Rollback yes or no

babylon

wean wrote: »

babylon wrote: »

wean wrote: »

Bluntski wrote: »

Mufasa wrote: »

wean wrote: »

I would think the best option would be to query the users and compare those have unnatural amounts to the general population. Weed them out and ban them. Let them come to Zen individually and state their case and work from that point. It would be better to harm a smaller population (with some innocent bystanders) than to harm everyone as a whole with rollbacks. I don't think they would recover from the damage of a rollback at this point due to the fact that everyday their credibility dwindles and it is getting closer to the end of the 30 day free period. People will speak with their wallets...and many won't be creating the "I'm Leaving" thread. Of course this is all my 2 cents.

Can you imagine the man power that will take? Now imagine the cost of those employees to deal with all of that on top of the current CS issues.

Manpower? 1 database engineer with a SQL script.

I assume the manpower comment is directed towards all the individual appeals from the people getting banned.

If they do it right it will only capture the actual dupers. Just need to follow the money/item trail after they grabbed data on all the wealthy players.

That will be what takes the most time. That is why I would think a few bystanders would be hit if they tried to tackle the situation swiftly with the minimal downtime for everyone. I dont condone the innocents being affected but time really is money in an MMO.

The few decent people a good search and destroy grabs will be the only ones taking up customer support time - the ones that can't be proved to be duping (they shouldn't even be in the net to begin with if it was done right). The rest should be proved to be exploiters and should have customer service rights taken from them altogether so they don't waste everyone's time.

Tough love for the server.

Bluntski

Mufasa wrote: »

Bluntski wrote: »

Mufasa wrote: »

Bluntski wrote: »

Mufasa wrote: »

wean wrote: »

I would think the best option would be to query the users and compare those have unnatural amounts to the general population. Weed them out and ban them. Let them come to Zen individually and state their case and work from that point. It would be better to harm a smaller population (with some innocent bystanders) than to harm everyone as a whole with rollbacks. I don't think they would recover from the damage of a rollback at this point due to the fact that everyday their credibility dwindles and it is getting closer to the end of the 30 day free period. People will speak with their wallets...and many won't be creating the "I'm Leaving" thread. Of course this is all my 2 cents.

Can you imagine the man power that will take? Now imagine the cost of those employees to deal with all of that on top of the current CS issues.

Manpower? 1 database engineer with a SQL script.

What in the world does that have to do with handling all of the individual cases that CS would have to sort through on top of the current ones, including the already known issue of people being auto banned when falling through the world in certain instances..... Derp.

You clearly didn't read the posts I replied to when I said that.

You mean my post you were replying to... Derp. So, not only did I read it, I wrote what you were replying to. Learn to read before posting. Thanks.

Lol you should go read it again then but let me summarize for ya! Paraphrased of course.

Wean (OC): They need to query individual characters and weed out the exploiters
You: Do you know how much effort that would take? CS is busy!
Me: They just need a SQL script.

DoctorBear

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

DoctorBear wrote: »

wean wrote: »

I would think the best option would be to query the users and compare those have unnatural amounts to the general population. Weed them out and ban them. Let them come to Zen individually and state their case and work from that point. It would be better to harm a smaller population (with some innocent bystanders) than to harm everyone as a whole with rollbacks. I don't think they would recover from the damage of a rollback at this point due to the fact that everyday their credibility dwindles and it is getting closer to the end of the 30 day free period. People will speak with their wallets...and many won't be creating the "I'm Leaving" thread. Of course this is all my 2 cents.

While it seems like a sound strategy, i imagine with all the information that ZOS can gather from the mega-servers for the users to have to be involved (Which would only delay the process, and may have privacy issues implicated) would be unnecessary. In fact, i don't see how innocent bystanders would have to necessarily be harmed in any sense, other than the items that they may have bought (unknowingly) from dupers being deleted. And in which case they could be compensated with the gold they originally traded for those items. To me, that seems more sensible. But yes, users who clearly had no hand in legendary items or were effected directly by the dupe, knew about it, or exploited it, I.E the majority of the player-base... Should be allowed to stay untouched by this predicament. Not just from a marketing point of view, but just from logical sense.

