On April 08, 2009, the Issue containing MA was released live to all servers. This received considerable online press from such sites as Massively.com and Wired.com.
When this issue was released, all players received an in-game notice (termed a Message of the Day, or MOTD). I have thus far been unable to find the exact wording of this MOTD, but to my personal recollection it reiterated the potential punishments for violating the Terms of Service as they relate to utilizing in-game exploits.
Anecdotal evidence from a variety of players at the time suggests that MA would be a large hit, as the areas where players could experience MA content were extremely busy, especially compared to other areas of the game that relied upon traditional, non-MA content.
Of course, there were players who saw MA as an excellent opportunity to utilize MA features to engage in "farming" for traditional rewards, such as experience points or in-game wealth, and thus created MA missions to engage in this activity.
For the most part, the City of Heroes staff were quick to alter or remove any of the mechanisms that provided such rewards out of proportion to the in-game risk. Such action removed some "custom creatures" that offered no threat but still provided rewards. A few patches were released during this time.
On April 23, City of Heroes enacted a "Reactivation Week", wherein lapsed accounts were granted the ability to login and play, both to celebrate the game's 5 Year Anniversary and to experience the MA content.
During this time, a type of MA mission referred to as a "Meow Farm" (known as such because of the name of one of the more popular MA missions to utilize a specific creature) became popular and widespread by a large number of players. Due to the way City of Heroes and MA are designed, it allowed players to "farm" characters to the highest level available in the game, 50, within a matter of hours. Several players reported taking a character at the lowest level (1) and having them reach 50 within as few as four hours, although it appears six to twelve hours being the more common amount of time.
Coinciding with this period, although admitted later, the City of Heroes staff where in what was referred to as a "publishing blackout" that prevented updates that would prevent such ability to level a character in such a manner. The lack of such communication regarding the "publishing blackout" led many players to conclude that such activity was condoned, as it was widespread and due to the volume, would have had to be willfully ignored by the City of Heroes staff under normal circumstances.
As a result, on 5/5/09, Positron began a forum thread entitled, "Abusing Mission Architect". In it, he again expressed the desired goal of MA, that being to "have an outlet for players to craft cool stories, using our assets, that other players could play and participate in. Other players could rate those stories and the best-of-the best would rise to the top."
He also reiterated that they expected some level of "abuse" of the MA system and announced a zero-tolerance policy for such "abuse".
He also made clear that as part of that policy, players that "abused" egregiously the MA system as the City of Heroes staff defined such abuse would be subject to "losing benefits they have gained - leading up to and perhaps including losing access to the characters power-leveled in this fashion." (emphasis in the original)
He also alerted players that some badges for MA would be modified or removed from the game.
He also said that those players "who knowingly use an exploit when creating an arc, run the risk of having access to MA suspended, or worse- depending on the severity of the action, their account banned."
To explain the position and actions of the City of Heroes staff, he explained that they were constructed to maintain a level of "risk:reward ratio", in other words, to ensure that actions taken in the game would provide rewards equal with the risk of those actions.
Two days later, after his thread had reach almost 750 pages (each page representing approximately 10 posts from players), he created another thread, entitled "FOLLOWUP: Abusing Mission Architect".
In this, he provided clarification to a few questions raised, in the form of a Question and Answer session.
His first answer addressed a question regarding the potential loss of characters that had utilized MA to quickly level, explaining that "Only the worst of the worst, exploitive, powerlevelled characters will be removed from the game. We don’t take retroactive punishments lightly, but some offenses are so egregious that no one would question their intent and those ill-gotten gains should be dealt with. I just want to emphasize that no one is looking to ‘punish’ anyone here, but rather remove the rewards of exploitive behavior."
In response to a request for a concrete definition of "abuse", he replied, "I know a lot of you want to know an exact definition to see if you were actually abusing the system, or just playing the game, but I don’t want to be set up in a situation where our definition of abuse is abused."
He was also asked about the removal of some badges, explaining that, "I apologize in advance if we remove a badge that someone got legitimately through normal gameplay. We didn’t want MA to become a badge farm".
For the first time, he informed the players of the "publishing blackout", "We had a publishing blackout during the reactivation that prevented us from putting new code up onto the live servers."
