Glitch abuse/exploitation

There seems to still be some doubt or confusion as to what abusing or exploiting a glitch means. I'll place some examples here to hopefully make things a bit more clear.

This snip of text was found during an investigation of glitch abuse several months ago, involving the cooking basin: "a word of caution. after NAME REMOVED sent me that rmail, i checked his online status and found 2 new mods monitoring our every move. so don't cook any glitch or refrest items".

The above is an example of intentional abuse. The users knew what they were doing was wrong, conspired together to continue abusing the glitch, and were banned as a consequence. If the users had stumbled across this glitch, repeated the steps they took to duplicate the glitch, then said "hey, we should report this!" there would be no penalty. There would also be no penalty for not reporting, as long as the glitch wasn't exploited.

I've mentioned showrooms before, as an example of oversight vs. exploitation. I'm bringing it up again because the showrooms were recently fixed, and you cannot stock pets above the level you paid for any longer. Hundreds of users were confused and frustrated when the fix was made, because they had such massive amounts of pets beyond the upgrade level. Staff was aware of this, yet no one was banned for it. It was an oversight on the part of most users that did not upgrade their levels, it was not exploitation.

Whether or not items gained from a glitch are sold or not is not relevant to the abuse of a glitch. You are indeed profiting if you are gaining items, pets, or TU in a way that does not require what it would normally require.

A glitch used to exist where you could manipulate an URL on the site to steal pets from ranchers, showrooms, profiles, the forest..basically anywhere a pet was, it could be stolen by a person who knew of this glitch. Was it okay for those pets to be stolen, as long as they were not sold? Absolutely not. Now, you may argue that this is different, because someone else is losing something, but consider this: when a glitch is being exploited to gain CS items, barter tokens, limited release items, retired items, etc., but not sold for profit, it is still theft. They are items which enter the game without putting anything back into the game. You're robbing yourself, your fellow players, and the website's funding.

So again, intentional and willful misuse of the site to gain items by way of a glitch is exploitation, and is a ban-able offense. Oversight, or simply stumbling across a glitch and not abusing it is not exploitation, and is not a ban-able offense.

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Multiple Account Misconceptions

When it comes to multiple accounts, there seems to be only one norm that everyone thinks of. The user creates more than one account, uses each of them and sends all of the profit to one account.

You'll often find notes on profiles that say, "Hi staff, me and my sibling _______ play on the same computer, please don't ban us!"

They then continue to play normally - and that's fine! It's when these things start happening that suspicion arises:

The sibling gets bored with Rescreatu and stop using their account.

--> The sibling 'gives' their account to their sister/brother.
--> The sibling only uses their account to make TU and give it to their sibling.
--> The sibling uses their hatches only for their brother/sister and trades all the good hatches to them.

Unfortunately, all of the above points are classed as multiple accounting. It doesn't matter if the accounts do not belong to you, if your sibling is giving you all of their stuff or simply using their account to help you, it is against the rules, whether or not you are bribing or paying them in real life or not. :c

If you are gaining a personal advantage from the account, you are cheating. Yes, we can tell. No, you won't get banned for exchanging gifts every so often, but we can ususally tell because all of the profit ends up, somehow, on one account.

So please, don't make this mistake. :) As always, any questions in the comments will be personally addressed.

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IP Bans

I received a very angry email this morning from a user who thought she was permanently banned from the site. I don't blame her one bit for being so angry, because she is completely innocent. What had happened was that her IP address changed, and it just happened to change to one that was previously used by a different member who truly earned themselves an IP ban.

I know some of you are wondering what an IP ban is. IP stands for Internet Protocol. Every website has an IP address - most just use something called a Domain Name System, or DNS, to associate an easy-to-remember web address with the IP address. The IP address for www.yahoo.com would be 209.191.122.70. Yahoo is certainly easier to remember.

Every user of the internet also has an IP address. There's no need for a web address since we don't visit pages on each other's computers. Most ISPs, or Internet Service Providers, recycle their IPs among the customers. When Rescreatu staff issues an IP ban for a particularly troublesome user, that means that every IP in that person's history will be blocked from accessing the site. Staff does their best to make sure that innocent users aren't affected at the time the ban is made, but since IPs are recycled, sometimes that old IP ban will affect an innocent user in the future.

