Some additional info the article doesn’t address or skims over:
The accounts were suspended for 3 months.
They only suspended accounts that were overly abusing the system. Players that duped on accident, or a small number of times were not punished except for the removal of some of their in-game currency and maybe a ship or two that they bought with the earnings they made from duping.
This is the first time that Star Citizen players have had a wave of suspensions like this for an exploit.
This is most likely because of how this exploit affected the servers. In Star Citizen, abandoned ships stick around forever on a particular instance, so other players would need to hijack/tow/destroy/salvage them to get rid of them. The players abusing this exploit would duplicate ships with cargo (that could be sold) as fast as they possibly could, leaving more ships behind than what the servers can normally handle well.
This also happened around the time of a free fly event where anyone could try out the game for a bit without having to pay. So the game wasn’t performing as well as it could have been during this event. Although, tbh, this game usually struggles during free flight events anyway.
Although, tbh, this game usually struggles during free flight events anyway.
Or just in general.
But isnt the game in pre-alpha or whatever not finish state?
Don’t they reset the servers regularly? People are supposed to test the shit out of it… How can you be suspended?
This scam makes non senses…
Okay, so I was around for this, so I saw what was involved and the outcome. To do the exploit involved filling your ship with some valuable cargo and then leaving it parked in a spot where it was technically not landed, in order to intentionally glitch the cargo grid. This would then let you sell the same cargo over and over.
The result of this was huge amounts of ships littering the landing zones in a completely unintended way, which would tank both the FPS of anyone else in the area and the server tick rate. This in turn makes the game look worse, it hampers efforts to test other things, etc etc.
As for the testing of exploits argument, CIG did say in their announcement that such is actively encouraged. They only suspended accounts for people who were doing it over and over and over and over and over. Basically anyone who was just using it to grind huge amounts of in-game money and making the play and testing experience for everyone else worse. Most of these people weren’t even reporting the bug.
Probably a lot of them were selling the credits on ebay, which… yes, is a thing, sadly. Even though progress is still being wiped occasionally, there’s still gold farmers. There’s actually a warning you have to click through every single login for this, but I’ve seen people argue for it, the idiots.
BTW, it’s in alpha right now, not pre-alpha (which I don’t personally believe is a thing).
That’s no way to treat role playing space pirates
This actually might be a good use case for a proof of steak open ledger, kind of like a cryptocurrency, but no crypto required.
Every item in game would have a chain of custody to an origination event, duplicates would be trivially obvious, you could see where bugs are duplicating things, or at least the time they got duplicated.
Incrementing and integer in a database is fine, and efficient, but but when you start to make it a currency, then you have fungibility issues and chain the custody issues like we’re seeing now.
Obviously this can always be addressed by writing perfect code and accounting for every origination in the code, but if the programmers aren’t perfect, moving to a ledger makes more sense
proof of steak
Is that like a cryocurrency?
…in a primarily single player game.
Ok then.
Edit:
lol oops
Star Citizen != Spacerim (Starbound)
