16 Responses to AA: Trion is really doing a great job, example 1 billion

1. JJ Robinson says:

   October 6, 2014 at 10:31 am

   Do you think it is just incompetence on part of Trion and publishers for allowing this to continue?

   Seems to me every MMO has always been understaffed with GMs. I know companies don’t want to pay the labor costs, but as you noted, letting exploits like this continue will ruin a game and cause the long-term profits to disappear.

   It just blows my mind that players are reporting the exploits, making videos on Youtube, and still nothing gets done…
   • kalex716 says:

     October 6, 2014 at 10:59 am

     Considering its a localized product developed elsewhere, the localization publisher here can do little about this other than rollbacks. They have to wait for a build from the developers that have the issue fixed in it, and depending on how efficient their pipeline is, that could go either quickly or slowly.

     Considering its a new game, and a new relationship between localization crew, and dev crew; well, we are seeing how inefficient it is right now.
     • kalex716 says:

       October 6, 2014 at 11:03 am

       I also want to add, that the localization crew may have some options in the short term…

       But who knows what kind of access the engineers on this side have to the codebase, in the industry, its typically very very limited though.

       They might be able to hack at it themselves, and come up with some strange band aid that could be used in the short term, like making a hard “gold cap” on accounts to slow it down. Yet, considering how elegant this exploit is, i doubt they can do anything meaningful…
   • silvertemplar says:

     October 7, 2014 at 4:48 am

     I think it’s purely a lack of resources being thrown at the problem. Trion can’t fix this with code, we all know that. XLGames is gonna take weeks/months to get a fix out to production servers (if ever) or they are going to say “wait for v1.7” .

     So all Trion CAN do is having physical support people (GMs) log into the servers, check the logs (assuming there are logs, since players are being obstructed to actually freely report spammers/bots ) and then ban accounts manually on a daily basis. And Trion has clearly being taking shortcuts with this from the starts.

     The way they can’t even handle their Ticket/Support channel properly is telling. This has caught them out on multiple occasions. They for example had to limit “real” support to Patron players, yet if the issue is the lack of patron when you paid for it, you can’t get to the support. Likewise if your authenticator breaks or their authentication server goes down and you need support, you can’t log in anywhere to reach support.

     It ALSO does not help Trion’s case that everything we are experiencing in the US/EU version of the game (v1.2) was exploited months ago on the RU/KO servers in the exactly the same way. <— surely Trion should have known this and prepared for it? There are countless russian videos of the exact same exploits/hacks happening. There are russian players on the EU servers stating they are there because Mail.RU (the equivalent of Trion for the russian version) was not doing anything to stop the flood of hackers on the RU servers either (much like Trion is failing now). <— yet Trion did not foresee this? I bet they did, i bet they saw how much Mail.RU made and figured they can just pull the same stunt?

     Now v.1.7 of the game might have closed some of the exploits, but we are still probably months away from its release ? Especially if the Trion localisation team is also a small team that is working on Rift and Trove at the same time.
2. hartsman says:

   October 6, 2014 at 11:46 am

   Hi! Those should all be long dead by now. The amount of work being done to keep things a hell of a lot cleaner than the initial blast is actually quite large.
   • SynCaine says:

     October 6, 2014 at 11:52 am

     Yet why aren’t GM’s watching these spots? As the video confirmed, these hacks were running rampant all day, to the point that large groups of players knew and basically accepted it. How hard is it for a GM to zip around to these locations and ban accounts? Why does it take DAYS for this to happen? It’s not like this is a borderline case where maybe someone is cheating; its a character sitting inside geometry teleporting, 23/7.

     It’s 2014, how is a GM team not prepared and ready for something like this?
     • kalex716 says:

       October 6, 2014 at 2:54 pm

       to actually empower a GM team to do much of anything to edit/deal with things in a robust way requires lots of tools, and audit systems, data logging, and support features. Its very costly, and they usually get prioritized very low as a result by dev teams. A smart publisher, who pays for and hires the right people for this will make it a priority to have these in place before launch.

       That being said, a ban tool is the simplest, and most rudimentary one.The Customer Service suite most undoubtedly already has it.

       What we are looking at here, is either a completely understaffed CS department, or a completely unprepared one. Likely a combination of both.
       • silvertemplar says:

         October 7, 2014 at 4:24 am

         Well just some basic BAN hammering when things are clearly happening on a global scale would do a ton of good, yet Trion is not using this.

         Weekends , especially on the EU side, there are clear evidence the entire AA service are running on 0 backup and 0 support.

         A spambot could take over a public channel for hours without anyone doing something about it. A GM should have been there to ban that account.

         The authentication servers go down on a sunday morning EU time, guess what? Trion only starts acknowledging it 4 hours later, and then still takes another 3 hours to fix it. The forums were lighting up as players couldn’t log in, Trion of course fast asleep in their USA timezone <– tells me there are 0 people supporting the data centre on weekends.

