Originally posted by Ganksinatra You said you didn't like the "Dude, it's open beta 'excuse'".....but it's NOT an excuse. See, excuses are usually pulled out of ones rectum on the fly when the truth might damage their agenda. They didn't say "We're launching the game", then when this crap happened said "Um.....it's open beta.....yeah that's it!".......they said "It's open beta, and barring any catastrophic coding, there will be no roll backs". They say the no roll backs thing to get people to play as much as possible, to find bugs like these. If you're told "Yeah, you can play, but at the end of X amount of time, we're going to delete the character you spent so much time on", the ONLY places that get saturated and really tested are the first 10-15 levels. Everything else goes untested for the most part, and then you find game breaking bugs at endgame that cost them dearly, as they won't be found until after the initial launch. You say excuse, I say you were told and are being willfully obtuse about it so you can make a complaint (not you per se, but the OP).
I understand what you are saying, I just disagree with the premise that the company saying its open beta and then running as a launch classifies it as open beta. A real open beta ( I have been in many) stress loads the servers, allows the devs to focus players towards areas they want to verify and allows for the devs to check fire and sort out whats wrong.
When you do a soft launch disguised as a beta, people feel you owe them something (this post and thousands like it on the official forums are proving that). If it was a straight up old school beta they could wipe the servers/rejig the wazzools/beat the testers like redheaded stepchildren and there is not a darn thing anyone can say as they have no money on the table (because it is a open beta).
Originally posted by Shadowguy64 Is it realistic to hope for permanent IP bans for the guilty of all PW games?
Only the people dumb enough to openly announce the exploit and generate massive spikes of AD will get banned. Most of the exploiters who were careful in covering their tracks and using dummy accounts to hide their identity will likely avoid being banned and continue playing merrily.
I get that Mordacai, and like I said, it was a poor choice to allow the users to use the system that used irl money.....but then again, would this dupe have been caught if they hadn't? It's another portion of that testing double edged sword. I'm assuming PWE thought that the system was ready to be used, and was undergoing a stress test of its own during this open beta. Had they not opened it up for use, the bug would have been found later, after the official launch, and THEN people like the OP would definitely have ground to stand on for demanding their money back. But beta is beta is beta, no matter what it "feels" or "looks" like. Until the company announces an official launch, it's beta. There are no semantics to be argued. It's just too bad. I just DL'd this game this weekend to give it a shot, as I cannot bring myself to level another 90 in WoW ever again (I think I finally burnt out), and it was a neat game.....but after this debacle, I'm glad I didn't put any money into it.
Originally posted by Ganksinatra I get that Mordacai, and like I said, it was a poor choice to allow the users to use the system that used irl money.....but then again, would this dupe have been caught if they hadn't? It's another portion of that testing double edged sword. I'm assuming PWE thought that the system was ready to be used, and was undergoing a stress test of its own during this open beta. Had they not opened it up for use, the bug would have been found later, after the official launch, and THEN people like the OP would definitely have ground to stand on for demanding their money back. But beta is beta is beta, no matter what it "feels" or "looks" like. Until the company announces an official launch, it's beta. There are no semantics to be argued. It's just too bad. I just DL'd this game this weekend to give it a shot, as I cannot bring myself to level another 90 in WoW ever again (I think I finally burnt out), and it was a neat game.....but after this debacle, I'm glad I didn't put any money into it.
We'll have to agree to disagree on the beta point, its all good. For me its the foundry system that will give this game some longevity. The amount of extremely well done playermade content is awesome. I've just been playing that for the last few days.
I'll be back playing when the servers go up (I'm a CO lifetime sub guy, proving that I am willing to turn the other cheek with gaming companies). A wipe would be nice (lvling is fast and Id rather not pay for a respec), but either way its all good to me.
Originally posted by Ganksinatra I get that Mordacai, and like I said, it was a poor choice to allow the users to use the system that used irl money.....but then again, would this dupe have been caught if they hadn't? It's another portion of that testing double edged sword. I'm assuming PWE thought that the system was ready to be used, and was undergoing a stress test of its own during this open beta. Had they not opened it up for use, the bug would have been found later, after the official launch, and THEN people like the OP would definitely have ground to stand on for demanding their money back. But beta is beta is beta, no matter what it "feels" or "looks" like. Until the company announces an official launch, it's beta. There are no semantics to be argued. It's just too bad. I just DL'd this game this weekend to give it a shot, as I cannot bring myself to level another 90 in WoW ever again (I think I finally burnt out), and it was a neat game.....but after this debacle, I'm glad I didn't put any money into it.
