; you could have generated 1.68 billion silvers with those accounts in 6 months just by reaching the monthly loot cap on each account, meaning they are making this huge stink about mechanics abuse and not keeping up with their bug announcements over 54 extra million silvers a month.

I'm all for the GMs maintaining the integrity of the game and I am appreciative of their effort, but this all seems a bit heavy handed based on these emails and the information we have been provided.

[Tgo01]

However many people are doing something should have nothing to do with whether it's against policy or not.

Yeah that's really odd reasoning.

I like to play this game a certain way, the fact that other people do or do not play the same way I do has no bearing on how I choose to play this game.

[beldannon5]

The powers that be at Simutronics have seen it fit to permanently ban me for making too much silver (implied: without them make enough money). I am posting this so that everyone knows the truth of the situation. For months, I have been fighting in REIM, I've probably said hello to some of you in the last node, where I spent most of my time. I was, as the GMs have now called it, cycling the Emperor and Empress. I bought thousands of dollars worth of REIM orbs and died hundreds of times in the process. All told, I made 1-2B silver in roughly 6 months (heavily tail weighted as I got better at it). After implementing the loot cap in April (which I honestly knew nothing about until I saw a random thought on LNET), they removed over 800M silver from my accounts and implemented a 90 day AFK penalty across them. When I contacted support to argue that nothing I did was against any published rules or implied game mechanics, they spent a week looking through logs. In the end, they determined that after the loot cap was implemented in April, one of my eight characters earned over the cap by abusing a game mechanic (they assigned every silver made to one character... the value was under the collective loot cap for my group). NOTE: This is not the penalty they originally stated. Despite my saying on multiple occasions that I would be honest and return whatever they thought was obtained "against policy", they decided my 25+ years in the game were not enough to substantiate my history of positive actions and interactions.

I would like to again thank all the GMs and GHs that made this game what it was/is for so long. Thank you to the many players that I have interacted with the years as well.

Sincerely,
Soleren

The main people in charge are complete tools. They used to be cool, but they have to make money now or be fired(guessing on that)

[SorcGoods101]

I did not edit any of the transcript. I scaled up to 8 accounts. It was less than 2B over a total of 6 months... fairly heavily tail weighted as I got more characters.

[SorcGoods101]

The main people in charge are complete tools. They used to be cool, but they have to make money now or be fired(guessing on that)

Not that it should matter how much somebody someone spends, but I dropped over $14K (simu store) on this game last year. I would have spent as much or more this year. I rarely sell anything (maybe a little BS here and there). They could have come any said "this is not the way we intended it to work, please stop while we fix it". I would happily have worked with them... even given back what they felt was in excess. You can read the email exchanges. They put me through BS for a week until they thought they had something worth the original punishment.

[Tgo01]

I'm really confused as to what exactly you were exploiting because I know nothing about Reim. So you're able to summon 2 boss critters basically, and summoning them "too often" was some sort of bug?

And these two boss critters apparently dropped a shit ton of loot that didn't count towards the loot cap, and previous to April 4th of this year the loot purposefully didn't count towards the loot cap, and after April 4th you were somehow able to bypass the loot cap?

[SorcGoods101]

I'm really confused as to what exactly you were exploiting because I know nothing about Reim. So you're able to summon 2 boss critters basically, and summoning them "too often" was some sort of bug?

And these two boss critters apparently dropped a shit ton of loot that didn't count towards the loot cap, and previous to April 4th of this year the loot purposefully didn't count towards the loot cap, and after April 4th you were somehow able to bypass the loot cap?

If you brought multiple characters into REIM, you could bring two to the boss room. Summon and have the summoning character leave the room. The remaining character would fight them and pick up 60-80K worth of gear. Because the summoning character left room (without attacking), they did not get credit for killing the bosses... meaning they could resummon in 10 minutes (a timer Simu implemented... no idea why/when, was "away" when REIM was made). Do that over and over for two hours with as many characters as you have (that can survive). If you were perfect, it resulted in about 6M silver. Any deaths (which were common) or timing issues. and you were down to 4.5-5.2M. Keep in mind, it cost 8 REIM entries to do this (which if translated from $$ to silver is ~2M).

[Tgo01]

If you brought multiple characters into REIM, you could bring two to the boss room. Summon and have the summoning character leave the room. The remaining character would fight them and pick up 60-80K worth of gear. Because the summoning character left room (without attacking), they did not get credit for killing the bosses... meaning they could resummon in 10 minutes (a timer Simu implemented... no idea why/when, was "away" when REIM was made). Do that over and over for two hours with as many characters as you have (that can survive). If you were perfect, it resulted in about 6M silver. Any deaths (which were common) or timing issues. and you were down to 4.5-5.2M. Keep in mind, it cost 8 REIM entries to do this (which if translated from $$ to silver is ~2M).

I mean this sounds like a simple fix from their perspective: just make it so when a character summons the boss they automatically get credit whether they attacked or not.

Also why just 2 hours? Could you theoretically do this all day? Or did you just stop after 2 hours because you got bored?

Also does doing this still use up a Reim orb? Or could you summon the bosses without using Reim orbs?

[SorcGoods101]

I mean this sounds like a simple fix from their perspective: just make it so when a character summons the boss they automatically get credit whether they attacked or not.

Also why just 2 hours? Could you theoretically do this all day? Or did you just stop after 2 hours because you got bored?

Also does doing this still use up a Reim orb? Or could you summon the bosses without using Reim orbs?

That is the fix they made last week. It took all of two days. Their is a timer on REIM entries of 2 hours. Cost 1 orb per character for 2 hours.

But none of the details matter to them. Once I refuted their original charge, they dug until they came up with something else. Why else did it take a week to get any response. Even now, there is no way a rational person buys it. This could have all been avoided so easily.

[Meddel]

If you brought multiple characters into REIM, you could bring two to the boss room. Summon and have the summoning character leave the room. The remaining character would fight them and pick up 60-80K worth of gear. Because the summoning character left room (without attacking), they did not get credit for killing the bosses... meaning they could resummon in 10 minutes (a timer Simu implemented... no idea why/when, was "away" when REIM was made). Do that over and over for two hours with as many characters as you have (that can survive). If you were perfect, it resulted in about 6M silver. Any deaths (which were common) or timing issues. and you were down to 4.5-5.2M. Keep in mind, it cost 8 REIM entries to do this (which if translated from $$ to silver is ~2M).

I'm still not wild about the punishment, but this does make it sound more like a bug being exploited. I'd prefer they just told you to knock it off, though.

That said, as soon as you got into legal threats, the deal was sealed. They take that as an excuse to end the conversation and bring out the ban-hammer.

[SorcGoods101]

I'm still not wild about the punishment, but this does make it sound more like a bug being exploited. I'd prefer they just told you to knock it off, though.

That said, as soon as you got into legal threats, the deal was sealed. They take that as an excuse to end the conversation and bring out the ban-hammer.

Who said legal threats? I said I would get my money back. Court of public opinion and the BBB for now.

I was away from the game for 10 years... just tell me this wasn't the way it was supposed to work. Posts on discord made it clear that players and staff knew about this. In the end, they didn't ban be for cycling, they said I broke the loot cap on a single character.

[Tgo01]

That is the fix they made last week. It took all of two days. Their is a times on REIM entries of 2 hours. Cost 1 orb per character for 2 hours.

Ah each entry lasts 2 hours, didn't know that.

I mean, 6m silvers in 2 hours is quite impressive.

If you did that for just 10 hours per day that's 900m a month.

But this seems like a lot of failures on Simu's part:

1) Why did the summoning person not get credit by default?
2) Why didn't Reim's loot not count towards the monthly loot cap to begin with?
3) I thought the GMs were keeping a pretty close eye on the amount of silvers players are generating these days, did they not notice 1 character was generating 110m a month and investigate this sooner?

[Meddel]

Who said legal threats? I said I would get my money back. Court of public opinion and the BBB for now.

I was away from the game for 10 years... just tell me this wasn't the way it was supposed to work. Posts on discord made it clear that players and staff knew about this. In the end, they didn't ban be for cycling, they said I broke the loot cap on a single character.

I'm not trying to bust your chops, just pointing at the "After tomorrow, I will proceed with action against Simutronics." statement from the transcript. I heard that as a legal threat. And if they did too, that's the end of the conversation.

[SorcGoods101]

Ah each entry lasts 2 hours, didn't know that.

I mean, 6m silvers in 2 hours is quite impressive.

If you did that for just 10 hours per day that's 900m a month.

But this seems like a lot of failures on Simu's part:

1) Why did the summoning person not get credit by default?
2) Why didn't Reim's loot not count towards the monthly loot cap to begin with?
3) I thought the GMs were keeping a pretty close eye on the amount of silvers players are generating these days, did they not notice 1 character was generating 110m a month and investigate this sooner?

Thank you!

[SorcGoods101]

I'm not trying to bust your chops, just pointing at the "After tomorrow, I will proceed with action against Simutronics." statement from the transcript. I heard that as a legal threat. And if they did too, that's the end of the conversation.

I just said action. They made a lot of assumptions in the punishment, makes sense they would here too. But again, that is all after the fact...

[Tgo01]

I just said action. They made a lot of assumptions in the punishment, makes sense they would here too. But again, that is all after the fact...

To be fair to the person responding from Feedback, I took that part to mean legal action as well, or maybe dispute the charges on your credit card.

[SorcGoods101]

To be fair to the person responding from Feedback, I took that part to mean legal action as well, or maybe dispute the charges on your credit card.

Fair enough. I wasn't coming back though, permanent or 90 temporary. They handled this wrong from start to finish. I gave them every opportunity to work out a "reasonable" solution.

