Update 5/23/17: We’ve made some additional changes to the achievements. First, many of you will be happy to know that based on overwhelming community feedback, we removed the throttle on Haunt visits. We realize many people have turned the Haunt-visiting at single locations in to a sort of mini-game, and that the throttling greatly hindered this. We studied and reassessed the situation, and have concluded that this aspect of the achievements, while the requests did seem to be coming in at a high rate, was probably not being automated, at least not by the vast majority of players who enjoyed this activity. We still urge you to strive to visit a variety of different Haunt locations instead of standing in one place at large Haunt farms. You can always access active Haunts using the Haunt button on your HUD.
We’ve also added some additional controls on the biting / clawing achievements (Berserk and Frenzy) in order to make gaming of these achievements using alts less rewarding. If you’re doing these achievements honestly with your friends instead of logging in lists of alts, you probably won’t notice any change. If any of your attacks do get throttled, make sure you aren’t logging in a long list of alts to attack, and instead, try to interact with a variety of real Bloodlines players in order to gain your achievements. Thanks everyone for your feedback and patience with us while we work to address these situations, and please let us know if you have any other thoughts.
Original post follows:
Yesterday we made a couple of adjustments to the Detective, Investigator, Voyager, and World Travels achievements. We believe that some people may have been using automated tools to cheat at these achievements. We commend people on their creativity and motivation in getting these achievements, but we also have to take the measures we can in order to prevent cheating, gaming, and exploits.
Wikipedia defines an exploit as:
“the use of a bug or glitches, game system, rates, hit boxes, or speed, etc. by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game’s designers. Exploits have been classified as a form of cheating”
To be very clear, nobody has hacked or compromised any Bloodlines items; rather some players have found ways to automate avatar logins or clicks in order to cheat at the achievements. We were also seeing things like 4 haunt visits per second, second after second, and thousands of avatar scans that run 24 hours per day. We see patterns in our logs that are clearly not legitimate actions performed by human players. So, we put in place some measures that we hope will make it inconvenient to cheat at the achievements.
This could be referred to as nerfing:
“Among game developers, MMORPG designers are especially likely to nerf aspects of a game in order to maintain game balance. Occasionally, a new feature (such as an item, class, or skill) may be made too powerful, unfair, or too easily obtained to the extent that it unbalances the game system. This is sometimes due to an unforeseen method of using or acquiring the object that was not considered by the developers. The frequency of nerfing and the scale of nerfing vary widely from game to game but almost all massively multiplayer games have engaged in nerfing at some point.”
Keep in mind that all scans and haunt visits will keep working just as they always have: you will always get scan data back, and information on haunts no matter what. The only thing that has changed is whether you get achievements for those actions. If you are playing in good faith, and finding real players to scan instead of logging in thousands of alts, and if you are visiting legitimate haunts instead of clicking as fast as you can at a haunt farm, it is very unlikely that any of the updates will affect you.
If you have any questions, please contact Lyle Maeterlinck. Happy achieving!
We had hundreds of Bloodlines member opt their Haunt locations into our 9th Anniversary Celebration week special event, and we have tremendous gratitude towards everyone who participated in celebrating this milestone with us by opting in, decorating, holding events, engaging the Second Life community with Bloodlines, not to mention the hundreds of avatars who attended events and voted on their favorite locations.
