26 Reply by Saha (edited by Saha 2011-02-13 18:42:26)

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Re: Insurance action

Ember wrote:

You got caught gaming the system... Insurance exists to indemnify not enrich, you should have known that without having to be told.  Blaming DEV's for your own F-UPs is weak, admins that actually enforce penalties for exploiting are good...

IMO, every major producers considered running an insurance fraud, not all of them followed through.  Having a bit of NIC wiped after exploiting isn't unduly harsh so just take it on the chin and move on.

Try rereading what I wrote earlier. NIC wipe is not an issue at all, at least for me (actually I personally lost 0 NIC). Issue is how it was handled, starting from time it took react to how actually "fix" was performed to how DEVs pretended to be white knights fighting the insurance fraud.
While actually those people who are being named and shamed today were pointing out the insurance issues to devs months ago as well as providing with variaety of possible solutions. So yes, go ahead and play white knights. Some people will believe it. But fact is you, Devs, *** up big time and try to channel down your own *** up on people who were actually trying to help you months ago. Way to go.

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Re: Insurance action

well joke pointed it out months ago too. Difference is we then didn't go do it as its no good for the game.

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns us, “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags."
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Re: Insurance action

Exploiters cry me a river ... you're lucky that DEVs doesn't used banhammer in first time ...

29 Reply by Tiggus (edited by Tiggus 2011-02-13 19:10:46)

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Re: Insurance action

All I know is GG didn't do insurance fraud and our bank account got wiped too...Not sure how they calculated this but I have to agree it seems to have some flaws....

Not like we were rich or anything but they definitely didn't research it very well.  We do use corp insurance for a lot of our bots but they get lost in pvp and pve like they are supposed to, so it's pretty much BS.  I think one of our guys blew up 4 of his own tyrannos *once* to get some cash for a heavy mech when they first came out, but that certainly wasn't "gaming the system".

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Re: Insurance action

sorry to hear that tiggus.

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns us, “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags."
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Re: Insurance action

It's cool devs took care of it after they investigated.

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Re: Insurance action

I'd like to clear up some misinformations:

  • There were no players or corporations who have owned over 1 billion NIC all by themselves at the time of our investigation.

  • We certainly didn't remove any items from any storage.

  • We didn't remove any money not associated to the suspected frauds. The 0 NIC accounts some of you see are because those corporations simply didn't have enough money on their account to cover it all. In these cases we went on with the private accounts of those corporation members who have actually executed the frauds or were connected to them.

  • Asking "how can we have 0 NIC, didn't we do anything for 3 months?" is very short-sighted. Ask yourself how much money you have spent on items and raw materials, how much money you have currently in assets and market buy orders, or how much you have traded or simply transferred to your own members.

33 Reply by Gaulois (edited by Gaulois 2011-02-13 21:10:15)

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Re: Insurance action

Dear DEv Zoom, I think this change was a gigantic *** on your part.

Please, allow me to explain:

I am currently victim of your overzealed whipehammer.

It is true that at some point, I did blow up a few bots for quick cash. That's true, because I was out of cash, and had no other alternatives, being a producer. (I don't mine.)

Why would I wait for a bot to sell on the market for 900k, when I can simply blow it up for 1 million.
It looked fairly normal, specially when I had to raise another skill (Insurance cost reduction) to really get any profits from it.

In my logs, I have a total of 13 assault bots that looks suspicious, as they were destroyed by corp-mates. Some were still destroyed normally, because we were simply having fun around ICS alpha.

Anyway... 13 bots, that cost a little under 900K to produce, that's a whooping 150k benefit per explosion. (and level 5 insurance cost reduction)
Yes, they cost that-much, because I was buying every material on the market. I'm not a miner, I am a producer.

I made something like 2 millions on the back of the insurance. And you removed 35 millions from my account. (I can't remember exactly how much I lost, but it's between 25-40M)
I am down to 1 million. It doesn't look normal, nor fair, at all.


Don't you get it? The reason small PvP corps were still actives, is because when a bot explode, they get enough money to buy a new bot, insure-it, and repair some T1 modules to directly jump back into the fight.


We are a 15 people corporation, we don't produce much, everyone (double accounts excepted) is PvP specced. It's utterly impossible we could have fraud as much as you seems to claim we did. Yet all our most active players lost money.

Are we getting punished because we bought bots on the market, and used them in PvP? It's not our fault the market price went down. Are you saying we shouldn't PvP in Perpetuum? All the recent changes seems to go that way.