We'll have to agree to disagree on the beta point, its all good. For me its the foundry system that will give this game some longevity. The amount of extremely well done playermade content is awesome. I've just been playing that for the last few days.
I'll be back playing when the servers go up (I'm a CO lifetime sub guy, proving that I am willing to turn the other cheek with gaming companies). A wipe would be nice (lvling is fast and Id rather not pay for a respec), but either way its all good to me.
It seemed pretty fun. I haven't had a chance to dive in very much, but I am excited to see some of the Foundry stuff. I kinda wanted to play a healer, but this "hit a button to shift from healing to damage" thing seemed offputting to me for some reason.
These companies, have taken the words Open Beta and run with them, completely mutating what they originally meant. Now they hide behind them whenever severe issues with their products arise, even as you pay for the often times shallow and broken product. This has completely muddled the mmo genre, and it has ruined a once thriving method of community testing, where player concerns and issues within the game were listened to and reacted upon.
Once the MMO developers depended on a smallish fanbase and they were themselves fans, and could/would not rest on their laurels hoping for the spur of the moment masses to fund the disaster. The games HAD to have some solidity, some fundamental quality, and certainly the games had to be trustworthy. If you invest your time, and attach yourself to an mmo you dont want its fundamtal mechanics changing or falling apart overnight. Look at swg. But LO' and behold, now you accept it, on smaller scales but all amounting to a run away trainwreck of the mmo genre, that this unfounded trust of f2p companies seem to fuel perpetually. You experience it in some degree over and over and over and over ad naseum. And still you purchase founder packs. Still you complain about this reality you create with your support of these games, and still you act outraged that the games flounder. Its also called insanity.
Every year new young, naive, gamers come into this consumer market, and they dont know what connotation beta once had. They will naively defend these companies, and unless you all start punishing these bloodsucking money grabbing companies, younger mmo players will never know anything remotely like the games that originally made this genre succeed.
Stop giving F2P games your monies before you have tried their product. You are not special in any good way when you prepurchase founder packs to get into their games early. You are just SPECIAL.
Open beta is a fraudulent term today. It only means that the company aims to take your money, while instilling in you a sense of priviledge for being among the first in their game. Meanwhile you are paying for this priviledge with not just your money, but with you chance at getting the kind of mmo's you deserve. The kind of games that would have longevity, meaningful development and communities thriving. The kind of games that left people still talking about them a decade later. Ultima, Everquest etc.
With your willingness to pay for something beneath what you deserve, you are destroying the mmo genre, and you are then complaining about the situation even as you are creating it.
STOP PAYING FOR OPEN BETA. TAKE BACK YOUR INFLUENCE ON THE MMO GAME GENRE AND EVOLUTION. It is only deteriorating atm, and it is mostly our own fault. The man will allways try to make a buck out of you, but when you let him over and over and over, you have to own some responsibility towards the end. Please wake up.
Originally posted by Ganksinatra I get that Mordacai, and like I said, it was a poor choice to allow the users to use the system that used irl money.....but then again, would this dupe have been caught if they hadn't?
Yes, it would have been, and it has before. As other threads have pointed out, it's a bug in the AH that was discovered and patched in STO last year. STO's AH used credits (gold) instead of dilithium (their astral diamonds), so the damage was limited to shops not tied to real money.
Cryptic took the pre-patch code and implemented it in NWO, rather than the patched code. It's a mistake Cryptic tends to make, accidentally rolling back fixes by using old code in new updates, so they should have been careful when tying it to a currency that can be directly traded with Zen. They weren't and dropped the ball, this doesn't justify any perceived overreaction on the part of customers, but it doesn't excuse Cryptic's mistake either.
Originally posted by Ganksinatra I get that Mordacai, and like I said, it was a poor choice to allow the users to use the system that used irl money.....but then again, would this dupe have been caught if they hadn't?
Yes, it would have been, and it has before. As other threads have pointed out, it's a bug in the AH that was discovered and patched in STO last year. STO's AH used credits (gold) instead of dilithium (their astral diamonds), so the damage was limited to shops not tied to real money.