[MispronouncedHeroine]

Fair enough. I wasn't coming back though, permanent or 90 temporary. They handled this wrong from start to finish. I gave them every opportunity to work out a "reasonable" solution.

That is a sweet exploit. It was grey enough they should've just closed the loophole, but I think the number of cookies you got out of the jar drew their ire. The ban hammer seemed a bit heavy and Quilic's justifications were exceptionally dumb. It blows my mind what GMs say sometimes.

But I am not sure why you thought the Karen act was going to get you anywhere? Cops, mods, GMs - they will perform elaborate mental gymnastics to avoid being wrong. You don't take those roles because you are a stable, intelligent, and mature person. You take them because you enjoy power over other people. Don't argue with people who have power over you.

[Winter]

Quilic says, "You pulled over a billion silvers out, and that's being very general. There's nothing in the game that even approaches that level of profit, and finding a way to do it should have been a pretty clear sign that something was amiss."

That's incredibly disingenuous, that's exactly what happens at Duskruin or does Duskruin pawnshop loot now also fall under the silvers cap?

[Izzy]

Yikes, big woe-is-me victim energy.

There's no possible way you though that perpetually summoning the Reim bosses with characters, then removing them to avoid credit was legitimate. It's very obviously intended that each character gets one attempt at the bosses per run. That's why you get locked out from summoning them as soon as you hit one.


That's incredibly disingenuous, that's exactly what happens at Duskruin or does Duskruin pawnshop loot now also fall under the silvers cap?

A duskruin entry is ~$1, and you get exactly 1 attempt at the event for that fee, unlimited time but rewards aren't related to time. Grants special currency in addition to loot.
A reim entry is the same price, and you're supposed to get exactly 1 attempt at the event for that fee, fixed time (2h) but rewards scale with time spent (especially if you game the bosses infinitely with GMA, apparently). Grants special currency in addition to loot.

[SorcGoods101]

Yikes, big woe-is-me victim energy.

There's no possible way you though that perpetually summoning the Reim bosses with characters, then removing them to avoid credit was legitimate. It's very obviously intended that each character gets one attempt at the bosses per run. That's why you get locked out from summoning them as soon as you hit one.


A duskruin entry is ~$1, and you get exactly 1 attempt at the event for that fee, unlimited time but rewards aren't related to time. Grants special currency in addition to loot.
A reim entry is the same price, and you're supposed to get exactly 1 attempt at the event for that fee, fixed time (2h) but rewards scale with time spent (especially if you game the bosses infinitely with GMA, apparently). Grants special currency in addition to loot.

To be clear, they didn't penalize me for that. They enforced the bans (temporary) and loss of all silver because I broke a 4 day old loot cap rule which they don't publish the workings of. If they stuck to their guns and could refute that they knew about the "bug" -- or that how it worked didn't follow normal game mechanics, this would be a different conversation. The fact is they punished me before they did much research on the basis of silver earned. Then they took a week to dig into the logs to try and find justification.

No woe-is-me. I don't believe in that crap. I don't like when corporations act like they can do anything they want. I and others spend a good deal of money on these platforms. Some accountability and responsibility should be required of them. The myriad of comments on GM behavior (some not most in my experience) above should be enough to prove that.

To the point of profitability, with 8 characters, cycling REIM was roughly 2x more profitable than DR. Without cycling (or farming mobs, etc), REIM is about 1/3 as profitable as DR. This wasn't game breaking amounts of loot or amounts not attainable anywhere else in the game as suggested.

[Winter]

A duskruin entry is ~$1, and you get exactly 1 attempt at the event for that fee, unlimited time but rewards aren't related to time.

The issue is the armour/jewellery/weapon are sold for silvers and not blood scrip which circumvents the silvers loot cap and makes it pointless. They could change that the rewards can only be sold or traded in for blood scrip and not silvers but they haven't, draw your own conclusions.

[Izzy]

The issue is the armour/jewellery/weapon are sold for silvers and not blood scrip which circumvents the silvers loot cap and makes it pointless. They could change that the rewards can only be sold or traded in for blood scrip and not silvers but they haven't, draw your own conclusions.

That isn't the problem. SIMU has stated that pay events are not subject to loot cap. Reim was under than umbrella until people abused it. If it were possible to sit in the duskruin arena for 2 hours and farm gems or use GMA to cycle additional rewards, then I'm certain they'd start applying loot cap there too.

[Methais]

Eh... I don't buy that argument. However many people are doing something should have nothing to do with whether it's against policy or not. They seem be throwing accusations hoping something would stick to justify what they elected to do. Going over 35m is a particularly odd one, are we supposed to hire accountants? I couldn't even begin to guess how much silvers I earn per month.

I didn't make it through that whoel email post, but so far this is my favorite part:


You had been pulling out more silver from Reim than what was actually possible, but when they switched Reim over to be loot capped, you continued to go behind the cap. You were also summoning the royals multiple times, which was a bug and was stated as such by GM Retser. No punishments were pushed through until after April 3rd, when you continued doing everything. It is the players responsibility to keep up on all announcements.

On paper, sure. But where was this announced other than as a needle in a Discord haystack?

People shouldn't have to use out of game means to find out what's going on in game, especially when they use a 3rd party program for all of their communications that requires you to link your account to.

The game literally has a NEWS verb for announcements. Let's see how that's looking:


>news
Listing all news items. Highlighted items are items you haven't read.

ITEM # - HEADLINE

** Category 1 - GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS **

4 - GIVE THE GIFT OF ADVENTURE
34 - KAMA WEAPON NOUN - MOVES FROM SCIMITAR TO FIST-SCYTHE

** Category 2 - GAMEPLAY **

2 - TIPS TO PROTECT YOUR VALUABLE ITEMS
11 - SAVE YOUR CHARACTER FROM DEATH HARDSHIPS

** Category 3 - PROFESSION AND GUILD NEWS **


** Category 4 - PLAYER RUN ORGANIZATION NEWS **

115 - [PRIME] GSE LUMNIS CELEBRATION!
116 - [PRIME] FISH AT COMPANION PARK WITH WILLOW HALL, THE BLACK WOLVES, AND HOUSE ONOIR.
117 - [PRIME] JOIN HOUSE ONOIR FOR SERVICE NIGHT
118 - [PRIME] TWILIGHT HALL'S 9TH ANNUAL MAGIC OF SPRING
119 - [PRIME] HOUSE DAINGNEACH ONOIR HOUSE HUNT
120 - [PRIME] BLACK WOLVES MEET AND GREET
121 - [PRIME] SOLHAVEN GRAND ART EXHIBIT

** Category 5 - BILLING AND POLICY INFO **

1 - ACCOUNT SECURITY ISSUES
2 - CHARACTER PURGE INFORMATION
3 - IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT EMAIL CORRESPONDENCE
4 - HOW TO TRANSFER CHARACTERS BETWEEN ACCOUNTS
5 - HOW TO GET A PIN FOR AN OLD CHARACTER
6 - HOW TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION
7 - LOSING ITEMS ON THE GROUND! IMPORTANT INFORMATION!
8 - THAT EVIL GUY THE JANITOR. WHO OR WHAT IS IT?
9 - SIGN UP A BUDDY!
11 - GEMSTONE IV FRONT ENDS
13 - POLICY UPDATE
14 - POLICY 18 UPDATED
15 - NEW CHARACTER RESTORAL POLICY
18 - EVENT TICKETS - TRADE, GIFT, TRANSFER & UPGRADE PROCESS
19 - NEW VERB RELEASED FOR SIMUTRONICS CONTACT INFORMATION
22 - SKILL MIGRATION ABUSE
23 - IMPORTANT REMINDERS FOR YOUR SECURITY
Select NEWS HELP for additional information on how to get the most from the NEWS command.
>news 5 14
Click next to read the next unread article.

Dateline 6/20/2015: POLICY 18 UPDATED

POLICY 18 has been updated.

Please take the moment to read over the new policy governing scripting violations by typing POLICY 18.

END NEWS ITEM



Their latest in-game NEWS item about POLICY is from...2015. :rofl:

gg Simu


No clue why the hell it isn't mandatory to post announcements in general as an in game NEWS item, but deciding that players have to link their account to Discord and stay glued to it 24/7 in order to keep up with what's going on is stupid as fuck. Which is typical Simu behavior, but still.


EDIT: What the fuck is cycling in REIM? I've never run the place and don't know much of anything about it other than it exists.

EDIT EDIT: Nevermind. I now know what cycling is in REIM.

[Winter]

That isn't the problem. SIMU has stated that pay events are not subject to loot cap. Reim was under than umbrella until people abused it.

That is the problem but only part of it, if it wasn't the REIM treasure cap would have been removed after the bug was fixed but I'm going to assume it's still there. The real issue here is Stillfront, the staff are under pressure to monetise everything and Stillfront couldn't give a flying fig about either the staff or the community, all they care about is their bottom line.

[SonoftheNorth]

This will be my last response to you on this matter given your last two sentences on your email from 6:33pm CT. No one searched for a week to come up with something. You performed game mechanics abuse in our system, something covered by POLICY. I went over months of logs to make sure it was justified. It was. There is no collective here, you earned all of this on XXX. But given your last email, I will be assigning this to permanent lockout.


Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 7:36 PM wrote:
I will also add how sad it is that almost 30 years of playing (accepting of some long breaks) will end like this. The amount referenced below is well over $10,000. I’m sure your accounting department keeps good records.

