Crafting Event Ban

Azwrix

ZoS is banning hundreds of accounts for their own mistakes. The crafting event was a joke mostly, half the features were removed because of bugs. Then all these people get banned for using a for something that harmed zero other people's experience. ZoS is again out of touch woth the player base. I'd love to hear your comments, thanks.

wilykcat

Hundreds of accounts get banned within the same time frame. This appears to be a software algorithm(an AI) is doing the banning without human moderator review.

Destai

At a bare minimum, I think @ZOS_GinaBruno and @ZOS_Kevin should have answered our questions about if it was a bannable offense or not.

Araneae6537

People are being banned for deconning for transmutes? It seems to me too obvious to be considered an exploit — gear costs X transmutes to recon and returns 25 transmutes when deconned. ZOS announced a temporary change in X — what did players do wrong? ZOS is expecting players to interpret their intentions? What else can be said about it when players are not doing anything unusual but taking advantage of a discount offered.

I think the maximum ZOS could fairly do would be to remove excess transmutes gained in this fashion, but maybe not possible if the players had already used them to recon other gear.

I did not get to take advantage of the reduced recon cost in any fashion, nor would I have used it to generate transmutes because I try to avoid anything that I could conceive of being looked at funny, and because I do not think it is how the recon discount was intended to be used. But I cannot in fairness say that this mistake was not entirely on ZOS and not the players.

(Edit: Fixed typo.)

Soarora

While the event was a mess, it is not an excuse to very clearly exploit. Personally, I’d say rollback the affected accounts with the time between the ban and unban being a tempban, but I’m not in charge.

Dragonnord

ZOS making a mistake doesn't allow us to exploit.

It was so obvious that reconstructing a piece of gear for 12 crystals and then deconstructing it for 25 was not intended.

Still, people continued to reconstruct + decon countless times, 100% on purpose.
 

Dagoth_Rac

Araneae6537 wrote: »

People are being banned for deconning for transmutes? It seems to me too obvious to be considered an exploit — gear costs X transmutes to recon and returns 25 transmutes when deconned. ZOS announced a temporary change in X — what did players do wrong? ZOS is expecting players to interpret their intentions? What else can be said about it when players are bot doing anything unusual but taking advantage of a discount offered.

Yes, you needed to interpret ZOS' intentions. It was quite clearly a discount on reconstruction, not a glide path to infinite transmute crystals. If people had reconstructed gear and tried it out in content or on test dummies for a while and then decided they did not like it and deconned it, I can absolutely see that being normal and expected use of the crafting event. And I don't think those are the people getting banned. The bug was hotfixed pretty quickly, and legitimate use of reconstruction and deconstruction would have resulted in only minor unintended transmute gain.

But constantly reconstructing garbage gear you never even equip, then instantly deconning it, as a path to endless crystals? No one in their right mind would think that is intended. If ZOS wanted us to have infinite crystals for the event, they would have just bumped everyone up to 1000 crystals and made reconstruction free for duration event, not made players jump through hoops.

If a store was having a 50% off sale and you bought something for $12, then returned it and got $25 back, then started buying everything in the store and returning it instantly, would you say, "Well, they know how their cash registers and computers and sales work. This must be what they intended!"

Yes, dollars are a more valuable currency than transmute crystals. But a currency is a currency. And no central bank, by design, is going to hand out a printing press to users. It was painfully and obviously a bug/oversight in the event design. And playing dumb and acting like this must have been what ZOS wanted is silly.

spartaxoxo

Creating hundreds of nirncrux to flood the economy absolutely hurts the experience of those who got them fairly. I hope they only banned obvious exploiters and not people who only got a little bit of stuff because they wanted to try out the gear or whatever

merpins

What? You're telling me people got banned for exploiting an obvious exploit in a game whose TOS explicitly says you'll get banned for exploiting exploits and has done this exact thing multiple times in the past? No way. That's crazy, [snip]

[edited for baiting]

sleepy_worm

Do you all honestly think bans are warranted? [snip]

[edited for bashing]

Braffin

If these bans are about transmute/nirncrux cheesing aka "exploiting a bug" at least temporary bans and rollbacks are more then justified.