Cryptic took the pre-patch code and implemented it in NWO, rather than the patched code. It's a mistake Cryptic tends to make, accidentally rolling back fixes by using old code in new updates, so they should have been careful when tying it to a currency that can be directly traded with Zen. They weren't and dropped the ball, this doesn't justify any perceived overreaction on the part of customers, but it doesn't excuse Cryptic's mistake either.
If the behavior you describe is true, this is yet another reason why people should stop given money to these people. The F2P model is FLAWED and the blind giving of money to these companies is empowering them to continue to screw the players over because we are obviously to dumb to make educated decisions.
Originally posted by Ganksinatra I get that Mordacai, and like I said, it was a poor choice to allow the users to use the system that used irl money.....but then again, would this dupe have been caught if they hadn't?
Yes, it would have been, and it has before. As other threads have pointed out, it's a bug in the AH that was discovered and patched in STO last year. STO's AH used credits (gold) instead of dilithium (their astral diamonds), so the damage was limited to shops not tied to real money.
Cryptic took the pre-patch code and implemented it in NWO, rather than the patched code. It's a mistake Cryptic tends to make, accidentally rolling back fixes by using old code in new updates, so they should have been careful when tying it to a currency that can be directly traded with Zen. They weren't and dropped the ball, this doesn't justify any perceived overreaction on the part of customers, but it doesn't excuse Cryptic's mistake either.
If the behavior you describe is true, this is yet another reason why people should stop given money to these people. The F2P model is FLAWED and the blind giving of money to these companies is empowering them to continue to screw the players over because we are obviously to dumb to make educated decisions.
The bug/exploit/dupe was shown in STO , another Cryptic/PWE game , months ago.
The CC companies do not like it when you do this either. Activity such as this will determine your line of credit, interest rate, ect. in the future as well. I am not saying you did anything wrong necessarily, but those are considerations.
This is false information. It does not affect anything to do with your credit card. Credit Card companies are actually thankful for people that use this method to flag fraudulent businesses and the only one having trouble in the future is the companies that got charged back the most because those will end up on a black list and can not charge credit cards any more or only at an increased fee.
"Give players systems and tools instead of rails and rules"
The game is a piece of grinding pay to win horse shit.
Seriously why is anyone playing this? Don't waste your time or money on this garbage, if they won't refund your money then they're not worth your time.
You might could have at least waited to see if they were going to resolve the issue you posted about. Granted they probably wont, but waiting and seeing what happened before doing a chargeback would have been prudent.
The CC companies do not like it when you do this either. Activity such as this will determine your line of credit, interest rate, ect. in the future as well. I am not saying you did anything wrong necessarily, but those are considerations.
This is false information. It does not affect anything to do with your credit card. Credit Card companies are actually thankful for people that use this method to flag fraudulent businesses and the only one having trouble in the future is the companies that got charged back the most because those will end up on a black list and can not charge credit cards any more or only at an increased fee.
1) It costs CC companies money - I highly doubt they are thankful.
2) Most banks don't care if you deal with fraudulent companies as long as they make a profit.
3) Only companies that get blacklisted are companies that get charged back so much that the CC company stops making profit. An example would be Jagex that is blacklisted in many places because of the amount of hackers using stolen CC info to use bots in RS.
Originally posted by nethaniah
Seriously Farmville? Yeah I think it's great. In a World where half our population is dying of hunger the more fortunate half is spending their time harvesting food that doesn't exist.
Originally posted by Dibdabs NEVER buy a Founder pack in ANY game. Ever. See, I don't dupe, I didn't rampage through the Foundry and I stuck to the spirit of the game and levelled/earned my stuff honestly. I see no need for a blanket wipe - punish the guilty and not the innocent as well. The logs are available to see who mysteriously made 50 million AD almost overnight and who mysteriously levelled to 60 in less than a day.
Agree except people that exploited got banned for 72 hours which is hilarious. The damage is done to the economy already. There is no recourse other than an economical reset at launch.
Of cause they can reimburse the people that where crazy enough to buy Founders or other packs (although they don't deserve it since they where fully aware they paying for a beta) .
In any case, congratulations to the people that made thousands of $ off this bug and got away with a slap on the wrist.
"Give players systems and tools instead of rails and rules"
OP - dude really you think you are the consummate consumer because you are charging back after a forum post / removal / ban. I hope you aren't going to Discover and saying you tried to resolve the problem first, because you didn't. Forums are not the place for account service, account service personnel don't read or post on forums, account service issues are handled by them privately. You tried to get something from forum moderators they can't give you. Why not admit it, you made the forum post to vent and rant and rave, you always planned on doing the charge back no matter what.
