no. wrote on Feb 28
th, 2018 at 1:46pm:
This is not a good method. VIP and Shards can skip quests to compete a saga...
Can only skip one quest per saga with shards though so the discrepancies would still show up for the saga as a whole. This is just semantics anyway.
With automatic log parsing and monitoring in place, there are multiple metrics that could be used to throw up red flags on anyone stupid enough to use this sort of exploit, especially after it becomes semi-publicly known.
Levels per hour/day/week.
Saga XP stones used per hour/day/week.
Sagas completed per hour/day.
Sagas quests completed versus sagas completed.
Total number of missions versus total number of level increases.
The list goes on.
The interesting thing about all this to me is that it seems SSG has finally taken a few pages from Valve/Steam's playbook on how to deal with exploiters. They've clearly known about this exploit for weeks or even months. Rather than doing their usual, stupid "nuke it from orbit now now now!" thing, they let it run for an undisclosed amount of time and just logged everyone that did it to build the ban list. Then *boom*.
That's how Valve handles VAC bans. Doing it that way makes it much harder for the originators of the exploits to determine exactly when/how/why they got caught. Plus it widens the net and catches the script kiddies who come along after the original group that they would have missed if they just banned the exploiters/hacks as soon as they found them.