So another "affair" has emerged with the launch of Ziost, and keeping in line with the last post I did on this sort of thing, I will be really quite vague.
The story of Ziost - which I plan to cover on Monday when we can hopefully finally access the entirety of it - is currently in a sort-of limbo state. Nobody can complete it until, as I say, Monday, and as a result everything afterwards, such as the Daily Area and hopefully a not-yet-integrated Reputation Faction, is currently locked away and nobody should be able to access it.
The key word there is should.
On the PTS, a path to locked-off areas was uncovered and BioWare very wisely shut this path off before full release. However, another path has subsequently been discovered and this has led to another Ravagers-esque event. If you know what happened there, then you pretty much know what this entails. My reaction to this endeavour is pretty much the same exasperated reaction, but this one is, in my opinion, worse - for temporarily undisclosed reasons. Again, more when we get full access.
There has been one good thing from this: BioWare's response. They acknowledged that they considered this traversing to be an Exploit and that they will be taking action. Indeed, it is because of their quick response that I could be a little less vague than last time.
Bear in mind that with the Ravagers exploit, they took four weeks just to even fully acknowledge it and then another two to finally reveal what was planned for some of those who had exploited. This time around, and inspired by their course of action last time, they actually responded within 24 hours. Credit where it's due, they do seem to have learned their lessons when it comes to response.
We don't know yet the severity of the actions they shall take, but considering that people are accessing a closed-off area and enemies that shouldn't even be available to anyone in-full yet, I have hopes that they shall be stricter - even ever so slightly - in dealing out punishments. The punishments for the Ravagers were still more lenient than I think they should have been, and this is the first true test of BioWare's apparently improved-upon system of dealing with exploiters.
Not a pleasant topic, but hopefully it shows that BioWare are learning to deal with these things more and more efficiently.
EDIT: Action has already been taken against those who used this Exploit, and the response has been more aggressive than that levied against those who used the Ravagers exploit. All in all, BioWare have certainly proved themselves with this very fast response.
I think thier response time is pretty solid. As to exploiting bugs, I have to wonder how you punish folks that just found a loophole that was not previously identified on the PST? Hopefully their public response will lessen the amount of exploiters until they can directly fix it. I'm not sure if it was too wise to release partial content that will be complete at the beginning of May though. That just begs for people finding the loopholes and exploits. My question, on PST did they have testers to see if the areas could be bugged or exploited for locked out zones? Were the bugs reported? If so what was the response from the dev's? I don't believe in exploiting myself, it's not good game play in my opinion. But human nature is human nature, if for no other reason than accomplishment and curiosity. Time will tell. The real lesson here is for the developers to be a bit more careful with timed releases of partial content.
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