I'm quite wealthy in-game, in fact probably one of the top 20-40 wealthiest in ESO at this time both in terms of gold and net worth in items. I'd be pretty tee'd off if they wiped out tons of items I bought with no knowledge or way to know they may have been duped recently, without restoring the gold I gave to people for said items unwittingly.

The best overall solution in my opinion is to simply permanently ban anyone who used the dupe bug (filtering out accidental ones that did it for example literally once or twice on junk items in a big guild bank on different items, which could legitimately have happened due to how this bug actually worked) explicitly.

The second-best solution, would be to backtrack all the transactions resulted from duped items, rollback the trades only (individual database changes), and leave everything else alone, while banning all of the exploiters/dupers permanently still.

However, simply mass-querying only for people who have a lot of in-game assets, and then banning them, would catch a lot of high-end players who had absolutely nothing to do with exploiting and never have, in the crossfire. It's a terrible idea for a solution.

In any situation, those who were effected by the dupers through trades should be properly compensated and reimbursed for their gold, but the items themselves as far as i'm concerned should be removed. I realize however, that this would be a considerable and tiring effort to be made by ZOS Staff, for something that ultimately will be fixed by itself through the natural process of players recycling items and deconstructing them once they find better ones. Which they almost always will, it's the nature of an MMO. However, at the very least all i ask and expect of ZOS Staff is that they ban those responsible and leave those innocent bystanders effected by them, or not effected, unharmed. I expect no less than a ban, it would be silly to give them any less of a punishment for their actions. If i remember correctly from way-back-when, private server MMOs tended to have a solution for duping (and they themselves selling items for 'donations') in that every item generated had some kind of ID number. And so, tracking duped items and those that took advantage of the exploit should at the very least be possible, if not a simple but time consuming task for someone with the right knowledge if such a thing was and is still common for MMOs of any kind. And of-course, accidental bug encounters excluded.

Squishy

Although some have points in that detecting everything is impossible, detecting unusally large amount of gold this early in the game should be a damn breeze :S.

Attorneyatlawl

Nordak wrote: »

Funny man. The only way you were making a few million gold an hour was exploit.

Who are you responding to? The post you quoted says nothing about millions of gold an hour, or even millions of gold at all.

Torasi

This would be a good solution. If it was possible for them to know exactly which accounts to ban. Hackers do what they do, and a majority of them do it well and know how to avoid being detected by any level of security that ZOS could put up. That being said it isn't impossible to root them out and they should certainly make every effort to eradicate them from the game, but it's not a 3 step process in which we "good players" get free game time.

South_of_Heaven

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

South_of_Heaven wrote: »

It's also impossible to detect everything. Don't bet on the dupers getting banned. This is wishful thinking. The best strategy for them is to let us forget about it.
.

Not sure how many MMO's you've played before, but banning exploiters is standard operating procedure. That you call it "wishful thinking" is telling of your level of insight into these kinds of issues.

I've been playing mmos since T4C, UO and Shadowbane.That's what it is. Wishful thinking. Yes all have a policy of banning exploiters.
But if you think they can/will detect most of them you are fooling yourself.

The damage cannot possibly be reversed and they cannot possibly ban all the accounts these people have traded with. Because for example, in a guild, one person would dupe for a hundred - they are not idiots for everyone to dupe separately for themselves you know.

If you want to believe otherwise... then good for you. That's the bloody reality.

Kyosji

Common sense in this thread is lacking. If Zeni does a 3 week rollback, how many of its players do you think will still be around? Also, I'm nearly positive that it would put Zeni in a legal bind and would have to resort to issuing out mass refunds. Sure they have their EULA, but massive changes like this that affects the entire game population would nullify it. Just look at Star Wars Galaxies with NGE. SOE was forced to issue out refunds for anyone asking for it, including myself. Why would ANYONE think that issuing a 3 week rollback would even be considered?

Attorneyatlawl

South_of_Heaven wrote: »

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

South_of_Heaven wrote: »

It's also impossible to detect everything. Don't bet on the dupers getting banned. This is wishful thinking. The best strategy for them is to let us forget about it.
.

Not sure how many MMO's you've played before, but banning exploiters is standard operating procedure. That you call it "wishful thinking" is telling of your level of insight into these kinds of issues.