         I would not be surprised if they have like one or two system admins who are bouncing the servers every now and then and a few .

         Then there is the fact that reporting spammers are not actually a feature in the game. You can block them, you can't report them. So even if GMs were around, they can't ban any gold seller spammers unless they don't physically see themselves.

         The bot reporting skill with the LP requirement is also not working. If i pitch up at a "botfarm" and i got like 50LP , what exactly am i suppose to do? Open a few gold bags, or report 1 bot out of the 10 that are there?

         Trion thus have zero awareness what's going on in the game. Youtube vids are all they got. Players are not going to use LP to report masses of bots, they are unable to report spammers in channels and Trion does not have any visible GM presence in the game….
   • Pendan says:

     October 6, 2014 at 3:36 pm

     If Trion were truly effective at removing the bots and exploiters along with all the money they generated and passed on then I would not see 2 or 3 bots still at every big killing area. Obviously they are profiting so they continue to do it. They are still getting bots to level 50 even though reported many times over the long hours of botting to that level.
3. NetherLands says:

   October 6, 2014 at 2:00 pm

   I think the main problem in AA (and actually many MMORPG’s) is that Customer Service/GM’s are almost always understaffed and underappreciated by the companies, resulting in lack of oversight, lack of tools (e.g. harassment etc. by Vent and other third-party software, good luck making complaints ‘stick’), and (partially as a result) a laissez-faire attitude (aka I’ll wait till my shift is over, let Gary handle it).

   MMORPG companies seem to be so wrapped up in the idea that MMORPG’s are ‘about playing with others’ that they ignore that those other players are likely to create the biggest problems for others as well, and hence enough oversight is needed, and therefore a well-staffed and trained Customer Service.

   Instead, now the days of EQ’s in-game GM’s are long over, companies rather spend money on flashy raids and fancy marketting than on taming their personal Leviathan.

   or it could just be Trion, something like this incident does make one wonder what anti-griefing and -exploit clauses are worth

   http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/572/view/forums/thread/421891/page/1
   • NetherLands says:

     October 6, 2014 at 2:51 pm

     To add to that :

     the UN recommends at least 222 police officers per 100,000 people.

     Click to access International_Statistics_on_Crime_and_Justice.pdf

     (pg 135)

     Say that MMORPG’s can do with ‘Judges’ á la Judge Dredd (so this number accounts for the whole law-enforcement body), and even if we take concurrent log-ins as the capita it should be clear that we’re talking a lot of GM’s here, especially with the big titles.

     Meanwhile, Trion has around 200 employees total

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trion_Worlds

     That still doesn’t justify certain (non)decisions, but does underscore IMO what running a virtual world with understaffed ‘law enforcement’ comes down to
     • SynCaine says:

       October 6, 2014 at 2:56 pm

       Apples to oranges. In the real world cops can’t teleport, enable god powers, and insta-kill (ban) someone with zero risk.

       Plus this isn’t about an understaffed GM force just not handling every little detail. This is a blatant display of ignorance to something that is, literally, game destroying.

       I’m fine with some chat spam, everyone MMO has that. I’m fine with some botting, as you can’t always track down every last one. This isn’t one of those. This is akin to a AH market dupe bug being left in the game for a few days, and then quietly fixed without further action/comment. If you duped, you win. If you didn’t, or you started after it was fixed, sorry, you’re screwed.
4. zaphod6502 says:

   October 6, 2014 at 3:46 pm

   The bigger issue at the moment is you must be very careful when you make any sort of change to your land holdings. The hackers have been running radar and teleport hacks that allow them to instantaneously snipe land from players when they demolish their plot to upgrade their housing. Two of our guild members lost 16×16 plots (and surrounds) when we were trying to reconfigure the land for large farm houses.

   Tickets have been submitted 4 days ago and there has been no response from Trion support (which is outsourced). It is an absurd situation for what could have been a very good game.
   • SynCaine says:

     October 6, 2014 at 4:25 pm

     Yea I’ve heard about the land sniping by hackers, which is why I’m very hesitant to re-org our guilds area. Pretty ridiculous to have one of the games best features held hostage because the publisher of the game can’t get their shit together. Total amateur hour.
5. Polynices says:

   October 7, 2014 at 10:29 am

   Anyone play Rift when it came out? Hackers managed to steal accounts without knowing passwords (I don’t recall quite how the hack worked but it was all server end, nothing the player did) — they could boot you offline even if you were logged in and take all your character’s money and gear while your guildmates watched and Trion did nothing about it. A week or so later they got around to restoring lost gold and fixing the hack but it really sucked at the time. That was an all-Trion game so they had no excuse and they still didn’t handle it well.
   • SynCaine says:

     October 7, 2014 at 10:37 am

     Ah yes, I do remember that. It had something to do with account switching, where if you switched over from one account to the other, the system never asked you to log in to the second account.

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