That was the state of affairs over the next couple of weeks. Discussion raged on regarding his statements (which culminated in a 369 page locked thread)
At some point on 5/20/09, players began to receive notice that they had violated the End User License Agreement (EULA) and their accounts were receiving a 72 hour ban from playing. Additionally, they reported characters that had reached lvl 50 were being deleted. This information was gleaned by in-game conversations as no official word of such actions was made available by the City of Heroes staff.
Among those players reported to have experienced the above punishment, some indicated that they had not engaged in such "abuse" of the MA system but in fact had characters which were part of a "level pact" with another player. They appear to have been affected by the afore-mentioned punishment as they were evidently seen by the City of Heroes staff to have "trained" within in the maximum allowed time (approximately 10 hours) but there appears to be no definitive estimate for how long it actually took for the character to reach the maximum level. This is in large part due to the design of the game, which separates the time taken to level and the time taken to train. As the two can differ by a significant period (for example, 40 hours in the former case and 20 minutes in the latter), many characters that were level pacted appeared to have gone from level 1 to level 50 in a duration deemed insufficient.
In-game discussion tended to support the notion that an automated script had been executed, which automatically performed the above action if a player had a character level and train (the step taken to realize the benefits of leveling) to level 50 in under 10 hours, although evidence discussed seemed to reveal some punishments affecting characters trained beyond 10 hours and skipping some trained in under 10 hours. Thus, it could be understood that level-pacted characters were affected as a script would lack the judgment provided by human discernment.
During this time, there was no official statement made concerning the action, to explain the scope or criteria.
As a result, several of the players affected began posting to the official City of Heroes Forum, detailing the actions taken against them and asking for clarification.
Due to the official forum policies, one of which precludes such questioning, their requests for more information were deleted and in some cases, warnings given out to the players responsible, threatening them with the possible loss of future forum posting. However, due to the same forum policies, mentioning this warning or continued requests for clarification could also result in the punishment being enacted.
This forum rule states as such, "4. Private communication between Customer Support, NC Interactive, Inc. (“NCsoft”) members, moderators and administrators of the forum and the forum users is not to be made public on these forums or by any other venue.
You are not permitted to publicize any private correspondence (including petitions, email or PM correspondence, in game chat logs, etc.) received from any of the aforementioned without permission. As such, warnings and bans are not to be discussed on the forum. Such matters shall remain private between the NCsoft and the user. Questions or comments concerning warnings and bans will be conveyed through e-mail or private messaging. Likewise, discussions regarding moderator actions are not permitted on the forum. If you have questions regarding a post or thread that has been removed or subject to other moderation, feel free to contact a moderator to discuss it.
Additionally, another forum rule was also apparently cited for the removal of discussion of the day's events,
17. Proprietary forums
The City of Heroes/City of Villains Message Forums are private message forums administered by NCsoft. All message board content is allowed at the discretion of NCsoft. NCsoft reserves the right to remove any message board content at will without notice for any reason at our discretion.
As the following two days went on, several posts or threads created by numerous players were deleted or edited as a result of these official forum rules.
Concurrent to the events occurring on the forum, one user who had a character level-pacted had contacted the City of Heroes Customer Support section and been told that they (Customer Support) had been instructed not to restore any such level-pacted toons or rescind the 72-hour ban, thus players had to face the possibility of going into a 3-day holiday (Memorial Day for Americans) with a significant portion of it being prevented from playing the for-pay game, under circumstances they felt to be erroneous.
Thus, the state of affairs for much of that day and the following consisted of players creating posts which violated either or both of the above two rules and subsequently becoming increasingly hostile as their threads were deleted or discussing the situation in various in-game methods.
Also during this time, discussion raged on between those who agreed with Positron's position regarding MA "farming" (and extrapolated to include all "farming) and those who were in favor of such activity. This culminated in the thread where the discussion occurred (Positron's FOLLOWUP: Abusing Mission Architect thread) being locked on the later afternoon of 5/21/2009, with an official notice stating that:
"Hello Everyone,
At this time we are locking this thread.
We are aware of your concerns and we are looking into it."
Those players who possessed level-pacted characters quietly had their characters restored from deletion on 5/22/09 and were given a thirty-day credit for play as compensation. This cannot be confirmed, as even confirming such restorative actions taken by the City of Heroes staff would violate Rule 4 of the forum rules, as stated above.
A statement was made that indicated that the following issue 89 of 113 MA badges would be made unavailable and removed from those characters possessing any number of those 89.
As it stands, as of 5/28/09, there has been no additional response from the City of Heroes staff regarding this matter.
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