It's interesting to read from both perspectives.  Everyones reality of the world is different, as far as I was concerned we did publicise this to the devs and although it can be considered taking advantage there wasn't any nefarious cloak and dagger on our part.

We quite openly told the devs we were doing it, so no one was 'caught'. I even joked with a GM in general chat one day about it.

Obviously it was a broken mechanic that anyone could use and we did, in good faith.

Now the way it has been handled is shockingly bad, if the devs had approached us we would have worked with then, as it is they have told us off like controlling parents and created a lot of anger and frustration across the community.

All i can say is try talking to us as adults In the future Devs, you might be surprised at the result

nice read ., ethical discrepances at most, or also "Rookie Dev team meets Mmo shark".
Seems Devs had a naive behaviour on this subject, but good comunication can fix all, and its good to hear some apologies (rare response to a common situation).
Players where told insurance was legit, and some decided to prove how wrong Dev´s where, get used to that. Some ppl play games to find their flaws, they are entitled to do so, but imho Dev´s works is too to perma balance game and even make adhoc rules to correct imbalances caused by large escale frauds. Insurance had no problem at all itself unless u make it you main activity in game, why do so, because you gain more billions? pls, ethical issues indeed.
life working as intended

Every game has these type of bugs.  It's well known to anyone who plays mmo's.  It can break the the game in a day if left unchecked.  Anyone who uses these exploits knows its not part of the games intened play and has a chance of getting banned.

Its the same in every game.  Toon gets banned for exploiting:  QQ a river on the forum.

"I didnt know it wasnt allowed"
"Everyone else is doing it" 
"I only used it 1 time" 
"Im going to call my lawyer"
"Everyone petition the GMs for me"

Just feel lucky they only took your nic.

A little common sense helps a lot. It is the responsability of the players to ensure that theyre not doing anything unwanted - and of course the scale at which things happen is a quiet important point.

The mechanic can work as intended and still it can be misused. To insure against unwanted loss is the intention - to insure against wanted loss is not.

edit: if yure tried to be on the safe side and asked the DEVs about the mechanic, you should have asked: "is it ok to use insurance to gain money in large scale?" - and not - "is insurance working as intended?"

The intention is a different one - and this is about intentions only.

NOW you see what you've done? server is broken...IT"S ALL YOUR FAULT!

IMO, both sides of this issue are right AND wrong. 

Devs:
Wrongs:
"Naming & Shaming"
"Passing judgment prior to warning that this act was indeed an exploit"
"Neglected a broken element for far too long, to the point that it became a serious problem"
Rights:
"Finally took the time to fix this broken element"
"Accepted responsibility for some of their mistakes"

Players:
Wrongs:
"Overly used this broken system, which they clearly felt was wrong since they continuously felt the need to question GM's and DEV's about the legitimacy of this behaviour"
Rights:
"Overly used this broken system to force AC to pay attention to the problem; so that it could be fixed before the game becomes too old to be fixable and maintain it's player base"

Both sides argued over moot points, this happens when people become defensive.  It's a natural reaction when someone feels attacked.  Once someone is in defensive mode they are far less likely to come out of it for a while.  They will continue to defend their actions regardless of being right or wrong. 

So to everyone involved I say to you, for the love of gaming and humanity, "Please, take a step back from this 'event' and take a breather.  We're all here because we enjoy this game.  None of us want to leave, but we all want a little respect.  Respect that WILL NOT be given while throwing around rediculous propaganda and finger pointing.  I recommend we all apologize, shake hands, agree that this was handled poorly (on all sides), and move on, because if we can't, or won't, this will get much worse and a lot more aspirin will be needed. 

PEACE!

I love all the haters/jealous posters who still dont get it.

So i'll put it in simple terms you can understand, sitting comfortably?

• We told them about this issue

• We then confirmed that it was still open to abuse and told them we were going to use it quite publicly

• When the light finally dawned and they realised *** people can make a lot of money out of this abuse they stopped it.

• The point being that they havent handled it well at all.

• It categorically wasnt illegal and wasnt an exploit and therefore open to be used as intended.

Now i'll agree that Rule 7 may have been broken and if we'd only blown up a 100 bots a week no one would have done anything about it.

However the positive out of this is that Insurance was removed briefly which is what we always wanted and hopefully the new insurance system will mean there is real loss in this game for a change, rather than easymode pvp for everyone

lol you mean the devs intended insurance to be a money printing machine? nice troll

We told them it was a cash machine, they knew it would be used to make withdrawals, we told them we would.  That sounds to me like they didnt really understand the mechanic, every game has features in it.

Not once did they say, "please dont", "wtf?", "wait, let us look at this first" or similar.  If at anytime in one of the many opportunities had they said something like that people (i like to think the best of them) wouldnt have done it.

This one we've fixed now.  You can all thank Infestation for that, we'll keep looking for other broken mechanics and highlight them to the Dev team in the most effective way possible

viva la revolution

oh now it's "bad DEVs are banbaited us" lol wtf. if you know that was unusual and maybe wrong, and even said DEVs about that, wtf did u used it and wtf r u whinning now?

M2S generates NIC in multiple ways. It's a large organized corp residing in a large organized alliance.

Insurance was the easiest, most organized way to make NIC for a large group of players. Especially when 3/4 of our members are bored to death because there is no one ever online to PvP us anymore...

Majority of you guys playing this game park on Alpha and AFK mine all damn day. Then you sell the ore back to M2S - BTW IS THIS AN EXPLOIT???? What a joke this all is...

You guys should thank us. We were responsible for buying all of your ore and items on the market. This is a sandbox, with what 2 hundred players online? 1/2 of which are alts. WTF would of bought your stuff, if not for us.

Everyone needs to think about what happened and grow a set.

Devs, fix your damn game and give us something to PvP over. Don't punish your customers for things your responsible for. And hire someone with a college business degree please.

-Big C

We lost very little actually, just some NIC.  I guess you just dont get it, but thats ok, anyone of differing life challanges can play games.  You keep going kiddo, dont let them tell you otherwise