I am temporarily suspended!!?

☆ Join date : 2012-09-30 Posts : 133

Valhades wrote:

LatinLegacy wrote:: This is becoming a huge mess. It would be wise for them to expedite this situation before it starts to damage Mobage, Silicon Studio & all other properties involved. It's only a matter of time before this situation hit major gaming sites & iOS dedicated enthusiast sites if the issue is not dealt with. I'm not suspended but I can shoot off an e-mail on Monday to see if I can put some pressure on them to handle the situation sooner.

If any of you guys have access to a lawyer that would freely offer there time to send in an e-mail on your behalf, have them do so. The contents of the e-mail will not matter but the fact that multiple e-mails are hitting them from multiple firms WILL start to get there attention. As long as the " From the firm of " letterhead is attached & your name is mentioned as a client, they will believe that you have lawyered up. This is only for those that have spent money in the game. You don't have to go down this route but it is an option. One that I haves used in the past with success.

-LatinLegacy

Even at my level of investment, involving an attorney is far from worth it -- The cost of legal fees outweigh what you can hope to get back. For the scope of this issue, issuing a credit card charge back is sufficient and your credit provider will stand behind you if your issue is legitimate; You are their customer after all.

As it stands, I will let them keep my account access -- or my money. It's entirely their decision, although one thing is certain, I will be getting one of them back.

That's why I said freely Wink

. That means someone you may know. A friend or family member that can accomplish that in your name. They won't hit you with legal fees for an e-mail. If they do, you'll just have to settle for the other options available to you. Such as the charge back option.

-LatinLegacy

☆☆☆☆☆ Join date : 2012-09-24 Posts : 954

Quote :: Even at my level of investment, involving an attorney is far from worth it -- The cost of legal fees outweigh what you can hope to get back. For the scope of this issue, issuing a credit card charge back is sufficient and your credit provider will stand behind you if your issue is legitimate; You are their customer after all.

As it stands, I will let them keep my account access -- or my money. It's entirely their decision, although one thing is certain, I will be getting one of them back.

My thought also. Added people are so used to hearing you will hear from my lawyer and never following through on it that they will prob laugh it off initially.

Easier to hit them in the pocketbook.

And more satisfying.

☆ Join date : 2012-09-30 Posts : 133

Don't rely on a chargeback working. In a lot or cases, it doesn't. A lot of companies & organizations protect themselves from being hit by chargebacks. It doesn't matter how legitimate your case is or who is backing you. For you guys sakes, I hope it is effective if you do decide to take that route. Just don't go in thinking it's a sure bet that you'll be getting your money back.

-LatinLegacy

Subject: Re: I am temporarily suspended!!? Sun Oct 21, 2012 1:06 am

Actually, chargebacks work most of the time. The CC company will typically investigate if it's over $500, but if it's under and you do it less than once or twice a year they lose less money issuing a chargeback than through investigating it.

☆ Join date : 2012-09-30 Posts : 133

Not in these kinds of situations. The persons involved paid for a service that was delivered as advertised. There was no form of fraud, illegal transactions, identiy theft or unauthorized use of funds. This situation here is more of a " you screwed me so now I want my money back! ". Something chargebacks Re not very effective for. It can possibly work but I just want them going into that situation expecting that it's a sure thing.

-LatinLegacy

Subject: Re: I am temporarily suspended!!? Sun Oct 21, 2012 1:17 am

I know someone who successfully charge-backed a couple thousand due to these suspensions.

☆ Join date : 2012-09-30 Posts : 133

clocksprocket wrote:: I know someone who successfully charge-backed a couple thousand due to these suspensions.

I would give that person a high five cheers

. I've done 3 in my lifetime & only one was effective.

-LatinLegacy

☆☆ Join date : 2012-09-09 Posts : 155

I would appreciate if people that this had nothing to do with or has no applicable experience would stay out of the matter.

Fact of the matter is, under these circumstances Mobage/SS have no grounds to dispute the charge back if someone were to initiate it. It's currently too early to do so, although if you've given the merchant ample time to reply and they are willfully non-compliant -- You are well within your rights to charge back the transaction.

Provided you word the reasoning for your dispute appropriately, Mobage's dispute would look something like this.

1- "Our client is charging back X Y and Z transactions under the grounds that you have withdrawn access to digital content our client has paid to access."

2- "(Mobage yada yada yada, Receipt, Timestamp, etc.)"

