Dear community,
We have been watching a sizable cross-section of people for some time now. Unfortunately these people (one of which I consider a friend from when I was a newb, and one of whom was once a guildmate of mine) have been greedily exploiting a bug for well over a week.
As a result of our surveilance of this situation many players have been banned for a period of one year. We deeply regret that it should have to come to this.
Every player must be accountable for their actions, and must inform us when they find exploitable bugs. The fact that this has occurred has cost the gm and dev teams many hours of our volunteered time. Both personally, and in the name of those who have lost the time they would have given to the honest and decent players who populate our server, I want to express deep disappointment in those who conducted themselves with contempt for the players/devs/and gms; actions such as this devalue all of our efforts and the time it takes all of us to make a nice playing environment.
If any of you encounter such a bug it is incumbent upon you to report it immediately and NOT to make use of it or inform other players.
Roughly 20 accounts were banned and many of these made efforts to hide their shady transactions and transfer tria to alts/mules/or other accounts. There will be no defensible claim of "just testing the a bug." Over 100 million tria were made by the various parties and there is no doubt efforts were made to hide it.
We must offer thanks to the anonymous player who discovered this problem and Immediately informed us. The bug itself was fixed within one day of our discovery and time was left for us to discover the extent of the exploiters' impact on the community.
Any appeals about these bans are to be directed to Kerol via pm on this forum or over IRC (server:freenode) in channel #planeshift-gmtalk. Any further efforts on the part of those who were banned to make this worse for the developers/players/or gms will be met with forum or IRC bans as the situation merits.
There are several accounts that are still being monitored and we hope that there will be no further need to do so, nor to ban members of our community from our world.
Please enjoy PlaneShift fairly, and use the bug tracker to help the hard-working volunteers who deliver this game to make changes that benefit all of us.
Thank you and happy gaming.
