Every so often a subject builds up in the community to the point where answering it in scattered replies stops being enough. Out of game trading and the question of who on our team can be trusted have both reached that point over the past weeks.
We would rather set out where we stand properly and in one place than keep handing out partial answers across a dozen different threads, none of which the next person ever finds.
We found weak points inside our own team. That includes cases where internal information ended up somewhere it was never meant to go. Those cases have been dealt with and of course removed from the team. We have also revised how internal information is shared and who has access to what, so that there is simply less opportunity for such things to happen again. It goes without saying that such things should not happen and we apologize that it did.
We are not going to name anyone or lay out the details. On the one hand because the people involved are entitled to the same discretion any of you would be and on the other hand because a public post mortem would only hand the next person a map. What we will say is that we did not have to be pushed into acting and we did not wait for it to turn into a community campaign first.
We would also ask you not to fill in the blanks yourselves. Once speculation starts it almost always settles on someone who did nothing at all and there is no clean way for that person to prove a negative.
We know out of game trading happens. We do not shrug at it and we would much rather you kept telling us about it. There is a difference, though, between telling us that something is going on and giving us something we can actually act on.
"Player X does OG trading" is a report we can hardly investigate. It gives us a name and a suspicion with nothing to test either against. We cannot take action against someone's account on that basis and we suspect you would not want us to if it were your name being passed around. That applies just as much to the accusations that circulate in the community for months before they ever reach us.
What we can work with is specifics. Screenshots, chat logs, dates, transaction details, anything carrying a timestamp, which we can line up against our own records. The more precise a report is, the further it travels. A vague one usually stops at the first person who reads it. Not because we are uninterested but because there is nowhere for it to go next.
If you have something concrete, please send it in. If all you have is a feeling about someone, we understand the impulse and we would still rather know that, but please do not expect it to move on its own.
A good deal of what reaches us concerns things that happened years ago. Most of those cases we’re already aware of, have looked into them and reached a conclusion.
Our attention is on what is happening now. That is not because behaviour stops mattering once enough time has passed. It’s that the further back a case sits, the less likely it becomes that anything new can be established about it. The obstacle were never our own records. A case of this kind rests on more than what the game itself can show us and time is not kind to that sort of thing.
Older reports are not unwelcome and we do read them. What we would ask is that you send a case once, through a ticket, rather than to several of us separately. The same report arriving five different ways does not make it move faster. It mostly takes time away from the cases that are live in front of us right now.
This one comes up constantly, so it is worth saying plainly. Two situations that look identical from the outside usually are not.
When we investigate, we see a great deal that never appears in a screenshot: the history sitting on the account, what else turns up once we start looking, whether something happened once or forty times and how the person answered when we put it to them. Any one of those can move an outcome in either direction. Two players can do what looks to everyone else like the same thing and end up somewhere different. The reason is almost always in the part nobody outside the investigation can see.
It is also why we will not discuss another player’s case with you, however unsatisfying that is. They are entitled to that privacy and so are you. If the positions were reversed, we would not be discussing yours with them.
Tickets, please. Anything account related and any report of the kind described above belongs in the ticket system. A ticket gets logged, assigned to someone whose job it is to look at it and stays visible until it is closed. A direct message has none of those benefits.
Messages to individual team members are harder to track and easy to lose in a busy inbox. They also put that person in an awkward spot, because they are suddenly holding something sensitive that nobody else can see.
The one exception is something genuinely urgent, an exploit being actively used, for example, where getting our attention quickly matters more than the paperwork. Send the message, make sure we have seen it and then open a ticket so the details end up properly on record.
All of these questions keep coming up because people here care whether the game is fair, which is a far better problem to have than the alternative where nobody bothers asking. Keep telling us. Just tell us in a way we can do something with.
Your Florensia Team