You are killing all the small corps. Do you really want the game to be about 3 major alliance, each one on a isolated island, never going out as they have everything they would ever need on it?

It looks like the most short-sighted one is you.

My blog about MMO design:
http://mmockery.wordpress.com/
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Re: Insurance action

Dear Gaulois,

If you're interested you're welcome to contact me in private so we can show you how much more than 13 bots we are talking about here.

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Re: Insurance action

DEV Zoom wrote:

Dear Gaulois,

If you're interested you're welcome to contact me in private so we can show you how much more than 13 bots we are talking about here.

I would love to know indeed.

My blog about MMO design:
http://mmockery.wordpress.com/
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Re: Insurance action

I was reading on the archived Beta forums about players and corps that would exploit bugs to exaggerate and highlight those errors to encourage the Dev's to fix them as quickly as possible.

In this thread, I'm reading that this was a known issue for some time, but no action was taken by the devs to corret it.

The difference now however, is this is not beta, the game is live. Exploiting bugs, even with the intention of making the game better, ruins the active game balance. Beta wasn't a problem because everything was going to be reset when it went live anyway.

The devs had no choice but to 'reset' the exploit.

I 1000% agree that they should have done SOMETHING about it much much sooner, even if it was to suspend insurance until they could work out a better system. But large scale exploitation of the bug did not help the game.

The real losers are the smaller corps that 'dabbled' with the exploit, and not the mass exploiters, that probably didn't need the NIC anyway.

Directly at the devs - being 'honest' with us doens't change the fact that you too should bear some of the burden for not being more PROACTIVE. I was just thinking about how very little actual information is flowing from you to us about the game.

I think even a blog post like "Hey, we know about the Insurance thing and we are working on a resolution. We are watching for this activity, so please don't exploit it or we will be forced to take action against you."

would it be so hard to acutally open discussions with the community about these things? What are forums for anyway!?!

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Re: Insurance action

Too little too late. That's all I have to say.

The Game

38 Reply by Saha (edited by Saha 2011-02-13 22:03:14)

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Re: Insurance action

Tiggus wrote:

It's cool devs took care of it after they investigated.

Glad to hear that. At least something is being done properly after first *** up. Would have been lovely if they did investigations first and wiped *** after though instead of randomly targeting "suspected frauds" as Zoom calls them in his post.

@Zoom:

There were no players or corporations who have owned over 1 billion NIC all by themselves at the time of our investigation.

Not really. You perfectly know you're wrong, same as I do. Nice touch with 1 NIC though.

39 Reply by Draz (edited by Draz 2011-02-13 21:59:01)

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Re: Insurance action

DEV Zoom wrote:

I'd like to clear up some misinformations:

  • There were no players or corporations who have owned over 1 billion NIC all by themselves at the time of our investigation.

  • We certainly didn't remove any items from any storage.

  • We didn't remove any money not associated to the suspected frauds. The 0 NIC accounts some of you see are because those corporations simply didn't have enough money on their account to cover it all. In these cases we went on with the private accounts of those corporation members who have actually executed the frauds or were connected to them.

  • Asking "how can we have 0 NIC, didn't we do anything for 3 months?" is very short-sighted. Ask yourself how much money you have spent on items and raw materials, how much money you have currently in assets and market buy orders, or how much you have traded or simply transferred to your own members.

Dear Dev Zoom,

As long as you are clearing up misinformation, how about being more forthcoming with facts.

Please name the "many more" corporations who participated in insurance fraud and were affected by the NIC confiscation.

Blog wrote:

The vast majority of these frauds originate from the corporations Menace to Society, X-23, Mahtisoturit, BattleAxe, Not Amused and E=Mk2 but there are many more (the frauds were not necessarily executed by the corporations but by their members without the corps' general knowledge).

Thank you.

Reactor......ONLINE
Sensors......ONLINE
Weapons......ONLINE
All systems nominal.

40 Reply by Lupus Aurelius (edited by Lupus Aurelius 2011-02-13 22:11:25)

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Re: Insurance action

DEV Zoom wrote:

I'd like to clear up some misinformations:

  • There were no players or corporations who have owned over 1 billion NIC all by themselves at the time of our investigation.

  • We certainly didn't remove any items from any storage.

  • We didn't remove any money not associated to the suspected frauds. The 0 NIC accounts some of you see are because those corporations simply didn't have enough money on their account to cover it all. In these cases we went on with the private accounts of those corporation members who have actually executed the frauds or were connected to them.