From:
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2023 7:33 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Cc:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

As I said, the issue is that Simu did not earn enough cash for the silver I generated. I have proven that the situation that led to this was both known and within normal game mechanics. You have searched for a week to come up with something to “charge me” with. I don't know the workings of the loot cap and have 8 characters. I did not earn more than the collective cap on those characters. If you think that this penalty is befitting of "that" situation, my playing is clearly over. For the sake of principal, I will fight your company for every dollar I have ever paid you. If you choose to refund it now, I will stop at that.
________________________________________
From: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2023 7:17:12 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

You went beyond the cap on Soleren of 35mil. And continued to do so after April 3rd. That is the fact. And that is the final decision here. You also were doing this before April 3rd to a degree which was earning billions of silvers. We did not permanently ban your accounts from this, but we did confiscate all the silver because it was not earned within the normal game mechanics. We also placed a large penalty on all of your accounts. Typically we permanently ban this level of POLICY infraction. This decision will not be changing. This was reviewed by over a dozen GameMasters, two Product Managers, and myself.


Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 7:13 PM wrote:
To be clear, you imposed a penalty for breaking game mechanics by cycling the emperor and empress of REIM. With me proving that to be mostly false, you have changed it to a trumped up penalty for breaking the loot cap, which was sloppily implemented with REIM. Even than, I did not break it across my 8 characters.
________________________________________
From:
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2023 7:00:52 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Cc:
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Vine,

As far as I know, the loot cap was enforced on April 1st (which I had no idea about until after it happened). I did not go “behind the cap” and never earned more than the cap given my 8 characters. I earned less than 240M during the month of April. Even if I did (which I did not), the proper response would be to remove the silver earned above the cap (not everything that I worked for over the course of months). If I believed that I had breached the cap, given my character count (you do not release the actual workings of the cap as far as I know), I would have notified you of such a bug. I’m sorry, but “you” (Simu) are trying to find some to way to justify this penalty. The issue is not that I earned silver, it is that you believe Simu wasn’t compensated properly for it. You are choosing corporate greed over customer service and player rights.

While I have been respectful during your “research”, I will not allow you to operate in such a manner or penalize me without actual facts. I will ask one last time to reconsider given the facts above.

After tomorrow, I will proceed with action against Simutronics.

Regards,


From: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2023 6:44 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

After fully reviewing the situation, the logs, talking with staff members, and looking over your activity, the penalty will be staying in place.

I think you missed an announcement.

> Starting on Monday, April 3rd, 2023, we're going to remove Reim orb entries from the SimuCoin Store. Premium characters will continue to earn one free entry per day. In addition, at that time, we're going to start enforcing the treasure cap for treasure generated in Reim.
> As previously announced, the treasure cap is now enforced in Reim. Entry orbs will continue to be available in the SimuCoins Store.

You had been pulling out more silver from Reim than what was actually possible, but when they switched Reim over to be loot capped, you continued to go behind the cap. You were also summoning the royals multiple times, which was a bug and was stated as such by GM Retser. No punishments were pushed through until after April 3rd, when you continued doing everything. It is the players responsibility to keep up on all announcements.

Generating silver via unintentional measures is an example in POLICY and game mechanics abuse. Typically this is a permanent lockout, but instead, they simply took your silver and put a penalty on all of your accounts. You mentioned you did not do this to profit from, however, you pulled out over a billion silver and we were not able to recover all that silver, so we are still trying to discover where the missing silver is if you didn't hand it off.

If you wish to close your accounts during the treasure and experience penalties, you may.

Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 4:29 PM wrote:
Hi Vine,

May I please ask for an update on this? We are approaching the second (self-imposed) “deadline”, and to date, I have received no significant feedback. It would be one thing if this process was done prior to imposing well over $3K in penalties (as I stated originally), but it was not. Additionally, I continue to pay for 8 accounts that are effectively banned.

Thanks,

From:
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2023 3:13 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Hi Vine,

If this is not resolved today, are you able to elaborate on “more involved”?

Thanks,

From:
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2023 9:33 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Hi Vine,

Thank you for the update, and I continue to appreciate the time you are spending on this. I will be respectful of you and the process (as I have been throughout my history in this game), but please remember that my accounts were all effectively banned prior to this. Perhaps that is not part of your review, but I continue to believe that this judgement was made with incomplete facts.

Regards,


From: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2023 8:23 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

The situation is a little more involved than I initially thought. We had a meeting about it today, but I likely won't have a response until tomorrow or Thursday.


Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 4:19 PM wrote:
Hi Vine,

Are you still on target to provide an update on this?

Thanks,

From:
Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2023 8:17 PM
To: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Hi Vine,

I’m not sure that a discussion with me will happen about this, so I’d like to take a few minutes to respond to some the things that Quilic said when we met in-game. I hope it will give you some discussion points when you meet with senior staff:

Quilic says, So, as I said, this is pretty clear GMA, unfortunately. The levels of loot were way, way above what was intended, and you farmed it pretty impressively for quite a while. Nothing in any of the documentation or announcements should have led you to think that this was "the way it worked.

In 25 years, I have never understood how people had billions of silver. Even today, I don’t understand how people hit the loot cap outside of paid areas. But clearly it is done, because Simu felt the need to implement such a cap. Obtaining more silver than was intended is an extremely subjective comment. If people can obtain a billion silver (in addition to the event currency) from DR or RW in 3 weeks, why is this “paid quest” different?

By documentation, I assume this means the Wiki – I don’t know what announcement are being referred to. The Wiki is extremely light on details for REIM. The only reference to the Emperor/Empress is this:

“An exception are the Emperor and Empress in the Throne Room: they are on an in-game ten minute timer instead…”

It seemed obvious to me that the timer was a mechanism to limit the number of times the Emperor/Empress could be spawned and killed. What other purpose does this serve?

Everywhere else in the game, if a player doesn’t hit a target, they don’t get exp/credit for killing it (bandits, rare spawns earlier in REIM, etc). Why should the mechanic here be any different?


Quilic says, You didn't find it odd that everyone wasn't doing the same thing?

I spent over $5K on characters and countless hours refining my skills to execute what you are calling a breach of policy. At no point was this easy or risk free. I didn’t find some way to alter an object and sell it for a 1M silver over and over. I compiled a team of 8 2-7x cap characters the were specifically trained to “compete” in the REIM environment. Even then, the 2x cap characters were very susceptible to maneuver attacks and groups which quickly resulted in their deaths many times. So is it easier to be active and deal with level 120 characters to obtain 4-6M per run or use whatever post cap characters you have and “sleep” through two hours of mobs to obtain 2-3M per run (I’m going by posts– I didn’t do enough testing to see what the limits were here). Further, I spent 7 months teaching myself Ruby to be more efficient. Anyone can turn on Bigshot and sit in a corner.

Quilic says, That loophole's been closed, and we'll definitely be looking back to see if there were any other violations, but there wasn't anything near on your level as far as scale goes.

Scale does not make something against policy. There is either a reasonable belief that this a game mechanic or not.

Quilic says, My hands are a little bit tied, as this is pretty much textbook GMA. I get what you're saying, but if this was how things were supposed to be working, it would be far, far more widely known. The numbers you were pulling were extremely impressive.

Per my earlier email, this was known – apparently to both players and staff. I didn’t learn about timing the emperor and empress by doing it (I started REIM with one, maybe two, characters). I watched people and how they handled the final room, specifically the timing of entry. Maybe people knew about some earlier communication (as Melivn referred to), but I was certainly not aware of it.

You say, "Game mechanics are very subjective here."
Quilic says, "Perhaps, perhaps not. But certainly if someone found a way to take something that was worth X, by general accepted knowledge, and make it worth X times a whole bunch, the expectation is that that person would do some research, and ask a few questions.

As I noted both above and earlier, my knowledge was that REIM was a very profitable area for some people. From what I could tell, the same people that “farm” DR, RW, and others. If people were pulling enough loot out of REIM to cause you to enforce a loot cap, why would it be reasonable for me to assume this level of loot was excessive?

Quilic says, "You pulled over a billion silvers out, and that's being very general. There's nothing in the game that even approaches that level of profit, and finding a way to do it should have been a pretty clear sign that something was amiss."

I spent thousands of dollars to generate 2-3M Bloodscrip during the last DR in 3 weeks time. I bought over 1M Bloodscrip during the prior event. All of this, with very little skill (and none with the new sewers). I bought the equivalent of thousands of dollars of REIM orbs. Granted, it was in-game – but the misvaluing of objects is not a policy violation. How, in this context, is 1B silver in a paid area, given the level of characters and effort involved much different? My point is that not just some, but every paid event is this lucrative. Perhaps the economics were more in my favor in REIM, but there was also way more effort and investment.


Thank you again for taking the extra time to review this. I hope my comments above provide at least some points of discussion for you.

Regards,



From:
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2023 5:50 PM
To: 'GemStone Feedback' <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

Thank you for the response. I appreciate the extra time and would welcome a discussion (as opposed to an official response) if that is ever possible. I will reiterate that based on evidence; this “bug” was known to exist. Further, a 10 minute timer was put on the spawning of the bosses, before I ever stepped foot in REIM (possibly before I returned to the game). This effectively capped the number of times you could farm them – which itself was not always an easy task. I can’t count the number of times I died or the number of hours I spent playing to accomplish what has been deemed a violation of policy. Why was there a 10 minute timer if they were not meant to be able to respawn?

From: GemStone Feedback <gsfeedback@simutronics.com>
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2023 5:37 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

This has been received, we usually take 24 to 72 hours to respond to feedback. I plan to go through the logs and meet with the senior staff. I won't have a formal response until Monday or Tuesday.


Vine

Simutronics Feedback


On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 1:40 PM wrote:
Hi Team,

I appreciate that you may be reviewing this internally, and respect that that process may take some time. Given the severity of the penalty you have implemented, I would appreciate some form of confirmation that you have received this.

