[AoC] Mass Bannings of Guild Leaders for 'Gold Exploits'

[gnomad]

Originally Posted by column

With the Windows media player tip, the game is running very smoothly at 1600x1200. At that resolution you do not need much AA on a 21 inch LCD to make it look very good.

I think performance wise AOC is MUCH better then it was in beta.

I tried the same trick using Quick Time and same results. It would seem that it has something to do with audio threads and that would make sense.

I have had problems with audio stuttering on the test server and at the same time causing video lag/hitching. Now it seems to have gone bye-bye.

[Pren]

Originally Posted by column

With the Windows media player tip,

Eh? Is this something AoC specific?

[Elerion]

No, it's something Windows specific. WoW was boosted heavily by the same trick a while back. It has something to do with task priorities, I believe.

[Kargon]

Originally Posted by column

I just upgraded from a 7800 to a EVGA 9800gtx that they sell on amazon for 300 bucks.Seems like the best deal going right now.

With the Windows media player tip, the game is running very smoothly at 1600x1200. At that resolution you do not need much AA on a 21 inch LCD to make it look very good.

I think performance wise AOC is MUCH better then it was in beta.

Mind posting the link to this fix? Did a quick google search but I'm not exactly sure what I'm searching for so nothing popped up.

[Jabberwhacky]

Leave Windows Media Player open (not even playing a file, just simply 'open') while running any other program. Voila.

[Tuco]

Darkane(Leader of PfB) speaks out:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

It's all about the gold.

One of the major selling points and drives for Age of Conan is the Borderlands and their associated Border Keeps. This is where all the major guilds on your server will be competing for 1 of 8 siegable cities, large fortifications that will house upgrades for your player cities and bonuses for your guild the longer you hold them.

It's a long road to be able to take a border keep, you need to attain a tier 3 player city beforehand. This requires a major effort on your guilds part, pooling of resources and gold in order to quickly progress through the city tiers. Now, originally, Funcom had a bank/guild bank/AH/postbox NPC (yes, all together) to help with the organization of this effort, but with many things at launch this became broken and disabled for a week. In the meantime, as any respectable guild would do, we pooled our resources by hand and designated one person to hold these resources and gold. Being the guild leader for AoC this person was me, as I was also the architect for the guild. I continually collected most of the gold our players earned which was alot of gold considering we were fielding the highest leveled players on the server, of the first ten level 80s we had six of them.

The patch finally arrived that was to fix guild banks and upon logging in I noticed that all the gold I had was gone, every last tin. I had over 30 gold at the time so you can imagine my shock. I /petition and wait in a 70 man queue for an hour when I was disconnected by the server. I am now unable to login. About an hour later I receive an email from Funcom:

Quote:
Hail and well met adventurer!

The Funcom team would like to thank you for becoming part of the Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures experience. As you can guess, this is a very busy time for us at Funcom. We are constantly working to improve our systems to make the experience for you, the customer, more enjoyable.

In our efforts to make improvements, mistakes are occasionally made which can affect our customer base. We try to minimize the impact of all such issues as much as possible, but unfortunately sometimes the issue in question is so volatile that it cannot easily be contained to a select few accounts.

Recently an exploit was discovered that allowed certain individuals to generate large sums of money well beyond the normal amounts expected for this stage in the game�s lifecycle. We will be removing the ill-gotten currency from the system in order to ensure that the economy of Hyboria remains stable for the rest of its law-abiding denizens.

Due to the nature of the exploit, we are not able divulge any details, but at this time your account has been suspended while we investigate. If you feel that this incorrectly affected your character, please send an e-mail containing your character name, account name and server to account-status@ageofconan.com. Only e-mails pertaining to this issue will be answered.

Thank you for your understanding
Regards,
Funcom

Pretty absurd, no?

At first the email address they gave didn't even work, and I had to send off several emails to various funcom addresses and PM's to devs and QA people on the boards. Only one ever got back to me and I greatly appreciate his help. I then resorted to posting all over the official boards, beta boards, and random gaming boards trying to draw attention this; that Funcom mass suspended players with an excess of gold to try and cover up a gold dupe or exploit of some kind. Many guilds were slapped with the same thing, having their guild leader or money holder stripped of their gold and suspended, guilds like Sinister, Darkhand, Rising Arms, PfB (thats us), Lords of the Dead (no suspension just gold wipe), and many more smaller guilds from all servers.

The worst part about all of this is the lack of communication between Funcom and the playerbase. We have no idea what is going on half the time, and especially in this case. Scores of people sent Funcom replies to their suspensions, I myself have sent multiple emails to multiple addresses everyday, and not until today, 3 days later did we receive a reply:

Quote:
Greetings,
Your account is still under investigation. Sorry for the delay.

--
Regards,
GM-xxxx
Funcom Customer Support

Timely and informative response, eh?

Where is our community manager? Why isn't he getting involved in this and help sort out the glaring errors made by Funcom? This game is still under launch status and to screw up massive suspensions by sweeping players who had over 10g (random guess here) into the exploiters catagory is absolutely unacceptable. This is a major concern and the root issue isn't the suspensions, it's the lack of Customer Service. This isn't 1999, MMO's are no longer in thier infant stage, the community has an expectation level that is not currently being met. This is a billion dollar industry that revolves around the interaction between company and consumer.

