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pherik

Exploited priests rewarded - Non exploiters punished?

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I wanted to post this because we are hearing nothing regarding the punishment of the people who used the priest exploit, is anything going to be done? Those of us who were following the rules are now way behind because we could not abuse the link exploit and now linking has been hindered badly for channeling gain .

 

Can we get something regarding what is going to be done? 

 

Recommendations were to roll them back to 1 or even ban them like every other game has done before.

 

Changes and the exploit was detected on the 11th yet the exploiters have been flooding the market and screwing those of us who played fair in the long run.

Edited by pherik
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I was able to become a priest on August 2nd, only missing a day or two of faith ticks. So, realistically with all restarts someone could've priested by roughly July 30th. That means a player would've been able to abuse that exploit for approximately 11 days and reap the benefits of this channeling grind for that time frame. Now that I know this, it's no surprise there's so many high casts in the market already. 

Edited by Romadador

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While I can see your frustration with the way that the priest changes were handled it still does not affect those who did not spend tons of money and link multiple priests together to grind channeling. Players come and go in Wurm the linking has been around for years and this is a very small portion of the market(Less than 10 players) and player base. Sure they are making money on the market before everyone else. If this was such an issue for everyone they would have boycotted their casts and not bought them. I only try to concern myself with the controllable and leave the issues outside of my control to those who handle those decisions.  

 

There will always be someone that has higher skills than you in a game. Don't let that ruin the way that you play the game. It's a sandbox. If someone else wants to spend hundreds of dollars on membership for marks, wants to premium a bunch of alts to hold sermons, or just wants to casually play on 1-2 characters one being a priest in the end and after some time and dedication youll be able to accomplish the same thing. Wurm is a Sandbox and its how you make your life in it not worrying about what others are doing. 

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The real exploit here is Romadador being able to priest 22 days before the server was released

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People were using a technique to link way more priests together than the system allowed which increased the difficulty of some of the spells which allowed them to shoot up in channeling to a point where they could cast on tools with almost no chance of failure at high levels. By allowing this, and not banning them or resetting them like every other MMO out there, the market is being flooded by tools and weapons with super high casts ensuring that those of us who did not exploit can't compete. The going theory with my group and many others is that they are focusing on how much money those people spent for now and are throwing the rest of us who don't have a huge amount of disposable income, and want to play legit, to the side.

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Just now, Melros said:

The real exploit here is Romadador being able to priest 22 days before the server was released


Days are running together due to the 'rona! Thanks for pointing that out haha. Fixed.

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1 minute ago, BattleWall said:

While I can see your frustration with the way that the priest changes were handled it still does not affect those who did not spend tons of money and link multiple priests together to grind channeling. Players come and go in Wurm the linking has been around for years and this is a very small portion of the market(Less than 10 players) and player base. Sure they are making money on the market before everyone else. If this was such an issue for everyone they would have boycotted their casts and not bought them. I only try to concern myself with the controllable and leave the issues outside of my control to those who handle those decisions.  

 

There will always be someone that has higher skills than you in a game. Don't let that ruin the way that you play the game. It's a sandbox. If someone else wants to spend hundreds of dollars on membership for marks, wants to premium a bunch of alts to hold sermons, or just wants to casually play on 1-2 characters one being a priest in the end and after some time and dedication youll be able to accomplish the same thing. Wurm is a Sandbox and its how you make your life in it not worrying about what others are doing. 

This does effect everyone. The few that used the exploits, are eliciting huge profit margins on spells. They are also decreasing prices and demand for lesser enchants. This has major effects on the economy as a whole and only those that used the exploit are benefiting. I think it's probably too late now to actually fix it though.

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Just now, Kelody said:

 

This does effect everyone. The few that used the exploits, are eliciting huge profit margins on spells. They are also decreasing prices and demand for lesser enchants. This has major effects on the economy as a whole and only those that used the exploit are benefiting. I think it's probably too late now to actually fix it though.

