Crosspost: Canary in the Coal Mine

[p0intman]

Note: This was originally posted on the official forums by Kedric and the post is located here: http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/i...al-mine.72781/

I have edited nothing, but think this deserves some commentary to a bit wider of an audience.

I have seen trends in games in the past and it's easy for me to tell now when a game is going to be successful or not, and whether or not a game has competent management running things.

The current handling of exploiting/cheating in this game is abysmal, and it can and will utterly train wreck what little credibility SOE has left with the wider gaming community. As in, PlanetSide 2 could end up a permanent ghost town just like PlanetSide 1, and even seal the fate of SOE's F2P business completely if not this branch of the company itself.

Right now PAYING CUSTOMERS who have much to lose are being punished unfairly with permanent bans for doing silly stuff like making enemy faction characters to duel with or test game mechanics with. What makes this particularly offensive is the fact that this game is FREE TO PLAY, so the very people who have the most to lose and can thus be kept in line with a simple warning are instead punished the most severely.

This offends me so greatly because of the attitude that it demonstrates on behalf of management. Since management cannot - with their current methods - permanently eradicate the griefing scum who mass kill people with teleportation / god mode hacks, the management instead takes out their frustrations on the very people they should be protecting. This kind of attitude is utterly ineffective and is a clear indication of poor problem solving skills.

Please note that I have no stake in this issue other than my wider concerns for the game, as my account is in good standing and no one I know personally has been banned.

Now let me further cover the major issue of rampant cheating/exploiting that will kill this game and its business model outright if not addressed promptly.

1) Deliberate mass crash bug/exploit.

Currently, there is a bug in the game that can mass crash players in a given area.

This is now being exploited on many servers by many outfits/platoons to take out enemy forces in preparation for an invasion to easily secure the base.

The use of this exploit is reaching epidemic levels on Connery server in particular, and is one of the main reasons I am here posting on the forums instead of enjoying the game.

If exploits of this degree of severity are not fixed in a timely manner now and in the future, then PlanetSide 2 is over. Stick a fork in it, it's done. I've seen bugs and exploits on this level before, and they kill games in their crib when the dev team ignores them.

My entire outfit is pretty upset about this exploit, and now that they know it is 100% a repeatable exploit that is being used to deliberately swing battles in enemy favor they are beside themselves with frustration.

Let me repeat SOE, this will kill your game if you don't fix it ASAP. PRIORTY A-NUMBER ONE.

2) Deliberate mass kill griefing with god mode / teleportation hack.

I'm not talking about the occasional punk who is cheating to win or padding his stats. I'm talking about people who have absolutely no intention of hiding their cheating or operating under a pretense. These griefers are here to do one thing and one thing only: kill people until they quit the game out of frustration. I would not put it past SOE's competition in the MMO world to be deliberately building hacks and trying to ruin their business model. After all, who better to program and use a hack but game creators themselves?

These griefers make explicit and obvious use of teleportation hacks and aimbots, including even god mode now. There is nothing a player can do to respond, you can't kill these punks even with C4 and tank explosions in their face. It is classical God Mode, it is literally that bad. You can even be hunted down in the safe zone / pain fields and killed repeatedly until you leave the continent or log out of the game.

Suffice it to say I have personally experienced this on more than one occasion now and it is rapidly destroying my interest in this game. If you have not yet experienced this behavior yourself, then be thankful, because it is utterly demoralizing to be a paying customer in a game and be relentlessly griefed by a cheater who you cannot retaliate against without any customer support for over an hour on end.

I place this issue as priority number two only because it has not yet reached the widespread epidemic levels that the crashing exploit has. But make no mistake, failing to respond to this issue in a timely manner will most certainly kill PlanetSide 2 and even SOE's entire business model for this game just as assuredly.

Conclusion

It's time to get on the ball SOE. It's make it or break it time, and I'm not going to say this again. Solutions exist to these problems - many of these solutions being posted in this very forum. You need only read and implement them. PlanetSide 2 is an epically wonderful game and I have already given you folks nearly $100 in membership / Station Cash purchases. I feel that this is money well spent even in spite of the current state of the game, because I've enjoyed hours of excellent gameplay already far beyond what any single player game can currently deliver. That said, my continued financial support of this game and indeed any SOE ventures in the future hinges entirely upon your prompt and immediate attention to these issues. Hire people if you need to, fire people if you need to. Get the job done, because there is precious little credibility left for you in the community and these sorts of issues will be the nail in the coffin for your reputation if you don't handle them now.

And that would be a tragedy, because games like PlanetSide 1 and PlanetSide 2 don't come around often.

firstly, the first point about deliberately crashing servers.. is abhorrent. I would very much like to see those responsible, as an outfit, permanently banned. Additionally, they should be actively shunned and ex-communicated. Overloading the servers in order to gain a combat advantage is detestable and is the mark of an inferior player. They are no better, as an outfit and as individual players, than actual hackers who modify their clients to gain advantages.

To the devs that read this forum: Fix this shit, and make a public example out of those that are doing it. Name and shame them.