The cheating and questionable actions I've done:
- Re-created Kayla's Brooch when instinctively and carelessly walked into Kayla's house too early (before the Mysterious Chest respawned from using a previous brooch). (And no, this source of XP in general is fine because it's once per hour on average and doesn't have much impact once you reach the Expert levels. I'm aware of players hogging it and have never tried to stop it... just occasionally getting annoyed when I go to use Kayla's Brooch and find the Mysterious Chest not in (in which case I just accept my loss - the above incident was in response to my own stupidity because I had just used the Mysterious Chest 5 minutes prior)... I will not make it PK).
- Refunded 10,000 gold after carelessly running into the scrapyard in Harabec with nothing to trade (no /examines sought).
- Refunded 5,000 gold after accidentally running into the room with the Blue Cauldron in the Coven with no Empty Flasks (the /examine was not touched). This happened due to hitting and running Bandits in the Royal Forest and running back to the Coven to heal and to minimise the risk of getting PKed, and getting my directions wrong.
- Increased Balrog's hypnotise factor from 0 to 0.01 after observing a level 40 Ranger constantly soloing it (0.01 shouldn't really affect a level 40 Ranger though unless their Charisma is particularly bad, since at that level they've kind of already earnt the right).
- Felt that +2 Int, +1 Dex was too much for a single boss drop which was possibly designed to make the boss appealing over some quest items that were already around in-game, especially after observing that some of the PKing Mages had 33 Int at level 37 (with another +1 Int available at level 40), so reducing this item to just +1 Int I felt was the best way to temper this power, with the logic that it will still have +1 Dex, +5 armour and 0.1 Spell Absorb over the other non-quest Int item that can go in this slot (it's +1 Dex, +3 armour over the quest item).
- Toned down the Erebus Lance ever so slightly after hearing just how fast some Berserkers were training (this on top of the ridiculous notions that "18m XP is not that much")... it also opened my eyes as to why these players were so privileged... they were using heavy hitters with training weapons and spells, something that not everyone can afford, especially if they're using a class like a Paladin that trains more slowly even with a powerful PvE weapon.
- Tracked players, mostly out of curiosity, especially if they're soloing a boss and possibly making adjustments based on their performance (especially if a boss is not designed to be soloed). OFten, nothing needs to be done because it takes a ridiculously long time to solo a boss. After the PKing recently picked up and I was being personally hunted, I did briefly use it to work out where PKers often looked, but this was mostly unhelpful because said PKers were able to check the entire realm in a matter of minutes and nowhere was safe, and they were thorough. In the end I just fell back to old intuition of staying off the beaten path and preferably being behind a line of KTP monsters that they wouldn't think to initially check (e.g. parts of Mt. Sentant are a good choice... the Ancient Tunnel is a bad one).
On my mortals, I'm effectively in my own clan and am a mercenary for hire, and mostly just want to keep to myself unless explicitly invited. All I want to do is private training and to keep to myself, not disturbing anyone and not being disturbed in return. I'm a loner... always have been. My staff name "Stig" is a reference to a Brisih television show where the resident expert driver is a guy in white overalls, an unknown identity and never seen with his helmet off, although there's always been speculation and an older, black-suited variant of "The Stig" who was outed as the racing driver Ben Collins was killed off, so part of me knew I would eventually be exposed as Gareth/Crane and I was kind of lampshading it... and that happened when a player once slyly asked me a staff question on my mortal and I answered without thinking, prompting a "gotcha" and a "You just told me" reaction - I was nothing short of furious and feeling incredibly stupid that I fell for the oldest trick in the book. Unfortunately, at that point on, the line between mortal and staff was no longer distinct and even I struggled to keep them separated.
So for the incident that kicked this all off... the crackdown on auto-rolled crits. A player (Blake I think, I'm terrible with names) sent me screenshots of a conversation and a virtual machine showing the infamous auto-roller in action. I knew this was serious and undeniable evidence that the auto-roller exists, and I couldn't see any immediately obvious doctoring, so I checked the account in question and found that 18 out of 22 crits were 6 stats. This rang alarm bells, most likely influenced by what I had just seen, but feeling this was well out of my league and I couldn't actually prove anything for sure, I sent everything I had to JLH. He told me to ban the account pending investigation (which I did) and he ran his own log analysis on the entire server, which flagged 18 accounts as having used an auto-roller or which shared an IP with an auto-roller. No names, just pure logic and analysis (JLH mentioned that one IP had over 300,000 rerolls within 24 hours... that's nearly a consistent 4 per second). I had nothing to do with who got banned and who didn't, other than the order to ban the initial account. Unfortunately there were accusations of favouritism because one of the flagged players claimed innocence, and after I analysed the crits in their account one by one, I determined that none of them were 6-stats and hence were likely not auto-rolled. Once JLH himself was satisfied the account was clean, it was unlocked. This caused the ire of one player because I had trained with them once and they were adamanti that this player was not innocent, sending me proof that they were using multiple VPNs (it didn't click initially that this was what was happening in the screenshot and I was too overwhelmed with everything else to make head or tail of it), and this caused me to be labelled as corrupt and constantly hunted. I just wanted to be left alone, but now this wasn't an option on my mortals any more.
