Feldon As has been widely reported, when StationCash Item Gifting was added to SOE games, players realized that they could create new accounts and sign up for trials of SWG, EQ2, and other games and receive free StationCash in each game. With the ability to Gift items, players were able to gift hundreds of StationCash items to themselves without spending a penny.
Item Gifting will be coming back sometime this week, with suitable controls to prevent further exploits. More details after the jump…
Here’s SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:
Gifting will go live again either tomorrow (Tuesday) or Wednesday, in the next hotfix.
There will be a restriction that you have to be an active Silver, Gold, or Platinum member in order to Gift. Sorry, but Bronze members won’t be able to Gift.
This was done because there was an exploit you could use to create lots of trial memberships and get SC for having created those memberships. You could then gift a bunch of stuff back to your main account. One guy did it a ridiculous 596 times…so obviously, we had to stop it from happening.
But, this feature will be back again in the next day or two.
…
We know the account names of each and every person that exploited the situation.
For those doing the math on that, it’s potentially 476,800SC or $4,768.
Wow. You know, it never occurred to me to do that — all I figured was it would have let me gift the one or two items I bought with the ‘refer a friend’ accounts I made instead of doing what I did, which was buy a houseitem and drop it in the home of an alt. I didn’t realize that even the standard bronze trial accounts started with station cash.
Judging by the number of people who used it and didn’t get suspended, Smoke is again blowing ‘smoke’. The moral of the story in EQ2 is if you find an exploit, exploit the hell out of it because most likely they will do nothing.