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.