Today we wanted to connect with everyone regarding the recent gold exploit, as well as exploits in general within the online environment. We want to talk a bit about what we’re doing in regards to these issues, and what our plans for the future are.
We take exploits within Last Epoch very seriously and ensure that any time an exploit comes up, we give it our full and immediate attention. We strictly enforce our Terms of Use when it comes to exploits and RMT (Real-Money Trading), and as such, one can expect that abusing such exploits or engaging in RMT, both buying and selling, will result in a permanent account ban.
Since 1.0 has launched, we have been aware of two exploits. The first allowed duplication of items through the bazaar. We were made aware of this exploit three days after its first discovery, and deployed a fix for it the same day. The second exploit we became aware of was the recent gold exploit, which we created and deployed a fix for in less than 24 hours of being made aware of the exploit.
Current Actions
In response to the gold exploit, we have reviewed gold activity on an account level, identifying, and banning those accounts which have been participating in illegitimate gold generation. We don’t want to speak too much to how this was tracked, as it could only really serve to provide bad actors information to try to avoid detection. With this, we are aware of the concerns of legitimate accounts being falsely flagged. We are quite confident in our tracking not falsely flagging accounts, though as always you can appeal any moderation action through support.lastepoch.com.
We have also banned accounts with duplicated items from the first exploit, and we have been and are continuing to process and ban all accounts linked to RMT services (both buying and selling). These regular account bans for RMT involvement are actively removing significant amounts of gold from the economy, which we expect will help bring down inflation.
We are aware of the inflation which has occurred within Merchant’s Guild, and are discussing methods to deflate the economy again. We expect the removal of much of this gold through the bans to both those who exploited the gold bug, as well as RMT involved accounts, will help quite a bit, though we are also discussing additional actions. At this point, we’re not implementing any actions which we’re able to talk about, however if we do plan to take any actions which directly effect players we will communicate those actions.
Moving Forward
We want to make sure we’re not only reacting to exploits, and are instead working on proactive measures to prevent exploits in the first place. We’re making sure to act both on a technical level and on a user level. Actions we’re taking on a technical level are much harder to discuss, as saying what we would be doing is just providing information to bad actors on how to try to exploit after. However, we want to strongly state that we are not ignoring these exploits occurring and are taking active measures to combat them.
Lightless Arbor and Runes of Creation generating legitimate duplicate items has also been contributing to the perception of item dupes. Some of this comes from awareness regarding that these legitimate duplicates are possible, as well as to what extent. It may be surprising to know that Lightless Arbor’s Vaults of Uncertain Fates can actually produce up to 12 duplicates of the exact same item. These legitimate duplications can produce some very suspicious-looking listings on the Bazaar. So when we talk about changes on a user level, what we mean is that we are working on not only preventing these exploits, but also this kind of confusion being generated by user experience. As our first action to help address this, we will be introducing mirrored item card graphics to help visually represent when an item is a legitimate duplicate (on duplicated items, the 2D art for the item will be mirrored / flipped).
We’ve also found, in general, the Merchant’s Guild centralizing of gold leads to a fair amount of inflation all by itself, and as such, are looking into and discussing inflation control methods such as implementing a Gold Tax on transactions in 1.1. We don’t want to implement this kind of change during the current cycle as it would be a fairly fundamental change to the Bazaar and Merchant’s Guild. We’ll have more information concerning inflation counters, Tax or other, as we get closer to 1.1.
Closing
We don’t think it’s a very controversial statement to say that abusing an exploit, ruining the game for all players is not acceptable, and that doing so should result in a ban. We also acknowledge this isn’t just on bad actors, but it’s also our responsibility to do everything we can to prevent these exploits from being possible in the first place.
With that said, we want to be clear in stating that we acknowledge the feedback from the community concerning allowing these exploits to have slipped through, and want to make sure we state that we are taking these events very seriously. We are actively investing in both addressing, and preventing these exploits, with no efforts spared, or shirking of the issues.
