This will appear relatively long, I'm sorry for that, I'll try to break it into pieces:-
As far as the duping issue goes, it's a matter of how dedicated to screwing things up for a server someone is to find such a glitch/bug. Think about how long the current Item System and all of it has been around, and not been changed. This was always possible, it's just that Player A finds it, tries it over and over, no one is aware of this, then Player A realises he/she was able to do it again and doesn't want to stop, so he/she tells Player B, but also tells Player B not to tell anyone... Well, of course Player B is going to tell all his/her friends, as it would greatly benefit them, and before you know it, no one of the position to stop these few players has found out until it was too late.
The problem with what Dusty said is the fact that it is easy to say "Reset the player, not the server", but you need to know which player did it, and reset them before they spread what they duped around, and you would also need to know what it was they duped in the first place. Logs are a great tool for figuring most of this stuff out, but tracking it down to specific players, then saying "Oh, sorry, I know you paid thousands for that weapon, but I'm going to have to remove it from you and reimburse you" is another thing that makes player quit, since they wanted such a thing so badly, then it turned out there was no point at all.
Frankie said something about the players, which Stephen replied to with something about it not being responsible to pin whatever on the players, but you do have to think about it: Player A is found out, you seriously think he/she's going to give up what they know about it to someone who could probably fix it? Hardly likely. I've been down that road hundreds of times, already. Even tried bargining with some of them, but once they have their end of the bargin, they're right back to it, knowing they've completely lied to your face.
Which brings me to the attitude of Era, which was also mentioned as a concern, I think by Elizabeth or Dusty. It amazes even me that oh so many of Era's players are rude, arrogant, racist, foul mouthed snobs, even though we have a filter, while other servers can go filter-free, and around 90 percent of their players are well-behaved, well-mannered, well-spoken characters of the population. Personally, I'm sick to death of punishing people for it, but all it takes is one person to hang around with someone like that, and monkey hear, monkey say. Recently, we had a sweet young kid start playing, and he managed to get caught up in the wrong crowd (Obviously easy to do on Era), and now he's a rude, annoying, foul-mouthed scammer. Sadly, that's human nature, and even more sadly - most of them are concentrated on the one server, which spreads it within itself. I could spam the heck out of words that will just appear as *'s on here, but it doesn't change the fact that I said it, and all it would take is an impressionable newbie to see it, think it's fine, and then repeat my action thinking it's the acceptable thing to do. |