This is a final note that we are, for the moment, wrapping up our investigations in historical “PK farming”, or the process of cheating to increase the PK stat by repeatedly killing a drone “alt” running on another account (in some cases, thousands of times). This practice is not welcome in Vendetta Online. The PK stat has little inherent value in gameplay; but it still carries a perceptual value within the community, as an indication of experience and skill.After concerns over the issue were raised by people within the community, we started the research process in our logs, and found half a dozen or so suspicious cases that merited further investigation. The fact that we found a number of cases of different individuals meant two things:1) The issue was common enough to require a “policy” response. We couldn’t just deal with one person quietly, or even two: we had to create a response we could apply more broadly and fairly to a larger group of people, and potentially maintain moving forward.2) The individual cases still required considerable time to investigate. People kill each other all the time in VO, and there are a lot of factors to consider in identifying this kind of behaviour. We wanted to be absolutely sure we didn’t punish anyone inappropriately, so some depth was required.Because this process was so time consuming to research and correlate (and we’re already busy), some people were “punished” before others. This only resulted from the “luck” of who was in more recent logs, or had cheated on a grander and more easily-verified scale. The order and timing of our actions was simply based on when we came to some certainty from log data.While investigating the individual cases, we found some people had been doing this kind of thing for as far back as we had logs (about a year). This presented a conundrum: for these players, we couldn’t really provide any realistic count of the person’s “actual” PKs vs their “fake” PKs. So, in fairness to the apparently overwhelming majority of players who don’t engage in this kind of activity, we zeroed the PK stats of the people who had been definitively cheating.This wasn’t a step we took lightly, some of these players had been with us for a long time. Regardless of how this issue came to light, we probably would have come to the same conclusion on the appropriate minimal action. It seemed to be as fair as we could be; if we had had older log data available, we might have tried to do more to mitigate the punishment, but that simply wasn’t possible.Above and beyond this, some individuals really kicked up a controversial mess in regards to the “cheating”, with the issue basically being used by different factions to troll one another, both in-game and on the forums. This further elevated the level of controversial hysteria over the problem, and gave everyon