Sincerely,

From:
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2023 9:19 PM
To: gsfeedback@simutronics.com
Subject: RE: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

I don’t me to “bombard” you emails, but I would also like to point out a post from this week:

Melivn — 04/11/2023 1:15 PM
could for sure be this, we were told at one point the emps weren't really meant to be cycled like people cycle them, and were supposed to be a one per group thing iirc so could be something changing with that.

I have found no reference to this is any of the wiki material (that fact that we were not supposed to cycle emps (what’s an emp?). The fact is that people, and apparently you, knew about the process. So I will again question, how this is then a “bug” that was exploited.


From:
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2023 6:04 PM
To: gsfeedback@simutronics.com
Subject: Policy Violation(s) - REIM

To Whom It May Concern,

I received multiple account violations today for silver farming in REIM. Having had a brief discussion with Quilic, I am writing to “appeal” the decision that you have made. I was gone from the game for the better part of a decade (two decades if you discount a brief return in 2010) and came back to a game that was less recognizable than the one I had left. I had to relearn almost all aspect of the game – mechanics, quests, paid-events, and scripting were all radically different from when I left. I also discovered that there were basically two classes of players, those with large groups that farmed paid events and those that didn’t – my first experience being DR a year ago or so. Whether it was farming the arena, sewers or jousts, the results were all the same – farming to raise silver and sell valuable “found” game items. I think I bought over $4K in bloodscrip (secondary marklet) that year to fund my first Sigil staff and spell books. My enjoyment of this game has never been an issue, and over the last 1-2 years I have spent well over $10K in the Simu store alone.

Over this period, I assembled a team capable of fighting in the DR arena with the best around (at least I think so). While playing the game, I became aware of large groups playing REIM for the purpose of silver farming. Over some period of time, I dabbled with REIM… generally watching people and their tactics – both to survive and make it lucrative. I certainly didn’t “come up” with farming the bosses and I viewed it similar to the constant farming of DR to sell items – which people do for hundreds of millions, even a billion silver if you believe the message boards. REIM was a “paid” event and therefore described as isolated from the loot caps (something else that was new to me) in the rest of the game. I did nothing to hide my activities and was present for all of it. I engaged with almost everyone that rested with me and raised my characters every time they died (which was a lot). Further, REIM was around for years before I came back. Couple this with my experience of the DR arena, and I did not see this as a “bug”.

To suggest that my actions are somehow more detrimental to the game or dishonest than the hordes of people AFK scripting 18 hours a day is hard for me to believe. I actively play the game, across 6 32” monitors – watching all my characters. I help people, offer advice, and almost never sell things for actual money (and never silver). I can appreciate that you would view my actions as against policy, but coming back to the game that exists today and watching people bid millions/billions for items, I assumed that the silvers were coming from someplace. People can openly talk about farming millions from REIM mobs – to which your response was a loot cap – but because of my efficiency in farming a different part of REIM, I get all my silvers removed and 3 months of “ban” across 8 accounts (which also cost over $100/month).

The situation, in my opinion, warranted a discussion at the least. Hopefully you can see at least some portion of my point-of-view and will engage me on the topic.

Sincerely,

God damn you're a douchebag. Good riddance.

[HebrewToYou]

To be clear, they didn't penalize me for that. They enforced the bans (temporary) and loss of all silver because I broke a 4 day old loot cap rule which they don't publish the workings of.

Perhaps I'm misreading the transcripts you provided, but it seems like they hit you for GMA related to exploiting how the reim bosses spawn and not completing the quest as designed. As someone who ran Reim daily for years on end, the boss mechanics are clearly designed to allow each quest participant to individually complete the quest. The respawn mechanics facilitate the use-case of failing to complete the quest and giving the individual additional opportunities to do so.

It beggars belief that you didn't understand that this was an exploit. Did you think that Staff intended for you to be able to generate 4-to-5 pieces of pawnable gear over and over again through NOT completing the quest? All that said, I do think Simutronics does an absolute shit job of communicating changes, documenting policy, and fixing defects. You actually got off with a fairly reasonable punishment. Reminds me of the first rule of holes...


So, wait, all this time there was a loot cap but Reim was exempt from this loot cap? Holy shit. Man those people in the Hand of Reim or whatever it's called truly are the favored sons aren't they.
To be clear, this isn't specific to Reim as I believe Izzy pointed out. All paid quests – including Troubled Waters, Night at the Academy, Return to Black Swan Castle – were exempted from the loot cap.


No clue why the hell it isn't mandatory to post announcements in general as an in game NEWS item, but deciding that players have to link their account to Discord and stay glued to it 24/7 in order to keep up with what's going on is stupid as fuck. Which is typical Simu behavior, but still.
This is a very good point, and it's especially troubling when Wyrom is booting people out of Discord for dissent but allowing them to retain their active subscription to the game. It essentially ensures that you're going to miss crucial communication that can be leveraged against you when resolving disputes.

[Flap]

LMAO. Yet another scummy dude trying to pay the bills playing a video game, shut down. You threatened your way into a permaban.


If you brought multiple characters into REIM, you could bring two to the boss room. Summon and have the summoning character leave the room. The remaining character would fight them and pick up 60-80K worth of gear. Because the summoning character left room (without attacking), they did not get credit for killing the bosses... meaning they could resummon in 10 minutes (a timer Simu implemented... no idea why/when, was "away" when REIM was made). Do that over and over for two hours with as many characters as you have (that can survive). If you were perfect, it resulted in about 6M silver. Any deaths (which were common) or timing issues. and you were down to 4.5-5.2M. Keep in mind, it cost 8 REIM entries to do this (which if translated from $$ to silver is ~2M).

You knew you were abusing mechanics. Don't play dumb.

[audioserf]

OP have you considered getting a job. also, lol owned

[Renaden]

They let you off pretty easy considering how they've handled blatant GMA (You literally described - in great detail - how you were abusing the boss spawn system) in the past, but you had to poke them until they decided on a permaban, never in the history of ever has threatening a chargeback/lawsuit resulted in a game company reversing a punishment decision. Sucks, but you kind of did it to yourself my guy.

[drumpel]

I know of two in game bugs that still haven't been fixed even though I posted about them on the officials months before it was locked and I even bugged them in game (multiple times over the course of a few months when I discovered them). One does allow you to bypass functionality of an adventurer's guild bounty while the other just needs the script updated for the items that bypass a functionality that shouldn't be allowed.

I can still make use of the two bugs today, but I have an understanding that they are bugs because it's obvious you shouldn't be able to circumvent game designs. So I try not to use them, but sometimes I just think - fuck it, and I use them anyway. If I get in trouble for it, that's on me. Best I can figure is that the bugs I know about you can't really benefit too much from the game by using them, but I'd honestly call one of them cheating the system.

After reading through the transcripts you posted you can clearly tell you understood how the mechanics were supposed to work, but you found a way around them and exploited it. Either accept you fucked up and got caught with your hand in the cookie jar and take the punishment and continue to play or walk away. Since you already claim to be walking away, just go. Complaining here on the PC isn't going to fix anything for you.

[BLZrizz]

Ultimately, players have some responsibility for stewardship of the game, not just GMs. Players are presumed to have a general understanding of the game's design and what constitutes exploitation, and ignorance of any specific policy announcement is of no excuse. So if you are generating 5x prorated loot cap in a single day, a reasonable player knows or should know that the thing is likely an unintended mechanic. The onus is on the player to seek clarification or assume the risk of a GMA ruling. Typical Simu though, the customer facing communication is anywhere from bad to mediocre, at best.

I agree the OP unnecessarily pushed himself into a ban. He could have wound down his accounts and left with something, but chose brief, fleeting, and hollow emotional satisfaction in making a threat of legal/quasi-legal action when he had zero leverage, the most counterproductive threat in all of human history.

[Methais]

Ultimately, players have some responsibility for stewardship of the game, not just GMs. Players are presumed to have a general understanding of the game's design and what constitutes exploitation, and ignorance of any specific policy announcement is of no excuse. So if you are generating 5x prorated loot cap in a single day, a reasonable player knows or should know that the thing is likely an unintended mechanic. The onus is on the player to seek clarification or assume the risk of a GMA ruling. Typical Simu though, the customer facing communication is anywhere from bad to mediocre, at best.

I agree the OP unnecessarily pushed himself into a ban. He could have wound down his accounts and left with something, but chose brief, fleeting, and hollow emotional satisfaction in making a threat of legal/quasi-legal action when he had zero leverage, the most counterproductive threat in all of human history.

Where's GSLawyer when we really need him?

[beldar17]

Drumpel it saddens me that you would abuse these bugs. Please send these to me in a private message in great detail so I can make sure that I do not.

[Methais]

Drumpel it saddens me that you would abuse these bugs. Please send these to me in a private message in great detail so I can make sure that I do not.

https://i.imgur.com/hNl2Lxm.png
https://i.imgur.com/A9aRUhQ.png

[Winter]

https://i.imgur.com/hNl2Lxm.png
https://i.imgur.com/A9aRUhQ.png


LOL!

[2Sage]

So they pulled orbs because of this? I never joined the big group but it was my understanding you could keep rubbing orbs to get the 1k scrip over and over again in the swarms. Weird they would let people do that for so long and now stop it. I always wanted to give it a go one time with a group and build up my scrip as I have been doing it pretty steadily every day for a long time and only have like 420k built up, which I think isn't even halfway to the armor reward, another year and a half assuming I don't try the pile or something.

Also wasn't there a thread on here about getting a property out of the pile? Whatever happened to good stuff in the pile?

[Donquix]

Who said legal threats? I said I would get my money back. Court of public opinion and the BBB for now.

I was away from the game for 10 years... just tell me this wasn't the way it was supposed to work. Posts on discord made it clear that players and staff knew about this. In the end, they didn't ban be for cycling, they said I broke the loot cap on a single character.

