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.