So I was thinking about the past MMO and thought of something that really ticked me off. In EQ EQ2 and I beleive i read it happened in WOW. Some of the top raiding guilds had Dev's in the guild that assisted them on some really really hard content that without his help it wouldnt have been killed. Now on a PVP server we had ways to deal with this and that was make sure no contested mob was ever killed by killing the entire raid over and over. But on the PVE server there was no defense.
The question is has VR thought about this and as it gets bigger make sure no Devs are helping raid guilds clear content??
In all honesty, having a dev in the guild in EQ1 hasn't been that much of a boon since they started using guilds to beta test raids, we basically were spoon fed the basic raid mechanics for testing. Hell, for quite a few expansions they actually posted all of the effects and mechanics of the raids on the beta boards. Most of the top guilds knew how to beat everything on launch day. I know this was a much bigger concern in WoW and can't really speak to EQ2.
The point i was making is that every guild beta testing raids got dev info, it was written on the boards. Up until recently i was an officer in one of the top 5 guilds so i dealt directly with the devs during the testing, and we were pretty much always invited to beta test with a dev every expansion (no dev in our guild) and it would have made no difference to us if we had a dev in the guild. Having a dev in the guild doesn't matter if you are using guilds to beta test your content. The race to first becomes about executing strats rather than learning them. If you stop using guilds to beta test, then it becomes more of a concern since it does lead to information that other guilds may not have access to.
Yes but it wasnt just feeding them raid information that wasnt accessable to every guild the guild in mention was also heavly exploiting the game and being shielded by there relationship with an SOE employee also reports that the SOE employee also auto killed mobs with leet laser googles and allowed them to loot the gear with out even trying. in EQ and EQ2 the test strats were supposed to be slighty changed before going live timers and such should of been switched and also in eq2 the guilds testing wernt given raid information at the time this all went down.
All in all it wasnt just having someone there to hand hold with raids there was a lot of cheating and unethical stuff coming out of this.
I wonder if a player council, like in EVE that CCP started after the controversy of a dev helping out a corporation, would be beneficial. The council could have the ability to gather more information, like what devs are doing in game or discuss upcoming changes, to try to curb devs using their knowledge to benefit guilds and with the assurance that VR management will come down hard on violations. Of course it isn't fool proof, but it could help act as a mediator in such disputes.
I think it is fine that devs are allowed to raid with any guild, as long as it is understood that they are barred from providing any tips strategies, or from running raids/raiding guilds that contain non VR personnel. Also it should be noted to all guilds that if the have devs in their ranks, it mean possible exclusion from testing.
My .02 cents.
Bluefyre said:I wonder if a player council, like in EVE that CCP started after the controversy of a dev helping out a corporation, would be beneficial. The council could have the ability to gather more information, like what devs are doing in game or discuss upcoming changes, to try to curb devs using their knowledge to benefit guilds and with the assurance that VR management will come down hard on violations. Of course it isn't fool proof, but it could help act as a mediator in such disputes.
I think it is fine that devs are allowed to raid with any guild, as long as it is understood that they are barred from providing any tips strategies, or from running raids/raiding guilds that contain non VR personnel. Also it should be noted to all guilds that if the have devs in their ranks, it mean possible exclusion from testing.
My .02 cents.
Haha I forgot about EVE. The Council for steller management was more of a elected player base that voiced things that the community would like. Im not sure the CSM actully did anything about the wrong doing that the DEV did in the long run. While the Idea is sound a player council could be full of pissed off people that just want punishment and might not be interested in more then a witch hunt.
I would like to see Devs and GM's have a system where they have to inform people of the guilds they join and what account they have and all player chat from those accounts are auto recorded and maybe scanned by a keyword search to root out this sort of issue. IDK to me it seems a serious issue as I have seen it first hand. as well as exclusion from testing.
Yeah there is little a player council could do, but it can help a little where they have access to more data, by signing NDAs, like chat/loot logs, or something, in a situation where some are claiming dev impropripety. Players would trust an announcement of no evidence of dev cheating coming from other players over VR. It is certainly far from bullet proof, but it is at least something.
Another thought I had was making dev accounts inaccessable outside their office network so that any actions they take while logged into those accounts could be more scrutinized. Could help with devs a using God accounts for player benefit.
I don't know. It's such a tricky thing to really keep an eye one.
Bluefyre said:Yeah there is little a player council could do, but it can help a little where they have access to more data, by signing NDAs, like chat/loot logs, or something, in a situation where some are claiming dev impropripety. Players would trust an announcement of no evidence of dev cheating coming from other players over VR. It is certainly far from bullet proof, but it is at least something.
Another thought I had was making dev accounts inaccessable outside their office network so that any actions they take while logged into those accounts could be more scrutinized. Could help with devs a using God accounts for player benefit.