I've been playing mmos since T4C, UO and Shadowbane.That's what it is. Wishful thinking. Yes all have a policy of banning exploiters.
But if you think they can/will detect most of them you are fooling yourself.

The damage cannot possibly be reversed and they[.b] cannot possibly ban all the accounts these people have traded with.[/b] Because for example, in a guild, [.b]one person would dupe for a hundred - they are not idiots for everyone to dupe separately for themselves you know.[/b]

If you want to believe otherwise... then good for you. That's the bloody reality.

You don't ban people who unwittingly got duped goods. You roll back the transactions alone in those cases, and ban the people who actually duped said goods. As I said, your lack of insight is pretty telling, regardless of what you want to say . It doesn't take much database querying to do any of this.

Gelston

Damia wrote: »

and yes sorry,, some of you and me as well will loose items but if this does not get fixed remember one thing, you will quit the game and loose all your time and items.

I also say all veteran lvls should be set back to 0

All Vet levels should be set back to 0? Why? I'm VR3, I never exploited ANYTHING. I did all the quests and etc. I never camped world bosses or any of that. I have put in a LOT of hours. I have nearly 100% completion(due to bugs in some I couldn't do all the quests in all of them) in EVERY zone I have been to. You don't need to be exploiting anything to get to Vet Levels. You just have to put a lot of time into the game.

Edit to add- Also, there is no 0.

Bluntski

Mufasa wrote: »

Damia wrote: »

and yes sorry,, some of you and me as well will loose items but if this does not get fixed remember one thing, you will quit the game and loose all your time and items.

I also say all veteran lvls should be set back to 0

Bluntski wrote: »

Mufasa wrote: »

Bluntski wrote: »

Mufasa wrote: »

Bluntski wrote: »

Mufasa wrote: »

wean wrote: »

I would think the best option would be to query the users and compare those have unnatural amounts to the general population. Weed them out and ban them. Let them come to Zen individually and state their case and work from that point. It would be better to harm a smaller population (with some innocent bystanders) than to harm everyone as a whole with rollbacks. I don't think they would recover from the damage of a rollback at this point due to the fact that everyday their credibility dwindles and it is getting closer to the end of the 30 day free period. People will speak with their wallets...and many won't be creating the "I'm Leaving" thread. Of course this is all my 2 cents.

Can you imagine the man power that will take? Now imagine the cost of those employees to deal with all of that on top of the current CS issues.

Manpower? 1 database engineer with a SQL script.

What in the world does that have to do with handling all of the individual cases that CS would have to sort through on top of the current ones, including the already known issue of people being auto banned when falling through the world in certain instances..... Derp.

You clearly didn't read the posts I replied to when I said that.

You mean my post you were replying to... Derp. So, not only did I read it, I wrote what you were replying to. Learn to read before posting. Thanks.

Lol you should go read it again then but let me summarize for ya! Paraphrased of course.

Wean (OC): They need to query individual characters and weed out the exploiters
You: Do you know how much effort that would take? CS is busy!
Me: They just need a SQL script.

I am going to waste my time to do you a favor, so you will shut up.



_______________________________________________________________________

wean wrote: »

I would think the best option would be to query the users and compare those have unnatural amounts to the general population. Weed them out and ban them. Let them come to Zen individually and state their case and work from that point. It would be better to harm a smaller population (with some innocent bystanders) than to harm everyone as a whole with rollbacks. I don't think they would recover from the damage of a rollback at this point due to the fact that everyday their credibility dwindles and it is getting closer to the end of the 30 day free period. People will speak with their wallets...and many won't be creating the "I'm Leaving" thread. Of course this is all my 2 cents.

Mufasa wrote: »

Can you imagine the man power that will take? Now imagine the cost of those employees to deal with all of that on top of the current CS issues.

Bluntski wrote: »

Manpower? 1 database engineer with a SQL script.

Care to continue further? Learn to read before posting. Have a nice day.

If your intent was just to respond to that single sentence why didn't you quote just that? Kind of hard to understand what you are referring to when you don't quote specifically what you are responding to.