The raid from the Better Business Bureau to get your money back is going to be epic. See if you can get Yelp or Angie's list to form a joint task force with them.

https://i.imgur.com/XcRBrz4.gif

[HebrewToYou]

So they pulled orbs because of this?
They did not. You can still buy Reim entry orbs from the Simucoin store. They had initially said they were going to be pulled, but that was reversed.
Not sure why that attachment failed, but it's a screenshot of the simucoin store.

[entropy]

Sorry Icarus, only HoA can fly that close to the sun. Shame about your wings.

[SonoftheNorth]

Sorry Icarus, only HoA can fly that close to the sun. Shame about your wings.
Yes but HOA stopped on april 3rd like they were told to


"And continued to do so after April 3rd"

[Ramrod]

Pretty shit punishment tbh. If they're gonna take all the silvers you earned then why the ban? Does anyone really give a fuck anymore? I don't care if someone earns 1 bil across 8 accounts. I don't care if someone AFK scripts 24/7 as long as their script is right and doesn't affect me.

Your real mistake here is that you exploited a mechanic when all you had to do was sit 8 characters in the locksmith pool to earn roughly the same amount.

Simu is pretty short-sighted with all this shit. They're not adding any new customers so they should really work to keep every account they can especially those spending $14k/year. I don't think this was driven by Stillfront given 8 active accounts with a $14k/year spend has to be in the top 10% or so of individual players.

[peam]

If they're gonna take all the silvers you earned then why the ban?

'Cause dum-dum made something pretty close to a legal threat. Any company with a lick of sense will immediately shut that down and refer the client to communicate with their legal team moving forward.

He fucked around and found out.

[Ramrod]

My bad. I thought they originally hit him with a 90 day lockout and I was referencing that.

[SonoftheNorth]

They're not adding any new customers so they should really work to keep every account they can especially those spending $14k/year.


Spending 14k a year to make like 40k a year(probably more) abusing mechanics. They don't want the game to be a money laundering operation.

[Ramrod]

Spending 14k a year to make like 40k a year(probably more) abusing mechanics. They don't want the game to be a money laundering operation.

That type of thing is nothing new with this game. I'd wager to guess many of their top spenders and account holders are people trying to turn a profit.

The new(ish) thing here is that Simu is getting that 14k versus other players. Weren't they also able to collect most of the earned silvers, which suggests he wasn't just selling them?

[Tgo01]

My bad. I thought they originally hit him with a 90 day lockout and I was referencing that.

Sounds like he was hit with the new punishment they have going around where you can log on but you can't earn silvers or experience (at least I'm pretty sure it's both.)

It's effectively a lockout though if you don't want to pay Simu 15+ dollars a month and all you can do is RP for 90 days. I imagine most people would just cancel their accounts until the ban wears off.

[Tgo01]

Also yeah. Let's not pretend a lot of people don't earn a profit playing this game. We can argue how large the profit is or if that is their main motivation for playing the game. But if Simu started banning people for simply making a profit off this game then this is going to be one dead game.

[SonoftheNorth]

Also yeah. Let's not pretend a lot of people don't earn a profit playing this game. We can argue how large the profit is or if that is their main motivation for playing the game. But if Simu started banning people for simply making a profit off this game then this is going to be one dead game.


Right but repeatedly spawning bosses to pull billions from the game would have gotten you banned during any era of gemstone.

Also they took back what he had on him. Not what he sold or spent.


"I ONLY MADE 240M IN APRIL" He got caught on like the 13th if not sooner.

[SonoftheNorth]

I earned less than 240M during the month of April.

Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2023 6:04 PM
To Whom It May Concern,

I received multiple account violations today for silver farming in REIM.

[SonoftheNorth]

they decided my 25+ years in the game were not enough to substantiate my history of positive actions and interactions.

I was gone from the game for the better part of a decade (two decades if you discount a brief return in 2010) and came back to a game that was less recognizable than the one I had left.

[SonoftheNorth]

I spent over $5K on characters and countless hours refining my skills to execute what you are calling a breach of policy. At no point was this easy or risk free. I didn’t find some way to alter an object and sell it for a 1M silver over and over. I compiled a team of 8 2-7x cap characters the were specifically trained to “compete” in the REIM environment.* Even then, the 2x cap characters were very susceptible to maneuver attacks and groups which quickly resulted in their deaths many times. So is it easier to be active and deal with level 120 characters to obtain 4-6M per run or use whatever post cap characters you have and “sleep” through two hours of mobs to obtain 2-3M per run (I’m going by posts– I didn’t do enough testing to see what the limits were here). Further, I spent 7 months teaching myself Ruby to be more efficient. Anyone can turn on Bigshot and sit in a corner.

[Rjex]

No clue why the hell it isn't mandatory to post announcements in general as an in game NEWS item, but deciding that players have to link their account to Discord and stay glued to it 24/7 in order to keep up with what's going on is stupid as fuck. Which is typical Simu behavior, but still.

I'm logged into the game for much of the day, and I do have discord up full time and tend to check it on the regular, and yet I still generally learn the "news" second hand when someone casually mentions in it. Cause there's 300 fucking discord channels in there for no good reason and what passes for releasing 'news' is some GM casually mentioning something in one of them which immediately gets buried by 1500 other comments.

[Donquix]

I'm logged into the game for much of the day, and I do have discord up full time and tend to check it on the regular, and yet I still generally learn the "news" second hand when someone casually mentions in it. Cause there's 300 fucking discord channels in there for no good reason and what passes for releasing 'news' is some GM casually mentioning something in one of them which immediately gets buried by 1500 other comments.

And yet most of the time when you're like HEY WHAT THE FUCK someone links you to the ANNOUNCEMENTS CHANNEL where the information you're bitching about is. You're not actively monitoring shit other than hentai on the second monitor, jesus you kids fucking lie to yourselves nonstop.

[HouseofElves]

The more I see from Vine the less I believe they should be in communication with customers.

[beldar17]

It is 2023. Frankly he could likely tell the right contingency lawyer a good enough story about an evil corporation trying to interfere with his fun and eventually get a payout.

[entropy]

And yet most of the time when you're like HEY WHAT THE FUCK someone links you to the ANNOUNCEMENTS CHANNEL where the information you're bitching about is. You're not actively monitoring shit other than hentai on the second monitor, jesus you kids fucking lie to yourselves nonstop.

See, this guy gets it. If you can't find it in one of the six announcement channels or two starboards, its definitely pinned in one of the 40 other channels. For Christ's sake man, get it together!

In other news...
https://i.imgur.com/VoQVhPV.png

[SorcGoods101]

Spending 14k a year to make like 40k a year(probably more) abusing mechanics. They don't want the game to be a money laundering operation.

Know some facts before you spout off. I've never sold anything except < $500 of BS because people were asking for it. I was the guy everyone was pissed at for dropping the price to 2.40 (basically what is costs to earn minus the item/orbs). Everything I have every purchased in still on my characters, over 20K worth of items in the current market.

[SorcGoods101]

Sounds like he was hit with the new punishment they have going around where you can log on but you can't earn silvers or experience (at least I'm pretty sure it's both.)

It's effectively a lockout though if you don't want to pay Simu 15+ dollars a month and all you can do is RP for 90 days. I imagine most people would just cancel their accounts until the ban wears off.

Correct.

[SorcGoods101]

Right but repeatedly spawning bosses to pull billions from the game would have gotten you banned during any era of gemstone.

Also they took back what he had on him. Not what he sold or spent.


"I ONLY MADE 240M IN APRIL" He got caught on like the 13th if not sooner.

I had 8 characters. That is still under the loot cap... learn math.

[Tgo01]

And yet most of the time when you're like HEY WHAT THE FUCK someone links you to the ANNOUNCEMENTS CHANNEL where the information you're bitching about is. You're not actively monitoring shit other than hentai on the second monitor, jesus you kids fucking lie to yourselves nonstop.

lol

There are literally 8 announcement channels on Discord, but I'll grant you that if you just play on the prime server and only have a basic sub that only 4 announcement channels pertain to you and game development.

Have you actually looked at those announcement channels? It makes my eyes want to bleed. Announcements can range from a single sentence to several multiple paragraphs, and they aren't structured in any sort of readable sense at all.

Also I went looking for the announcements just now for the supposed announcements mentioned in the email log, and here is what I found:


As previous announced, the treasure cap is now enforced in Reim. Entry orbs will continue to be available in the SimuCoins Store.

Okay. That's literally the only announcement I could find in regards to this, that the treasure cap is now enforced in Reim. Nothing about it being a bug to bypass the treasure cap or if it's even possible to bypass the treasure cap, nothing about it being a bug to summon and resummon the boss critters and if you resummon them you are engaging in game mechanics abuse and will be punished for doing so.

But hey, maybe that announcement is in there somewhere too but I just couldn't find it, which only further proves my point.

But I'm willing to bet that the announcement about the resummoning bug wasn't even mentioned in the announcements channels.

[SonoftheNorth]

I had 8 characters. That is still under the loot cap... learn math.

Had is the key word here loser.

[SorcGoods101]

'Cause dum-dum made something pretty close to a legal threat. Any company with a lick of sense will immediately shut that down and refer the client to communicate with their legal team moving forward.

He fucked around and found out.

I know why they made it a permanent ban. The issue is that in the end they only accused me of breaking the loot cap in April -- we can debate the finer points of group cap vs single cap later. For breaking the cap by 200M, they confiscated +800M in silver and banned all accounts 90 days. I'm sorry, but the two do not equate. It was a power play because they feel untouchable. As long as everyone keeps paying them and nobody holds them accountable... they are.

[peam]

Let us know how the lawsuit goes.

