One aspect of the customer service world at SOE that always gathers comments is that of gold sellers, credit spammers, botters, farmers, real money traders, hackers, exploiters or whatever you would like to call them. This is a topic that you always see on various threads on the forums as well as a multitude of tickets in the queues. Let me get straight to the point and set the record straight as there are so many rumors in regards to what we do or don’t do with the players and accounts associated with these actions. First and foremost, we do take action against such accounts and players. In fact just last week we banned over 12,000 subscriptions (not free accounts or trial accounts but active subscriptions) across the SOE catalog of games (EverQuest II 5,929, Star Wars Galaxies 3,800, Vanguard 572, EverQuest 346, etc.). This isn’t a one time shot; this is a regular result of the time and manpower we put into combating the cheating in each game. How this comes about is three fold:
- Customer submitted Petitions/Tickets:
Our Game Masters, in answering your petitions/tickets, investigate and verify that these players are doing what was reported by other players. Sometimes players will see immediate results in regards to their petitions, and at other times they won’t because we want to thoroughly investigate the alleged issue and actions of the account, maybe tie them to other related accounts, determine what 3rd party software is or is not being used and see exactly what is happening. Sometimes the reported players are doing nothing wrong, the player that reported them was mistaken, and no harm done. But we do investigate, we do take it seriously and we do take action.
2. Logs, event triggers, and reports:
We have a plethora of logs and reports at our disposal to help us identify players that are exploiting the game, hacking, cheating or otherwise diminishing the gameplay for others. These tools enable us to identify not only individuals cheating, but identify rings of cheaters which we banish from the game. A tool like the recently developed EverQuest II Spam Filter is a great example of the work that our development team does to make the land of Norrath more enjoyable for all. This is being looked at by the other game teams for implementation, as well as other solutions like the creative solution the Star Wars Galaxy team implemented with the warden program, whereby volunteer wardens are able to squelch spammers immediately and automatically report them to GMs for further investigation and action.
3. Online Game Master observation
The simplest method is by simple observation by the GMs themselves. Much of this is done in the background and unnoticed, while at other times it is a bit more public, like when in Star Wars Galaxies, the “Credit Spammers” of Mos Esley were flagged “Overt” and other players were able to attack them and put a stop to their chants of credit selling sites. I imagine this was a dream come true for many.These actions and investigations take a lot of time, and this is just the high level overview of what happens, many of these investigations start with just one player that gets reported and by investigating the player activity, trades and transactions, it leads to various other accounts that also get banned. For example, a short while ago, an EverQuest II player was reported, the GM doing the investigation found 152 related accounts which were also banned, and the following guilds were identified as being related to this illegal activity and disbanded:
- Bleke on Antonia Bayle
- Over Lord on Butcherblock
- Buobao on Guk
- Onyx on Kithicor
- Bougon of Hate on Nagafen
- Jeweles on Venekor
- Enlightcn on Vox
- S H E on Vox
I tell you all this to let you know that we are working diligently to remove this element from the games, but also as a word of warning to not support this behavior. The only reason they exist is people continue to purchase items from these individuals and companies. Doing so is not only a violation of our code of conduct and terms of service, and could result in action taken against your subscription, but more important there are real world examples of credit card fraud associated with this activity. We continually see hundreds of stolen credit cards used by these individuals to purchase accounts that are then used for the above actions. This will be an ongoing battle, and we will do whatever we can to lessen the impact of this behavior within each of the games. This isn’t just a Customer Support task, we work together with the developer teams, community teams, and legal teams, and will continue to do so to assure that SOE games continue to be as fun and entertaining.
Brad “Mutato” Wilcox
Executive Director of Customer Support
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