I don't know. It's such a tricky thing to really keep an eye one.
That is very true and it would be better then nothing. The only issue with Dev accounts is a lot of these guys might work from home and as an IT worker that works from home a lot doing that is BS. It might just come down to it happens and VR fires someone as soon as it happens. Sony and EQ2 made it worse by 100 percent ignoring it and deleted any threads on the forum about it
Kalgore said:So I was thinking about the past MMO and thought of something that really ticked me off. In EQ EQ2 and I beleive i read it happened in WOW. Some of the top raiding guilds had Dev's in the guild that assisted them on some really really hard content that without his help it wouldnt have been killed. Now on a PVP server we had ways to deal with this and that was make sure no contested mob was ever killed by killing the entire raid over and over. But on the PVE server there was no defense.
Assisting with content by a developer in a player guild isn't the problem. It's developers in player guilds who use their special GM 'powers' to spawn things from items to NPCs to money to whatever else their GM abilities allow. If the back-end logging is poorly implemented and the GMs know it, it becomes an even bigger issue. My minimal preference is GMs (if they are assigned to a specific server) not be allowed to join a player guild on that same server. GMs need to be able to play the game, experiencing the same bugs we experience as that benefits the game long-term.
Vandraad said:Kalgore said:So I was thinking about the past MMO and thought of something that really ticked me off. In EQ EQ2 and I beleive i read it happened in WOW. Some of the top raiding guilds had Dev's in the guild that assisted them on some really really hard content that without his help it wouldnt have been killed. Now on a PVP server we had ways to deal with this and that was make sure no contested mob was ever killed by killing the entire raid over and over. But on the PVE server there was no defense.
Assisting with content by a developer in a player guild isn't the problem. It's developers in player guilds who use their special GM 'powers' to spawn things from items to NPCs to money to whatever else their GM abilities allow. If the back-end logging is poorly implemented and the GMs know it, it becomes an even bigger issue. My minimal preference is GMs (if they are assigned to a specific server) not be allowed to join a player guild on that same server. GMs need to be able to play the game, experiencing the same bugs we experience as that benefits the game long-term.
This is actually the dilemma that I am facing, I am the CM and will most likely be a GM but I am also a guild and raid leader for an Australian guild, I will probably have to keep my Kilsin name for a GM character and make a new name/character up for my normal guild activities and playing the game in general, which is kind of annoying, to be honest! lol.
I would never help my guild with inside information, though, it spoils half the fun of raiding and working things out as a team! I am not sure why anyone would want that either, powering to the top to say you're the first when everyone knows it was handed to you...not a tag I would like my guild or myself to wear at all.
The top guilds are usually picked to test because they are usually the most dedicated and strategic, the devs want to watch them fight mobs to see how they handled situations, so they can take that data and tweak it to make it harder or easier, they are not usually given the whole strat but enough to have a solid attempt, I am not sure how it worked in EQ but I have heard stories of FoH and others having devs in guild that actually gave strats and helped compete against other guilds with devs in them, that is not something that will happen in Pantheon.
But yeah, this is something I am going to have to work out with the team and I think it is a good topic, something we will discuss more during testing.
Kilsin said:Vandraad said:Kalgore said:So I was thinking about the past MMO and thought of something that really ticked me off. In EQ EQ2 and I beleive i read it happened in WOW. Some of the top raiding guilds had Dev's in the guild that assisted them on some really really hard content that without his help it wouldnt have been killed. Now on a PVP server we had ways to deal with this and that was make sure no contested mob was ever killed by killing the entire raid over and over. But on the PVE server there was no defense.
Assisting with content by a developer in a player guild isn't the problem. It's developers in player guilds who use their special GM 'powers' to spawn things from items to NPCs to money to whatever else their GM abilities allow. If the back-end logging is poorly implemented and the GMs know it, it becomes an even bigger issue. My minimal preference is GMs (if they are assigned to a specific server) not be allowed to join a player guild on that same server. GMs need to be able to play the game, experiencing the same bugs we experience as that benefits the game long-term.
This is actually the dilemma that I am facing, I am the CM and will most likely be a GM but I am also a guild and raid leader for an Australian guild, I will probably have to keep my Kilsin name for a GM character and make a new name/character up for my normal guild activities and playing the game in general, which is kind of annoying, to be honest! lol.
I would never help my guild with inside information, though, it spoils half the fun of raiding and working things out as a team! I am not sure why anyone would want that either, powering to the top to say you're the first when everyone knows it was handed to you...not a tag I would like my guild or myself to wear at all.The top guilds are usually picked to test because they are usually the most dedicated and strategic, the devs want to watch them fight mobs to see how they handled situations, so they can take that data and tweak it to make it harder or easier, they are not usually given the whole strat but enough to have a solid attempt, I am not sure how it worked in EQ but I have heard stories of FoH and others having devs in guild that actually gave strats and helped compete against other guilds with devs in them, that is not something that will happen in Pantheon.
