...How about resetting those who used mass hacks, those who switched out engines on ships and so forth? May as well while you are digging through logs.

Please tell me nobody driving this barely-on-the-rails train is wasting their time on resetting stats...

Yeah they are. A few complained about Siegers recent stat humping. Turned out at least one of them had padded their own stats in a similar way. So they both got reset to 0 player kills. Seems only fair that anyone using any cheats to inflate stats should be dealt the same cards, no?

Lots of things would be great/ideal/fair, but the Devs of this game don't have time for any of that.

Anyone who's done something sufficiently out of bounds to merit a stat reset should just get the relevant character(s) deleted. Though I would guess the real time sink is reviewing logs to confirm who did what, cutting in favor of the standard 'Fuck it, just don't do it anymore' VO approach.

I agree lecter, but seeing as how they have just spent weeks pouring through logs to find out what has been found out, why not make it an all around deal?

If they reset 1 person, then reset another to keep "balance", shouldn't all people who cheated get the same treatment? Or there is no balance.

Probably your best idea yet, Yoda! Keep it coming.

I agree. Let's remove guild and group chat from the /vote mute penalty.

We can't even agree on what is cheating. There are lines I don't cross but my lines and yours are probably not in the same place.

Yoda, every single thing we're searching for is a unique timesink. You really want us to burn more time on more issues?

The PK thing was elevated by a few people in the community, and on analysis it turned out to be something half a dozen people were involved with, so we couldn't just quietly talk to a single individual.. we had to formulate an "official policy". Some people had been doing this for awhile, and we did not have enough log data to re-construct how many of the people's PKs were real, so in the interest of fairness to non-cheating players, I opted to reset the stat. It didn't make me happy to do so, and it wasn't me being a reactionary ass either.. I was irritated that people wasted our time by making it into such a controversial mess, but even if it had been quietly reported, the stat-reset outcome would have been the same.. I just don't have enough data to do anything nicer, that's also fair to all. It was a crappy situation, but I made the best call that I could.

We sure as shit did not reset anyone to keep "balance". We always search through all the logs and reset all the people we find. But in this case, it was (AND IS) really time-consuming. So we found some people first, who had done bad stuff more recently, or on a massive scale. Later we found other people, who had been doing things for longer. Still others have been more careful, or just did it on a smaller scale. I sure as hell didn't want to penalize anyone unfairly, so I spent a lot of time avoiding false-positives. The distance between "suspicion" and "confirmation" is quite a bit of work.

Just because you have only heard of two people, does not mean it was only two people. And just because the timing seems reactionary to you, does not mean that's related at all. We always contact people individually and handle things as quietly as we can. Unfortunately, it doesn't counter the rumor-mill.

Writing scripts the walk a TB of compressed logs, across two datacenters, and aggregate PKs, and eliminate bot-PKs, and then sort the remaining ones by various factors, and then check a database, and output a lot of "likely possibilities" that then require manual analysis, GeoIP lookups, tracking through a zillion alt accounts and deleted-characters to figure out what happened to whom and when.. largely that does not translate to "other cheating shit". Those have very different profiles, different behaviour, different potential mechanics, different false-positives, etc.

A bunch of development has been delayed as a result of all this: re-working the F2P system balance, the iOS re-launch, etc. And I'm still working on the PK crap.

So, before you ask us (really, me, since I did all of this myself) to start dedicating time to every possible cheating thing you think might have existed, please consider the ramifications of what you are requesting.

yoda is a troll... nobody took his suggestion seriously

The pk count does not significantly alter pvp, pvm, trade, or mining, and frankly, imo, was not worth correcting.

The fact that the community was made aware that the stat was being artificially inflated was perhaps the limit of what should have been done about it.

If something directly impacts the game mechanics of player interaction, then that is a much more important issue than non game mechanic player interactions.

You, the devs, can alter game mechanics. That is your job. You can not always alter a player's feelings, and even if you can, do you really want that to be your job.

As an example, a prom engine in a valk is a big deal, in pvp. I do not care how many valks have had prom engines, only what valks currently have prom engines.

Fix the future, not the past.

How was that done, putting prom engines in valks? I don't plan to do it but I'm curious about how things work.

