[MUD-Dev] Re: Blacksnow revisited

[John Robert Arras]

Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:

> We have a small team of employees who are responsible for finding
> exploits, reporting the exploit to the dev team, and then banning
> the players who are using them. In this process, we apparently
> banned 22 accounts of Blacksnow employees. We banned them in the
> regular course of finding any player who has violated our rules of
> play. These accounts were very serious offenders: they were
> increasing multiple levels at impossible speeds (sometimes within
> seconds) and we found that they had multiple, massive duplicates
> of items (in the hundreds and thousands). These were not minor
> exploiters. Funcom is taking exploits very seriously because we
> feel that they ruin the balance of the game for all of the
> legitimate players. We will be doing everything we can to prevent
> cheaters from destroying the economy on Rubi-Ka. In the letter
> from the attorney retained by Blacksnow, they have threatened to
> sue us if we do not reactivate these accounts. We will not
> reactivate these accounts.

I am speaking from a personal perspective and doing this might get
you into more trouble, but...

If I were running things, I would give them a dump of their
playerfiles and let them know that they now have everything that
they "own".  It's not that you have taken anything away from them,
since they have the things that they "own". It's just that you have
chosen to stop allowing them to keep this stuff that they "own" on
your server. After all, if they can't play by your rules, why should
you let them keep their bits on your server?

They may someday win a claim that they really do "own" the stuff
that they have online, but I can't imagine a judge forcing companies
to provide storage space to people who try to break the systems
provided. You haven't denied them their "property", you have just
decided that you won't store it for them anymore.

It's amazing that all of these lawsuits are over "ownership" of bits
one someone else's server. Just give the people their darn bits and
tell them that you won't store their bits anymore.


John


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