[SonoftheNorth]

Let us know how the lawsuit goes.

Simu gonna countersue him at 1m exploited silvers = $4

[Rjex]

And yet most of the time when you're like HEY WHAT THE FUCK someone links you to the ANNOUNCEMENTS CHANNEL where the information you're bitching about is. You're not actively monitoring shit other than hentai on the second monitor, jesus you kids fucking lie to yourselves nonstop.

That's a retarded take, there's 8 announcement channels not to mention a bunch of shit just gets pinned in the individual sub-channels, if it even gets pinned at all.

[Renaden]

Obviously the man knew what he was doing was kind of fishy, but let's not pretend the official discord is some hub of clear communication, I'm on there 8-12 hours a day fairly actively and shit still blindsides me constantly.

[Tgo01]

What’s really bad about the announcement channels is how vague they are. Like sure multiple announcement channels can be useful, but the channels are vague like “Premium” and “Gameplay changes.”

Maybe you need one channel for known bugs that will get you into trouble if you exploit said bug, people might read that one more often.

[Ramrod]

I know why they made it a permanent ban. The issue is that in the end they only accused me of breaking the loot cap in April -- we can debate the finer points of group cap vs single cap later. For breaking the cap by 200M, they confiscated +800M in silver and banned all accounts 90 days. I'm sorry, but the two do not equate. It was a power play because they feel untouchable. As long as everyone keeps paying them and nobody holds them accountable... they are.

Yeah, that's what's bullshit here. Either give the 90 day "totally not a ban just a penalty" or take the silvers, but not both. In the end, Simu is gonna Simu.

[phantasm]

The American dream, get your piece of the pie, a bigger piece than everyone else, the piece you deserve. Spend a chunk of your life as normal pleb trying to scrape it together but it's never enough. Until one day you decide to say fuck it lets go all out and get rich. With your puny criminal brain you hatch a semi-legal plot that you feel is safe. It all makes sense to you at the time, it seems legit, legal. It succeeds in making the money flow. Then people notice, you are pulling in more than your share. The people in power punish you, the other plebs laugh at you for being so dumb and making such an obvious mistake. All the while you still believe your own story that everything was fine.

[Zeminar]

My favorite part is how the guy is obviously exploiting but everyone acts all incredulous.

Like, we basically have a pretty good playground here and RMT is allowed to exist... But everyone is always trying to get away with the dumbest shit at all times. If you are trying to have your characters contributions be an actual income source IRL, yeah, you are going to have a very hard time and rightly so.... It's a video game and other players are trying to have fun also...

....I await people picking apart my comment regarding how it's anecdotal and this isn't about monetizing but fuck that, you know what I mean and it's true, you brainlets.

[Tgo01]

My favorite part is how the guy is obviously exploiting but everyone acts all incredulous.

My biggest issue is the GMs' reasoning. "No one else was doing this so you should have known better."

I have no idea what 99% of the people in GS are doing.

Also the fact that rather than pull him aside in game personally and say "Hey, look, knock it off. You're exploiting a bug." They instead didn't notice for apparently months that one character was generating 100+ million silvers a month, then took away all his silvers, gave him a 3 month ban, and then told him it was all his fault for not knowing he was exploiting a bug because supposedly it was listed as a bug somewhere (and I just checked through about a year's worth of posts from Retser on Discord and I didn't see him mention it anywhere.)

I'll admit when I first read the email chain it sounded like the GMs were being completely ridiculous, but then when he explained exactly what he was doing to get the GMs involved I was kind of like yeah......that does sound like you were doing something that was not intended.....

Like I said earlier I appreciate the GMs' efforts to try and maintain the integrity of the game, I really do. Doesn't mean there isn't some room for improvement for how they go about things sometimes.

[Zeminar]

The guy was abusing the end mechanics of Reim for what, 6 months? So some lower level GMs said some stuff that wasn't completely on message and simu obviously needs to polish some customer service messaging... yeah, that's fine. Have you ever called at&t or comcast? This is expected stuff.

[Tgo01]

The guy was abusing the end mechanics of Reim for what, 6 months? So some lower level GMs said some stuff that wasn't completely on message and simu obviously needs to polish some customer service messaging... yeah, that's fine. Have you ever called at&t or comcast? This is expected stuff.

The dude from feedback told him it was his fault for not reading about some bug which I have not seen anywhere being mentioned. From what I understand feedback is supposed to be above even Wryom since he will tell people to take things up with feedback.

Unless Retser did personally pull this dude aside and said what he was doing was abusing a bug and that's why I can't find mention of this anywhere. And yes, if that's the case I would totally say the OP is 100% wrong if he kept doing it after that.

[Zeminar]

It's some serious gymnastics to argue against that he wasn't very clearly and obviously abusing a bug for 6 months, regardless if he read about it or not.

[Zeminar]

And not that I don't disagree that the GM messaging in question clearly needs work.... It was still obviously against policy. What more are you guys looking for here? Abusing a bug for six months isn't against policy? There are 9 pages to this thread?

[Rjex]

The normal thing to do would be to pull him aside and have a chat, and maybe take off anything earned that was deemed excessive. This is really in that grey area between true GMA and clever use of mechanics. When I think of GMA I think of infinite scrip glitches that we had, and silver ones, things like that. This is more convoluted, and more akin to creative farming. The fact that they had to have internal discussions about it in itself shows that it was really more in that grey area. Naturally they could have ultimately decided to clamp down, and that's fine, but it could have been handled in a much better way. I don't know why they so often default to the position that the customer is their enemy and needs to be punished. I'm pretty sure had they just had a normal conversation with him and told him to cut it off, and took some of that silver off, that would've been the end of it.

[Fleur-de-me]

Eh... I don't buy that argument. However many people are doing something should have nothing to do with whether it's against policy or not. They seem be throwing accusations hoping something would stick to justify what they elected to do. Going over 35m is a particularly odd one, are we supposed to hire accountants? I couldn't even begin to guess how much silvers I earn per month.

Exactly. I'll say it again the lootcap is a TERRIBLE mechanic, period.

[Fleur-de-me]

Where's GSLawyer when we really need him?

There are NO grounds for legal action here whatsoever. That will be $2500 dollars please.

[Fleur-de-me]

I'm logged into the game for much of the day, and I do have discord up full time and tend to check it on the regular, and yet I still generally learn the "news" second hand when someone casually mentions in it. Cause there's 300 fucking discord channels in there for no good reason and what passes for releasing 'news' is some GM casually mentioning something in one of them which immediately gets buried by 1500 other comments.

Get your news from Newsby on lnet like any other self respecting player whats wrong with you.

[Fleur-de-me]

It is 2023. Frankly he could likely tell the right contingency lawyer a good enough story about an evil corporation trying to interfere with his fun and eventually get a payout.

Like PT Barnum said there is a sucker born every minute. I'm sure at least one grew up to be a lawyer

[Red]

Remember when people were selling firewheel flowers to the pawnshop? Once it was noticed the item was, let’s say patched to not be pawnable. The resummoning in the throne room with no intent on completion case is hard to reason is not GMA. There are similar mechanics in the necropolis to resummon the lich and collect loot although it was 30 minutes and per character (if I remember correctly. In the case of Reim there was an an abusable mechanic to resummon that was allowed to exist to allow everyone who attempted the quest multiple opportunities to win in this case, or at least that was the intent. Retser was aware of this and communicated this to the players testing reim at the time. I think it remained this way to allow all players to be able to finish the bosses even if they were defeated in the throne room and it was not widely abused. Now it has to be addressed and reim will be loot capped. The juxtaposition on how this was handled is evident in these examples. In hindsight monitoring of this event could have alleviated this result entirely. It could keep the mechanic the way it was to allow players to finish reim and prevent it from being exploited to this degree. Waiting this long and after that much silver has been farmed sends mixed messages.

[Fleur-de-me]

Remember when people were selling firewheel flowers to the pawnshop? Once it was noticed the item was, let’s say patched to not be pawnable. The resummoning in the throne room with no intent on completion case is hard to reason is not GMA. There are similar mechanics in the necropolis to resummon the lich and collect loot although it was 30 minutes and per character (if I remember correctly. In the case of Reim there was an an abusable mechanic to resummon that was allowed to exist to allow everyone who attempted the quest multiple opportunities to win in this case, or at least that was the intent. Retser was aware of this and communicated this to the players testing reim at the time. I think it remained this way to allow all players to be able to finish the bosses even if they were defeated in the throne room and it was not widely abused. Now it has to be addressed and reim will be loot capped. The juxtaposition on how this was handled is evident in these examples. In hindsight monitoring of this event could have alleviated this result entirely. It could keep the mechanic the way it was to allow players to finish reim and prevent it from being exploited to this degree. Waiting this long and after that much silver has been farmed sends mixed messages.

I find it disingenuous at best to think they didn't realize or notice this was going on much earlier than we are lead to believe. They didn't notice one account pulling that much silver, psh...doubt it. I also don't believe he was the only exploiting it either IF they really didnt notice.

[Ramrod]

The normal thing to do would be to pull him aside and have a chat, and maybe take off anything earned that was deemed excessive. This is really in that grey area between true GMA and clever use of mechanics. When I think of GMA I think of infinite scrip glitches that we had, and silver ones, things like that. This is more convoluted, and more akin to creative farming. The fact that they had to have internal discussions about it in itself shows that it was really more in that grey area. Naturally they could have ultimately decided to clamp down, and that's fine, but it could have been handled in a much better way. I don't know why they so often default to the position that the customer is their enemy and needs to be punished. I'm pretty sure had they just had a normal conversation with him and told him to cut it off, and took some of that silver off, that would've been the end of it.

100% this.

