Anyway, talking about all of that is a bit premature, I need to see the final log analysis.

To be clear, this hasn't happened yet. Just engineering, testing and releasing the update on Friday took all day, and late into the night.

The log analysis had to be deferred until this coming week.

"I really don't like "grind". I can say there is an improved design around all of this, and a different "drop" system that's been in-testing (in production) for almost a year."

u say that yet just made capships useless in sss farmin, i get the drop rate decrease yet really this low, on top of a sss sector limit? might as well just stop drops on turret kills.

u say that yet just made capships useless in sss farmin, i get the drop rate decrease yet really this low, on top of a sss sector limit? might as well just stop drops on turret kills.

I also wrote here that I'm making whatever interim changes I need to, while we're working on the intended solution.

I couldn't get the new Hive system done in time, and some of you are too effective at farming. So, it is what it is, for now.

The current implementation does not impact people who want to go after convoys, which was one issue that came up before, in the "NPCs drop nothing" scenario.

The log analysis had to be deferred until this coming week.

We've completed log analysis and made some inventory adjustments. Like the previous trading situation, we only adjusted the characters who had the most extreme gains.

Hands in the air the sss i farmed using autoturrets has been taken and i'm not complaining just being open to what i did and that is has been removed.

Yup. Although much like the trading exploit, we didn't take everything, we aren't trying to nullify people's time. We just adjusted things to be more in-line with the time dedication at a more reasonable drop-rate.

Anyway, that's all for administrative stuff on this topic. There will be continued gameplay changes and tweaks on this, going forward.

this kind of farming has been going on since the arrival of capships (in a fully automatic fashion) and speaking of "fundamental differences".. well.. pre-existing turret bots can do this task and have completely independent targeting and independent triggering and the ability to fire with the captain undocked. theres no real difference when the end result is a giant pile of drops in all cases. so im with ironlord on that one and he shouldnt be so easily dismissed.

it should also be mentioned that many of us were capable of farming these levels of sss completely by hand, and not just capable.. some of us have been doing just that. the concern seems a little bit out of the blue considering how much resources are really stored out there in the universe already. stockpiles of drops didnt suddenly begin with activateturrets and its of little surprise to anyone that a lot of us went out to kill bots with the new feature.

while hun's suggestion to allow manual turreting is great and all, whats to stop people from "manually" (automatically) firing capswarms and gems with gunners? theres nothing to stop it. people have always done it and will continue to do it. not that i have a problem with it personally, i dont mind other peoples business but apparently its suddenly a problem.

none of us were going out of our way to create work for anyone and none of us want to hurt the network, if the drop system was/is flawed then its always been flawed. the turrets performed exactly as they were designed to from my point of view. activateturrets is virtually automatic in and of itself without extraordinary modification.

people will go on to use turrets in the same way but in different scenarios.. is it still an "exploit" when you rotate your target and fire on players? how about camping a wormhole. its literally the same sequence. will it happen? its already happening. do we put a stop to that as well? theres a zero reaction time, the turrets fire the instant they see a target.

how about using turrets to greatly damage everything in a sector to near death but not actually getting the kill.. then getting the kill through other means.. exploit?

how about sitting on a collector sector exit point instead of a spawn, with full gunners to make sure extra bots spawn, letting them mine and fill up, then waiting for them to waltz over and kill them all. sounds like 400~500 ore every 8 minutes with only a dozen bots let alone amplifying the number of bots with added player presence. as long as no one kills the queen the exit point will remain the same. exploit?

i placed my goliath in a station sector and let it run wild.. the strikeforce couldnt get near it for the most part.. if one minor capship can devastate the strikeforce, guards and sector in general, whats to stop say two goliaths, or even mighty tridents from camping a station and any players within it in addition to being able to completely annilhilate the strikeforce. is that an exploit?

sure, vets might be able to handle it or call in friends. what about all the players who dont have the knowledge or the resources to handle the situation?

just because people might not be scooping up sss doesnt mean they arent getting rewarded in some way or another.. be it kicks, "denial of service", credits/piracy, and so on. it would seem that almost any use of activateturrets could be an "exploit"..

exploit is being used pretty loosly from what i can see. i do understand lots of drops were generated and that it might not be a great thing, but, of course we try to benefit from a new feature, if a new feature isnt to benefit us, whats its point at all? seemed like a no brainer to farm with the turrets, yet even when we farmed while attending the client its being called an exploit. ridiculous really.

people havent even begun to get creative yet..

