How we can tell people cheat in seasonal hunts

Seasonal hunts are, unfortunately, are the times of year when Support staff come across the most cheaters. Let's face it - they are the most opportunistic times of the year for cheating. The more accounts you have, the more eggs you get. Here are a lot of the things that cheaters do during hunts...

--> Create more than one account. This is an easy spotted feature of the seasonal cheater. They have more than one account in order to be able to have an extra 48 hour hunt. How do we tell? Pretty simple, really. Wait until the hunt is over, then we are able to check egg transfers. It isn't hard to spot - numerous transfers of eggs, all going into one account, and no profit to the sending accounts.

--> Use Autoclickers/autorefreshers. These are something that a lot of users will consider using during their time on the site. It is also an offence that users think we cannot detect - and those who are banned because of it claim that we have no proof. In fact, we do. Every egg that any user picks up around the site is logged individually. We can see for how long a user is picking eggs up for. Let's take an unnamed case of a banned user - I will show YOU the information we found, and you can make your own informed decision.

1. Eggs were picked up without ANY breaks for an entire 48 hours, with only two six hour breaks - presumably for sleeping when the computer was turned off. (So they didn't need any toilet breaks... or to eat... or to nip out to the shop.... for a full 2 days.)

2. One hundred and fifty eggs plus were picked up in one 48 hour sitting. Compare that to any user who legitimately hunted without cheating and using these programs. I believe that the highest number of eggs found without cheating was around 55. It is impossible for any user to find so many eggs without using an autoclicker.


What do you think? Perhaps this will allow users to see how the evidence stacks up like this - and how no matter how a user cheats, we are able to detect it easily.

The lesson here?

Don't do it. You'll get to keep your account and all the eggs you find. Is an extra batch of iluvu eggs that will be worth about 500k each by the middle of the hunt week really worth risking your account over? I know I wouldn't.

Comments are completely welcome and I will gladly answer questions.

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Amnesty Week!

As voted on our previous poll, Amnesty week has been put into place!

The rules of Rescreatu have been established in part to help keep the game fair and balanced. Owning more than one account or exploiting glitches for profit damages the game economy to a great extent - much more than many people realize.

Rescreatu's Support Staff realizes that we are all human, and sometimes temptation gets the best of us. The staff does not like banning users any more than the users like to be banned; however, banning is a necessity to keep gameplay stable. For this reason, during the next seven days, we are offering Amnesty Week. This means that anyone who is guilty of multiple accounting, account sharing, or glitch exploitation will be given the chance to report this to the Support member of their choice, and as a result, Support will work with you to undo what was gained by cheating. Choosing to turn yourself in will result in a greatly reduced penalty: Ideally, we would like you to be able to keep your account and not ban you.

Please be aware that this is not going to be a regular occurrence but is more of a one-time deal. After this week, activity logs which reveal cheating and glitch-exploiting behavior will continue to be reviewed as usual, and bans will continue to be issued as usual based on the findings. All activity on Rescreatu is logged, and this is how bans are determined. Bans are not issued based on sharing an IP address or a computer.

If you would like to turn yourself in, there are several ways this can be done. You may rmail the Support Staff member of your choice - please make sure they are Support; dark blue names only. You may also open a support ticket if you like. The link for support tickets can be found at the top of your rmail inbox. Last, you may e-mail abuse@rescreatu.com. Support will work with you in sorting out your situation.

Thank you for supporting Rescreatu, and thank you for considering this request.

This can be viewed on the official updates page of Rescreatu.

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What to do...

Well darn! We ran out of ideas! Myths to be busted, ban methods to explain... So we're asking for your input! What do you want to know from us?

Maybe a post from myself and broken with some fun staffy facts about ourselves?
Can you think of a myth that needs busting?
Do you have something to say?
Would you like us to do a blog on an opinion or view of yours?

Ideas, ideas, ideas! <33 Comment below to get yours discussed!

- Fizz

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If you ever wanted to know more about Pat...

I just read this interview with Patrick over on Virtualpetlist, and I was completely surprised by some of the info there. I thought some of you might be interested in reading the interview as well, so here is the link!

Also, here is another VPL link with some nice V3 previews from Pat.

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Staff members read our Rmails!?

It is not a tool that Support are going to deny, no. Far from it, in fact. Contrary to what the misinformed minority believe, we are not all compulsive liars and frauds.

Yes. We are able to check R-mails. However, the reason we check them and under what circumstances are completely different from the ones portrayed by more... unsavoury members of the internet.

Here are the reasons that we check any one user's Rmails:

1. A support ticket has rolled in; someone accusing another user of scamming them out of a deal they promised. The user has no screenshot proof to provide us with, nor any copy-pastes, as they claim they have deleted the rmail. In this situation, the staff member would take to the user's r-mails. We search thusly: CTRL + F, search for the exact date the Rmail claims to have been sent, or the subject matter, or the username involved. We can then determine if the user is lying, or if they have indeed been scammed.

2. User-submitted R-mail reports that require background information on the situation and whole conversation that took place - what if it was a retaliation to a user breaking the rules that was reported?

3. Suspicious account activity meriting the staff member to check r-mails for signs of glitch abuse, multiple accounting, scamming, or conspiring with other members to do any of those things, or things that explicitly break site rules. (This however requires the Support member to fully justify their reason.)

What if a staff member sees a private conversation?


Firstly, Support are not permitted to simply go rooting around looking at private conversations that may be sensitive in any way. Why would they have the reason to? Not only that, but even if they DO stumble across one, they signed a privacy agreement upon entering training which forces them to keep ALL information regarding a user, staff-related or otherwise, to themselves or their team leaders. Any staff found to be leaking any kind of sensitive or important information regarding ANY members or ANY development features for that matter are instantly fired.

There's no need to worry, and if you're still concerned, feel free to use other methods of chatting when it comes to really important or personal issues. We have no problem with that, of course. :) <3

Loves, hugs and snuggles from Fizzeh!

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Your input matters!

I am interested in hearing opinions, questions, and ideas from you guys concerning Rescreatu. It doesn't have to be ban-related, just Res-related.

Comments can be made anonymously or not, that is totally up to you guys. I'll leave this up for a week or so and then make responses. =)

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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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