FF14 - turn yourself in if you're a cheater or get spanked
PostPosted:Mon Sep 27, 2010 9:27 pm
http://support.na.square-enix.com/news. ... 0gv8hl57k4
In FF14, it appears you only get XP for hitting stuff (killing the mob actually yields no XP, but it will let you redeem whatever XP you've been building up while hitting it). To prevent healers from never getting XP, they get XP for casting heals and buffs on people. At least that's how I understand it.
Now, if you've ever played Shining Force or any SRPG where there's a system like this, you'll probably realize the first thing to do is just KEEP ON HEAL YOURSELF OVER AND OVER. I mean sure some games makes it you have to take damage but it's not like it's hard to have someone whacked you for one and then heal again. So people are getting crazy XP for just healing themselves over and over.
Now I don't care if they define that as an exploit. I mean you can do this in Shining Force 2 to get healers to level 99 with 5 lifebars while killing stuff generally stops at level ~40 or so, so clearly it is can be pretty overpowered. But what the heck is this 'turn yourself in before it's too late'? Is this kindergarden or what? I got the feeling it'd be awfully hard to actually monitor this without excessive logs. You might not even have this information available, and there are games that have such a system (WAR comes to mind) that isn't exploitable. In short, it'd be really hard to enforce this, so if I were them I would just say 'well we never played Shining Force so we got tripped up here' and just move on, unless you want to do something drastic like roll back everyone who has played a healer class for the last week (probably not smart).
I mean it's not like this incident will kill FF14 or whatever. Either people will report themselves for whatever reason, or they won't and almost certainly there will be no way to catch them, but the way they handled it strikes me as totally amateurish. It's true you can suspend people even if you totally screwed up, like say if WoW introduced a bug that makes killing critters drop 100000 gold and then they suspended you for chain killing critters that's within their right because you're technically exploiting (anyone can tell this isn't supposed to happen). But even in this case they still have to catch you doing this! Here Sqix is saying we probably can't catch you but you better confess or bad things will happen to you!
In FF14, it appears you only get XP for hitting stuff (killing the mob actually yields no XP, but it will let you redeem whatever XP you've been building up while hitting it). To prevent healers from never getting XP, they get XP for casting heals and buffs on people. At least that's how I understand it.
Now, if you've ever played Shining Force or any SRPG where there's a system like this, you'll probably realize the first thing to do is just KEEP ON HEAL YOURSELF OVER AND OVER. I mean sure some games makes it you have to take damage but it's not like it's hard to have someone whacked you for one and then heal again. So people are getting crazy XP for just healing themselves over and over.
Now I don't care if they define that as an exploit. I mean you can do this in Shining Force 2 to get healers to level 99 with 5 lifebars while killing stuff generally stops at level ~40 or so, so clearly it is can be pretty overpowered. But what the heck is this 'turn yourself in before it's too late'? Is this kindergarden or what? I got the feeling it'd be awfully hard to actually monitor this without excessive logs. You might not even have this information available, and there are games that have such a system (WAR comes to mind) that isn't exploitable. In short, it'd be really hard to enforce this, so if I were them I would just say 'well we never played Shining Force so we got tripped up here' and just move on, unless you want to do something drastic like roll back everyone who has played a healer class for the last week (probably not smart).
I mean it's not like this incident will kill FF14 or whatever. Either people will report themselves for whatever reason, or they won't and almost certainly there will be no way to catch them, but the way they handled it strikes me as totally amateurish. It's true you can suspend people even if you totally screwed up, like say if WoW introduced a bug that makes killing critters drop 100000 gold and then they suspended you for chain killing critters that's within their right because you're technically exploiting (anyone can tell this isn't supposed to happen). But even in this case they still have to catch you doing this! Here Sqix is saying we probably can't catch you but you better confess or bad things will happen to you!