Busted!
Recent Exploit
Recently we discovered an exploit that, if abused, could generate platinum. We restarted the servers the other day to patch it, and begun investigations into abusers. We found 3 people that have been abusing it for quite a while.
Exploiting a bug such as this is one of the worst forms of cheating, far worse than the use of third party programs. It has the potential of affecting the entire server in a negative way, and furthermore it breaks the trust and friendships you may have with other players as they now too are affected by your actions. The punishments for this are severe. All associated accounts, meaning any account this person logged into, will be receiving a form of disciplinary action regardless of owner.
There were only a handful of accounts that were used to perform the exploit, however, the exploiters have logged into 106 different accounts in total. Of these accounts, 86 of them are guilded in The Mystical Order. While most of these accounts are owned by other players who may have had no knowledge of the actions of the people they were sharing their accounts with, the account owners take that risk when they share their information.
We had a CSR Staff meeting last night to decide how to proceed, and we agreed on the following.
All accounts are initially receiving bans. Accounts that are owned by the persons actually performing the exploit will not be unbanned, neither will accounts that generally have no owner (Shared banks, porters, trackers, etc).
Accounts owned by others that were logged into by the exploiters a small number of times will be reviewed on a case by case basis, and could be reduced to a 2 to 4 week suspension. Only accounts logged into a small number of times will be given this reduction.
We also discussed any actions to take against the guild as a whole, taking into consideration other recent events such as another guild member recently banned for heavy RMT inolvement, and an officer recently suspended for ninja looting.
It is based on that information that we are raid suspending the guild for 2 weeks. We brought up the possibility of completely disbanding The Mystical Order. Personally, I find it hard to believe that TMO leadership was not aware or suspicious of this happening, however we are only able to take action on the information we have.
