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Dec
30

Mission Change: "Safari Cruise"

We recently became aware of an exploit to the "Safari Cruise" mission that could yield an unusually large number of drops, when coordinating tactics across multiple accounts or players. The mission has been pulled offline for the moment, and the drops that were improperly obtained have been removed from player inventories.

To reiterate what I wrote earlier this year, on the previous exploit: If you find something that confers an obviously significant advantage and yields an unusually high value in drops or rewards, REPORT IT.

For one thing, anything Manufactured or gained via content generated from an Exploit is just going to be lost anyway, whenever we trace and remove the content; and that could include items traded to other players (much like the risks of buying stolen merchandise in the real world, we do not "refund" player trades on exploited game content; so be careful who you buy from, limit your trading to other responsible individuals).

Plus, anything other than reporting the problem just ends up hurting the game. It absorbs time for us to do log forensics, it derails carefully-scheduled development plans while we do "emergency analysis" of potential gameplay problems, etc. We have lost months of development time to exploits in the past, which obviously could have been used instead to make the game better, if the problem had simply been reported.

We *could* also have a game completely free of issues and exploits, but it would require us to also stop making gameplay improvements. So, if you want to see the game continue to get frequent additions and changes, then you need to be on board with reporting the inevitable problems. We don't have the benefit of a large Q/A team, we rely on our players to behave responsibly and report issues as they find them. It's part of the basic reality of an independent, actively-developed MMORPG.

Please keep that in mind.