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.