I'm sure Simu will sign up enough new customers to make up for losing this one. /s

[Ramrod]

My favorite part is how the guy is obviously exploiting but everyone acts all incredulous.

Like, we basically have a pretty good playground here and RMT is allowed to exist... But everyone is always trying to get away with the dumbest shit at all times. If you are trying to have your characters contributions be an actual income source IRL, yeah, you are going to have a very hard time and rightly so.... It's a video game and other players are trying to have fun also...

....I await people picking apart my comment regarding how it's anectodical and this isn't about monetizing but fuck that, you know what I mean and it's true, you brainlets.

As far as GMA goes, this is like speeding ticket level. It's not duping items or abusing the pawn shop. The punishment never fit the crime and the position that he should have kept up with announcements is ridiculous.

[peam]

My favorite part is how the guy is obviously exploiting but everyone acts all incredulous.

They're the same shitheels that would've been doing it too if they knew about it. This is clear-cut mechanics abuse and to pretend it's on the low end of that spectrum is (purposefully?) ignorant.

[Winter]

They're the same shitheels that would've been doing it too if they knew about it.

I don't believe that at all, there are significantly bigger ways to abuse mechanics that have been in the game for well over a decade for example any capped Elf that lives in the nations will know about and I'm assuming nobody has abused that or we'd all of heard about it and that's been possible since the nations went live. It's possible for a capped Elf with capped trading skill and influence to sell back something they bought for MORE than the vendor sold it for. That would potentially generate billions in a day just buying and reselling the same item to the pawnshop and forking the economy to kingdom come in the same way Duskruin does. I've reported this more than once over the years along with other broken spells that nobody seems bothered to fix so people do know.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should and it's been my experience that most people here get that, this place has always run on goodwill of the players since it's inception.

[SonoftheNorth]

*spends 13k on reim orbs because he obviously found a scam*

oh i didn't know i was doing anything wrong!!!!



GemStone IV Player Policy: Bug Abuse

Attempts to gain an unfair advantage which circumvents the letter or spirit of the rules presented in the documentation and version notes, as judged solely by Simutronics, are a violation of policy. Types of abuse range from sending special characters or signals to the software to obtain an unusual result, to using normal game mechanics in ways they are clearly not intended.

Examples of serious bug abuse: Disconnecting from the merchant manager to avoid paying the purchase price of an item; finding a "feedback loop" with spells or mana points, which allows spells to be cast multiple times with little or no cost; repeatedly injuring yourself (or another character) in order to generate experience for an empath or cleric; finding a special circumstance in which to use a potion whereby its quantity is not decremented when it is used; abusing game mechanics to cause duplication of items or silver.

Abusing bugs disrupts the balance of GemStone IV and reduces its effectiveness to remain an entertaining product. Sometimes there will be a great temptation to abuse a bug for personal gain because the negative effect is not readily apparent. Therefore, Simutronics will exercise no tolerance whatsoever for anyone participating in this type of activity.

Bugs should *always* be reported. Serious bugs should be REPORTed and BUGged, while minor ones should be BUGged. If you observe someone else abusing a serious bug, or discussing a plan to abuse one, and fail to report it, you are subject to the same penalties as they are. Serious bugs should be reported through GemStone IV Feedback.

Benefits obtained from bug abuse may be confiscated. Failure to cooperate with Simutronics as to the extent or nature of a bug, or failure to be honest about the benefits obtained from bug abuse, is grounds for immediate lock-out from GemStone IV.

[peam]

Elf that lives in the nations

Exploiting this would require you to both play an elf and visit EN. No sensible player is doing that.

[SorcGoods101]

100% this.

I'm sure Simu will sign up enough new customers to make up for losing this one. /s

You can read my original comments, I admitted in the first email that I can see this from their viewpoint. With that said, they knew about this issue, reviewed it and implemented a "fix" or publicly let players know at the time what not to do. Where is that posted? If you implement a 10 minute timer, then expect that to be the standard by which the royals can be resummoned. It took them all of two days to close the "loophole". Developers have responsibilities to do things correctly.

Further, my issue all along was how they handled this. Switching what I guilty of, watching me for months and then using the loot cap as way to justify punishment, and then the excessive penalty. If they came a said "knock it off" and took back 200M silver, this would be over. At the end of day, we are all customers. I would never treat mine this way.

[Ramrod]

You can read my original comments, I admitted in the first email that I can see this from their viewpoint. With that said, they knew about this issue, reviewed it and implemented a "fix" or publicly let players know at the time what not to do. Where is that posted? If you implement a 10 minute timer, then expect that to be the standard by which the royals can be resummoned. It took them all of two days to close the "loophole". Developers have responsibilities to do things correctly.

Further, my issue all along was how they handled this. Switching what I guilty of, watching me for months and then using the loot cap as way to justify punishment, and then the excessive penalty. If they came a said "knock it off" and took back 200M silver, this would be over. At the end of day, we are all customers. I would never treat mine this way.

Yep, 100% agree.

After all these years though, none of this should come as a surprise. I would just think that given how profit driven they are now they would try harder to maintain customers.

[Dud]

You can read my original comments, I admitted in the first email that I can see this from their viewpoint. With that said, they knew about this issue, reviewed it and implemented a "fix" or publicly let players know at the time what not to do. Where is that posted? If you implement a 10 minute timer, then expect that to be the standard by which the royals can be resummoned. It took them all of two days to close the "loophole". Developers have responsibilities to do things correctly.

Further, my issue all along was how they handled this. Switching what I guilty of, watching me for months and then using the loot cap as way to justify punishment, and then the excessive penalty. If they came a said "knock it off" and took back 200M silver, this would be over. At the end of day, we are all customers. I would never treat mine this way.


I agree, this should've been a take back the silver and "knock it off" resolution. But this was obviously sketchy and detrimental to the game - I don't believe you actually thought this was okay to do? I am surprised you didn't just take your punishment and move on.

[Deadelf]

I'll point out as someone who loathes Discord and frequently ignores it. It's not actually hard to just mark the four channels you need to actually check once a day to see if something impacts you. It's not eight, it's four.

1. General Announcements.
2. Development Announcements.
3. Prime Announcements.
4. Premium Announcements.

That's pretty much it. If you were plat(with the four to sixteen I ever see logged in there) you could also mark that one as well. If you were running CHE's or MHO's that's two more. Otherwise you can ignore Discord pretty much. Everything else you could keep muted which I sometimes do because people generally annoy me anymore.

[SorcGoods101]

I agree, this should've been a take back the silver and "knock it off" resolution. But this was obviously sketchy and detrimental to the game - I don't believe you actually thought this was okay to do? I am surprised you didn't just take your punishment and move on.

You may make assumptions as you like, but the fact that you could respawn creatures in the game that have a timer on them does not scream bug to me. Somebody took the time to put that process in place, and the effort to "correct it" clearly wasn't that hard. I was under the loot cap each month (again, collectively) until the end and generated far less silvers than DR (or any other event). REIM was still a paid event, so a certain level of profit should be expected (we can argue all day as to what that is). So lets say I should have been held to the loot cap for 4 months (not even the 6)... that's still over 1B silver across 8 accounts. So how detrimental was this really? I don't believe the level of punishment was warranted.

Also, many people are assuming that I just deposited easy silver. I died hundred of times. Where else in the game to 2-7x capped characters die like that? Certainly not in DR where you can AFK script your way to a billion silver in a week. Rules are only rules when Simu wants them to be. According to the policy rules posted, everyone that was sitting in the node with me should be punished, no? It was clear what I was doing... they had an obligation to report me. If you are going to leave some things up for interpretation, it's pretty hard to be absolute on others.

[SorcGoods101]

I agree, this should've been a take back the silver and "knock it off" resolution. But this was obviously sketchy and detrimental to the game - I don't believe you actually thought this was okay to do? I am surprised you didn't just take your punishment and move on.

Let me ask you an honest question...

The mechanic that I was accused of breaking seems to be the exact same one that applies to bandits. If you summon a bandit (or group of bandits) but do not "participate" in the kill (I have no idea the actual mechanics), you don't get credit for killing them. Therefore, you can summon bandits endlessly for a group, with no timer. If somebody did this (summon bandits endlessly), are they breaking a game mechanic? The loot should not play a roll if the underlying question is the mechanic.

Now let's say you had 1 hour to complete a bounty, and could only summon bandits every 2 minutes (more than enough to finish your bounty in 10-15 minutes) -- which is much more stringent than the current system (no time limit and no cool down). If you summoned bandits 30 times over that span (by not killing them all yourself), have you broken a game mechanic?

Game mechanics and "proper loot" are both very subjective at times. If you have any bit of doubt about the above questions, then apply it to a paid area -- where there were no loot caps.

The 2 hour time limit on REIM was "probably" to give people enough time to complete and search a little (with some resting). When I played it one character, it would take me 1-1.25 hours to complete (that includes getting 1000 ethereal scrip). With a group of 4+, you can do that in 10-15 minutes. Is that what happens... no. Groups sit in one area with major loot boost using the increased spawn rate to rack up 2-3M silver in 2 hours - many don't even bother finishing. Couple that with the increased chance for legendary drops (a subject of several other posts) and it's a pretty good scheme. I'm sure that was not the "intention" of the design. Should they all be punished? PS - that is several other large groups, probably 20+ accounts.

[Orthin]

I'll point out as someone who loathes Discord and frequently ignores it. It's not actually hard to just mark the four channels you need to actually check once a day to see if something impacts you. It's not eight, it's four.

1. General Announcements.
2. Development Announcements.
3. Prime Announcements.
4. Premium Announcements.

That's pretty much it. If you were plat(with the four to sixteen I ever see logged in there) you could also mark that one as well. If you were running CHE's or MHO's that's two more. Otherwise you can ignore Discord pretty much. Everything else you could keep muted which I sometimes do because people generally annoy me anymore.