KlauthWarthog

Yeah, no. This was effectively an item duplication glitch. I am not inclined to believe anyone could reasonably assume it to be the expected and intended behavior.

SeaGtGruff

I think whether or not banning were justified would depend on each individual case, which is why appealing is recommended.

If someone reconstructed a single piece of gear, said "Oh, crud, I picked the wrong trait," and deconstructed it so they could do it again correctly, that's one thing, and it seems perfectly understandable and non-exploitative.

But if someone did the reconstruction/deconstruction over and over again so many times that it clearly must have been very deliberate on their part, then that's obvious exploitation of an unintended programming oversight.

Hapexamendios

If really depends on how badly someone abused the exploit. If someone did it a few times and stopped, I'd be inclined to say no ban. Do it 25 or more and I'd say goodbye. Anything in between is maybe a warning or a suspension for a day or two.

EF321

It's like getting banned for picking too many resource nodes during double resource node event. It's free resources out of nowhere, obvious exploit. So what if it is literally advertised with huge official ZOS popup in your face upon logging in, you should know better and not spend too much time participating in the event.


It was not some obscure bug that occurs under rare and very special circumstances, which was secretly abused by those few who learned about it through word of mouth. It was a thing promoted by ZOS, none of the players were looking to do this that day, not before ZOS incentivized them with their banner covering whole screen. Cheap reconstruction, cheap transmutation, increased chance to get materials from deconstruction. Was it a test to see who is trustworthy, and not an event?


It was officially advertised. There was incentive from developers to engage with transmutation/reconstruction/deconstruction systems.

olsborg

It was a bug exploit, very clearly, ppl who did it broke the TOS, maybe a permban was too harsh, but a ban was legit.

uniqpy

If you intentionally exploit a bug, you'll get banned. Every guild i'm in informed the members that would be the case and here we are.

The excuse "BuT zOs pUT THe bUG In". Yes, and you chose to exploit it. Granted it shouldn't be permanent as the accounts are easily rolled back and the exploiting undone.

I doubt many "innocent" players were caught up in this.

In real life, if your bank makes a mistake and you get given more money than they should, guess what? Your responsible for not spending it and informing the bank. Too many people cannot take responsibility for their own actions.

Major_Toughness

You are not meant to be able to get back more transmutes than you spend.

[snip] a method was introduced where you could gain more transmutes for deconstructing then it took to reconstruct.

Oversight or not, it is unintended and taking advantage of it is exploiting.

Should the players be permanently banned? Not at all.
A rollback should have been done as soon as the exploit was fixed.

Also, those banned aren't everyone who exploited the other event. A lot of people either had no repercussions or just had their current transmute currency reset to zero.

If you told people about the bug via in-game chat appears to be a factor in wether you got banned or not. Spreading information about exploits.

[edited for bashing]

Alienoutlaw

a member of my guild decon'd 2 rings and got perma ban nothing from ZOS other than the auto reply, they appealled and still nothing

Grizzbeorn

EF321 wrote: »

It's like getting banned for picking too many resource nodes during double resource node event.

Not even the same thing.
Double resources from double-resource nodes is intended, and they don't ban people for "picking too many" resources during those events when double resources are offered. (there is no cap on gathering resources.)

It was a thing promoted by ZOS...
It was officially advertised.

No. It was not.

Only the Reconstruction discount portion of that process was advertised (Reconstruction for 12 crystals.)

Getting the full 25 crystals back upon Deconstruction of those items was NOT advertised, nor promoted, and was an
unintentional bug, that people CHOSE to continue exploiting after the bug had been made known publicly; some even having the hubris to brag about on the forums.

Dragonnord

Alienoutlaw wrote: »

a member of my guild decon'd 2 rings and got perma ban nothing from ZOS other than the auto reply, they appealled and still nothing

I don't think your guild mate has been banned for deconstructing only 2 rings.
 

