**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
It is not our fault they did this right?
We did not hack or cheat to get these rewards, we got them in the way the game intended
Bro, it was not intended and you know that. It was the same with Mutant Treasure Island (a Side Quest) a year ago … you were able to run the same path again and again and get the rewards again (pretty juicy rewards). Exploiters got banned for a week and items reverted, easy solution.
In fact, if someone had not explored act 1 in the past, then it was intended that they explore from scratch and get new rewards.
This is also where the problem/ambiguity arises. People who had explored act 1 also got 0% on all their quests, was this intended? The post only specified about completion and partial exploration.
Mods should do their job and comment on this!
I previewed some of Act 4 and it still looks incredibly long and tedious. Then previewed some of Acts 2-3 and nothing looks any different
Looks like it isn’t patched, went refill farming and got this, despite having the quest already explored.
It sends the message that maybe this is intended and we can complete for rewards, but also could end up being "oh sorry, no bans but were taking back rewards" after we all wasted energy and time.
Absurd that something as important of this hasn't been address as this is a huge talking point in alliances, content creator world and the forums.
Having said that, I doubt if people are going to get banned for this, and I think it is unlikely rewards will get pulled. In general, having some experience with the policy issues surrounding exploits in online games, here and elsewhere, the general rule of thumb is that if a player knowing does something that is clearly not within the parameters of playing the game normally with specific knowledge that this will give them either an obviously disallowable advantage or radically better rewards that would otherwise be unachievable, they place themselves in jeopardy of having disciplinary action taken upon them.
In the case of Mutant Treasure Island, people were rerunning paths repeatedly to get the rewards. It was obvious that this was a bug, it was obvious that this was not intended, the rewards achieved were so high so as to be obviously disallowable and otherwise unachievable, and to get these rewards required doing things no player would otherwise do if they were unaware of the exploit. So it was not a difficult call to discipline players in that case. And I should point out that not everyone who used the exploit were disciplined. They only banned players who were obviously leaning into the exploit, doing it tons of times. Players who did it once or twice were not banned, as you could argue a player that only did this a couple times may have been doing so out of curiosity, But twenty, or fifty? Not so much,
The updated Act bug does not appear to be a punishable exploit by this criteria. First of all, because the game reset everyone's progress to zero, it would not be obvious to a player that they were not intended to get rewards again. Furthermore, there was no way to repeatedly get them through degenerate behavior: the game was just giving the normal rewards any player would get by running the content once. The "bug" was that players who had already done those Acts would now be able to do the new versions of them, which was not intended. But this would not be obvious to a player who only looked at the content itself.
Furthermore, this change affected the very earliest Act content in the game, and that means the bug doesn't just affect veterans, it affected new players as well. A player who just started playing a week ago could have found themselves looking at a reset Act 2 and thinking cool, I'll just run it again. If this issue affected the Abyss, say, it would be much harder to argue that players were not aware they shouldn't rerun - that content is really only open to significantly experienced players of the game, and the rewards are so high no one could reasonably believe the devs were allowing players to have a second shot at them without announcing such.
Of course, there are going to be players that knew this was unintended and tried to farm the units and potions until the content was reverted. But since the developers cannot know which players they are, and datamining will catch the innocent along with the guilty, and as the rewards involved were not high enough to justify bans on their own (they are significant, but not so high that they would obviously be rewards the developers would never intend to hand out to anyone - clearly, as they intend to give them out to new players), in my opinion there's a very low probability the devs would try to yank the rewards back, and an extremely low (essentially zero) probability that they would issue bans for it.
This is just my opinion of course. I believe it to be a well-informed opinion in general, but as I said, I have no specific knowledge regarding what actions Kabam may or may not take regarding this issue. And this is not a blanket green light to exploit the game either: Mutant Treasure Island handed out punishment, and in my opinion justifiably so. Every situation is different, and if you aren't an expert in online game exploit management, it is always best to steer clear of these sorts of situations. "But you didn't ban for that" is never a valid defense.