Unsurprisingly, because people are people, one of the first things some players did upon entering the galactic playground of Elite: Dangerous was to seek out exploits that let them generate piles of virtual cash. Developer Frontier Developments isn’t too happy about this.
According to a post from developer Andrew Barlow, anyone caught taking advantage of these exploits faces punishment, including being banned from the upcoming ‘Race to Elite’ competition, though they won’t risk being barred from the game outright.
On January 1 several players were left unable to play the game due to a server issue, and Frontier Developments refunded all the affected players for any transactions they had made and topped that off with a 20% bonus for their troubles. Unfortunately an error caused some players to be accidentally gifted up to five billion space dollars. Oops. This is hardly the customers fault of course, so bans aren’t being considered.
“To be clear - these players will not be banned. Over the next 24 hours we will be investigating every affected player and performing individual commander rollbacks where we feel it’s fair to - which may include credits, assets and rank where appropriate. We may reach out to individual commanders where this situation may not be straight forward. None of these players will be eligible for the “Race to Elite” competition if we feel they have gained an unfair advantage over the competition.”
There are those who have been intentionally gaming the system, however, making use of a bug that allows them to create credits. Those players are at risk of harsher punishments - though Barlow doesn’t elaborate on what those might be.
“Actions may be taken against players who are known to be exploiting the system and do stand out from the commanders who were simply given the credits during our credit refund process. These players will also not be eligible for the “Race to Elite” competition if we feel they have gained an unfair advantage over the competition.”
In order to avoid a similar situation in the future, Frontier will publish a Server Status dashboard that will let players know what the current state of the galaxy is, and if there are any issues they should be aware of. If you’ve been negatively affected by an issue in Elite, you can get in touch with its support team here.
