Hmmmmmm

[Liwsa]

Don't logs show WHO sold something to a vendor? If so maybe it can be tracked down if a person is selling 100's of gems to a vendor where in that char's log they got them. The gems could not have just poofed into their inventory, would have be be a log somewhere of how that many gems got in their inventory(quest had in, looted from mobs...) something has to be somewhere.

Maybe instead of trying to recreate the occurence it can be tracked down from a char's log as to where THEY got them in the first place.

[Unapuma]

I went through many npc is Felwithe and didn't find anything unusual so maybe it's not occuring on Maelin? I didn't comb over every other cities though.

[Maevenniia]

I was gone on vacation for a week. Today in both areas of Felwithe I found several thousand more raw diamonds, flawless diamonds, and diamonds that were not there when I left last week. There clearly is a problem that SOE is not able to track down or fix. SOE, hiding your head in the sand will not make it go away. These gems are from different expansions so I doubt they are being farmed as some have suggested. I have never in the past seen so many raw and flawless diamonds on NPCs.

All Ngreth said was that they haven't been able to reproduce it yet, there is no need to accuse them of "hiding their heads in the sand".

We've got to let them work on it, and continue providing detailed information.

It may take SOE putting some sort of "watch" in the various cities, maybe a flag that gets triggerred if large quantities of raw/flawless and other diamonds get sold to the NPCs by the same character...something that will tag the seller invisibly for "forensic" investigation (ie: alerting GMs that they should backtrack through a specific player's logs...

[kekenewah]

sorry

It is just frustrating that someone is getting away with this for such a long peroid of time and making so much plat off of this exploit. When SOE put those NPCs with tradeskill stuff into the game they caught the cheaters right away and did the rollbacks (which actually made things worse as people used the rollbacks to dupe stuff). You would think that if they could track people who used those NPCs they would be able to track down who is selling the gems to the NPCs now.

[Elyssanda]

Well... with patches yesterday and today. it can be checked to see if it's still happening... anyone checking in the last week or more would be checking zones where we already knew it was happening because most of them didn't reset in the last 30 days since the last patch.

[Ngreth Thergn]

it was a MUCH more confined set of circumstances.

We had a defined thing to track. We also had a defined time period.

With this... we don't have a great time period.

We don't have an defined place to look (can people start posting actual NPC names with the zone?)

And with what people thought was an over-reaction last time we are a bit leery to jump the gun on "deleting" stuff. Wouldn't you be just as in-sensed if for whatever reason you had been collecting gems for a year or two, and decided to sell them off an POOF you are banned, or your money deleted or you are rolled back.

Plus. Constantly just rolling back people won't help us find the problem and instead just cost us lots of time and bad feelings. No-one has come up with ANYTHING that will help us find the actual problem... just the results.

[Ngreth Thergn]

TAke Rivervale as an example, on teh day I discovered the gems, there were

Diamonds
Blue Diamonds
Flawless Diamonds
Raw Diamonds

at LEAST 20-30 each, many time more, on almsot every single merchant in Roivervale, even the low traffic/low visibility merchants that are usually not sold to.

Sure Diamonds and Blue Diamonds may have been dropping more in TSS, but not teh Flawless Diamonds - those are from Velious. And the Raw Diamonds are from Planes of Power.

So, nope, I do not think there is an innocent explanation.

Now, I will say that lately I haven't seem enormous/suspicious quantities of these gems on merchants as I do my vendor-diving, just the usual 1 or 2 BDs here and there, but maybe the exploiters got wind of this thread and decided to lay low, or decided to sell to full merchants so that the gems would not be visible in a merchant's inventory...or maybe it's because Quellious has crashed 3 Saturdays in a row...

I have about 20 Flawless Diamonds in the bank of my mule that is holding that stuff. So my only "flag" would be the consistency of it happening, not that it happened.

[Maevenniia]

Aye, people can and will hoard stuff, but it was pretty blatant.

Every merchant in rivervale had quantites of every diamond I mentioned (till I bought the BDs, before my "something is wrong here" bell started ringing, hehe)

I did bug a few of teh merchants when I saw it in a couple of other cities...Felwithe was one, I think.

If I spot the same thing happening, I will /bug the merchant and post the info here.

[Faerwynd]

I found a few THOUSAND diamonds, flawless diamonds etc on merchants in felwithe yesterday (I bought ~700 diamonds a few weeks ago from a merchant to skill up, no BD's on them though). Ill check again and post merchant names next time I see it.

[Maevenniia]

If they are smart, they probably DO use a new "throwaway" level 1 every time, unless the hack requires a higher level character.

[Maevenniia]

People, it will be a lot easier if we post specifics from now on. Telling them, "just check the merchants and who sold to them" isn't constructive, when there are hundreds of NPC merchants in the game.

example:

date discovered:
zone:
name (& loc?) of NPC merchant:
issue: (what gems and in what quantities)

Then Ngreth can give the investigator(s) the info so they have a specific place to start. It will save them time if we give them more than just a vague "those merchants, over there in XXX zone"

Also, it's good that a patch just occurred, because if we spot any merchants today with suspicious quantities of various diamonds, the selling activity will have to have been today..

So get out there today and check your home city's merchants, for a start, and if you find what we are looking for, /bug it in game and come post the details here for good measure.

[Cerpicio]

If we buy any of these gems, are we possibly going to get into trouble later?


-- C.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Well..

The other possibility is that because people went to level 75 and are hunting in higher level zones with higher level mobs, there are just a ton more diamonds and what not dropping. My guys in Valdeholm have been collecting 20 or more times of gems what I used to get hunting in lower level zones.

Its not unreasonable that a level 75 mob has a 20 times or even more probability to drop a diamond or blue diamond as compared to a level 70 or level 65 mob.

Thus if you hunt in a zone 5 levels above you get 20 times more diamonds and blue diamonds....

Basically 1/2 of the player base that logs in every day is up 5 levels... If the probability is 20X then you're going to see 20X the diamonds etc in the game ...

[Sam DeathWalker]

Ya ...

Well ya just saying that there are a lot more in the game now... but as you correctly point out there is much unexplained by that fact.

[Diani]

More gems dropping I can understand.
However, a lot of gems on out of trafic merchants is realy suspicious. If more gems are dropping then why are people now using out of trafic merchants to sell them to and not the normal high traffic merchants