 

If they ban them or reset them now the market will stabilize.

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I don't neccesarily believe they need to ban the players though. I just think that the Religion system overall needs to be overhauled which they stated they are working on. What happened was players who used priests for years on the Southern Freedom Isles did what they we used to doing there for channeling skillgain. I would personally like to see huge changes to priesting altogether. I do believe calling for people to be banned and rolled back is a little much in this situation. They got the edge ahead sure but how much of the community is really angry about them doing it. It's really simple if you don't agree with it dont support the seller and support those who cast later down the line.

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If they dont get punished they will use the next exploit and the next and more and more people leave the game (again, after coming back due to steam). Be glad your not on a pvp server, here its even more shitty. 

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If they don't punish the abusers, revert the system to the way it was and let others use it too. It's not just about punishing the abusers, but providing a level playing field and right now they own the field.

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8 minutes ago, BattleWall said:

I don't neccesarily believe they need to ban the players though. I just think that the Religion system overall needs to be overhauled which they stated they are working on. What happened was players who used priests for years on the Southern Freedom Isles did what they we used to doing there for channeling skillgain. I would personally like to see huge changes to priesting altogether. I do believe calling for people to be banned and rolled back is a little much in this situation. They got the edge ahead sure but how much of the community is really angry about them doing it. It's really simple if you don't agree with it dont support the seller and support those who cast later down the line.


I'm not sure if much of the community is aware of the situation. The lead these players have is pretty substantial on a new cluster that was based around everyone starting fresh. 

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There are people who were not able to abuse priest linking who are also already dominating the market. It only gave the select few who abused it a few days at most compared to those who did not. I originally was in the camp crying for roll backs, but in the grand scheme of things, it did not give that much of a head start compared to those who grinded their channeling legitimately. 

Edited by McGarnicle
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23 minutes ago, McGarnicle said:

There are people who were not able to abuse priest linking who are also already dominating the market. It only gave the select few who abused it a few days at most compared to those who did not. I originally was in the camp crying for roll backs, but in the grand scheme of things, it did not give that much of a head start compared to those who grinded their channeling legitimately. 

 

Really? lol

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Hrm...   This sound like some form of "dirty trick" being used for skilling to gain a huge advantage.   Geeze...  I wonder if anyone saw that coming....   (https://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/171793-wo-steam-discussion/&do=findComment&comment=1758598)

 

Yes, this is how wurm works, folks who "abuse" mechanics always get to keep their skillgain; see shield skills, folks who ground channeling on early days Nahjo, folks who managed to "farm" moon metals using smelting pots, fountainpans (that was "fixed" years later), and lets not forget when forage/botanise/forestry ticks multiplied the more you got in a row!  Wurm is a buggy mess at the best of times, and if the devs rolled back for every abuse, the server would permanently be stuck on day 0!

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I went about as fast as I could, without the exploit and now that I can start casting some decent spells (if I get really lucky), the early market bonanza of outrageous prices is gone.  So yes, the reward for the exploit was real.  Enjoy the gold!

 

Honestly, Wurm has a long history of riding the "we don't talk about fight club" gravy train.  I'm guilty of leveraging Mooring ropes for years.  If it isn't stealing or griefing in nature, devs just sweep it under the carpet and maybe that is the best way to deal with it?  Unfair?  Probably.  But if they drop the hammer on everyone that did it, they can probably kiss quite a few good revenue accounts goodbye. Revenue is rule number one.  That is why we can't craft with priests and why there are multiple gods.

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2 hours ago, pherik said:

 

If they ban them or reset them now the market will stabilize.

 

The market will be still the same and will get to the usual point, sooner rather then later, or at least i asume.  Banning is relative term as wurmhole described and i will add: rouelette style.  I just hope they tweak anything priest related  and they not just "cash cows" as someone else said.

