The Energon Pub

Caelus wrote:You'll have to forgive me for being anal;

I do on a daily basis.

No seriously. I understand what you want and why and do agree.

So i'll throw this definition out there, someone might be able to improve on it or put it in better terms.

Unfair Advantage
An unfair advantage is an advantage you have gained through a glitch or loop hole in programming.
For example ...
• Accessing weapons you do not have the FP/SK requirements to access
• Upgrading of stats and tactics past 10
• Programming macros that allow you to deploy automatically without the need to be at a computer
• Activating more than 6 bots

In short, any action that is not within the normal parameters of game play.

Unfair Advantages that you had no control over
These will often result from programming changes and you should contact a Moderator as soon as possible to help you correct these issues.

dealing with the unfair advantage:

Starting today, I'm manually going through the character database looking for stats over 10. When I find them, I bring them back to 10. I'm not awarding or deducting XP lost because of this. If the player wants their missing XP back, they'll have to reset. I do hope to have a permanent fix soon.

How is this?

First and foremost, Heavy Metal War Players must abide by all of the rules regarding conduct on Seibertron.com in general. The full list of those rules, can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3266

Of particular importance for those playing Heavy Metal War:

- Do not create multiple accounts either to post in the forums or to play the game. Not only is this against the rules of Seibertron.com, it’s also one of the most blatant forms of cheating in Heavy Metal War.
- Mod's the Word. You are expected to abide by the decisions of the site and game’s staff, even if you disagree with those decisions. If you do disagree, please discuss it with the staff member via private message, or contact another staff member about the issue.
- Seibertron.com, and Heavy Metal War by extension, is PG-13, so that both minors and adult fans visiting from school or work computers can safely view it. If it is prohibited in the forums, then it is also inappropriate for use in the bios, names, or mottos of your Heavy Metal War Team. This means:
- Do not create improper usernames or game-character names.
- No excessive cursing, violence, or sexual content.
- No hate speech.
- No threats.
- No discussion nor promotion of illegal activities.
- No Spam or Commercial Advertising.

Rules which are Specific to Heavy Metal War:

- You may not exploit an "Unfair Advantage" in the game by:
- Sharing your account with another individual. This is considered cheating, even if it is only to have someone ‘baby-sit’ your team while you are on vacation.
- Creating programs (scripts, macros, hacks, virus's etc.) to play the game for you or to cheat by harming other player's accounts or altering your own.
- Exploiting a glitch or loop hole in the game's programming to access weapons you do not have the FP/SK requirements to access, upgrade stats and tactics past 10, upgrade stats and tactics beyond what your bot’s xp allows, activate more than 6 bots at a time or, in short, take any other action that is not within the normal parameters of game play.

- If you discover a glitch in the game that allows your bots to be given an unfair advantage, regardless of how minor it may be, you MUST report it immediately and cease taking advantage of the exploit immediately. If you do so there will be no consequences.
- If you do not report the glitch and instead utilize it to give yourself an unfair advantage then you will be issued a warning via Private Message to stop exploiting the glitch. You will have 24 hours to comply with this warning, if you continue to exploit the glitch after the 24 hour period a second warning will be issued and you will have 12 hours to comply. If you fail to comply after that you will be suspended according to Seibertron.com rules and also face a loss of xp and/or energon. Missing warnings due to infrequent checking of your Private Messages will not be considered a valid excuse.


Note: Unfair Advantages that You have No Control Over
These will occasionally emerge as the result of programming changes or maintenance by the game's administrators. You should contact a Moderator as soon as possible to help you correct these issues.

If these meet with approval, I'll pass these on to the powers that be for final review, and hopefully, official posting.

Sounds good, but considering most of it is what I said my opinion isn't really necessary for this.

Caelus wrote:- If you do not report the glitch and instead utilize it to give yourself an unfair advantage then you will be issued a warning via Private Message to stop exploiting the glitch. You will have 24 hours to comply with this warning, if you continue to exploit the glitch after the 24 hour period a second warning will be issued and you will have 12 hours to comply. If you fail to comply after that you will be suspended according to Seibertron.com rules and also face a loss of xp and/or energon. Missing warnings due to infrequent checking of your Private Messages will not be considered a valid excuse.

Caelus wrote:2) If the person does not respond within ??? amount of time, or if they resume illicit activities afterward, suspend their team. Time-Suspended will be based on how much xp they likely accumulated while cheating, and how long they would normally take to accumulate that much xp.*

Step 2 is the one I need a lot of help with.

First of all, I need to know, how long should a moderator reasonably wait between steps 1 & 2? If the mods have a large civillian support staff to help us, we could go the extra mile and keep track of how many missions offenders have played since receiving the first warning, as I think that's a more pertinent measure than just time. If the person doesn't respond in 24 hrs, they may simply have not been on for 24hrs. If they've played 24 missions since you issued the first warning though...

Can you guys come up with a fair way of making that work?

If you want a permanent solution once some work is done on the backend, here's how we handle this at my job, anything in parenthesis would be things that would need to be changed to fit this being a forum instead of your entire internet service.

Step 1) Warning, e-mail (pm). a "quarantine" where no matter what you do you are directed to a single page which tells you what you did wrong and a button to click to agree to not do it and get back to what you were doing.

Step 2) Final warning, e-mail (pm). A "quarantine" like above only no click through, you must call (send pm to mod) to be released.

Step 3) Suspension, e-mail (pm). A "quarantine" again but this time we must get a faxed (pm'd) statement of what's been done to resolve the situation, or in case of intentional activity, a written promise not to do it again.

Step 4) Termination. Buh-bye, thanks for playing, there's the door.

Obviously in the case of this game and forums Step 2 & 3 are redundant. If you can't get an "HMW exploiter" usergroup set up that has redirects to one specific page no matter what they do, (ala "miserable users" on VBulletin) take away the activate button and replace it with a button that takes them to their PM inbox.

This takes the "Well they didn't play for the whole week during the warnings" thing out of the equation.