If you were really doing this in a conscientious way and trying to work with them you would have 1) seen what their "solution" is (I don't think there will be one, they are so screwed no matter what at this point) 2) if you weren't happy actually contact people who are responsible for account service 3) then charge back if not resolved.
You got pissed off, ragequit on a forum, then charged back your credit card charge is what you have actually done no matter how else you try to describe it.
Reading comprehension again is hard.
Discover specifically has an option for "product or service did not meet my expectations".
It didn't and neither does their service. Which is the option I checked.
Now PWE can prove how it does meet quality expectations..
I'll make sure and post the final resolution screenshot for you folks who think they won't chargeback PWE.
Side bets anyone ?
Reading comprehension is non-existent. The vast majority of online commentators are soap-box self-promoters. They literally ignore EVERYTHING others say, and then speak whatever they want, even when it makes absolutely no sense. You know how you feel like people keep not comprehending what you mean by "product or service did not meet my expectations"? They aren't comprehending it because they aren't attempting to comprehend ANYTHING you say. In fact, I would be incredibly shocked to find out they even read what you say. They most likely skim over it, if not ignore it entirely.
The idiocy online is rampant, but I have learned the best trick on this forum. I must thank you for making this thread, because it has helped me perform this trick that helps me so greatly. What is the trick?
The Block Function.
Block. Block. Block.
I literally lurk through threads, find threads like this, skim through them to find idiots, and block them. Anyone who defends PWE or attacks the OP is obviously a massive troll that has no idea what real life is about.
Do yourself a favorite and block. Block Block Block. Any idiot. Any troll. Any kiddie.
Reading these replies, those who I blocked don't seem to understand how the real world works. One poster in particular, LITERALLY doesn't understand how real life works. They assume your CC will be against you, side with PWE, and consider you fraudulent. I must thank you for this thread, as that made me laugh at the naivety of that user.
In fact, I have gotten many laughs out of this thread, an overwhelming number of facepalms, and a MUCH needed cleansing of the forum idiots that plague this website. I have had to have blocked at least 10 people for various idiocy. Thank you!
never buy founder packs of a game that has a well established publisher, like PWE or AGE or GAMEFORGE or any other you can name. they already have all the money they need to develop game, founder pack is just a scam from them. pre-order is a different situation, you get a bit taste of what you are getting and you like it enough to pre-order, that is just fine. kickstarter is usually done by indie companies, i say if you like their ideas go ahead and support them. and before you pre-order or support kickstarter or buy founder pack learn about the company that is trying to get your money. what i am basically saying is research before you spend your money. you can never expect to be treated fairly by these f2p publishers even if you spend shit load of money in their games.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
Knee jerk reactions are never a good thing. they''ve known about the problem for what a little over 12 hours now, and already you demand that they roll the servers back (to when?) sometimes you have to have all your facts before you do something which for most game companies usually takes longer then 12hrs on a weekend.
They have known about the problem a lot lot longer than that apparently. They chose not to act on it until after it went viral. People are saying they reported it in closed beta and even that it was a known issue with the engine from previous games. Of course this is the interwebz and people make random sh*t up to further their own agendas but there are enough coherent rational posts on the subject to suggest it's true. It was a pretty obvious bug too.
Dahkoht, you can keep spamming your utter stupidity of "didn't meet expectations", but your expectations are unrealistic at best. It's an OPEN BETA. That means there might be bugs and exploits not found yet. That SHOULD have been your expectation going in, but apparently you live in a world of gumdrops and unicorns crapping rainbows, where nothing is ever wrong with a game at launch, much less a BETA stage. I totally hope Discover bones you on this, because the utter stupidity of your expectations is like saying you'd like some "food" at a restaurant, and when they don't bring you the exact food you wanted, you scream and cry until you get the meal comped. You are the reason there aren't more quality games out right now......everyone is so busy making sure crap like this can't happen before even letting people touch it so people like you won't squirt out a litter of puppies when something goes wrong.
PS: How stupid do you have to be to pay the price of a console to play in a Beta? Apparently as stupid to expect no bugs in a BETA. Guess I answered my own question there. I will agree with you on one thing.....they should not have allowed the users to use the AD/Zen until the official launch so this stuff wouldn't happen.