Edited by Tor

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13 minutes ago, Wurmhole said:

I went about as fast as I could, without the exploit and now that I can start casting some decent spells (if I get really lucky), the early market bonanza of outrageous prices is gone.  So yes, the reward for the exploit was real.  Enjoy the gold!

 

Honestly, Wurm has a long history of riding the "we don't talk about fight club" gravy train.  I'm guilty of leveraging Mooring ropes for years.  If it isn't stealing or griefing in nature, devs just sweep it under the carpet and maybe that is the best way to deal with it?  Unfair?  Probably.  But if they drop the hammer on everyone that did it, they can probably kiss quite a few good revenue accounts goodbye. Revenue is rule number one.  That is why we can't craft with priests and why there are multiple gods.

I feel like there's some clarification needed here and posts like this can muddy the issue a bit. There was an exploit, but the exploit was not using linked battery alts within the normal constraints of what the game allows. It's been done for years because using battery alts is simply the most effective way to grind channeling, to the point where many guides written by players suggested it as the preferred way to do so. Does this favor players with the income to support battery alts? Of course it does, in the same way that someone with an army of premium alts can make many menial tasks (Such as mining or terraforming) exponentially faster.

 

The wording should have been clear that while the patch was performed to fix the exploit (Linking more priests than you were supposed to be able to at a given time), it also addressed grinding of channeling via linking until an alternative solution for channeling could be found. Instead, the post was overwhelmed with a large number of people assuming that the act of linking in accordance with game mechanics itself was the exploit. This leads to threads like this where people assume that anyone over X channeling must have performed some sort of exploit as opposed to grinding via the previously valid method.

 

 

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I know there has been a lot of discussion about people exploiting this, or how we should track them and ban them, but it's a little bit more complicated than this. 

When this potential exploit was shared with us, we compared top channelling skills across all servers. We found there to be a range between the average and highest, but not high enough to pinpoint using the reported exploit. Our logging tools did not record links between priests, and as such, we had no historical information to go by either.

With all this, it is impossible to identify any abuses from merely working with links to grind channelling as it previously worked. 

As such, we're not going to ban the highest channelling players as we do not have the evidence backing any such ban, and have zero evidence that the current priests selling goods benefitted in any such way.


So to answer your questions:
1) There is no evidence suggesting any priests abused this bug; please refrain accusing any priest who sells items on the market of abusing it. 
2) There were no significant outliers in our collection of data based on channelling skill at the time of the patch.
3)  We will not be taking action as we are more likely to ban innocent players who used links than anyone exploiting. 

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Er so um if there was no proof of exploting etc... we all got a horrible priest nerf for nothing? Not to be "that guy" but we are still nerfed even with out using a huge number of links.  Even a single link is badly nerfed all because no one was exploiting? I thought it was stated pretty heavily by staff that exploits had happened that was why we had to be nerfed so hard and fast.

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I just went back and checked the original ###### show that was that update.  Retro is the only one of the staff to actually say there was exploiting.  Darklord mentioned people abusing the system several times but I guess all together he could have just meant the way linking worked even with out the exploit.  I'll be the first to say I'm still a bit salty about the changes even as someone who only recently made a battery and only one at that.  I don't really care that others are ahead even though we play on the southern servers but I almost feel like we were lied to.   It was set up to sound like there was this huge set of exploiting and issues that required this instant knee jerk level response and a sustained nerf based on an exploit.  instead it sounds simply like the devs would prefer the rate at which people gained channeling skill to be reduced.  I get it that if you said that straight up people would be pissed but atleast we would have known where you were going.  Bleh, I guess I'll get back to squeezing my corn oil.

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1 hour ago, Retrograde said:

3)  We will not be taking action as we are more likely to ban innocent players who used links than anyone exploiting. 

 

But some people here would rather that you ban innocent players with the chance that you might catch exploiters, than you only banning people where there's conclusive proof that they actually did something wrong 🙄

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