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Recess is now over. Follow your line leaders back to class.

We received an email from Adam Young of Funcom. Yes, THE Adam Young. It’s a rebuttal and a “my side of the story” type of thing.

In response to the IGN article, Mr. Caldwell’s claims and the ICQ log.

Within negotiations, to obtain information, one has to attempt to gain the other parties trust, to make them feel as though you are one of them. Additionally, the other party has to feel that they are getting a fair deal in exchange for what you will receive. This is no different in the case with the personal discussions that I had with Mr. Caldwell. Additionally, I made it explicitly clear to Lee that I was not acting as an official spokesperson for Funcom, and that this conversation was strictly off the record. I repeatedly requested a point of contact from Wes, Andy, and Lee but was told time and again that they were not interested in receiving an official letter from Funcom explaining why their accounts had been banned and would not be released. The ICQ log was me having a personal conversation with Mr. Caldwell, attempting to get him to assist in resolving these exploits, at no point did I harass him, and was after the issuance of formal emails informing them that their accounts had been closed due to an apparent exploit.

With any story there are always two sides, Mr. Caldwell certainly has the art of spinning a story down pact.

In exchange for their cooperation in resolving the rapid level exploit, I discussed the possibility of releasing some of their accounts. That was until the characters were looked over and some serious item duplication exploits were found. This altered the negotiations, as I could no longer return the other accounts due to the extreme nature of the exploits present. The final arrangement was that I would allow them to retrieve legit personal equipment and credits from their personal AO play characters to transfer to new characters in addition to some tokens. My rational being that two 1000 token boards on two characters was a worthwhile compromise for eliminating eight serious exploits from the game.

Now what ended up occurring was that Mr. Caldwell also transferred some legacy stacks of armor and other items from this character and proceeded to use an exploit that he had informed me of to duplicate this stack of armor and stacks of tokens in order to generate credits for resale. Now if you note in the log, I advised them that if they were still going to continue to dupe stacks of items then they should build the stack up from non-stacked items and run there dupe exploit from there as the stacks of items were going to be removed from the game (this was me trying to win over their confidence to get them to finally provide the exploit details) at no point did I say that I would not ban an account if I caught them doing so. I had their word that these tokens were not going to be exploited, which they did anyway. After discovering this, these accounts were banned as well. Not for the potential that they might resell credits or items but that the account was using an exploit.

As for the advancement guidelines, this is what some of our best players are capable of accomplishing using legitimate in game methods.

From the IGN article:

“They didn’t ever ban our accounts,” says Caldwell. “They just had a rogue employee shaking us down in a very unprofessional way.”

Nope I personally blocked their access to our game servers from certain IP addresses until we could look into things further. A little history here, we had a serious exploit a while back involving some rather creative individuals who had hacked the data stream and were sending modified packets to the servers to rapid level their characters. This exploit was fixed and Black Snow Interactive’s macro looked to be the same issue. Sine the initial packet exploit, with issues this serious it is customary to deny access to the game servers to prevent damage being done to the system. Once it was determined that the issue was not the same, the exploited (rapid leveled) accounts were banned along with associated accounts and the IP subnet released so as not to deny service to any other players while still maintaining control over the situation until a more thorough walk through could be conducted. By the time this had been completed, Mr. Caldwell and I had already spoken and they were informally informed as to why the accounts had been banned. When asked to provide an address to receive the official letter as to why they had been banned his response was that he didn’t care for the letter. Within the ICQ log I cut and pasted an official response regarding the reason why the account would not be returned and why they would not receive a refund.

Rogue actions, nope not at all I kept Marius, Henning and Thomas abreast of the developments. Although, the log looks a bit rogish, this was intentional on my behalf to set an atmosphere in which these individuals would confide in me. Not to mention the good cop bad cop routine with me playing the role of the good cop and painting the Exploit Team lead as the bad cop. All information provided was already available, either from the Test Live Server for upcoming changes in 13.6 and or from external sites which are tracking character level progression. At times one has to bend a little in order to benefit the AO community as a whole. While discussing monitoring methods, I disclosed some minor methods that, at the time, were used to monitor for illegal activity. The actual tool set is much more complex and sensitive than what I eluded to. And has been enhanced since this incident.

The statement that they have ‘obtained all items and levels in complete accordance with Anarchy Online’s terms of service is incorrect as the EULA explicitly prohibits the use of 3rd party tools to alter the intended game play. As for the items, those were not obtained through normal game play either. How can one state that 5 to 6 backpacks full of stacks if 16K High Quality Medium Tank armors all with the same stack number, all of the same Quality Level, and all possessing the same item identifier are obtained through normal game play, not to mention the stacks of tokens. Yes they used the client to duplicate the items, but this is not the intended function of the code, thus they used a bug (irregularity in the code set) to achieve what is clearly an unfair advantage over other players who work hard to play the game by the intended rules.

Henning has given the go ahead to release the ICQ log between myself and Mr. Caldwell.

Adam “De’Valos”Young

(aka. “Rogue Employee” still ROFL about that one)

Lead Database Administrator/Engineer, Funcom Inc.