[Rogean]

I have a few different things I wanted to announce today.

Recent Exploit
Recently we discovered an exploit that, if abused, could generate platinum. We restarted the servers the other day to patch it, and begun investigations into abusers. We found 3 people that have been abusing it for quite a while.

Exploiting a bug such as this is one of the worst forms of cheating, far worse than the use of third party programs. It has the potential of affecting the entire server in a negative way, and furthermore it breaks the trust and friendships you may have with other players as they now too are affected by your actions. The punishments for this are severe. All associated accounts, meaning any account this person logged into, will be receiving a form of disciplinary action regardless of owner.

There were only a handful of accounts that were used to perform the exploit, however, the exploiters have logged into 106 different accounts in total. Of these accounts, 86 of them are guilded in The Mystical Order. While most of these accounts are owned by other players who may have had no knowledge of the actions of the people they were sharing their accounts with, the account owners take that risk when they share their information.

We had a CSR Staff meeting last night to decide how to proceed, and we agreed on the following.

All accounts are initially receiving bans. Accounts that are owned by the persons actually performing the exploit will not be unbanned, neither will accounts that generally have no owner (Shared banks, porters, trackers, etc).

Accounts owned by others that were logged into by the exploiters a small number of times will be reviewed on a case by case basis, and could be reduced to a 2 to 4 week suspension. Only accounts logged into a small number of times will be given this reduction.

We also discussed any actions to take against the guild as a whole, taking into consideration other recent events such as another guild member recently banned for heavy RMT inolvement, and an officer recently suspended for ninja looting.

It is based on that information that we are raid suspending the guild for 2 weeks. We brought up the possibility of completely disbanding The Mystical Order. Personally, I find it hard to believe that TMO leadership was not aware or suspicious of this happening, however we are only able to take action on the information we have.

Real Money Trading
I briefly mentioned some recent RMT bans, and I wanted to elaborate on that. We have done multiple waves of bans in recent weeks for RMT activity.

Contrary to popular belief, we take RMT seriously. We have a vast arsenal of utilities at our disposal to identify and track suspected activity. Once a particular player has been identified, it is very easy for us to match all associated accounts, and flag all possible transactions. More staff members have been given access and trained on these utilities.

It is not always immediate, but our logs exist forever, and you will be found. There are no way to hide the trades and it is just a matter of time.

DO NOT Buy OR Sell platinum, items, or characters for money. It is not worth it to lose your characters over.

Raid Scene
It continues to be an aggravating realization among CSR staff that 10% of the server population causes 90% of the problems. We are all for competition, but it needs to be fair competition. We are also all here for the same thing, to experience classic Everquest. The same guild monopolizing raid content for 2 years that they might not even need anymore is ridiculous, just to block other guilds from the chance of gearing up to take on the same end game content.

I was thinking to myself the other day and I came to ask myself.. Are we providing this server to give people the arena to compete to such bitter extremes that it has resorted to taking every absolute measure to be victorious, or are we here to provide a classic Everquest experience for everyone to enjoy?

A lot of you make fun of it in your own terms, but it really does come down to fighting over very old content.

Either way, we're tired of the constant bickering, the training, the ninja looting, and all the other bullshit that's going on. So here's what we're going to do.

Starting today and then evaluated when Velious is released the CSR staff will be keeping track of how the raid guilds are treating eachother. If we do not see a significant improvement in the behavior of the raiding guilds and how they treat eachother, Velious will be released without raid content. To be clear, we want an enjoyable raid scene for everyone, not just one or two guilds. This means working together to figure out a compromise when racing for mobs, and working with smaller guilds to let them have a chance at mobs you don't absolutely need for gearing main characters.

Don't think that this means you can continue shitting on each other and just not petition, the staff will still be watching.

Velious
Speaking of velious, I know you guys have been asking for an update. I plan to make a more accurate announcement at some point but Velious development is proceeding well and we may be opening Beta within a few months. Stay tuned.

Teams99
Unfortunately due to the efforts to bring Velious development to a close, we have decided to postpone the Teams PvP Server. Alecta (He's having hardware issues right now but will be back soon) and other staff members will continue to work with the PvP community on figuring out the best ruleset and implementing the mechanics for the new server.