This is just an unfortunate effect of some bans, but it can be fixed! If you have gotten a message when trying to log into Res that your IP address has been banned, and you honestly have no clue why, then please contact me so I can sort the situation out. You can comment here, but you will need to leave enough information so that I can find you in the system. It might be a better idea to email me at abuse@rescreatu.com instead of leaving your info out in public.

As a side note, many users get an IP ban message when trying to log in with their phones. This is one ban that can't be undone - but it doesn't mean your account is banned, it just means your particular phone provider is shared by someone who caused massive trouble on the site.

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Down with the Richness?

So lately, users have been spotted speculating why so many older site members are suddenly being banned. A favorite reason to list for these bans is jealousy, and of course the reasons already addressed in the first blog entry.

Simply put: You're seeing a surge in bans of older members because staff has more logging tools. Those that have been getting away with cheating for so long can now be spotted, and as a consequence, are banned. No ulterior motive here - staff is just doing the job they were hired to do.

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Mythbusters

It has come to our attention that there have been a lot of rumours flying around about staff members - especially Support staff. In this post, I will be hopefully explaining and busting some of the negative myths surrounding staff misconduct.

Myth no. 1

"Sticky-paws" staffers.

A lot of Rescreatu members have heard from members who have been banned that we ban people in order to steal pets and items from their accounts. Their only piece of "solid" proof is usually that they have seen banned users' accounts active on the online users list. Instantly, the users assume that the staff are stealing from the accounts.

Yes, staff members DO access banned accounts. However, for a much less sinister reason than everyone else might think (or banned members might spread). Everyone seems to have forgotten that after years of suggesting from the users, we have finally allowed pets that are "rotting" on banned accounts to be placed onto the users' profiles in order for them to die and lose their names for the rest of the users to use.

How do we do this?

1. We access the accounts, and put pets on their profile.
   
   
2. We also empty Libraries so that rankings do not remain, and it gives other users a fair chance at getting a decent rank.

No stealing, no sinister motives. We are simply doing what was asked of us by the users. :)

Myth no. 2

We don't like you! *ban*

This one confuses me a lot. If it were true that we instantly banned every member for the simple fact that staff didn't like them, let's be honest, a LOT of users would have been long gone by now. We're humans, sometimes people do things that cause us to dislike them. However, it is a staff rule, especially for Support, that professionalism comes before personal feelings. Any staff found to be banning people because they just don't like them would be discharged from staff and possibly banned themselves.

If you ever feel like a staff member is abusing their powers because they dislike you, report it. Your complaint will be reviewed impartially. It seems however that we've never recieved reports of this sort at all - thus leading me to personally believe that this myth is another spiteful rumour spread by bitter banned users.

Myth no.3

Staff are favoured with glitch abuse, and older users or people who donate are favoured when glitch abuse occurs.


The main problem with this myth is that it is extremely hard for current staff members to comment on. Most of the rumours going around concerning staff favouritism are from up to 3 or 4 years ago. At that time, an entirely different staff team ran the site. Perhaps they were corrupt, perhaps they were favoured - with no evidence for or against, we can do nothing about a vague rumour about an ex-staff member abusing an age-old glitch.

What we DO know however, is that current staff members are closely monitored for glitch abuse. If anything, the users are favourited over the staff! Staff members who are aware of a glitch on-site should know better, and that's the way we work it.

People who have bought credits with real money or donated to the site are not favoured AT ALL with the current staff. Again, we cannot make comments or actions for rumours of previous favouritism, but we do know that once a user breaks the rules, they forefeit any rights to the items/tu/credits that they bought, regardless of how much they donated. That goes for everyone: staff, older members, new members, and donating members.


I hope that this cleared a few issues up. If you would like to see any more Rescreatu myths busted, please do comment below with your request, and it will be attended to ASAP. :)

I am also completely willing to answer any futher questions here about the above mentioned issues.

