Busted...

[Lammalord]

e(#1)
2006-11-07 23:06:33
Exploit

Hello,

I have made an investigation and found out you were using a bug that allowed the completion of missions, using a very small number of ships. This bug was trying to get the system to not spawn any fleets for a battle, in a particalar high difficulty mission, ending the mission on success, having not faced any fleets, or very few fleets, exploiting the cost calculator to lower the enemy fleet spawns.
The logs show you used a very small number of fleets, in order to determine the cost calculator to reduce the number of enemy fleets, that determined some missions to end up having no enemies at all to fight, and receiving the reward for those high difficulty missions.

Using this bug, I have estimated a total of 250 billion credits were gained, from the moment of the exploit, that have been deducted from your commander.

I have recommisioned your fleets and marines, and left your 12 bil credits and 3 bil workers to recover.

Please reply with your explanation of this issue, in order to avoid further action.

I am asking if this commander is indeed Lammalord, or has he left someone else in chanrge of this account?
I am also sorry to inform you that your forum moderator rights have been suspended until this issue is resolved.

Thank you,

Sir Emi


humm ouch? welp if i got punished i hope the many others useing the bug do aswell, i know im not the only one for i got intrudused to it by a member of my alliance, who i think got it from somone else.. and i have seen about 20+ people useing this explit.. i hope i wont get framed for it, just beacuse i happened to be the most well known player useing it... (didnt even know its a bug.. oh well...)

[Silverthorne]

Holy moley areoly, you play with bugs?    250 billion - gimme sum a dat

[Lammalord]

wasnt really a bug i saw tons of people doing it, all you did really is reserve your ships (when i got 0red by midnight i had no need to bother with that) and then use 10 fleets and attack 200+% missions.. it worked fine, and it really didnt seem like it was anything bad liike emi put it out to be.. it was simply just useing 10 fleets at a real real low power to do missions, but oh well.. like fighting over anything with emi works...

and really i think it started out when one of my allaince members sent ten fleets of powerships into a 200% mission and won.. (at least the  mission part of it.. people were doing it in the galaxy from day one of the game...)

[Midnight44]

Well, I'm surprised your whole alliance didn't get busted Lamma. 

[Argus]

Perhaps you should supply Emi with a list of those people you know or suspect has used the bug, so we can move on with a clean game.

[ars68]

all I say is who in the world can you think it was not a bug, when the EXACT same thing happened before and E had to change things around???  in fact, this looked so much like the last one, that I thought this was just like a couple months late being put up.

remember?
people would do encounters by sending a 1 space ship by itself, and win very high encounters simply because no fleets would show up?

in fact... weren't you one of those people who found that one as well??? 

[Lammalord]

my member said it orginated out of AL2 actally, were davey boy and other AL2 members figured out how to do it in the galaxy (galaxy contracts) and win them for easy start up cash... and that was then told to soppe and charmz, when then told my member.. then my member tried it on mission contracts, and oddly it worked.. still didnt think sending swarm style ships into high % mission contracts would actally be considered as a bug.. but oh well....

[Argus]

So who is that member you keep referring to?
Seems to me you are not doing him any favours by witholding his identity, you only make it so that Emi has to work harder to discover it.
Better to show your willingness to get this mess cleared up by fully disclosing all you know.

At the very least I think the entire top ten should be investigated and share lamma's punishment if evidence of cheating is found.
I for one dont want people to think I am where I am, because i cheated.

[A^Bloody^Idiot]

Neither do I, I have nothing to hide highest mission I'm diong is 25% so.. and every1 can see that I've always been using like 4 - 7 ships... so.. you can't really accuse me if I even did high missions or is it possible with big ones aswell? ah, I don't know and I don't think I wanna know either

Greetz, ABI

[Soppe]

oh lol that explains the whole thing about why i was told that i should use that setup... it didnt work very good for me though cause i didnt win once so i gave it up pretty fast, and if some1 had told me it was a bug (which i cant remember any1 did), i wouldnt have done it at all, but im not very good at deciding whats a bug n whats not and i thought missions were as they should be neways, after all this time =S

[Hellsword]

i really dont see how oyu cna consider this to not be a bug lamma... paying less for fleets and getting bigger rewards easily...

[Seither]

hell, he didn't pay less for fleets, he just used small enough fleets where missions weren't sending any fleets to encounter his, so he'd win huge rewards.

Lamma, there is no doubt that this was a bug. Since when do missions never send fleets to encounter you, no matter how small of power a fleet(s) you send? As a moderator you should have reported this immediately. Just because others were doing it doesn't mean you should, you definantly shouldn't, seeing as you are a part of the staff.

I'm afraid I have to side with Sir Emi here, you exploited this bug, you deserve the consequences.

[FTP]

He didnt said he didnt deserve them he only said he hope those who deserve it to get their consequences aswell.

[Lammalord]

monkey if you read everyhing (witch sadly you never do) you would of seen that it said i always encountered fleets, and that their were super had to win (possible) but hard.. an avarage mission would take me 4-5 trys to win, and the only reason i would win was beacsue i would go against a low hit, high attack fleet, i bet this exact same stragey would work on any cost of ships, say 20 mil a ship, you would lsoe 4/5 missions (with loseing most your ships) but you would win adventally..

i mean there was once were i wasted over 200 turns on a mission to win.. with the hard to win rate, i would say its excally like the me doing the 35-25% missions, but without the crowd, so i can actally completle them, people wouldnt have even surched to try and find a easirier way to do missions like this if there was an abundent supply of the 35-25% missions, instead of making everyone wait 10 min for 3-4 missions at a time...

[TheMerchant]

First off i would like you to know that lamma was nowhere near responcible for the creation of this exploit, and that i take full responcibility for the creation of the high % mission discovery.

i would like to inform you that this so called "exploit" is not recent and that several commanders since the begginning of the round have used it to gain several credits from what i can tell, it seems that this "exploit" originated in al2 by davey boy at the very beginning of the round. He used this setup to do galaxy contracts, he told charms and tinkerbell then theborg and overtime this idea spread to skums dump mainly me and lamma. i then expaned on the galaxy contract idea, and tried mothership contracts. thus began a new era of this "exploit" in the above letter you claim that we used few fleets to complete these missions but actually we used more than the common amount (we used 10 while most pp. used 3 or 4) and you claim that we used this "exploit" to encounter NO enemies while in fact we always did encounter enemies and never at any point did we encounter 0 enemies creating an automatic win or try to encounter 0 fleets causing a win. i can supply several reasons proving that this "exploit" is in fact is not an "exploit", but a strategy.
1. only a certain style of ships can complete the missions successfully and they must be built a certain way and only a few commander have the ability to create such ships.
2. as many other strategies there is a downside, money for low xp
3. like many other strategies, your ships go against other ships with an equal win: loss ratio as normal strategies
4. it requires turns to make money, and was not very efficient strategy
5. the main purpose of this strategy was to increase profit and decrease ships loss
6. it became easier to accomplish higher missions when you added commander lvl based mission contract

there are several more reasoons but i feel that from reading yor posts on this topic lamma posted they wont be of much use.

Deepest Apologizes,

TheMerchant