Whether they call it open beta, beta, or even alpha has no bearing on there consumer obligations. The fact they where accepting money for it makes it a "released" product.
Well since they have announced there is a problem and are taking action, plus asking for a refund is done via customer service... forums have nothing to do with that aspect it could have been taken as instigating an issue or a repeat of other topics a forum ban means nothing. Unless you emailed them on a personal level about your account you still need to prove why it is false advertising since you got everything you were suppose to get when you bought your pack. Hopefully they fix it for the rest of the folks.
They banned my account , for asking for a refund in a thread about that exact subject , that's why I then promptly went and did the chargeback , their response to all of us with zero communication , for posting in a thread.
And really folks , do any of you think Discover doesn't side with me on this one ?
PWE now has to
1.) submit a response to them
2.)submit said response to them in time
3.)show why they banned my account for asking for a refund
4.)prove my assertion their product was "not ready to be sold and in an incomplete state, the quality is not what I expected"
Then if they actually manage to do all of the above , convince the dispute department on every account they have a case , I get to respond and so on , and at any point they don't make a deadline or such it's closed and done.
Seriously folks , they let a massive bug like this through their game , haven't answered people for weeks now who emailed customer support , they don't have a clue how to run a large scale mmo.
My cc company says I should file a dispute if I don't find a product as expected , and well , I don't , now I'll let Discover decide if I or PWE is right.
Who do you think wins that ?
It's threads like this where people really demonstrate which side of the fence they're on.
PWE/Cryptic have allowed a serious bug to slip into their game (for the second time; as I'm aware, the same thing happened in STO). They did not handle it well, at all.
Paying customers inquired about refunds since there wouldn't be a wipe, due to the massive exploits (which do affect the rest of the game and everyone else playing, whether they want to believe so or not... there are ripple effects that reach everyone). The "official response" to that inquiry was to ban accounts and delete the thread.
I would have personally been issuing a charge back as well. That kind of negligent and unprofessional behavior should not be rewarded with business, in my opinion.
But back to my point, it's interesting how you can tell, right away, which people in a discussion about a topic are the fans of the company/game and are going to try to spin the situation any way they can to make it somehow appear that PWE/Cryptic are in the right. But that's the inevitable outcome when someone's so personally invested in a game or company that they lose all ability to look at their actions/behavior objectively and judge it by the standards they'd judge any other company that didn't have their unflinching devotion. There's this odd mentality that's developed where people believe that in order to be a "true fan" of a game or company, you have to defend everything and anything they do - however indefensible - and will go out of their way to try and spin the situation back on the individuals affected.
On the other hand, you have people like the OP who, despite obviously liking the game enough to invest $200 of their money into it, also expect the developer/publisher to treat them a s a valued, paying customer (as they should any customer). However, that's not the case. Throughout this whole situation so far, PWE/Cryptic have proven to be unprofessional, unresponsive and downright incapable of handling what is clearly a serious stain on their product... and so early on, too.
But, I'm sure others will continue to spin the situation and make it sound like PWE/Cryptic have done nothing wrong, and it's the OP who's at fault here.
That's not true, about the manpower to go through the transactions?? A few lines of code in the database and they could find out very easily what went where to whom and when. So as far as some exhausting amount of man hours and they don't have the employees to pull that off...just takes one software dev..a few minutes. and BOOM..info rec'd. As long as..it was put together properly and they have this stuff in the server.
I understand being a bit miffed. I do. When you log in and your character is suddenly at a lower level. Not amusing. Not sure where I stand on the complete wipe or not. I know I wasn't happy losing almost 2 complete levels on my main character. Not sure how I'd feel on starting over. I can't tell which one makes me more irritated at this point. I think the zero customer service is what sticks it to me the most.
That's not true, about the manpower to go through the transactions?? A few lines of code in the database and they could find out very easily what went where to whom and when. So as far as some exhausting amount of man hours and they don't have the employees to pull that off...just takes one software dev..a few minutes. and BOOM..info rec'd. As long as..it was put together properly and they have this stuff in the server.
That may be true for anyone who wants to be lazy and just search for players who bid negative amounts of AD, but that's as far as a simple search can go.
Consider this extremely simple scenario:
Exploiter A (on main account) - puts an item on the AH for 50,000AD
Exploiter B (on mule account) - bids negative AD on multiple items, including Exploiter A's item
Exploiter C (on main account) - puts an item on the AH for 200,000AD
Exploiter B (on mule account) - buys multiple items in the AH for their listed prices, including Exploiter C's item.
