A devastating exploit hit Neverwinter over the weekend, resulting in millions of Astral Diamonds -- the title's in-game currency -- to flood into the system. Faced with potentially catastrophic damage to its in-game economy, Neverwinter's developers elected to perform a rollback on the game's servers.
"Thanks in no small part to the efforts of our continually amazing Beta community, we were able to quickly identify the exploit and the perpetrators," the team wrote in its official announcement concerning the rollback. "Once identified, we took immediate action, calling in the entire development and publishing teams to lock down the Neverwinter OBT as we sought out a solution."
"Rather than let the malicious efforts of a few unsavory players linger and continually impact the game's economy and balance as we progress through these later stages of Open Beta, we have made the extremely difficult decision to rollback Neverwinter to a time shortly before the abuse and exploitation began."
In all, servers were rolled back seven hours, voiding player progress in that time span.
Although a number of players on its official forums are vocally upset, the Neverwinter team thanked its Beta players for their patience and participation throughout the Beta.
"We will be sending a thank-you gift to players and opening ourselves up on the forums and various other channels to answer any and all questions we can."
Neverwinter's servers and auction house were offline temporarily following the rollback, but all systems are now online and functioning. The game will be entering into official release later this year.
There seems to be a misunderstanding here. The job of beta testers is to break your game, including your commercial systems. Charging players to break your game creates strange situations like this where the developer is describing their most productive testers as malicious and unsavory. After all, their internal testers (hopefully there are some) did not catch this, and the people who found the exploit (presumably more competent than the internal testers) were not paid for their efforts.
Now if they just gamified the testing process and rewarded their volunteer testing force for exceptional work, I think the whole dynamic would be much less antagonistic.
This is a bit weird indeed. Perhaps Devs are seeing this Beta test more like a demo for the final game rather than a bug crushing cycle, or perhaps this exploit was *so* severe that it could (somehow) severely damage whole beta testing process. Though I personally would like to see how game economy would recover from this massive inflation without having to resort to rollback, I mean this is beta, you can actually try some new untested ideas that might help you in as a MMO developer in the future.
Certainly, you are correct in that the "job" of beta testers (or public beta testers, anyway) is to assist in finding bugs and potential exploits. But it's one thing to find an exploit and report it and another thing to find an exploit, abuse it multiple times, and then to use the proceeds from that exploit to purchase high-level gear off the auction house, swap and buy items off the Zen market, and chain profession missions until (s)he hits 20.
I myself had actually discovered the exploit as well, but I created a new character to test it and promptly deleted that character and made a report promptly afterwards. My account was not banned. So, really, I feel these guys were quite fair in the way they approached this particular situation.
It's not really a beta. It's paid beta, which is to say it's a launched game. No one is expecting a character wipe, there is no NDA, and no one wonders when the game will exit beta.
Now if they just gamified the testing process and rewarded their volunteer testing force for exceptional work, I think the whole dynamic would be much less antagonistic.
Certainly, you are correct in that the "job" of beta testers (or public beta testers, anyway) is to assist in finding bugs and potential exploits. But it's one thing to find an exploit and report it and another thing to find an exploit, abuse it multiple times, and then to use the proceeds from that exploit to purchase high-level gear off the auction house, swap and buy items off the Zen market, and chain profession missions until (s)he hits 20.
I myself had actually discovered the exploit as well, but I created a new character to test it and promptly deleted that character and made a report promptly afterwards. My account was not banned. So, really, I feel these guys were quite fair in the way they approached this particular situation.