1 - "Provide proof that our client still has access to this content"

2- "(At this point they should provide logs of you logging in... instead) Uhhhh"

I have issued charge backs in the past for greater dollar amounts and I have never had one fail. If you are unsuccessful, you did it for an invalid reason such as buyers remorse (which is fraud). Non-receipt of goods or services being rendered and the goods/services being significantly different than advertised on receipt are also valid reasons for charge backs. Taking back digital merchandise easily falls under the prior.

☆☆ Join date : 2012-10-07 Posts : 290

Here is another response I got from Mobage and I like this one!

"Hey there Luke!

I can understand how frustrating it can be going back and forth between companies. Trust me, I've been there. I can tell you that your Mobage account is in good standing, and as Fantasica is a third party game, I cannot see why that account specifically would be under investigation.

We are going to contact Silicon Studio, the developer of Fantasica, to get to the bottom of this matter, and find some answers as to why this has happened to you.

The answer we find may very well be that you have to contact Silicon Studio again, but before we tell you to do so we will confirm that this is needed with them.

Thank you very much for you patience as we sort this out!"

Hopefully this will resolve soon!!! ><

☆☆☆☆☆☆ Join date : 2012-09-23 Posts : 1919

awesome that their working on it ^

ADMIN Join date : 2012-08-14 Posts : 553

Valhades wrote:: I would appreciate if people that this had nothing to do with or has no applicable experience would stay out of the matter.

AND... Silence for you.

Subject: Re: I am temporarily suspended!!? Sun Oct 21, 2012 6:06 pm

Valhades wrote:: I would appreciate if people that this had nothing to do with or has no applicable experience would stay out of the matter.

I like Val, I dont really know him personally, but I've come to the decision that he has my respect, so after this message, I'll probably stay out of it.

As for GT, I like him too! If he was RMT (notice the IF) then I understand why SS took action against him. If not, I'm waiting for them to send out their mass apology and explain to us that they just found out he is really Adam Sandler, and he just has money like that (that's been my guess from the beginning btw)

As for everyone else who are on the up&up and just got caught in the crossfire, I'm outraged for you because I (and everyone else) could have easily ended up in your situation and that would have been unfair. Furthermore, I would hope that SS has some better ideas on how to handle situations like this in the future, because if this happens to me I'm going strait to the chargeback, no questions asked! There are a lot of other apps out there offering similar gameplay. Dev's should really get off their high horse and handle these situations like they took buisness 101 or have seen the inside of an educational institution.

That is all.

☆ Join date : 2012-10-21 Posts : 3

This is what i believe is happening . If you guys do a quick search under " GTmeteor hacked forum " do a little digging around and you will find he is a web developer that is very good at what he does ( look for synapse game forum)

You will also find that he has pulled x3 6* cards from 1 box which he puts down to as Luck from another forum thread. I have no issues with Gtmeteor hats off to him for having the skills.

I think that he has been able to find a way to change the %rate of which he pulls out rare cards and Silicon has temporary suspended anyone that has traded with him in case he has shared this knowledge. We will be kept suspended untill the code monkeys at Silicone Re write the coding of how cards are pulled to prevent this happening again hence the statement " untill the vulnerabilities have been fixed "

what do you guys think of my theory ??

Subject: Re: I am temporarily suspended!!? Sun Oct 21, 2012 8:27 pm

Why do people think someone is "nice" just because they conducted one proper trade or didn't come off as an outright asshole the first time you talked to them?

Newflash, that person who just scammed you on an album trade? They seemed pretty nice. That hacker that screwed up the game economy? Well, they were well-spoken and seemed cool...

For anyone curious, here is how it probably went:

Hack game, create out-of-thin-air TEs. (You can't sell TEs for 5c each if they were legitimately gotten.) Use those TEs to offer for people's 6*s that they got out of boxes. Sell those 6*s to other people for real $$$. Use some of that $$$ to buy boxes and appear to be a legitimate, rich player.

Hell, there's a lot you can do just by having thousands of TE lying around, forget RMT.

☆☆ Join date : 2012-09-29 Posts : 224

clocksprocket wrote:: Why do people think someone is "nice" just because they conducted one proper trade or didn't come off as an outright asshole the first time you talked to them?

Newflash, that person who just scammed you on an album trade? They seemed pretty nice. That hacker that screwed up the game economy? Well, they were well-spoken and seemed cool...

For anyone curious, here is how it probably went:

Hack game, create out-of-thin-air TEs. (You can't sell TEs for 5c each if they were legitimately gotten.) Use those TEs to offer for people's 6*s that they got out of boxes. Sell those 6*s to other people for real $$$. Use some of that $$$ to buy boxes and appear to be a legitimate, rich player.

