Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Credit Dupe...
… A credit dupe has surfaced. We are aware of it, andhave put a solutionin place.
We know who did it. We log everyone’s financial transactions, including WHO AND WHERE THE MONEY IS TRANSFERRED TO.
Please be careful of receiving large sums of money from anyone.
We are going to suspend, and then ban anyone who has participated in this dupe, which includes transfer or reception of funds.
If you know of a PA hall that has received these funds, DO NOT attempt to retrieve any money... this will flag you as dirty as well. And anyone you transfer money to becomes dirty as well. And so on...
We take this extremely seriously, and will go to great lengths to protect your play experience.
Thx,
The Star Wars Galaxies Team
Message Edited by JustG on 08-25-2004 07:35 PM
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All persons potentially involved in the dupe have been banned or suspended. -
People who have been banned or suspended are going through the appeals process now. Each case is resolved privately between the customer and customer service. The appeals process will be complete by early next week. -
Over 75% of the duped credits are being removed from the economy preventing hyper-inflation in the SWG economy. -
No vendor owners were suspended for purchases made from their vendor with duped credits, only people that had money directly transferred to them were affected. -
We are committed to maintaining a safe and fair playing environment and exploiting will not be tolerated.
Much of the discussion on this has centered around the possibility that innocents were being banned unfairly. In a case like this, our first priority is to suspend accounts, and freeze the movement of the duped credits in order to limit damage to the game economy. There is always a chance that in doing so, players who received the credits unawares will find their accounts suspended. This is why we have an appeals process--so that each individual case can be examined by customer service after the fact.
Over the last week we have been carefully looking at each appeal. In this case approximately 15% of the appealing accounts were deemed to be not involved by this process. These accounts have been restored and credited for the play time lost, and each player has also received an apology from us.
We understand and appreciate the concern shown by both these players and their friends ... we do not want to wrongly accuse anyone. We hope that everyone appreciates that our primary goal is preserving the integrity of the game. We'd like to thank those players affected for their patience and forbearance while we investigated. As a reminder, anyone banned or suspended can appeal that action by emailing [email protected]
We have full and complete logs of every transaction, and all appeals will be scrutinized carefully.
We need to stress that the suspensions occurred at such a rapid rate in order to lock the credits down before they were dispensed into the economy. We apologize again to those that were inconvenienced by this, but we are always going to try to protect your play experience as much as possible.
The majority of the appeals from the recent exploit are complete at this point. About three dozen appeals are left to process--mostly ones that came in during the last 24 hours. We hope to have these resolved very soon.
When all is said and done, despite any controversy that may have arisen, we believe that the end result has been:
- the removal of around 200 players who were willing to damage the play experience of others for personal gain
- the confiscation of approximately 550,000,000,000 credits that were undermining the legitimate earnings of adventurers, crafters, and merchants throughout SWG
We remain committed to enforcing our terms of service to ensure a safe and fair environment for the players of Star Wars Galaxies. Thanks again for your patience during this past week.
- The Star Wars Galaxies Team