I think Inc already covered the rationale behind the dev's actions:

"I received a report from a Player, late yesterday evening, that there was a situation being exploited that allowed a single user to farm upwards of 3500 Synthetic SilkSteel within a few hours, and that this was being done in a completely-AFK, fully-automated fashion, using the new "ActivateTurrets" system.

I validated that there is a dramatic spike in the overall accumulation of SSS over the last couple of days, although I don't have more insight than that."

that doesnt address a single thing i had to say, but thanks for the copy/paste.

3500sss is nothing and thats been going on long before activateturrets. i have no plan on even reading this thread again so no need to reply. the information is there do with it what you will.

Question put to me in-game - "So how much time it took u to farm 3.5k sss ?"

Quote from forum - "single user to farm upwards of 3500 Synthetic SilkSteel within a few hours"

time and time again its been added to "within a few hours" it was never in a few hours more like 7hrs 500 per hour

i have been open honest and happy to do so but its getting my goat when its being exaggerated

There is no need to stir up the drama in general section & shoot incarnate for fixing this ActivateTurrets Exploit. You guys are forgetting it also wasted his 2-3 weeks of Dev's development time & he is still trying to find a reasonable solution for farming.

Just because players exploited before and got away with it doesn't mean that it makes it okay for everyone to do similar activities.

Synthetic Silksteel is a bot drop which helps the players in their capital ships construction. You need approx 2700 sss for Goliath Class Capital ship & approx 8500 sss for Trident Type M.

Ofcourse it was a major exploit - if you're able to generate thousands of sss within a *Single* day by just simply sitting in your capship and activating commands whether you go afk or not is an exploit. Capital ships is kind of a end game thing and it should cost you time to build one.

All incarnate did was reduced the bot drops rate if you kill bots with turrets. I don't know why is it a big deal for players to farm sss with small ships. You can still grab a cenataur and farm sss easy.

Incarnate is trying to make the game fair for everyone. People farmed like 10000 in a single day with this. That was totally not fair. Imagine a single player with capships stocking 300k sss within 2-3 weeks.

I'm glad incarnate took the action against this major exploit & it's not really a big deal if you farm the sss with small ships like cenataur. You still get free repair/refill in capships and can drop the cargo near it & scoop with capship. It already saves you a bunch of time.

Thanks incarnate for making the game fair for everyone :)

Incarnate made it very clear that he was moved to act because of unintended AFK activity involving ActivateTurrets. That's the reason I reiterated what he said, because that fact is the rationale behind the actions he took. It may be that bots provided similar functionality, but not everyone is able to use those bots. I don't need to address each point made in an earlier post, because Inc already covered them in his OP in this thread.

"time and time again its been added to "within a few hours" it was never in a few hours more like 7hrs 500 per hour"

The devs have a robust system of logs. They may have collected anecdotal reports from individuals, but they do have extensive data to back up their statements. The devs may not have been previously aware of the scale at which SSS can be farmed using a bot or ActivateTurrets because there may not have been a system to sound an alarm, but now that they are aware it behooves them to make changes if something is outside of the parameters they have in mind. It's their game, their vision, and their responsibility to make it work as intended.

Hey Scotia, if you think you found other ways to automate stuff or even generate what seems like an extraordinary amount of x, then do you think the answer is to use it to get lots of x? Or could that be exactly the kind of thing Incarnate went on about in his earlier news post?

There has been some huge overreactions in this thread to temporary fix the devs made to the game. Inc called them "interim changes". If you check the suggestion forums, you will see how things might be changing .

The current system with the hive drops will not be the permanent system for the hive drops. Let the devs develop and just have fun waiting for changes to happen.

Ugh.

1) An Exploit is anything that gives a massive and potentially-unintended/unexpected advantage; beyond this, it is particularly self-evident if it can be gamed at-scale and gives long-term benefits (like credits, ores/minerals or drops), and / or undercuts or imbalances well-known gameplay (like the economy, or capship construction). An Exploit is probably best handled by raising the issue instead of exploiting the issue to the maximum extent.