So since you were indeed referring to that single sentence, yes my comment does not apply. At the same time this doesn't really matter because the a proper script would severely reduce the people that were caught in a false-positive and reduce the amount of people that would nee to contact support.

wean

Kyosji wrote: »

Common sense in this thread is lacking. If Zeni does a 3 week rollback, how many of its players do you think will still be around? Also, I'm nearly positive that it would put Zeni in a legal bind and would have to resort to issuing out mass refunds. Sure they have their EULA, but massive changes like this that affects the entire game population would nullify it. Just look at Star Wars Galaxies with NGE. SOE was forced to issue out refunds for anyone asking for it, including myself. Why would ANYONE think that issuing a 3 week rollback would even be considered?

I am sure they are heavily weighing their options and this is probably the one thing they are trying their damnedest to avoid.I am not trying to be an apologist for them here but any business knows that what would impact their revenues the most should be avoided at all cost.

CrazyRoyal

servers back up at NA

Kyosji

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

South_of_Heaven wrote: »

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

South_of_Heaven wrote: »

It's also impossible to detect everything. Don't bet on the dupers getting banned. This is wishful thinking. The best strategy for them is to let us forget about it.
.

Not sure how many MMO's you've played before, but banning exploiters is standard operating procedure. That you call it "wishful thinking" is telling of your level of insight into these kinds of issues.

I've been playing mmos since T4C, UO and Shadowbane.That's what it is. Wishful thinking. Yes all have a policy of banning exploiters.
But if you think they can/will detect most of them you are fooling yourself.

The damage cannot possibly be reversed and they[.b] cannot possibly ban all the accounts these people have traded with.[/b] Because for example, in a guild, [.b]one person would dupe for a hundred - they are not idiots for everyone to dupe separately for themselves you know.[/b]

If you want to believe otherwise... then good for you. That's the bloody reality.

You don't ban people who unwittingly got duped goods. You roll back the transactions alone in those cases, and ban the people who actually duped said goods. As I said, your lack of insight is pretty telling, regardless of what you want to say . It doesn't take much database querying to do any of this.

How do you suggest they roll back the transactions? What if that person already used the items in their crafting? Do you strip them naked? What about all the EXP gained by using those items? Do you strip that from them as well?

You can't just take things away from players. Not only will it tarnish the name of the company for being known to screw over honest players like that, it could put them in an instance where even their EULA couldn't protect them. There IS a limit as to what you can and can't do to your player base.

Damia

you can not run a sql script to find dupes, they script can not determen if someone spend hours of harvesting or duped items n 10 seconds.

and yes agree hackers are not hackers because they are easy to find, they have multiple accounts and they dupe items have been moved elsewhere.

_

if you are pissed about loosing a few days of time playing imagine all the games you played and all the hours you lost playing, that's why they are games to enjoy playing, of curse you loose your time on them. imagine how pissed you be in a few months loosing months of time when you hit endgame and realize you cant compete lol..


bottom line , game should never have been released yet, issues need to be fixed asap and some kind of rollback has to happen. or its dead and you can quit and leave it to the dupers and hackers to noob kill like many other games that went down that road

epoling

If you people getting upset about this had spent any time in MMOLand you would know this happens in pretty much all games at some point or another. The devs eventually fix the duping bug and at least a few big time exploiters get banned as examples (they usually try to get as many as they can but it isn't really possible to get everyone). Personally, I don't know how they do maintained saves on characters in order to roll them back individually, but I would think at some point that would be an awful lot of drive space in a game with this many players. So no, I don't think rolling back individual characters is a realistic option. Don't penalize folks like me who have happily made it into the low teen levels by exploring every nook and cranny of Tamriel because of something that won't matter in a few months time.

Finally, I am pretty sure a lot of you folks complaining are more worried about somebody having better stuff than you. Another thing I have seen from playing these games for a long time. They seem to draw a lot of people who somehow base their self worth on whether or not they have better virtual items in a video game than anybody else. Personally, I don't care what these other folks have - my happiness is not affected one way or another. If it is attainable in game I will get it eventually as well (through honorable means).

Citraka

Roll back isnt a palatable option for me, Re covering the same quests and skills etc etc / yawn. Waste of my time playing.

I know nothing about the endgame in this but theres a limit to progression right? Just feeling that all those saying its ruined the game for eveyone who didnt cheat are a bit OTT ? Sure it'll make it a bit harder maybe initially to jump into pvp etc but its only a game of catch up right ?