But yeah, this is something I am going to have to work out with the team and I think it is a good topic, something we will discuss more during testing.
I have no issues with GM or Devs playing the game its when they abuse thosoe GM powers. It does suck that you might not be able to use the same name Im attached to my player name as well. Testing in eq1 and eq2 for a long time players were told almost nothing about the raid mob.
I would like to think that since this is a smaller team developing the game and there is no major corporation like Sony behind them, this won't be an issue since we as users are closer to the devs themselves. I don't know of any examples of this actually happening in a pay-to-play game and I have a feeling some of them may have become exaggerated over time but I don't know. We really have to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point. It's a sad statement if we are under the assumption before the game is even released that there will be collusion between developers and top guilds.
internalprime8 said:I would like to think that since this is a smaller team developing the game and there is no major corporation like Sony behind them, this won't be an issue since we as users are closer to the devs themselves. I don't know of any examples of this actually happening in a pay-to-play game and I have a feeling some of them may have become exaggerated over time but I don't know. We really have to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point. It's a sad statement if we are under the assumption before the game is even released that there will be collusion between developers and top guilds.
1: happened in eq1 and EQ2 I have first hand direct knowledge of one event in EQ2 and another in EVE and it was confirmed through Sonys one everquest2/players site that invovled a GM.
2: Second I wasnt implying it would happen but after seeing it happen it is a valid question for Any MMO that has GM or Devs that also play the game.
Kalgore said:Bluefyre said:Yeah there is little a player council could do, but it can help a little where they have access to more data, by signing NDAs, like chat/loot logs, or something, in a situation where some are claiming dev impropripety. Players would trust an announcement of no evidence of dev cheating coming from other players over VR. It is certainly far from bullet proof, but it is at least something.
Another thought I had was making dev accounts inaccessable outside their office network so that any actions they take while logged into those accounts could be more scrutinized. Could help with devs a using God accounts for player benefit.
I don't know. It's such a tricky thing to really keep an eye one.
That is very true and it would be better then nothing. The only issue with Dev accounts is a lot of these guys might work from home and as an IT worker that works from home a lot doing that is BS. It might just come down to it happens and VR fires someone as soon as it happens. Sony and EQ2 made it worse by 100 percent ignoring it and deleted any threads on the forum about it
True about the teleworking points. I telework myself so you would think I would not have ignored that. lol
Bluefyre said:Kalgore said:Bluefyre said:Yeah there is little a player council could do, but it can help a little where they have access to more data, by signing NDAs, like chat/loot logs, or something, in a situation where some are claiming dev impropripety. Players would trust an announcement of no evidence of dev cheating coming from other players over VR. It is certainly far from bullet proof, but it is at least something.
Another thought I had was making dev accounts inaccessable outside their office network so that any actions they take while logged into those accounts could be more scrutinized. Could help with devs a using God accounts for player benefit.
I don't know. It's such a tricky thing to really keep an eye one.
That is very true and it would be better then nothing. The only issue with Dev accounts is a lot of these guys might work from home and as an IT worker that works from home a lot doing that is BS. It might just come down to it happens and VR fires someone as soon as it happens. Sony and EQ2 made it worse by 100 percent ignoring it and deleted any threads on the forum about it
True about the teleworking points. I telework myself so you would think I would not have ignored that. lol
I would be pissed hahaha. The point of the post isnt to imply someone might do it but to hopefully see something get addresses before it might happen.. But at the same time the Devs and the GMS need to be allowed to play the game they helped build and maintain. Personally as a guild and a raid leader I would never cheapen my guilds raid accomplishments by cheating but that isnt everyone.
internalprime8 said:I would like to think that since this is a smaller team developing the game and there is no major corporation like Sony behind them, this won't be an issue since we as users are closer to the devs themselves. I don't know of any examples of this actually happening in a pay-to-play game and I have a feeling some of them may have become exaggerated over time but I don't know. We really have to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point. It's a sad statement if we are under the assumption before the game is even released that there will be collusion between developers and top guilds.
Unfortunatly VR being a small team, really doesn't make any one team member less susceptible to cheating. CCP was a small company at the time of the T20 incident. If you are not familiar with this, it was big deal as it was brought to light that a developer was in fact colluding with the latest player alliance in EVE. He was getting the. Powerful blueprints that were harder to get at the time. Everyone else had to go trough a lottery system to obtain them.
And your right about assumptions. We really shouldn't think of them as potential cheaters, guilty until proven innocent. As I have been mentioning, there are ways to kinda minimize this potential issue, but they are far from bullet proof and probably not worth the time and effort to develop systems to catch dev/guild collusion. Lets give them
Let's just give them the benefit of the doubt and hope it doesn't happen.