x-Taste-x wrote:I guess there is a first time for every character.
. And lag shall be the reason.
I once banned myself from a game because I had to make a point heard so that it would benefit others.
In the game there was a player trading concept and you could set prices for players. You could even rent areas to buy and sell things. However it was a problematic system and there were warning about players scamming and such.
Well I was one of the top players when it came to trading, and everyone loved how I always sold things to benefit the playerbase and not myself. I became so popular that I actually made money off of the tiny profits adding up in large quantities, and things worked out quite well.
However one day I had my inventory full of valuable items and ran into someone who wanted to sell me some of his stuff. This was a common thing that happened all the time so of course I went to check it out.
He said that he loved what I did for everyone and wanted to give me a special deal on his stuff because he wasn't going to be playing the game anymore. I told him I'd pay full price, but he insisted on selling me everything for half off.
The problem is, when you bull and sell things, the interface isn't all that great. It was very simple, and while it was easy to spot the common scams, he did something that I had never seen before. Normally they'll trick you by placing decimal points in the amount so that instead of buying 200, you're really only buying 2.00, or 2.000 instead of 2,000. I made sure that everything seemed okay and accepted the deal.
Next thing I know he says "Thanks!", and then runs off. I have no idea where he went, so I go back to doing what I was doing when all of a sudden I realize what happened. The items in my inventory had all disappeared. I was confused, shocked, and trying to understand what was all going on until my screen started filling up with notices.
See, when a person buys or sells something from your shop you get a notice. If they do it multiple times the notice will go off repeatedly. Except that this time my money was going away, and fast.
I run to my shop and sure enough that guy is there selling ALL of my stuff back to me. I remove all of my shop icons and essentially shut it down, but by that time I had no money left and he had logged off.
I screenshotted the logs, immediately went to the forums and sumbitted reports with all the info I had.
He didn't get banned. He then scammed more shop owners for the next 3 weeks nonstop and no one did anything about it. Eventually I just had enough of it and started asking in chat about why he wasn't banned yet, and why people like this are able to do this.
One of the higher ups gave me a warning and asked me to report it. I told him I had and that it had been 3 weeks with no reply or anything. He said he'd look into it, which was when I broke.
"IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BAN *insert player name here*, THEN BAN ME"
I spammed that in chat for probably about 25 seconds as players kept telling me to stop and to not do this. So many players didn't want me to leave, didn't want to lose such a great person in the community.
and of course, I get kicked for spam. Permanant ban. After following the forums for the next week, the entire community got that guy's IP blacklisted, and eventually the whole market system got changed to be much easier and safer.
I had to do it. Obviously this situation isn't as crazy as mine was, but without that one person to actually stand up and say something about it to create change or to create change, things will stay ignored, or communication will never happen.