Hi there,

We know several of you have asked this question in a few different QOTW threads, and so we'd like to take a moment to chat about those sorts who aim to exploit Earthrise's economy in future stages of beta and beyond:

Q: Kole brings our attention to the ever-dreaded botting question: "Does Masthead have plans of their own for minimizing gold sellers that they are implementing into the game or is it something they'll tackle at launch?"
 
A: Masthead Studios has always followed a stance against "gold sellers" and botting the game that creates unfair playing field for our loyal players. Most of the Earthrise design has followed the paradigm of requiring player interaction and skill through every aspect of combat, crafting and logistic movement so we firmly believe the game will be, by design, very difficult to automate via known methods. "Gold farming" at pure profit is also difficult to do when every use of an item contributes toward wearing that item out and allows us to balance micro-expenses against expected reward.

During upcoming stages of closed Beta newer testers will initially find a "laissez-faire" type of economy approach where (almost) anything goes. Still, we expect our testers to try to break things as much as possible and come up with scenarios to work within and around the game's design. Exploiting bugs and imbalances will be strictly logged and monitored, as well as any discrepancy between the predicted flow of the economy and player actions.  As we proceed through beta, you can bet we'll continue to watch the economy carefully. We would definitely like to see how our players would actually approach "gold farming" into Earthrise in all stages of beta based on our current designs, and we'll be strengthening our monitoring tools for this sort of behavior based around actual (and predicted) player activity. After all, the point of beta is to try as many things out and report as many bugs as possible, so don't get comfortable with any sort of "get rich quick" schemes you may uncover. When we expand into open Beta, this sort of activity will be just one of the issues we will tackle with high priority.

And that's the word on that! We'll see you next week!
~m.

YAY! There are newer stages to closed beta to come! WOOT! lol sorry that is like the first thing that caught my attention.

I always believed that with a open PvP mmo that exploitation would be set to a low as the game will punish those before they can truly get any more out of it. I am happy that MHS is dedicating a while log and really monitoring it. I feel safer already... Well somewhat...

I know they stated that they will keep a keen eye on exploitation, but something that was pseudo-rampant in other games was the use of radar programs to track player movements.  Thats a nasty thing for pk's cause they can track solo players, gank them and steal their gear. (forgive me, but if there is some sort of tracking class or items in game I am not aware).

Its also nice to see that the game is trudging along through the beta stages.  I'm just itching to play, but i'd rather have a nice polished finished project than a borken game that scares off half of the community.  In the past, if a game was released unfinished(like on of my all time favorites DAOC) was ok, because there was only 3-4 MMO's out then.  Now if a game is unfinished it instantly gets a bad reputation and no one wants to bother with it when it does become smoothly playable.

Sin

Thanks for the info, I do not know much about computer programing so that was somewhat enlightening.

Nice post, hope to see how the crafting economy system works "soon" lol

Almost all MMO's do run scans for spyware like key loggers, this is a security precaution, and one could include software that allows clients side exploits into this category as well. The problem is that the user can simply load the cheat software after the client has loaded and bypass the scans. Scanning for software is not always the best thing as that software can take different shapes and forms. Someone can track player movements (radar tracking) through packet sniffing and other means as well, like by just being very attentive... It seems better in my opinion to log player behavior that is out of the norm (suspected cheating), and look for patterns. Patterns that seem scripted, macro'd, or just robotic. Then when they see this they can run a quick program scan. This is what most companies do, and it's something that can be silently monitored without players getting touchy about privacy.

Actually I'm a little disappointed by this QOTW. "Gold-farmers are bad and we try to catch them" and "In beta we expect our testers to try and dig out as many bugs and exploits as possible before release". Isn't that rather standard? Not that I wanted anything more or different on the subject, but it's just more fun with QOTW on gameplay

Good to hear that Masthead will take care of exploiting and gold selling. The problem is that "china farmers" are poorly payed humans which are sitting in front of a pc and have to play 12 hours to get gold, items or do powerleveling.