To re-emphasie, I hate PKing... I absolutely hate it, and want nothing to do with it and to just be left in peace, but players make the game what they want to make it, and in their mind, if you don't like PKing, get off the game or go play multi-alt. From a long-range perspective, I can see this only driving off moderate players, especially those who can't put in many hours a day because of the extortionate XP losses and other unfair penalties on being PKed that some classes can't get back as quickly, or only in set locations (e.g. undead areas for Clerics) where they'll likely just get nailed again. I would wish that prizes and penalties were more dynamic and could be made fairer, especially if griefing and bullying becomes a problem, but the things i can influence in the game are limited, and hard-coded mechanics I have absolutely no control over. And now I was being hunted over an accusation of favouritism and nothing could counter their desire for blind vengeance.
Now to the business of the Red Dragon. I was tracking Djinn at the time - I can't remember why I never just sent Stig back to the staff room, but that's rife for speculation. I guess this is where my naïveté shows, because not once did I envision them actually follow us into the Twilight Jungle, so you can imagine my horror when they did just that, and then strategically wait for us to reach the Red Dragon so they'd have a better chance and an easy escape. Now I knew they were stalking us, but I knew I couldn't tell the party that "they're in here with is" and would just have to wait until the fireworks started flying. Maybe it's from being too addicted to this game that it caused me to bave an adrenaline dump and a fight or flight response because, you know, my life was in danger in-game. I think the other players suspected something might be up, possibly due to Ares being in the party with them (although they should have no reason to check the location of their own clannies, if they even could, while being distracted by the area's hazards). At the same time, I realised the area had a design flaw that the PKers could exploit... the entrance square was PK, and being killed at any of the Red Dragon's spawn squares would send is back there, so any victims could receive a double whammy of lost XP and items, something that in my mind was beyond unfair, so I corrected the problem and made the square noPK (but still able to attack monsters).
In the end, I slipped up and mentioned I had a bad feeling, possibly unable to contain the panic any longer, and the feeling seemed to resonate with the team. At one point the PKers lost track of us, and I knew we had to get this over quickly and hoped we could kill the Red Dragon before they returned... alas, it was not meant to be. They timed their opening volley right after we attacked so we would have no stamina, and our Cleric went down instantly. Being a Paladin, I would stand no chance against a Mage and a Berserker of a similar level and I knew this, so having already cast Champion's Strength on the hitters a couple of rounds earlier, I knew I had done all I could and logged to the entrance. To my surprise, the PKer got killed by one of the surviving Berserkers (the only one that wasn't Ares) because he managed to hold out against the Nightshade spam with his own use of Ration Packs, and when his 5 stamina recharged, he managed to round him thanks to having Enhance and Champion's Strength active... and then amazingly managed to kill the Red Dragon too, which was near-death. I'm not sure what happened to the other PKer, because they have no kills or deaths on their profile, or at least no extra ones, so I suspect they got killed by the Kitsune that had spawned on the square. Pkers and victims alike reconvened on the entrance square, and the victims said it's a shame that the square was noPK because they wish they could PK them back there and then (which confirmed in my mind that the PKers would be doing just that given their large inventory of Nightshade Elixirs). The whole incident had really shaken me up, and I just wanted to get back to town after all that. My body was trembling out of panic. Some people live for that rush... I don't. I like to keep control of my destiny.
My reputation. I want to be known as fair and just, but I don't want to be put on a pedestal. I'm not an infallible god and I never want to be. I don't want to be a hero or the face of anything or seen as this great person. I have no desire to fame, because ultimately we all die and are forgotten to the sands of time. I'm the technician who keeps his head down and makes sure things are working, and whom you wouldn't give a second glance to on the street. My life is irrelevant in the grand scheme and I seek only to serve things greater than myself so they may continue running once I am gone. Frankly I could live being the most hated subhuman in the universe, as long as I could do my job and keep exposure to a minimum, but due to how politics have played out in this game, that option has been taken away from me and for too long I have been the only active moderator of this game, and so have become the face of it. With no other staff around, me questioning myself and me being an extreme introvert, in the end I had to rely on players to help with ideas and testing, which of course gave them knowledge of things that other players had yet to discover or work out... one example is Lady Talaska's new drop and what to do with it, and the new craft in the Coven. I have asked to keep it on the QT and to not be the first to craft it, but I can't control that ultimately, and if players aren't that observant, they may miss something (e.g. a subtle clue in the text descriptions or NPC chat) that my helpers know already due to being part of the design process.
And now a final word... frankly I'm sickened that even upstanding people instantly go for 'guilty until proven innocent', like with the last member of staff who got chased off the game. A screenshot exists of her teleporting a level 18 Mage to a square near the Magician Bandit... unfortunately it's not the complete picture... she was teleporting her BACK to the Magician Bandit because she had teleported her away to test a Mage weapon (she was trying, unsuccessfully, to make Enhance useful for them) - unfortunately when she finished and teleported Mew back to its previous location, another player was on the square. The staff was more than willing to have JLH confirm that this is what happened, but players had already decided she was a cheater and to not let her forget it. Worse, people who are completely unconnected to the incident believe her to be guilty... doesn't anyone think to ask "care to explain this?" before jumping to conclusions? And of course, with her gone, I was alone once again, having to endure endless vitriol and entitlement and rapid-fire debates without assistance. I just want to design things and make players happy, but because I'm the only one left, I'm forced to deal directly with people. In case some of you haven't noticed, I can't even remember people's names half the time or who belongs to what.
As for what happens to me now... unless JLH himself decides my fate, I'll let you speculate. Don't try looking for me - you won't find me - and maybe at last I can rest in peace.
Yay... less lag.