Hell, there's a lot you can do just by having thousands of TE lying around, forget RMT.

Wha...? You mean that guy trying to sell me beach front property in Arizona might by lying? But he seems to nice.

Subject: Re: I am temporarily suspended!!? Sun Oct 21, 2012 8:44 pm

I'm checking my email obsessively for a reply from Silicon Studio. No luck.

I agree with Clocks' theory about gt hacking TEs. This would explain why there are still thousands of TEs in the game, even though each event must burn up thousands. I don't think anyone here believes that people are actually buying TEs from Mobage at $1 each... Pure speculation, since we can't prove anything.

I don't get why anyone would defend gt at this point. I can't see his account, because I only have one device, and I don't plan to make an account that I can't use. So I don't know if he is indeed banned.

But if the suspensions are tied to him (and it seems likely from the evidence so far) - He screwed over everyone who traded with him by implicating all of them in the hacking. That makes him an asshole.

Subject: Re: I am temporarily suspended!!? Sun Oct 21, 2012 9:33 pm

styles001 wrote:: This is what i believe is happening . If you guys do a quick search under " GTmeteor hacked forum " do a little digging around and you will find he is a web developer that is very good at what he does ( look for synapse game forum)

You will also find that he has pulled x3 6* cards from 1 box which he puts down to as Luck from another forum thread. I have no issues with Gtmeteor hats off to him for having the skills.

I think that he has been able to find a way to change the %rate of which he pulls out rare cards and Silicon has temporary suspended anyone that has traded with him in case he has shared this knowledge. We will be kept suspended untill the code monkeys at Silicone Re write the coding of how cards are pulled to prevent this happening again hence the statement " untill the vulnerabilities have been fixed "

what do you guys think of my theory ??

Its not easy to hack the % rate, most likely he hacked the coins and the number of time elixirs, making him able to buy tons of boxes and have tons of te's. And that wasnt the only thing he hacked. Don't you guys notice his ranking jumps abnormally? 20k points in half an hour.... no way

Android Mechanic [Rare] Join date : 2012-08-14 Posts : 374

It's pretty sad that one (or a few) people can ruin the entire economy (and potentially hundreds of players' accounts) though.

☆ Join date : 2012-09-30 Posts : 133

Clocks pretty much nailed it. As I stated a few pages back, I'm sure a lot of legitimate players got caught up in this bulk of suspensions. Some however are most likely just as corrupt of a player as GT was. They just were not caught in the act like GT was but to be fair, he was pretty sloppy about it. They can come off as wonderful well spoken people & have a rock solid defense. That doesn't make them innocent of any wrong doing. In my opinion, there is no way a normal person would throw thousands of dollars in a few months time at an iOS game/app unless they have some kind of return coming back to them. That is not a statement to accuse anyone that has done that. That is just my opinion.

As for pulling multiple rare cards from one box. I would just label that as lucky or they pulled a rare card in a multiple string of purchase within a short period. I have seen that happen a few times. Twice by players that have posted in this thread & I have a screenshot of one of them. That doesn't mean anything of course but I have seen it happen.

-LatinLegacy

☆☆☆☆☆☆ Join date : 2012-10-01 Posts : 1038

lukef4f4 wrote:: Here is another response I got from Mobage and I like this one!

"Hey there Luke!

I can understand how frustrating it can be going back and forth between companies. Trust me, I've been there. I can tell you that your Mobage account is in good standing, and as Fantasica is a third party game, I cannot see why that account specifically would be under investigation.

We are going to contact Silicon Studio, the developer of Fantasica, to get to the bottom of this matter, and find some answers as to why this has happened to you.

The answer we find may very well be that you have to contact Silicon Studio again, but before we tell you to do so we will confirm that this is needed with them.

Thank you very much for you patience as we sort this out!"

Hopefully this will resolve soon!!! ><

this is the first time i see Mobage having a non-standard reply. i have contacted Mobage before and their reply is usually the standard:
Thanks for your email and interest in Mobage-powered games like Fantasica!

While we provide support for a wide range of Mobage-related issues, for assistance with Fantasica, you'll need to contact the developer directly via email at: fantasica_support@siliconstudio.co.jp.

