Guild lost its reputation

yea im not sure whats going on but this season ive seen my guild lose 10 levels overall. i thought maybe someone sold some corrupted (cheated) swords either with or without knowledge that it was an issue so the 1st reduction was like ok maybe they were just cleaning up over levels from selling inflated swords due to cheaters. but this second time happened just today after that fix had been put in place so unless they are still going over things and there were even more undeserved levels. but as you said your guild was maxed in season11 so nothing happening this season should have any impact on where you currently were.

seems like in their attempts to correcting this exploit which was due to their own negligence they are over correcting and punishing guilds and players who did nothing wrong?

the thing that blows my mind the most is the majority of these exploit methods just seem to be a repeat of the shores of gold hourglass exploit that was very much well known by both players and developers after season8 released and that exploit became publicly know. so you would think when adding a new feature that would be the very first thing the dev team would think about testing "people cheated this last time better see if it works for this new feature too" but nope.... didnt even cross their mind.

i love the game they have created but man... they really need a cheater on their dev team or something. someone who thinks like the players who like to exploit stuff so that they can go in and catch stuff before it happens. imo if anything the insiders system is just being abused by cheaters who learn about an exploit by testing it once. ok this works... lets not report it so when it goes live we can cheat like crazy

it almost seems to me like they couldnt figure out who gained reputation honestly and dishonestly over the past week so they just did a blanket 7 level reduction to EVERY guild.

will see if others confirm this but i know my main guild lost 7 levels as well and theres only 2 of us in it and we didnt do the burning blade exploit. and havent even sold swords with levels on them yet only 2 from sinking the thing instead of taking it over

@aawatt yea apparently there seems to be an issue with telling what was legitimate and what wasnt. they could take all my gold if they wanted but it was all the reputation and gold were earned honestly but the reputation is more valuable than the gold

@cptclapz yea i dont believe anyone in mine exploited. i know for a fact my main guild didnt. we grinded the 8 streak commendation which took us 2 hours per hand in and we farmed the orb commendation off the same temple over and over as they reset every 15 minutes. so unless they did a simple "did they get more than 1 completion for the same temple back to back? if yes delete all their reputation for the whole season" the actual exploit people were doing was get the whole crew to vote to end ritual at the exact same second and each player would get credit thus making the burning blade streak increase 3-4x per temple. we never did that. we only even sold 2 blades and neither of them even had a streak on it. 1 was from a player with a 1 or 2 streak the other was from just sinking the burning blade instead of claiming it.

if the only metric they are looking at to "punish" people is "did they do the same temple more than once back to back" well thats just not the right way to go about it as i said above they reset every 15 minutes. park your ship. clear the temple. go chill on the ferry messing around for 15 minutes or canon away from your ship and go swim somewhere... 15 minutes later come back and do the temple again. thats been sea of thieves since day1 if the deal now is to start punishing people for having knowledge that islands reset after 15 minutes.... then we are really in trouble.

taking back gold? fine whatever.... with 1000 guild levels to gain and punished people unjustly for just playing the game "their way" when not even exploiting.... thats wrong.

they banned people who buried emissary flags and dug them back up which removed the "yours" tag because the emissary flags were tied to a title or something so it was a commendation with pvp implications that was meant to be earned... meanwhile people exploited shores of gold in hourglass..... never punished.. pretty much all the hourglass exploits when that patch dropped went unpunished. and even cheating was running rampant with bans to peoples temporary accounts so they just make new accounts. and even now people learned how to circumvent anti cheat so from what it sounds like hourglass is back to being as bad as it was.....

yet the burning blade seems to be a hill rare is willing to die on. unjustly removing rep from people who actually earned it honestly. punishing others who might have sold an exploited sword by sinking the actual cheaters. you have some naive people out there who probably wouldnt even be able to understand that the sword had been leveled in such a broken way. keep in mind their target audience for this game is younger than most of us who post here. i would say the majority of their player base isnt even aware any exploits existed.

all i know is what ever method they are using is clearly getting some false flags. taking back the gold is 1 thing but the game is such a long reputation grind and having been working really hard to level guilds the past month to see the progress get rolled back twice now is so dishartening. my friend gave up. he was working on commendations and said well if the guild progress is going to keep getting reset hes just gonna go on safer seas and tick some boxes and not loot anything. saving himself the time not having to get stuff on the ship and sail back to sell since safer seas has such little progress potential. certain no reputation gain but also nothings worth selling because the values so nerfed and you cant even sell at sovereigns.

i doubt they will look further into where their false flags are coming from but hopefully this is the end of the rolling back of levels. and im sure now that they have ruined the season for many of us they made their choice to punish those who did nothing wrong and that decision is final

my guess is they didnt really have a way of tracking who the bad actors were so they looked at the top 30,000 reaper emissarys and just issues blanket exp and gold reductions. like they set a minimum threshold they figured was a reasonable amount of reputation for the start of the season and anything over that got punished. not accounting for those like myself who play 30+ hour sessions sometimes

unhealthy? sure.. in my friends only guild 2 of us grinded out the commendation for 8 streak with skeleton curse equipped 10 times. apparently the reputation pay out for this was so high that it reached whatever metric they targeted for punishment. it took us 2 hours per 8 streak and hardly in anyway exploiting so certainly wasnt a measure of how fast streaks were gained or the overly bloated streaks in the hundreds or thousands that weve seen screen shots of. highest sword we sold was a 1 streak.

while the reputation loss did take some wind out of our sails we were more in it for the commendations. i just hope next time they figure out a better way to detect the bad actors rather than not accounting for people who have too much free time and play too much? hard to say without know what metric they used to determine who should been reduced. but clearly some false flags here so a flaw in their method.

@keylessword4029 said in Guild lost its reputation:

my guess is they didnt really have a way of tracking who the bad actors were so they looked at the top 30,000 reaper emissarys and just issues blanket exp and gold reductions. like they set a minimum threshold they figured was a reasonable amount of reputation for the start of the season and anything over that got punished. not accounting for those like myself who play 30+ hour sessions sometimes

unhealthy? sure.. in my friends only guild 2 of us grinded out the commendation for 8 streak with skeleton curse equipped 10 times. apparently the reputation pay out for this was so high that it reached whatever metric they targeted for punishment. it took us 2 hours per 8 streak and hardly in anyway exploiting so certainly wasnt a measure of how fast streaks were gained or the overly bloated streaks in the hundreds or thousands that weve seen screen shots of. highest sword we sold was a 1 streak.

while the reputation loss did take some wind out of our sails we were more in it for the commendations. i just hope next time they figure out a better way to detect the bad actors rather than not accounting for people who have too much free time and play too much? hard to say without know what metric they used to determine who should been reduced. but clearly some false flags here so a flaw in their method.

Entirely possible that some got unfairly marked in the process but I strongly doubt they intentionally punished any accounts without some form of damning evidence against the account.

I don't play 30 hour sessions but I've played a lot for a long time and all my stats line up with the amount of hours and the style I play. Never had any issue over the years because I avoid all the unfair play, duping, extreme exploiting stuff. It's why I never worry about whatever they decide to do with enforcement, I can account for all the activity.

They aren't looking to enforce against legit play, extreme play or not. In case of a mistake it's likely that support can correct it after looking into it.