  • Asking "how can we have 0 NIC, didn't we do anything for 3 months?" is very short-sighted. Ask yourself how much money you have spent on items and raw materials, how much money you have currently in assets and market buy orders, or how much you have traded or simply transferred to your own members.

I logged on today, found wallet empty. Every bit of it I earned thru assignments and thru farming kernals.  None of my nic in my personal wallet came from any othr activity.  Basically, this was theft, for whatever motivation, just because an individual was in a corp suspected of the activity.  If you check your logs, or did a thorough investigation, you would have seen that. 

To just remove personal isk from a player just because they are a member of a corp, regardless of it being legitimately earned, is totally unacceptable, and should be to any player in this game.  WE ARE THE CUSTOMERS HERE!

Before you condemn someone for some percieved issue, you are obligated to do accurate investigation, instead of just punishing by decree.

*edited* I'm being civil here, I'm only asking the same of you. Thanks. - DEV Zoom

In the gods we trust, all others bring data!

41 Reply by Euphoric (edited by Euphoric 2011-02-13 22:06:33)

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Re: Insurance action

I would assume that the corps that were listed were done so in order of severity. I believe NA had many assault suicidish roams on domhalaran that were encouraged by good insurance payouts. AFAIK they did not actually scam as a systematic way to earn NIC. Pretty sure most of the community, including unnamed beta corps, got their NIC "honestly," whatever that means.

Took too long, but late is better than never. It's nice to see that a severe precedent is set for "exploiting."


I hope the developers don't think that this issue is over. You have certainly made mistakes with this correction, and I hope you are willing to review alot of individual cases.

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Re: Insurance action

Moar tears plix!

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Re: Insurance action

Saha: would you like to share your secret with us? If we don't know about it, it's only logical that such amount didn't come up during our investigation so we couldn't have removed it either.

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Re: Insurance action

That was a good decision.

Thanks to be attentive to equilibrate the game.

Good Job.

45 Reply by Saha (edited by Saha 2011-02-13 22:16:33)

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Re: Insurance action

DEV Zoom wrote:

Saha: would you like to share your secret with us? If we don't know about it, it's only logical that such amount didn't come up during our investigation so we couldn't have removed it either.

First of all, going to forum fight with random consumer is poor choise. Same as was poor choise to transfer 1 NIC to account after wiping it. It just shows you became personal.

Now let's get to the point. Are you claiming that investigation did not show any corp with more than 1 billion earned via insurance fraud? Because if so, you better get ready to pay back some cash as there were corps who lost quite a lot more than 1 billion NIC during your crusade.

46 Reply by Euphoric (edited by Euphoric 2011-02-13 22:20:42)

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Re: Insurance action

Arga wrote:

I think even a blog post like "Hey, we know about the Insurance thing and we are working on a resolution. We are watching for this activity, so please don't exploit it or we will be forced to take action against you."

This. I wouldn't care to venture a guess at how bad certain parties in the game were set back capital-wise, since that would only encourage vultures...but a notice of any kind would have been more considerate of a VERY active and vocal section of the player base.

It's not like they could have gone back and "undone" the insurance frauding...and a little heads-up could have gone a long way toward preparing the "offenders" for a sudden, complete loss of NIC. Now it may very well be a crisis for them.

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Re: Insurance action

I stand corrected. I  suicided over 30 bots for the insurance since December.

Still, before this announcement, I didn't know it was considered an exploit. Specially when a bot costed me around 950k-1,1M on the market (or if I bought the material on the market, a bit under 900k to produce).

I probably earned less than 5 millions in total on theses bots. I would have made more money by farming kernels, or doing transport missions.

My blog about MMO design:
http://mmockery.wordpress.com/
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Re: Insurance action

You cheated, you got caught and you got fined.

You admit you were aware of the exploit and you still went ahead and did it.

So stop crying about it, you all got what your own actions warranted.

Now I believe the DEVs were lenient, but keep crying and we will see if they continue to be.

We are now all affected by your actions as none of us can insure bots atm.

BRAVO DEVs, well done.

49 Reply by Voodh (edited by Voodh 2011-02-13 22:39:08)

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Re: Insurance action

Gaulois wrote:

I probably earned less than 5 millions in total on theses bots. I would have made more money by farming kernels, or doing transport missions.

And you should have, instead of frauding.

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Re: Insurance action

Crosshair wrote:

We are now all affected by your actions as none of us can insure bots atm.
BRAVO DEVs, well done.

That's actually because of a insurance exploit completely separate from the widespread insurance fraud.  One I would consider a real exploit and worthy of punitive measures.