By now, you'll notice that some of your friends or enemies are unable to log on. That's because we have been detecting the money bug for a while now and have been recording people who have been abusing the bug. These people are banned and unwelcome in our game.
Now that we've banned most of the major perpetrators, let me explain how things work. Our primary goal when there is a bug is to find and ban cheaters. Our secondary goal is to fix the bug and minimize the impact on the game. The reason why finding and banning cheaters is our first priority is because people who cheat in one area are likely to cheat in other areas. Cheaters ruin the game, and getting rid of them helps the game.
Honestly, we've known about the dupe bug for a while. We do periodic inspections of the economy as I've put in a lot more detection into it. It's easy to see when there's a sudden increase of money or other items. The trick is, of course, finding the specific bug being abuse. Thanks to the help of some people on the inside, we were able to find the bug and put in detection. We then waited for the cheaters to do what they do best: continue cheating. We also did a money cap to "encourage" the cheaters a bit here at the end. We logged the cheat activities and we banned people that were abusing the system.
As a side note: If you were unfairly affected by the money cap, send a POLITE gmail to Help and we will look into it. Note that it might take a little while for us to do our research to verify your claim. It requires loading up an old save game and going through some logs. It's unfortunate that some legitimate people got stung by this; you can thank the cheaters for this inconvenience. Please note that you may not get fully reimbursed for all your shillings. Just because you sold 100 BDS to someone for 10 million shillings doesn't mean you're going to get those shillings back. Take comfort in the fact that the last patch increased drops on higher level mobs by as much as 50% and go regain your fortune.
Let me touch on the issue of communication. To put it simply: we COULD NOT discuss this issue with you all. We even said there was no bug when we knew there probably was. Why? Because if we admit that we know about the bug then the cheaters will figure we know a way to detect it. This means they will not cheat, not get caught, and still be playing the game looking for other ways to cheat. This is not helpful. This is one of the main reasons we ask for a little bit of trust. People coming on here and demanding information (this means you, Bink) are not going to get it. It's also very hurtful to read all the accusations that fly on boards like this, which does nothing but hurt our feelings and cause unnecessary distrust.
Compare this to how Star Wars Galaxies recently treated a dupe bug. The developers posted that they knew about the bug on the forums and that anyone with "dirty" money would be banned. What happened? The cheaters started giving money away to innocent people. Lots of innocent players got banned for no other reason than they took money from someone who cheated in the past. Go do a web search about players being "teleported into space" and you can read up on how giving out information can be very harmful.
In the end, we're banning an estimated 40 accounts. This represents 4-5% of the total number of accounts playing the game. We take cheating VERY seriously, and we get rid of cheaters regardless of the cost to us. Honestly, if we want to make more money, we wouldn't be running this game. If you want to thank us for this, go get your friends to sign up for an account to replace the accounts we're missing because of this. Also, keep in mind in the future that whining about a bug will not get it fixed faster. Finding out what the bug is and reporting it to us will get it fixed faster.
As of now, the dupe bug no longer works and we will detect people trying to abuse it. We will still ban accounts that attempt to use the bug.
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