There was a brief time (like a week or so) in 2009 (I believe, can't remember exactly) when ships dropped engines and we were able to equip different engines on all ships.
Devs fixed that very quickly and removed engines from the game.

They didn't remove mass hacking tho, they just tweaked it so that a ship can only ever be reduced to it's base mass. This is of course excluding weapons, power cells and cargo.

If you want me to name names, I will if that will make things easier. And it was not that people "dropped" engines, people used a Lua code to eject the engine into a station, and a similar Lua code to equip said engine on to a ship. (yet another reason to remove the Lua access?) The recent mass exploits are done in RAM, so harder to detect. But if nothing else, they are a LOT WORSE than stat padding.

Spidey, Nahin and a few other spring to mind that used (still use?) said mass hacks, sure, they can no longer make a ship weight nothing (or equip the wrong engines on a ship), but they still can reduce mass to a ships "basic" level.

It is a bigger problem than people shooting alts of their own; who really cares that much about PK stats than the two people who were reset? Nobody really. I mean past 500 pks what does it get you?

Your ship being lighter than it should be IS an issue, especially if they are using it to fight while carrying cargo like Samo/pure xith around...

[edit]

And Inc, this should be a much much easier thing to find out. Anyone who launched with a ship that was mass +<10 = cheating. A power cell adds mass, so unless they managed to launch without one... (2TB of a decent DB should not be that CPU intense, I have to trawl through loads more in my work, are you really using SQL? or some other secure DB? or just a flatfile...)

[edit 2]

Yes yes, I used the engine exploit once or twice, but I reported it as soon as I found out about it, which is why it got fixed. And Bojan, it was going on for months and months, not a week or so. You found out late is all.

"(yet another reason to remove the Lua access?)"

Nah. Just a reason to fix that one oversight, which it sounds like they did.

"The recent mass exploits are done in RAM, so harder to detect. But if nothing else, they are a LOT WORSE than stat padding."

Agreed. However, I'd rather see continued development over the short term rather than more delays to deal with minor cheaters -- I'd rather worry about dealing with them later on, perhaps after the supply-side economy stuff is done.

(If anyone thinks this is being hypocritical or biased, I would remind them that I was never advocating for dev-punishment of Sieger. I specifically said at the time that I didn't really give a shit one way or the other. I was only pushing the "he's an asshole and we should treat him as such" angle. And if anybody can provide proof as solid as what we had against Sieger about people who use mass hacks, I'll say the same about those people.)

"And Inc, this should be a much much easier thing to find out. Anyone who launched with a ship that was mass +<10 = cheating."

I don't think it is necessarily that easy. Depends on what they're logging and when they log it.

I agree with Rin -- addressing other fringe accusations of cheating is only going to hurt the game more at this point. The recent squabble and tattle-tail fest was necessary to knock some sense into the heads of people since it was affecting some fundamental aspects of the game. One can only assume it had reached critical mass with the devs, which is why they addressed it.

This is not to say mass hacks aren't shitty. They are. But they are relatively rare. Rare cheats aren't worth the trouble of addressing under the current circumstances.

This is not to say mass hacks aren't shitty. They are. But they are relatively rare. Rare cheats aren't worth the trouble of addressing under the current circumstances.

Are you kidding, or just fucking retarded/high/defending a preferred hack?

Rare or not, anything that lets a player fly a fully equipped ship (e.g., flare valk) like it's got no mass over base is a much bigger problem for the game than some stupid script that just let people run up a meaningless counter. Ooo, they got some ADV rails faster than they should have...

Literally the only thing of any substance or value in VO is the twitch combat model - PK stats do not have anything to do with that, while mass hacks very much do. The idea that anyone has spent any Dev time on the former while ignoring the latter because "rare"...should make heads explode.

You are missing the point in a very loud way, Lecter. Go big or go home?

I agree with Lecter, except the name calling insulting parts

Hacks / cheats are always possible. Mitigation of them should be rendered according to a variety of conditions, the most important of which being:

1) Amount of resources needed to correct : amount of resources salvaged by correction (which includes subscriptions retained)

2) Active / current degredation level to VO gameplay / morale of subscribers the cheat poses

If someone mass hacks once every blue moon, it's not worth fixing in light of everything else that needs fixing.