About a month ago we got patch update info regarding trade exp abuse by some players while using specific trade crates:

• Corrected an issue where Trading EXP was abnormally obtained when selling the following trade items in certain situations:
• Magical Mandragora, Witch's Poison Herb, Saffron with Strong Scent, Fantastic Blue Rose, Moonlit Evening Primrose, Medicinal Autumn Bellflower Root
• An investigation is underway for individuals whose Trading levels increased abnormally due to this issue. If any cases of abuse are found, actions will be taken in accordance with the operational policy.

After that I didn't find any other info, what happened to those players, but we can still see some players from BugCat guild with absurd trading level (G51, G30 and G29). Those trading levels are not possible to acchive even if those players had all possible workers working on trash crates for EXP. For G51 one would need to turn in 20 billion crates, which is simply impossible.

At last infographics that we got in December, highest trading level is Guru9, and even that takes insane amount of time to get.

I'm just wondering what kind of investigation is needed in that case? For starters just look at all players that have trading level over G10, and revert exp gained.

A lot of players spent a lot of time, silver and buffs to reach Guru levels in trading, and it just pains them to see those abusers still being around the game like nothing happened.

It's just not as simple as "Ban everyone with X amount of level". That would be a very dumb thing to do.

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For starters, the data they used for the infographic was months old even before the height of people using the exploit to bump their levels. Levels change and given how long it took them to actually pay attention to this exploit, they could have changed a lot. There are actually at least two legitimate G10+s now and you would not want the PR hit of banning such players indiscriminately.  Also, Trading is the only(?) lifeskill where you can basically "bank" exp/levels by making, but NOT turning in, crates so people can be much farther along than they would appear to be otherwise.  All the exp from months/years of effort from one ofthe high level guys doesn't show itself a turn-in is made.  Eg)  I was said highest person on the infographic with a Trading level of G9.whatever.  I am also sitting on a crate stockpile large enough to get that level 4-5x over again.  The only reason I'm not G14-15+ is me having no luck in getting any Kimchi and a general apathy in moving said crates unless one of the other Traders makes me.  Should I have been banned for happening to do a turn in in the last 6 months? Course not.

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Mainly, it's just bad business practice for a gaming company to go around banning their players without solid proof, especially if they mess it up like has happened before.   Yes, it's completely obvious with a number of these people because they have levels that wouldn't be possible in hundreds of years under current mechanics, but there's probably a good number of people who don't stick out as much. 

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It also just simply takes a lot more steps than that and they all have to be taken seriously and checked.   PA will have to decide on how they want to go about detecting these people, most likely multiple ways. Although given how specific the requirements for this to work like it did, there's quite a few easy ways.  They'll have to create their way to check for each of those. Make sure it works.  Could all this have been done 'accidently' and are we accounting for that? (Not in this case though).  Run that check through millions of accounts across a dozen regions to get their list of players. Have a real people check that for false positives.  Decide what they are going to do about it and what criteria they are going to use for what level of punishment. If they aren't straight up banning some people, they'll have to have rollbacks of some kind.  That'll have to go through all those steps again.  Of course it's not a deturrence against future exploiting if you don't include some sort of punishment like losing the extra silver they made for the last 6 months (almost every single one of them we could find in the community was a PvEr with no significant lifeskills other then fishing, so it was mainly done to double/triple their bargain bonus for an extra 400m+ a day from afk  fishing), so if thats what PA chooses it'll involve another around of fixes/checks.  There will have to have a statement and a  ban list planned, written up, checked, posted, etc, etc...   Probably a half dozen more steps im forgetting and all pressing on limited dev time, resources and pressed into a weekly update schedual. Probably done by an overworked dev or three.

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Yea it sucks it's taking so long, especially considering it could have been avoided entirely had they taken our initial reports seriously last July(?), but it is happening.  There's just a lot more going on behind the scene that has to be properly done then most people would think about.

The problem is that you can't punish them
1 - they didn't exploit bugs, just game mechanics and it was several items that were affected
2 - Even if you ban them anyway, how long will you do it? the level they gained is equivalent to several years of trading
3 - delete the level of trading they had? it makes no sense, even if they gained a lot of levels, the manipulation to do requires a huge investment behind it, it's not just by left-clicking that they had all these levels, there's a whole optimization behind it and it's a huge amount of game time concerned

I don't see how they can "punish" them, it seems very complicated to me

None of that made sense.

1. Doesn't have to be a bug involved to be an 'exploit' and PA gets to decide what that is. Think of the time people abused guild rewards/bosses to print out money by making hordes of new few accounts. Everything worked completely fine, no bugs, but they still all got banned because they were knowingly taking advantage of a loophole going against PA's intentions and printingout masses of silver.   Also, In this case, most common people would say knowingly taking advantage of a very specific set of items, in a very specific set of circumstances only open to a very specific portion of the playerbase to break the mechanics behind Trading exp so that it ignores the key scaling mechanic such that you get impossibly large gains and silver with virtually zero effort a "bug" and or "exploit".

2.  I mean, what or if anything PA does is up to them.  However, in a game based in competitive progress and silver generation,  you really can't let something like this slide and do nothing about.  Makes you look bad and why would your regular players keep playing if people do this and you let em.  It invites people to do it again.     Also it wasn't several years, it was several hundred years of progress.

3.  They absolute can and it's probably not a big deal mechanically.  This will be the 4th time people have had rollbacks to levels because of an exploit or mess up by PA.  The first they went back like 5 years to calculate the correct levels.  The last two were done on a weeks notice when they used changing out levels as a temp hotfix when they messed up family wide levels.
 

its just a game dude, doest that number really bother you that much?

Sure it's just a game and just a number.

But you wouldn't care if someone made it to level 70 in a day? While others are grinding for years to get to that level.

And what if someone abused a bug to get max gear for pretty much free. You still wouldn't care? How about some non intended way to get 10t silver? It's just a number right?

Apologies if I don't want to see abusers on life skill ranking.

Debatable ^^

Those high Guru abusers did get correct punishment, but with that update a lot of players that traded crates legit, got exp removed. Some players that did overshoot when trading (either on purpose or randomly), lost some exp, while others didn't.

I did want those abusers to get reverted back, but PA went one step further and messed everything up.