Thank you for reading,

Horselova/Fizzeh, Support Staff.

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Behind the scenes of Rescreatu

Recently, there is a lot of mis-information floating around Rescreatu and the internet regarding the staff and bannings.

1. Staff are lazy, and ban accounts that appear on the same IP address
2. Staff are corrupt, and ban accounts to steal items, TU, and/or pets
3. Staff are designing the game to maximize profit for themselves
4. Staff bans users for accidentally abusing glitches

#1. Consider this for a moment: AOL is still one of the most popular ISP's today. AOL users have IP addresses which are constantly recycled and shared. Same for users in Singapore. The site has members with dozens, even hundreds, of IP matches from users on AOL or users from Singapore. If it were true that bans happen merely on the basis of an IP match, an enormous portion of the user-base would be banned.

#2. Staff has access to tools which can generate any item existing on the site. How do you think refunds are issued for items lost due to glitches? Staff also has access to tools that can edit the amount of TU a user has on-hand, and access to tools to edit user banks. Staff also has access to edit the location of any pet on the site, and move it anywhere it needs to go. This is how glitched forest finds, pets stuck in auctions, and pets stuck in trades are returned to you.

#3. Staff has less time to play the game as a user than any normal status user does. Staff put in countless hours of brainstorming new ideas, reading suggestions from users, designing, testing, and implementing new features of the game. It profits Patrick not ONE BIT for the game to be designed for staff profit. In fact, staff are extremely careful to design things in a way that does NOT give an unfair advantage; including reducing pay more than 50%. The amount of credits staff are paid works out to mere pennies on the hour. It DOES profit Patrick for staff to design the game in such a way that attracts and maintains a high number of users. If staff were designing the game purely for themselves, we would be fired.

#4. There is a severe misunderstanding of what is exploiting or abusing a glitch, vs unintentionally abusing a glitch. Showrooms are one example of unintentional abuse. They are not currently coded properly, and users are able to stock as many pets as they like, regardless of the upgraded level. Stocking pets beyond the level you paid for in your showroom is not exploiting a glitch. It is an oversight. You aren't profiting from it. Glitch abuse occurs when one or more users knowingly conspire to abuse a glitch for profit.

Everything done on Rescreatu is logged. Those tools staff has? Pat logs everything done with them. If a staff member were to become corrupt and use the tools for their own use, they would be discharged and banned. When I say everything is logged, I mean it is all logged. Merchant shop purchases, Rancher shop purchases, Stock market purchases, Pet trades, Bank transfers, Items sent, Items received, Credit offers completed, Credits purchased, Activity on all quests, Eggs you have picked up, and Rmail. Yes, staff can read your rmail. It doesn't matter if you delete it or not; its still there for us to see. Do we go through rmails routinely? No. That would be a ridiculous amount of work. Do we go through rmail ever? Yes. Users report harassment, it has to be investigated. Users claim deals have been made, it has to be investigated. Users under investigation for cheating will have their rmails reviewed also. If a staff member were to log into a banned account and send an item or pet from that account to theirs or any other, this would be logged.

Activity logs are reviewed regularly, and suspicious activity is flagged. This is how users are banned. There does not even need to be a matching IP address. A few users have invested time in finding dozens of proxies for their cheating behavior, thinking that will keep them under the radar. It simply isn't true; they are very exposed. They employ indirect methods of transferring items, pets, and TU to the main account via these proxies, yet the behavior is still obvious.  Investigation of cheating accounts sometimes goes on for weeks and months; it is rarely immediately able to be proven.

Are mistakes ever made? YES! I have made mistakes and issued bans wrongly due to misinterpretation of the activity logs. I'm human, what can I say. I have also gone back and corrected these mistakes when found, and apologized for my error.

As difficult as it may be to discover a friend has lied to you about their ban, chances are, that is exactly what has happened. I am hoping that this blog might shed some light on how things are really done behind the scenes, and encourage rational, logical thinking, rather than the conspiracy-theory gossiping garbage floating around the net.

Feel free to post comments or ask questions. I'll be happy to answer anything I can.

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