And the money thing well sure theres an advantage t opeople with cash to buy stuff, but is it actually going to give them an advantage that ruins the game for everyone else ?

Or am i wrong, I'm more than happy to be wrong btw I just maybe dont see the impact yet.

Vuldan_Ironhand

I love how all the "I'll quit if you don't fix it but I'll quit if you roll it back" people spout drivel as if OMG they would just be so devastated to have to redo their mad rush to VR10 again. And then the "I'm one of the richest people in game and I better be compensated if they take my stuff which I didn't know maybe might have been duped but I bought it legit do I'm a good person". Ridiculous.

Based on all the information from a large variety of threads, there is, unfortunately, really only one sure way to fairly fix the entire thing.

A) complete server wipes, reverting ALL accounts to day 1 opening hour. This of course after you have perma banned every single duping dirtbag you can find.

provide all accounts on good standing an additional 15 days, give everyone imperial edition perks or like items to enhance xp as they rebuild.

Accept the losses of those restarting players who just can't accept a restart cause OMG that digital pixel item was so important to them. Most threats to leave are just that, empty wind to make themselves feel better. Consider it zenimax. I think you run a greater risk with the unbalanced result of this duping thing by leaving it all I'm game than you do by restarting the planet,

TassenAruhn

I've more then 100 hours of farming to buy legendary things for my craft, and now rollback? No way. Ban for exploiters. But no way for rollback.

reignfyre

No. Not even Diablo 3 did a rollback after their launch when duping was crazy out of control.

Bluntski

Damia wrote: »

you can not run a sql script to find dupes, they script can not determen if someone spend hours of harvesting or duped items n 10 seconds.

and yes agree hackers are not hackers because they are easy to find, they have multiple accounts and they dupe items have been moved elsewhere.

_

if you are pissed about loosing a few days of time playing imagine all the games you played and all the hours you lost playing, that's why they are games to enjoy playing, of curse you loose your time on them. imagine how pissed you be in a few months loosing months of time when you hit endgame and realize you cant compete lol..


bottom line , game should never have been released yet, issues need to be fixed asap and some kind of rollback has to happen. or its dead and you can quit and leave it to the dupers and hackers to noob kill like many other games that went down that road

If the items are in a database, which they most definitely are, there is no reason you cannot run a script. There is an obvious threshold on the amount of items someone has that would make it look suspicious.

Kyosji

epoling wrote: »

If you people getting upset about this had spent any time in MMOLand you would know this happens in pretty much all games at some point or another. The devs eventually fix the duping bug and at least a few big time exploiters get banned as examples (they usually try to get as many as they can but it isn't really possible to get everyone). Personally, I don't know how they do maintained saves on characters in order to roll them back individually, but I would think at some point that would be an awful lot of drive space in a game with this many players. So no, I don't think rolling back individual characters is a realistic option. Don't penalize folks like me who have happily made it into the low teen levels by exploring every nook and cranny of Tamriel because of something that won't matter in a few months time.

Finally, I am pretty sure a lot of you folks complaining are more worried about somebody having better stuff than you. Another thing I have seen from playing these games for a long time. They seem to draw a lot of people who somehow base their self worth on whether or not they have better virtual items in a video game than anybody else. Personally, I don't care what these other folks have - my happiness is not affected one way or another. If it is attainable in game I will get it eventually as well (through honorable means).

Again, there is a limit. A day at most for serious issues, but to do a rollback for these dupes, thats nearly a 3 week rollback. It will NEVER happen.

South_of_Heaven

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

South_of_Heaven wrote: »

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

South_of_Heaven wrote: »

It's also impossible to detect everything. Don't bet on the dupers getting banned. This is wishful thinking. The best strategy for them is to let us forget about it.
.

Not sure how many MMO's you've played before, but banning exploiters is standard operating procedure. That you call it "wishful thinking" is telling of your level of insight into these kinds of issues.

I've been playing mmos since T4C, UO and Shadowbane.That's what it is. Wishful thinking. Yes all have a policy of banning exploiters.
But if you think they can/will detect most of them you are fooling yourself.