Alienoutlaw

Dragonnord wrote: »

Alienoutlaw wrote: »

a member of my guild decon'd 2 rings and got perma ban nothing from ZOS other than the auto reply, they appealled and still nothing

I don't think your guild mate has been banned for deconstructing only 2 rings.
 

i have no reason to disbelieve them

sleepy_worm

I don't think AI ban waves are good for the game. It may get sanitized here, but off these forums, this company and this game have a certain reputation for this. Temporary bans (with proper communication) are ideal. But that's not what usually happens.

loosej

Alienoutlaw wrote: »

a member of my guild decon'd 2 rings and got perma ban nothing from ZOS other than the auto reply, they appealled and still nothing

When I saw the announcement the first thing I did was reconstruct/deconstruct a piece of gear to see how that would work.

I really, really wasn't expecting to see a notification showing 25 crystals on deconstruction, and hadn't bothered to check my crystal balance before, so I did the same thing again to make sure the amount actually went up by 25 and it wasn't just a UI bug.

So in my case at least, 2 items weren't enough to trigger a ban. I did submit a ticket reporting the bug immediately after, not sure if that would/could have made a difference, all depends on how the ban bot works I guess.

Elsonso

Alienoutlaw wrote: »

a member of my guild decon'd 2 rings and got perma ban nothing from ZOS other than the auto reply, they appealled and still nothing

Why did they create and then decon the rings at the exact same time there was an exploit for doing that? Is this something that they frequently do? (These are rhetorical questions, I don't really care about the answers)



As for the appeal, it is well documented that it takes time for ZOS to work through an appeal and reply to it.

Dragonnord wrote: »

I don't think your guild mate has been banned for deconstructing only 2 rings.
 

Why not? I could see someone being scrutinized for creating and deconstructing just one ring.

Unlike the farming resource node argument above, I suspect that constructing then turning around and deconstructing gear is not something that happens a lot. Unusual, even if we take into consideration the event and mistakes. People doing this would sort of stand out.

jad11mumbler

Azwrix wrote: »

ZoS is banning hundreds of accounts for their own mistakes. The crafting event was a joke mostly, half the features were removed because of bugs. Then all these people get banned for using a for something that harmed zero other people's experience. ZoS is again out of touch woth the player base. I'd love to hear your comments, thanks.

If you exploited the event it's entirely on you and you deserve the ban.

If someone drops their wallet Infront of you, it's wrong to keep it, even if its "their fault for dropping it".

Alienoutlaw

Elsonso wrote: »

Alienoutlaw wrote: »

a member of my guild decon'd 2 rings and got perma ban nothing from ZOS other than the auto reply, they appealled and still nothing

Why did they create and then decon the rings at the exact same time there was an exploit for doing that? Is this something that they frequently do?

As for the appeal, it is well documented that it takes time for ZOS to work through an appeal and reply to it.

they had made a ring in the wrong trait deconned it and made another and deconned another ring for mats

Elsonso

Alienoutlaw wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

Alienoutlaw wrote: »

a member of my guild decon'd 2 rings and got perma ban nothing from ZOS other than the auto reply, they appealled and still nothing

Why did they create and then decon the rings at the exact same time there was an exploit for doing that? Is this something that they frequently do?

they had made a ring in the wrong trait deconned it and made another and deconned another ring for mats

Updated my original comment to reflect that I am not looking for answers, and that the questions were rhetorical. Fact is, we don't know what they were doing or why they were doing it. If your guild mate was doing nothing wrong, then I don't expect they will remained banned.

Major_Toughness

Can you imagine if it was the other way around.

I'm not sure exactly how the code for this game works, or any online game, but if it is something like

If Crafting event = active
Then Cost = Cost / 2

What is it was the same for deconstructing

If Crafting event = active
Then Transmutes gained = Transmutes gained / 2

Would items we made for 25 given us 12 in return? So we lose Transmutes?

How would the game distinguish between a event reconstructed item or not. Does each item hold a timestamp of when it was created? I know crafted items retain old character names so that must be held by item.

Just seems not well thought out and lack of testing has caused them a huge issue.

loosej

Major_Toughness wrote: »

Just seems not well thought out and lack of testing has caused them a huge issue.

That's what it should be, an issue for them. Unfortunately they're making it a player issue. The fair thing to do would be to either spend time and resources reverting any gains that were made by using this bug, even if it takes an insane amount of work, or just let things be and learn from it for future events.

moo_2021

It's not an exploit until someone reported and told ZoS to handle it.


Why? I can't think of any reason from a player's perspective. Worrying about fellow players having too many crystals?