Get a cup of tea, you’ll need it for this post scallywag!

Preface (For context and some basic awareness)

Why is it, as soon as we have a nice long stretch of no drama someone has to go and ruin it, Dirty thieving scrubbers!
I was looking forward to having a nice productive weekend, oh well it’s not like staff have things to do or anything. /s 🙂

Let me preface all of this by how staff work; We work like police, only investigating when reports are made or something is found that needs changing/fixing. Its not always perfect but we are human. Nobody is sitting there reading through logs daily trying to pin things on people, we try and respect the community on PirateCraft, anyone that thinks otherwise needs to re-think how moderation should work, consider the police metaphor.

Staff Ethos
I have always hated other servers where their staff team just “appears” while you are trying to play in survival, having someone just teleporting to you breaking all immersion, all their spawned items, shiny god sets, infinite god apples, showering you with items they think you want. This kills the entire point of playing! You don’t want these items, or money, you don’t want to see them! The entire point of playing survival is to earn your own items and money. If someone is just generating infinite items and giving them out “just because” it ruins your game, then there is nothing to play for.
That’s why you never see me in armour, that’s why I ask to teleport (most times lol) It’s a mindset I’ve always had, as I’ve played on shit servers. This is also why nobody on staff has gm1, this is why nobody on staff can create items or money, this is survival! Yarr!
Creating items and money from nothing isn’t acting as “Robin hood”, this is a mindset that dousnt understand how a survival server runs. Handing out infinite items/money just break gameplay, completely for an entire server, which is why this is such a serious issue that a small pocket of players have dramatically impacted the server for their selfish, thoughtless destruction over 2 years. We still don’t know the full effect this has had on the server as a whole as we only found out about it yesterday evening, at 11pm!

What happened?
Last night I found 3 craftsmen (staff builder rank) were using their staff ability to edit signs to give themselves infinite money and dupe items using the shop plugin over the course of 2 years. The shop plugin wasn’t checking for permissions when shop signs were edited by the third party plugin, only created directly. This allowed admin signs for generating income/free items to be made with no supply needed. We have so far tracked 10.1 Million in-game money generated from nothing; total from 3 players, 9.1 Million from one player alone and an infinite amount of items (including custom items) duplicated (same player) with ibuy (OP only sign) signs. 95% of this is one player: KetohPie. This was by no means a one off and was extremely abused, I’m talking multiple max balances of 240,000 a DAY being sent out.

Fixing this mess
We already started attempting cleanup (Lol, 2 years this money is long in the system!); We have been clearing inventories/Echests and vaults from these players involved taking this money & generating it.
I have avoided removing money from those that sold items to KetohPie, as you may not have known this was happening and wouldn’t be fair to punish those for his cheating. We’ve not collected items from people before, the idea being, this player is now banned, instead of locking the items up, we could auction off these custom items and remove some large chunks of money from the eco.

We’ve never had to do this kind of moderation before as we’ve never had duplicating/money generation on this scale. 10.1 million was laundered between players all the way back since 2016. Player accounts are limited to 250k, so moneys been given away fast.
I’ve followed the money trail, and some balances of players have had money removed, we’ve been talking to players, checking chat logs, checking server logs, transaction logs to figure out if money was “Just sent” or items sold, It’s just tedious so the top offenders have been denoted from, Funny it was mostly all one crew?

More people involved

Turns out a lot of people knew about this and were abusing it, either directly or indirectly.
Including The_Network (Previous admin believe it!), he was in on it from Day 1, so he’s been removed and banned, alongside other things I’ve found out in the last week or so, sharing staff chats with crews, bias moderating, the list goes on, I don’t really want to have to get into all the nitty gritty and start a witch-hunt, he’s gone.

The other two partners in crime editing the signs at cove was Rivvur who took 100,000 in in-game cash (Nearly all paid back), and moossolini who took just short of 1 million (A far amount to be repaid). Both of these worked with staff to try and pay their debts in as many resources/claim blocks as possible to reclaim this stolen in-game money, both Rivvur and moossolini received permanent ban. In the near future resources collected will be auctioned off.

This goes way deeper, but there’s only so much I can put into a boring fourm post! No need for all the drama, but I still wanted this all to be clear and transparent to all players on PirateCraft.

Im extremely disappointed that a multiple staff members I trusted, really trusted have known about this entire scenario for years since it stared, and abused it, even after I warned all craftsmen from day 1 when I created the rank that this bug existed and not to attempt to use it. How fast 2 years can wizz buy eh!? I guess I should have listened to my own staff ethod to just not trust anyone that has the possibility to dupe.

What about the money

The moneys in the economy now, it’s been in there a long time, changed hands many times by now! But it doesn’t mean we still cant do some cleanup and run a auction! I think people may like to have an opportunity to get their hands on an old custom item that will never be made again! We have no eta as we still have a lot of cleanup and research to keep doing, every time we get back into it we find something new!