Exploiters A, B, and C can rotate roles (and accounts, IP, etc.), thus generating logs that "prove" they've made "legitimate" sales as well as being "victimized" by the exploit; so right there you can't just filter out victims or filter out legitimate sellers, because they'll be hidden in those groups. A developer needs to go through every single sale and identify a relationship between people who are victimized and people who make legitimate profits. If we base it off the above scenario, a relationship like the following:
Whenever Exploiter A is "victimized", Exploiter B and/or Exploiter C makes a legitimate sale.
Whenever Exploiter B is "victimized", Exploiter A and/or Exploiter C makes a legitimate sale.
etc.
Now imagine how much more complex the laundering becomes when you have ten or twenty people doing it, with additional variables like "posted item but didn't make a sale", "didn't post an item during the time frame of negative bidding", and "exploiter victimized his own legitimate account".
Now imagine when you have an unknown number of guilds of 10~20 people, all independent of each other (thus not generating any relational associations), doing this over the course of a month.
It's not impossible, a dedicated investigator with the help of some behavioral analysis, statistics, and cooperation of VPN/proxy providers (requires a warrant though) can identify every exploiter. Unfortunately PWE is not the FBI, that level of investigating will never happen, so it's essentially impossible for all exploiters to be punished.
So basically what I am getting from this is, say I shop at Walmart and someone shoplifts from said Walmart and then sells the products they stole to someone else. I should then demand all my money back from the Walmart and demand they remove all of their stock and restock the store.
Comments
I understand what you are saying, I just disagree with the premise that the company saying its open beta and then running as a launch classifies it as open beta. A real open beta ( I have been in many) stress loads the servers, allows the devs to focus players towards areas they want to verify and allows for the devs to check fire and sort out whats wrong.
When you do a soft launch disguised as a beta, people feel you owe them something (this post and thousands like it on the official forums are proving that). If it was a straight up old school beta they could wipe the servers/rejig the wazzools/beat the testers like redheaded stepchildren and there is not a darn thing anyone can say as they have no money on the table (because it is a open beta).
Only the people dumb enough to openly announce the exploit and generate massive spikes of AD will get banned. Most of the exploiters who were careful in covering their tracks and using dummy accounts to hide their identity will likely avoid being banned and continue playing merrily.
Nope.
We'll have to agree to disagree on the beta point, its all good. For me its the foundry system that will give this game some longevity. The amount of extremely well done playermade content is awesome. I've just been playing that for the last few days.
I'll be back playing when the servers go up (I'm a CO lifetime sub guy, proving that I am willing to turn the other cheek with gaming companies). A wipe would be nice (lvling is fast and Id rather not pay for a respec), but either way its all good to me.
It seemed pretty fun. I haven't had a chance to dive in very much, but I am excited to see some of the Foundry stuff. I kinda wanted to play a healer, but this "hit a button to shift from healing to damage" thing seemed offputting to me for some reason.
These companies, have taken the words Open Beta and run with them, completely mutating what they originally meant. Now they hide behind them whenever severe issues with their products arise, even as you pay for the often times shallow and broken product. This has completely muddled the mmo genre, and it has ruined a once thriving method of community testing, where player concerns and issues within the game were listened to and reacted upon.
Once the MMO developers depended on a smallish fanbase and they were themselves fans, and could/would not rest on their laurels hoping for the spur of the moment masses to fund the disaster. The games HAD to have some solidity, some fundamental quality, and certainly the games had to be trustworthy. If you invest your time, and attach yourself to an mmo you dont want its fundamtal mechanics changing or falling apart overnight. Look at swg. But LO' and behold, now you accept it, on smaller scales but all amounting to a run away trainwreck of the mmo genre, that this unfounded trust of f2p companies seem to fuel perpetually. You experience it in some degree over and over and over and over ad naseum. And still you purchase founder packs. Still you complain about this reality you create with your support of these games, and still you act outraged that the games flounder. Its also called insanity.
Every year new young, naive, gamers come into this consumer market, and they dont know what connotation beta once had. They will naively defend these companies, and unless you all start punishing these bloodsucking money grabbing companies, younger mmo players will never know anything remotely like the games that originally made this genre succeed.