I have faith in Funcom to rectify this situation, they did great and amazing things getting people involved in their release. I, myself, was able to experience their enthusiasm by being flown to Oslo to participate in their launch party, which was amazing amounts of fun and you can read about that trip here.

The ball is in your hands now Funcom. What are you going to do with it?

Baseline/Sepelion Speaks out:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Hello fellas. I am Baseline (In-game Sepelion), leader of The ßox on Deathwisper, one of the top 5 guilds on the server if I'm being modest, and the foremost guild on the server in city-building (we completed a Tier 1 city with all walls and nearly a Tier 2 keep yesterday evening when I was banned).

In a nutshell, I'm just going to copy/paste what I posted on the mmorpg.com forums, since it was locked on the official AOC forums:

The current discussion on MMORPG.com is here:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cf.../183226/page/1

Here is the post:

Here's the original - now locked - thead on the AOC boards: Age of Conan Forums

Me. The Guild Leader of The ßox, on Deathwisper, just got banned very quickly. Basically, a GM just sent a generic PM about exploiting, and kicked me off without answering my inquiry as to why exactly.

My guild has spent the last week hardcore grinding coin in Keshatta and pooling all coin and resources to me to get our guild city completed with all walls as of just yesterday.

I had over 60 gold in my inventory today, pooled from our guild of nearly 100 people and friends of the guild, all grinding in raids in Keshatta with us. Yet the GM still banned without a specific explanation.

The bottom line here, is that Funcom just banned me, the leader of the guild, because a lot of our enemies on the server petitioned in saying I was exploiting, duping, etcetera, and they probably looked at how far we were with the city and how much gold I still had and believed it.

GG funcom. You said that it's going to be a guild effort to do this. You said that everyone would have to pool their resources to the guild leader and architect (both me) to make the cities / sieging happen. We did that, and you banned the guild leader.

Not surprising. Other people on the server have had their gold purged and bans have been handed out very quickly to anyone with any real pooled progress.

Here's a tip funcom, learn to differentiate between Dupers/Exploiters, and people pooling their endless hours of hard work into one person.

I won't be buying this game again, and you just pissed off about 100+ very vocal people that pooled a lot of resources, time and coin to me. You've also spread a lot of negative publicity about your game for how quickly you ban and ruin a lot of peoples pooled efforts.

Gromph from Addiction
Vipin from Ebonlore

also suspended on Tyranny.

[Elerion]

For what it's worth, our architect and guild leader had their suspensions lifted less than 48 hours after submitting an e-mail. Still shitty, but at least they're back in action.

[Deris]

Pro move by Funcom. Nice game you got there.

[Tuco]

They're still adding people to the ban list apparently. People are trying to launder the money they get from quests/grinding, heh.

Still no real responses to the banning either.

[Kolle]

maybe funcom made some mistakes. you have to also consider that if someone is a cheater then it wouldn't require much effort on their part to pretend they were legit and post a letter saying they didn't do anything wrong.

[krinkled]

Originally Posted by Tuco

They're still adding people to the ban list apparently. People are trying to launder the money they get from quests/grinding, heh.

Still no real responses to the banning either.

Alot of those people are full of shit. Even if the guild leader himself was not exploiting, the members that were "contributing" the gold were exploiters.

I like the fact that Funcom is taking a very tough stance against this.

Did you expect the guild leaders to admit to it??? Of course they are going to play innocent victims!

[Fammaden]

Originally Posted by Kolle

maybe funcom made some mistakes. you have to also consider that if someone is a cheater then it wouldn't require much effort on their part to pretend they were legit and post a letter saying they didn't do anything wrong.

Wouldn't FC potentially have the ability to track where all the money came from? Not sure if that would be too intensive with trading from one character to another and stuff, but they could have the ability to see that certain gold came from non legit means. Kind of hard to believe they are just banning anyone with a decent stockpile and progression on a keep, but I guess Blizzard banned a bunch of guild banks at one point to just because they were holding piles of gold.

[Fammaden]

Originally Posted by krinkled

Alot of those people are full of shit. Even if the guild leader himself was not exploiting, the members that were "contributing" the gold were exploiters.

Well were other people in connection banned too or just the guys holding the big stashes?

[Elerion]

Ï don't get what sort of "gold exploiting" anyone would have done at this point. A level 80 character will have made 10-15gold leveling up. As far as I know very few of the banned characters had over 100 gold even after considering spending. If people were exploiting, we're talking a couple gold at most.

For our guild, 99% of the cash was raised by 4 of us that outleveled the others, and I guarantee you none of us exploited for it. The whole guild contributed, but I doubt anyone else put in more than a gold or two. We still got two people (architect and guildleader) suspended for 48 hours.

[spronk]

imo this was more a "stunt" to tell subscribers that they will ban first and ask questions later. It will definitely detract people from botting, hacking, etc if they think/know Funcom will be aggressive on it. You pretty much know most guild leaders at this point are like "dont send me any fucking money I dont wanna get banned".