I don't think that actually needs to be explained, I think people want to feel like opposing that is somehow rational, so they can give themselves permission to do whatever they want. Bullshit. Use common sense.

2) IronLord never raised ANY criticisms of "Turret Bots" relating to FARMING. His issues were always about PvP, and were discussed extensively. From a PvP context, there was no way to change anything about turret bots, without removing all turret capabilities from capships (even for real players). There was no administrative solution, which I repeatedly explained to him, but he refuses to believe that.

From what we have seen, at least thus far, most SSS has been farmed using techniques that are much simpler than extensive multi-boxing and scripting of capship turrets.

3) "Other bugs have existed in the past, therefore we shouldn't fix any bugs" is not a perspective we support. We fix bugs when and where we find them, to the best of our ability/relative-priority.

4) If someone claims there's a catastrophic exploit that is being done on an automated basis, yes, I'm going to investigate it. Yes, it may result in fixes to bugs, some of them new, some of them long-standing.

If we see usage of an exploit that is extreme, in compared to expectation and all other similar cases, we're probably going to reverse that result. I think that's reasonable. So, in this case, someone generated 20,000 SSS in a relatively short investment of time, where others generated vastly smaller sums.

5) Could we completely "lock down" the game and prevent exploits? Yes, but not without permanently ceasing forward development. Do you want the game to change? Then get on-board with reporting problems instead of using them for personal gain.

6) We're an Indie, operating a complex, custom-engine, cross-platform MMORPG that ships updates every week or two. In the game industry, this is regarded as something like running a competitive Ultra-marathon, while simultaneously painting a Rembrandt-grade self-portrait.

Have you considered that your expectations might be a little out of whack? No, our monitoring isn't perfect. No, no our tools aren't perfect. No, our ****ing game isn't perfect. But, that is why, to quote what I wrote back on the 13th: "As a result, we have always (necessarily) relied on our userbase to make decisions that are in the best interests of the game "as a whole", as opposed to the benefit of the individual, specifically when it comes to the reporting of exploitable bugs."

7) I am also frustrated by the level of player-manipulation that are accompying these issues. Like, who the hell is "Black Horse"? Oh, of course, that's Pandoram's IP, using a special-case Forum Alt he created today (which is explicitly against the rules) to hypocritically criticize someone else for exploiting the game, right after exploiting the hell out of the game himself. But, he won't post under his own name, because of course his feedback isn't going to be very well-received.

8) The fact that we were not cognizant of the scope of a problem, and that players became used to a problem being the norm, does not mean the problem was acceptable. It isn't going to re-define the generalized meaning of an "exploit".

But people should be very careful when making comparative critiques of our application of the term "exploit". Because, yes, we do call this situation an exploit. And the current investigation and ramifications were very limited in scope (to August), due to the recent launch of ActivateTurrets.

We could go back for years, and look for other forms of large-scale farming. There's a good chance that a great many people would cease to have capital ships if we did that, since we would full-trace all SSS that ever came out of it. Be careful what you wish for.

I just want to point out I was not involved in any of these shenanigans for those who think I am the source, you know who you are :D

From a PvP context, there was no way to change anything about turret bots, without removing all turret capabilities from capships (even for real players).

Well, you could simply remove targeting and +shoot# from being scriptable, while not a solve-all case, it at least makes people use third party applications and not just some lua script that is shared among the elite. "But it breaks auto-stack and chainfire!" - small price to pay in many respects, and isn't the latter something that could be built-into the client already?

You cannot please all the people all the time, best you can hope for is to please some of them some of the time and even that is a lot to ask. Meh, auto turrets is something that should be a thing.

(Facepalm). The point was that IL's post was inaccurate, and his interest had nothing to do with the topic at hand. It was literally a rebuttal that the prior reports had anything to do with farming.

And now you want to expand a pedantic technical debate about whether internal or external triggering solutions would have mollified someone, two+ years ago, who primarily just wanted to ban anyone using "automated turrets" in PvP. And who, likely, would have been just as upset by external triggering.

Because, that's totally what this thread is about.

I think it's probably best that I lock this, now.