Goblin Squad Member
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Watching SW:TOR's happenings has tremendous entertainment value. Not even 6 months old and the economy has been irreparably damaged by a number of exploits, and the community sees nothing but shallow promises.
Exploits can ruin games fast, in the most resent exploit over at SWTOR players where able to unlock all of the new 'legacy' items and buying up all the high value items on the 'auction house'.
First:
Don't just throw exploitation rules into the TOS, make it a separate easy to find entity.
Second:
Be transparent, tell us what you are doing for punishment, and maybe post a wall of shame. Simply saying "we are taking action" means nothing to me. "We banned 10,000 accounts for life, and reverted all purchases by those accounts on the global-trade-network" would be comforting to a community.
Third:
Don't 'pull a SWTOR*' and not have descent monitoring software until 4 months after launch. You should be able to bring up any player's information and see everything they have been doing since their account was created, and a system that automatically and pops up red flags when a player has suspicious number trends.
Fourth:
Reward the finding of any exploits. Encourage people to report findings with non-power granting items, like game-time, or a unique design pattern.
Every report should be being read, and it should be easy to set up a system where the reader can flag the item for a known exploit.
New reports would only be valid if they bring new data to light, or it has been a few days since the initial report.
Fifth:
SHUT DOWN THE SERVERS
If something big is found, don't be afraid to shut things down. It will be worth it in the end, letting things play out and/or rolling back only hurts people, and there will be tons of people that see a positive income, but for no exploitative reason(exploiter buying their goods). All offline time MUST be refunded. An alternative is making it well known that there will be a rollback of X, Y, and Z, to mm/dd/yyyy HH:MM:SS so people can still do other things, but stay away of those activities.
Sixth:
NEVER make it seem like the community is to blame, own up to your actions, admit you made a mistake and APOLOGIZE to the community.
Seventh:
NEVER release a patch that has a known bug. NEVER give us a release date. NEVER 'pull an SOE**' elude to something like 'new content every month'(DCUO) that you can't possibly own up to.
*Definition:
'Pull a SWTOR' -
- The act of being short-sighted and arrogant in your action, resulting in negative fallout.
**Definition:
'Pull a SOE' -
1 - Excessively using indefinite answers
2 - Taking an action that caused player in-game protests that crashed your server(IE. Combat Upgrade)
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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What killed SWG was that the Combat Upgrade significantly changed the game into a different type of game. (from stat, tactic, and strategy based to twitch based)
Except the entire player population already liked the game the way it was. The death spiral of existing players leaving couldn't be offset by new players entering, and closing the servers was really just a formality after that.