STO Took Away "Exploited" Advancement Points...Then Gave Them Back

On last week's Free to Play Cast, we chatted about a recent "exploit" that allowed Star Trek Online players to level 17 times faster than normal. As a result, Cryptic Studios drew a line in the sand at 10 advancement points and any player (about 300 characters in total) that gained more than that had the excess points removed and the "exploit" was fixed.

Why do I keep putting the word "exploit" in quotes? Well, it seems that what was happening might not technically fall into the category of "players exploiting a game" as much as it might fall into the "devs were told about the bug and did nothing" category...at least that's what a lot of the Star Trek Online playerbase had to say on the game's forums.

There's actually a few points that multiple players brought up on this topic and they weren't very happy about it. The first, as implied above, is that the incorrect experience modifier was entered into the game's code, this was brought up as player feedback during the expansion's beta but it was never addressed. On top of that, the taking away of any Advancement Points earned over 10 led to quite a few innocents caught in the cross fire. It seems that the script used to determine who should lose point didn't take other modifiers into account (i.e. things like experience potions) and took AP away from those players as well.

The end result? All players had their AP refunded. Yep! Guilty? Innocent? It doesn't matter, you got to keep the points you gained!

Check out Stephen D'Angelo's official word on the refund.