The damage cannot possibly be reversed and they[.b] cannot possibly ban all the accounts these people have traded with.[/b] Because for example, in a guild, [.b]one person would dupe for a hundred - they are not idiots for everyone to dupe separately for themselves you know.[/b]

If you want to believe otherwise... then good for you. That's the bloody reality.

You don't ban people who unwittingly got duped goods. You roll back the transactions alone in those cases, and ban the people who actually duped said goods. As I said, your lack of insight is pretty telling, regardless of what you want to say . It doesn't take much database querying to do any of this.

You can ramble all you want about my supposed "lack of insight" but it is more than obvious that it is impossible to ban anyone whom the dupers traded with. Wittingly or unwittingly - obviously there is no actual way to determine it.

The fact that you think that they will be rolling each of these transactions back is almost entertaining - especially since most of them will have been used in equipment, used to max crafting skills etc. It baffles me how you cannot understand that and yet keep saying that I lack insight.

One has duped for a hundred, who wittingly or unwittingly exploit the dupes. If you think this can be magically repaired then, as I said, good for you. Then again you may be one them yourself - if that's the case - even better for you

DoctorBear

Torasi wrote: »

This would be a good solution. If it was possible for them to know exactly which accounts to ban. Hackers do what they do, and a majority of them do it well and know how to avoid being detected by any level of security that ZOS could put up. That being said it isn't impossible to root them out and they should certainly make every effort to eradicate them from the game, but it's not a 3 step process in which we "good players" get free game time.

You're assuming they're hackers however. This was a bug, which was exploited. It doesn't take a hacker to do that, just someone who stumbles upon it and figures out how to repeat the process. And then to continue repeating it.

Exivus1

Finding these people is as simple as a SQL query to find who has what item ID of a greater quantity of x for a level y or a game time of z.

Just ban them and be done with it. Very doable.

babylon

It won't be hard to spot the points the exploit actually happened, from what I read about the method used. Then from there follow the item and money trail to see who profited from the exploiting.

They also need to go back to start of server opening (early access) because that's when this all started.

Kellhus

Rollbacks are a every couple hour occurrence once you hit Cold Harbour -- I think one night I lost 15-20 minutes of progress every hour for the entire time I was logged in. Shouldn't be too hard to roll them back, just send them to Cold Harbour and wait.

Nordak

Damia wrote: »

you can not run a sql script to find dupes, they script can not determen if someone spend hours of harvesting or duped items n 10 seconds.

and yes agree hackers are not hackers because they are easy to find, they have multiple accounts and they dupe items have been moved elsewhere.

_

if you are pissed about loosing a few days of time playing imagine all the games you played and all the hours you lost playing, that's why they are games to enjoy playing, of curse you loose your time on them. imagine how pissed you be in a few months loosing months of time when you hit endgame and realize you cant compete lol..


bottom line , game should never have been released yet, issues need to be fixed asap and some kind of rollback has to happen. or its dead and you can quit and leave it to the dupers and hackers to noob kill like many other games that went down that road

Spot on, couldn't have been said better.

Mufasa

Bluntski wrote: »

Damia wrote: »

you can not run a sql script to find dupes, they script can not determen if someone spend hours of harvesting or duped items n 10 seconds.

and yes agree hackers are not hackers because they are easy to find, they have multiple accounts and they dupe items have been moved elsewhere.

_

if you are pissed about loosing a few days of time playing imagine all the games you played and all the hours you lost playing, that's why they are games to enjoy playing, of curse you loose your time on them. imagine how pissed you be in a few months loosing months of time when you hit endgame and realize you cant compete lol..


bottom line , game should never have been released yet, issues need to be fixed asap and some kind of rollback has to happen. or its dead and you can quit and leave it to the dupers and hackers to noob kill like many other games that went down that road

If the items are in a database, which they most definitely are, there is no reason you cannot run a script. There is an obvious threshold on the amount of items someone has that would make it look suspicious.

Though each item does not have a unique ID. So.... How do you suggest they differentiate duped from legit?

Citraka

Nordak wrote: »

Spot on, couldn't have been said better.

Well it could, because i still dont see where the 'games ruined/impossible to compete' stuff comes from. Why ?

Edit bit, I do get how its an unfair advantage to say have all the best gear while others have to get random lucky , but does it truely Kill the game dead ?