Billions of credits have surfaced illegally in SWTOR. The reason is an exploit that was exploited generously.
The last major update, Patch 5.6, enabled a serious exploit in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Players of the Empire were able to visit the gift vendor on the Imperial Fleet and purchase noble companion gifts for a few credits.
The problem: Players could sell the purchased gifts back to the same vendor at a much higher price! Thus, anyone who wanted to exploit this could easily cheat several million or even billions of credits within minutes.
Money Laundering in the Global Trade Network
To make the theft “perfect,” the money also needed to be “cleaned.” Like in any good crime story, it was spent in the auction house (the Global Trade Network). The crooks bought up all the expensive resources, furniture, and weapons.
Meanwhile, the fundamental problem has been resolved, and the acquired gifts now have a lower resale price than their purchase price.
The damage has already been done, and many billions of additional credits are now in circulation.
Moreover, it will be difficult to punish the true fraudsters, as a large portion of the credits are now with players who legally put items up for sale in the auction house and received their fair price for them. If the credits cheated by other players are taken away from them, they would at least have to get their goods back.
Numerous players are demanding that BioWare should pull the emergency brake and implement a rollback of at least a week to compensate for the damage done.
BioWare itself has already announced in the official forum that investigations against exploiters are ongoing and that they will take severe action against accounts that have exploited this. However, this would be an ongoing process.
Whether the damage done can really be repaired will likely be revealed in the coming days.
What Patch 5.6 brought besides the exploit, you can see here!