Stop giving F2P games your monies before you have tried their product. You are not special in any good way when you prepurchase founder packs to get into their games early. You are just SPECIAL.
Open beta is a fraudulent term today. It only means that the company aims to take your money, while instilling in you a sense of priviledge for being among the first in their game. Meanwhile you are paying for this priviledge with not just your money, but with you chance at getting the kind of mmo's you deserve. The kind of games that would have longevity, meaningful development and communities thriving. The kind of games that left people still talking about them a decade later. Ultima, Everquest etc.
With your willingness to pay for something beneath what you deserve, you are destroying the mmo genre, and you are then complaining about the situation even as you are creating it.
STOP PAYING FOR OPEN BETA. TAKE BACK YOUR INFLUENCE ON THE MMO GAME GENRE AND EVOLUTION. It is only deteriorating atm, and it is mostly our own fault. The man will allways try to make a buck out of you, but when you let him over and over and over, you have to own some responsibility towards the end. Please wake up.
Yes, it would have been, and it has before. As other threads have pointed out, it's a bug in the AH that was discovered and patched in STO last year. STO's AH used credits (gold) instead of dilithium (their astral diamonds), so the damage was limited to shops not tied to real money.
Cryptic took the pre-patch code and implemented it in NWO, rather than the patched code. It's a mistake Cryptic tends to make, accidentally rolling back fixes by using old code in new updates, so they should have been careful when tying it to a currency that can be directly traded with Zen. They weren't and dropped the ball, this doesn't justify any perceived overreaction on the part of customers, but it doesn't excuse Cryptic's mistake either.
If the behavior you describe is true, this is yet another reason why people should stop given money to these people. The F2P model is FLAWED and the blind giving of money to these companies is empowering them to continue to screw the players over because we are obviously to dumb to make educated decisions.
The bug/exploit/dupe was shown in STO , another Cryptic/PWE game , months ago.
http://i.imgur.com/oA6Z8.jpg
The exact same bug.
This is false information. It does not affect anything to do with your credit card. Credit Card companies are actually thankful for people that use this method to flag fraudulent businesses and the only one having trouble in the future is the companies that got charged back the most because those will end up on a black list and can not charge credit cards any more or only at an increased fee.
The game is a piece of grinding pay to win horse shit.
Seriously why is anyone playing this? Don't waste your time or money on this garbage, if they won't refund your money then they're not worth your time.
Never trust PW
1) It costs CC companies money - I highly doubt they are thankful.
2) Most banks don't care if you deal with fraudulent companies as long as they make a profit.
3) Only companies that get blacklisted are companies that get charged back so much that the CC company stops making profit. An example would be Jagex that is blacklisted in many places because of the amount of hackers using stolen CC info to use bots in RS.
Guys guys ... move on. Who cares, its not like someone actually consider nwo as good mmorpg anyways.
Agree except people that exploited got banned for 72 hours which is hilarious. The damage is done to the economy already. There is no recourse other than an economical reset at launch.
Of cause they can reimburse the people that where crazy enough to buy Founders or other packs (although they don't deserve it since they where fully aware they paying for a beta) .
In any case, congratulations to the people that made thousands of $ off this bug and got away with a slap on the wrist.
Reading comprehension is non-existent. The vast majority of online commentators are soap-box self-promoters. They literally ignore EVERYTHING others say, and then speak whatever they want, even when it makes absolutely no sense. You know how you feel like people keep not comprehending what you mean by "product or service did not meet my expectations"? They aren't comprehending it because they aren't attempting to comprehend ANYTHING you say. In fact, I would be incredibly shocked to find out they even read what you say. They most likely skim over it, if not ignore it entirely.
The idiocy online is rampant, but I have learned the best trick on this forum. I must thank you for making this thread, because it has helped me perform this trick that helps me so greatly. What is the trick?
The Block Function.
Block. Block. Block.
I literally lurk through threads, find threads like this, skim through them to find idiots, and block them. Anyone who defends PWE or attacks the OP is obviously a massive troll that has no idea what real life is about.
Do yourself a favorite and block. Block Block Block. Any idiot. Any troll. Any kiddie.
Reading these replies, those who I blocked don't seem to understand how the real world works. One poster in particular, LITERALLY doesn't understand how real life works. They assume your CC will be against you, side with PWE, and consider you fraudulent. I must thank you for this thread, as that made me laugh at the naivety of that user.