How would these apply to individuals who do not wish to link with discord? If these are blocked unless you link with discord I think that should be addressed and either make those folders available or post it on the website. I will say I do not use the discord often and have been on a little break

[Dud]

Let me ask you an honest question...

The mechanic that I was accused of breaking seems to be the exact same one that applies to bandits. If you summon a bandit (or group of bandits) but do not "participate" in the kill (I have no idea the actual mechanics), you don't get credit for killing them. Therefore, you can summon bandits endlessly for a group, with no timer. If somebody did this (summon bandits endlessly), are they breaking a game mechanic? The loot should not play a roll if the underlying question is the mechanic.

Now let's say you had 1 hour to complete a bounty, and could only summon bandits every 2 minutes (more than enough to finish your bounty in 10-15 minutes) -- which is much more stringent than the current system (no time limit and no cool down). If you summoned bandits 30 times over that span (by not killing them all yourself), have you broken a game mechanic?

Game mechanics and "proper loot" are both very subjective at times. If you have any bit of doubt about the above questions, then apply it to a paid area -- where there were no loot caps.

The 2 hour time limit on REIM was "probably" to give people enough time to complete and search a little (with some resting). When I played it one character, it would take me 1-1.25 hours to complete (that includes getting 1000 ethereal scrip). With a group of 4+, you can do that in 10-15 minutes. Is that what happens... no. Groups sit in one area with major loot boost using the increased spawn rate to rack up 2-3M silver in 2 hours - many don't even bother finishing. Couple that with the increased chance for legendary drops (a subject of several other posts) and it's a pretty good scheme. I'm sure that was not the "intention" of the design. Should they all be punished? PS - that is several other large groups, probably 20+ accounts.

Honestly, I have zero interest in discussing bandit mechanics and GM protected Reim groups. You can take it up with the supreme court of gemstone. I genuinely wish you the best and am sorry to see you go.

[SonoftheNorth]

If you summon a bandit (or group of bandits) but do not "participate" in the kill (I have no idea the actual mechanics), you don't get credit for killing them. Therefore, you can summon bandits endlessly for a group, with no timer. If somebody did this (summon bandits endlessly), are they breaking a game mechanic?



If they were endlessly farming it to the tune of 2 billion silvers they'd probably end up banned too.

[Gelston]

That sucks. Go drop all your money into Ultima Online now.

[Methais]

They don't want the game to be a money laundering operation if they're not getting a cut.

Fixed.

[Methais]

I sure hope that I get to sniff Estild's asshole one day

.

[Methais]

Eh... I don't buy that argument. However many people are doing something should have nothing to do with whether it's against policy or not. They seem be throwing accusations hoping something would stick to justify what they elected to do. Going over 35m is a particularly odd one, are we supposed to hire accountants? I couldn't even begin to guess how much silvers I earn per month.

I don't remember the wording and I'm too lazy to go look for it, but Estild posted something in Discord at some point about how there were ways to go above the loot cap. He was only talking about squeezing out an extra 5-6m or so, but he mentioned that there were ways to do it and made no mention of anything policy related.

I'm guessing he was referring to smaller things like hoarding gems all month and purifying them as late into the month as possible before selling, maybe skins too, etc. but who knows.

[Methais]

There are NO grounds for legal action here whatsoever. That will be $2500 dollars please.

Finally after all these years, confirmed that Fleur-de-me is GSLawyer.

How's Edgeleaf doing?

[Methais]

Yep, 100% agree.

After all these years though, none of this should come as a surprise. I would just think that given how profit driven they are now they would try harder to maintain customers.

Just for laughs, whenever someone gets permabanned, Simu should have to report it to Stillfront along with the amount of money that person has spent on subscriptions and in the Simucoin store.

[Ramrod]

Just for laughs, whenever someone gets permabanned, Simu should have to report it to Stillfront along with the amount of money that person has spent on subscriptions and in the Simucoin store.

Imagine them explaining this one.

[SorcGoods101]

Just for laughs, whenever someone gets permabanned, Simu should have to report it to Stillfront along with the amount of money that person has spent on subscriptions and in the Simucoin store.

I took that care of that for them.

[Methais]

I took that care of that for them.

Actual footage of Stillfront in a meeting with Simu after:

https://media.tenor.com/mHmlx15q-kAAAAAC/angry-boss-mad.gif

[Winter]

I'm guessing he was referring to smaller things like hoarding gems all month and purifying them as late into the month as possible before selling

Neither of those things are influenced by the loot cap, purifying is excluded and gems contribute towards the cap on looting. I remember you saying that your treasure dropped drastically when you sold a lot of gems but I'm convinced that's an oversight or bug.

[Methais]

Neither of those things are influenced by the loot cap, purifying is excluded and gems contribute towards the cap on looting. I remember you saying that your treasure dropped drastically when you sold a lot of gems but I'm convinced that's an oversight or bug.

I should have just worded it as "selling" them as late into the month as possible. I just purify everything before I sell is all. But yeah I remember now them stating that purifying didn't affect it. Selling definitely does whether it's a bug or not, because treasure intake is still normal while I'm purifying, but then drops off a cliff as soon as I'm done selling it all after. But it's usually several million worth in gems, fwiw.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

I mean, there is a lot to read here, but when I got to this part

"I actively play the game, across 6 32” monitors – watching all my characters."

I got a chuckle. You are like Barney in How I Met Your Mother with his entire wall being a monitor.

[Ramrod]

I should have just worded it as "selling" them as late into the month as possible. I just purify everything before I sell is all. But yeah I remember now them stating that purifying didn't affect it. Selling definitely does whether it's a bug or not, because treasure intake is still normal while I'm purifying, but then drops off a cliff as soon as I'm done selling it all after. But it's usually several million worth in gems, fwiw.

It was posted in the trainwreck of a Discord somewhere, but a GM was saying how you could exceed lootcap by selling all your skins on the last day of the month too. I assume it's all due to trading ranks and quality that isn't accounted for until you sell.

It was also in Discord that something like 80% or so of their customers only had a single account if I remember correctly. So them banning a customer that had 8 subs and spent $14k/year in the Simu store has to put that single customer in the top 5% in terms of spend I would guess. Just fucking lol.

I guess I just can't wrap my head around a company handing out bans when their own staff historically has been some of the shadiest people around. Even today, staff plays favorites with regards to their customer base.

[Winter]

It was posted in the trainwreck of a Discord somewhere, but a GM was saying how you could exceed lootcap by selling all your skins on the last day of the month too. I assume it's all due to trading ranks and quality that isn't accounted for until you sell.


Well that's a silly mechanic, it ultimately gives people like me with a player shop a massive advantage over people that don't.

[Ramrod]

I mean, there is a lot to read here, but when I got to this part

"I actively play the game, across 6 32” monitors – watching all my characters."

I got a chuckle. You are like Barney in How I Met Your Mother with his entire wall being a monitor.

hahaha. Dude shoulda just brought a projector for this project.

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XQJoPlkb1x0/maxresdefault.jpg

[Methais]

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XQJoPlkb1x0/maxresdefault.jpg

When you add rl parrying to your GS setup:

https://i.imgflip.com/1itoun.jpg?a467280

[Sthrockmorton]

So i take it there may be a few capped characters for sale at a pretty low price here? ��

Clear abuse of mechanics. Should’ve just taken the slap on the wrist and moved on. Nice mental gymnastics though.

[Methais]

So i take it there may be a few capped characters for sale at a pretty low price here? ��

Clear abuse of mechanics. Should’ve just taken the slap on the wrist and moved on. Nice mental gymnastics though.

I don't think there's much demand for permabanned characters. But with as stupid as the GS player base is overall, I don't rule anything out.

[Sthrockmorton]

I don't think there's much demand for permabanned characters. But with as stupid as the GS player base is overall, I don't rule anything out.

Ahhh, great point. In my head it was the accounts not the characters.

[phantasm]

Buy them low and hold out for a permaban reduction salve in the simu store someday.

[Fiend394]

Sometimes I wake up at night laughing thinking about this post. I just wanted to say thank you for making the dumbest post on the forum in a long time.

[chrenraf]

There's a reason why major games make you sign/re-sign (accept) a EULA each time they make a major update and make you hit that accept button BEFORE allowing you to play after its' effective date. That's all I am going to say.

[Guister]

The powers that be at Simutronics have seen it fit to permanently ban me for making too much silver (implied: without them make enough money). I am posting this so that everyone knows the truth of the situation. For months, I have been fighting in REIM, I've probably said hello to some of you in the last node, where I spent most of my time. I was, as the GMs have now called it, cycling the Emperor and Empress. I bought thousands of dollars worth of REIM orbs and died hundreds of times in the process. All told, I made 1-2B silver in roughly 6 months (heavily tail weighted as I got better at it). After implementing the loot cap in April (which I honestly knew nothing about until I saw a random thought on LNET), they removed over 800M silver from my accounts and implemented a 90 day AFK penalty across them. When I contacted support to argue that nothing I did was against any published rules or implied game mechanics, they spent a week looking through logs. In the end, they determined that after the loot cap was implemented in April, one of my eight characters earned over the cap by abusing a game mechanic (they assigned every silver made to one character... the value was under the collective loot cap for my group). NOTE: This is not the penalty they originally stated. Despite my saying on multiple occasions that I would be honest and return whatever they thought was obtained "against policy", they decided my 25+ years in the game were not enough to substantiate my history of positive actions and interactions.

I would like to again thank all the GMs and GHs that made this game what it was/is for so long. Thank you to the many players that I have interacted with the years as well.

Sincerely,
Soleren

Sounds like you've got a lot of time on your hands.