If there's anything else I can help you with in the future, please don't hesitate to email!

in regards to this case, i'm not suspended. i dun know of any ally that has been suspended. but i can say that from what i have read, it seems that this has impacted many top players (usually also equal top contributors in terms of $).

honestly, i think the developers are really amateurs. this is NOT the first time they have implemented really stupid things... there's the really stupid device registration that forces people to have multiple accounts just because they upgraded to a new device.

and now... p1ssing off the top contributors?!? i'd seriously reconsider spending any more real money on this game. clearly developers are not 'listening' to people who are paying their salary...

☆☆☆☆☆☆ Join date : 2012-10-01 Posts : 1038

btw, gtmeteor also suspended/deleted in this forum?

☆ Join date : 2012-10-20 Posts : 8

Ugh, I guess it's time for me to chip in as well...

@myad - Crowex said that he was toying around, and... accidentally deleted the account, as well as several others...

Anyways... So...

What I did was not hacking. I can't say what it was, obviously. But trust me. It was not hacking.

Early in the game I've contacted SS listing the hmm 'vulnerabilities' they had (rather IDIOTIC design), and I think no one would be surprised that the response I got was... wait.. what response? Yeah. No response.

So, I guessed it was all fine and dandy, since SS didn't care. (Again, this wasn't any hacking)

I went on doing my things, and it went on an on for a good month or so... Then this bullshit happened.
It's really an amateur approach from SS... Suspending totally innocent people. I really hope all of your accounts do get unsuspended, as for me - my account WAS deleted.

So in the end, I've checked the game. The vulnerabilities are STILL there. And to be honest... I wouldn't spend a dime on this game if at the beginning I knew stuff I know now.

SS doesn't care about customers.
All of your accounts ARE NOT SAFE.

And, well... You really can't blame me. None of this would've happened if SS were at least decent developers.

As I've mentioned. I've contacted them. No response. Showed them. No response. A month later they suddenly go "OH SHIT!"? And still they haven't fixed even 10% of the stuff...

Anyways, feel free to ask any questions :/

☆☆☆☆☆☆ Join date : 2012-10-01 Posts : 1038

gtmeteor wrote:: Ugh, I guess it's time for me to chip in as well...

@myad - Crowex said that he was toying around, and... accidentally deleted the account, as well as several others...

Anyways... So...

What I did was not hacking. I can't say what it was, obviously. But trust me. It was not hacking.

Early in the game I've contacted SS listing the hmm 'vulnerabilities' they had (rather IDIOTIC design), and I think no one would be surprised that the response I got was... wait.. what response? Yeah. No response.

So, I guessed it was all fine and dandy, since SS didn't care. (Again, this wasn't any hacking)

I went on doing my things, and it went on an on for a good month or so... Then this bullshit happened.
It's really an amateur approach from SS... Suspending totally innocent people. I really hope all of your accounts do get unsuspended, as for me - my account WAS deleted.

So in the end, I've checked the game. The vulnerabilities are STILL there. And to be honest... I wouldn't spend a dime on this game if at the beginning I knew stuff I know now.

SS doesn't care about customers.
All of your accounts ARE NOT SAFE.

And, well... You really can't blame me. None of this would've happened if SS were at least decent developers.

As I've mentioned. I've contacted them. No response. Showed them. No response. A month later they suddenly go "OH SHIT!"? And still they haven't fixed even 10% of the stuff...

Anyways, feel free to ask any questions :/

thanks for the explanation...

i guess this only strengthen my perception that the developers are really 'not normal'...

and again... i'm not at all happy with that stupid thing called device registration....

anyway, care to 'indulge' a bit on that exploit? as in... can i assume you discovered the algorithm used to generate what you get for the random draws -- like 6*, etc?!? Very Happy

☆☆☆☆☆ Join date : 2012-09-24 Posts : 954

What's amusing is they are listening now. Say you traded with gtmeteor and they suspend you within 4 hours!

On the weekend no less.

☆ Join date : 2012-10-20 Posts : 8

myad wrote:: thanks for the explanation...
i guess this only strengthen my perception that the developers are really 'not normal'...
and again... i'm not at all happy with that stupid thing called device registration....
anyway, care to 'indulge' a bit on that exploit? as in... can i assume you discovered the algorithm used to generate what you get for the random draws -- like 6*, etc?!?

Yeah. SS are crappy devs when it comes to games. Their SDKs are great, but the game... Smile

Device registration is fine as a principle, how it was implemented here - ... we all have a lot to say about that, but definately not anything nice.

RNG algorithms are impossible to deduce/discover. I doubt anyone still uses minutes only for seed generation, thus making nearly impossible to hit the correct time seed, due to inconsistent ping between client and server. Plus, it's server sided so... Yeah. Impossible.