In fact, I have gotten many laughs out of this thread, an overwhelming number of facepalms, and a MUCH needed cleansing of the forum idiots that plague this website. I have had to have blocked at least 10 people for various idiocy. Thank you!
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
They have known about the problem a lot lot longer than that apparently. They chose not to act on it until after it went viral. People are saying they reported it in closed beta and even that it was a known issue with the engine from previous games. Of course this is the interwebz and people make random sh*t up to further their own agendas but there are enough coherent rational posts on the subject to suggest it's true. It was a pretty obvious bug too.
Whether they call it open beta, beta, or even alpha has no bearing on there consumer obligations. The fact they where accepting money for it makes it a "released" product.
It's threads like this where people really demonstrate which side of the fence they're on.
PWE/Cryptic have allowed a serious bug to slip into their game (for the second time; as I'm aware, the same thing happened in STO). They did not handle it well, at all.
Paying customers inquired about refunds since there wouldn't be a wipe, due to the massive exploits (which do affect the rest of the game and everyone else playing, whether they want to believe so or not... there are ripple effects that reach everyone). The "official response" to that inquiry was to ban accounts and delete the thread.
I would have personally been issuing a charge back as well. That kind of negligent and unprofessional behavior should not be rewarded with business, in my opinion.
But back to my point, it's interesting how you can tell, right away, which people in a discussion about a topic are the fans of the company/game and are going to try to spin the situation any way they can to make it somehow appear that PWE/Cryptic are in the right. But that's the inevitable outcome when someone's so personally invested in a game or company that they lose all ability to look at their actions/behavior objectively and judge it by the standards they'd judge any other company that didn't have their unflinching devotion. There's this odd mentality that's developed where people believe that in order to be a "true fan" of a game or company, you have to defend everything and anything they do - however indefensible - and will go out of their way to try and spin the situation back on the individuals affected.
On the other hand, you have people like the OP who, despite obviously liking the game enough to invest $200 of their money into it, also expect the developer/publisher to treat them a s a valued, paying customer (as they should any customer). However, that's not the case. Throughout this whole situation so far, PWE/Cryptic have proven to be unprofessional, unresponsive and downright incapable of handling what is clearly a serious stain on their product... and so early on, too.
But, I'm sure others will continue to spin the situation and make it sound like PWE/Cryptic have done nothing wrong, and it's the OP who's at fault here.
That's not true, about the manpower to go through the transactions?? A few lines of code in the database and they could find out very easily what went where to whom and when. So as far as some exhausting amount of man hours and they don't have the employees to pull that off...just takes one software dev..a few minutes. and BOOM..info rec'd. As long as..it was put together properly and they have this stuff in the server.
I understand being a bit miffed. I do. When you log in and your character is suddenly at a lower level. Not amusing. Not sure where I stand on the complete wipe or not. I know I wasn't happy losing almost 2 complete levels on my main character. Not sure how I'd feel on starting over. I can't tell which one makes me more irritated at this point. I think the zero customer service is what sticks it to me the most.
That may be true for anyone who wants to be lazy and just search for players who bid negative amounts of AD, but that's as far as a simple search can go.
Consider this extremely simple scenario:
Exploiters A, B, and C can rotate roles (and accounts, IP, etc.), thus generating logs that "prove" they've made "legitimate" sales as well as being "victimized" by the exploit; so right there you can't just filter out victims or filter out legitimate sellers, because they'll be hidden in those groups. A developer needs to go through every single sale and identify a relationship between people who are victimized and people who make legitimate profits. If we base it off the above scenario, a relationship like the following:
Now imagine how much more complex the laundering becomes when you have ten or twenty people doing it, with additional variables like "posted item but didn't make a sale", "didn't post an item during the time frame of negative bidding", and "exploiter victimized his own legitimate account".
Now imagine when you have an unknown number of guilds of 10~20 people, all independent of each other (thus not generating any relational associations), doing this over the course of a month.
It's not impossible, a dedicated investigator with the help of some behavioral analysis, statistics, and cooperation of VPN/proxy providers (requires a warrant though) can identify every exploiter. Unfortunately PWE is not the FBI, that level of investigating will never happen, so it's essentially impossible for all exploiters to be punished.
So basically what I am getting from this is, say I shop at Walmart and someone shoplifts from said Walmart and then sells the products they stole to someone else. I should then demand all my money back from the Walmart and demand they remove all of their stock and restock the store.
Hmm.
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