When items should be returned

[Bluvox]

This is just a thread about my opinions.
There’s a lot of controversy about players getting their items returned after losing them, and personally, I have a few opinions on the system.
While I certainly agree that returning lost items is a lot of work for the devs and admins, I also believe it’s a means to help the player learn a lesson.

What I mean is, that if the items being lost have any part on the victim, then the items shouldn’t be returned.
Getting scammed is the act of falling for another player’s tricks or lies, and as a result, losing items. A lot of players get scammed daily so returning all their items would be absurd, but not only that, them losing their items in itself is sort of a lesson of “hey, watch what you’re doing next time.”
In certain cases, players falling victim to hacks are also often on the victim’s part too.
Them getting their account hacked is more than likely a result of their password being easy to guess, or them giving it away somewhere they weren’t supposed to.

Now there are cases I think it would be fair that items get returned, and these are cases in which the victim had absolutely no part in the losing of their items, and that it is entirely unfair and unexpected.
Cases like these are very rare, but this would include things like the game glitching out somehow and deleting items in their inventory. The players had absolutely no part in that whatsoever and lost their items.
Another being the (rare, but not impossible) chance that there’s some type of hacker that’s managed to jump through walls or something to collect items on the other side.
Sure, the owner could have done better to block the items, but it should be a problem considering they’re 100% supposed to be safe anyway.

There some other unfair occurrences I can think of, however these ones would be almost impossible for the admins to tell if they’re true or not.
This includes players getting their accounts hacked by a database leak somewhere. They could have had a good password and knew how to keep it safe, and somewhere, their password was leaked, and then they were hack.
I do suppose however they did have some part to play in it by using the same password in multiple places though.

Another one is if there is some kind of duplication glitch in Pixel Worlds, and a player unknowingly obtains duplicated items, only for them to get it taken away later. This one is a very hard one.
Let’s say a player sells their wings for 100 WLs. The next day, their WLs are gone, but the wings they sold before aren’t. Essentially, they were “scammed” by the system, however the system that’s necessary in order to not ruin the game’s economy.
These kinds of players are the unluckiest because the devs can’t exactly give them new world locks to replace the duplicated ones… That’d solve nothing.
And the player can’t get their wings back because the other player would have suddenly had their item taken away, too!

All in all, those are just some random opinions of mine that I had and wanted to share as a means to maybe spark some discussion or hear other peoples’ opinions.

[POKERUSS]

I do think that there are some situations where getting scammed is “Return-Worthy”.

But for those who aren’t worthy, it’s better to delete the items that were stolen from the scammer. This would become a reminder for the scammer, telling them that “Scamming just gets you into trouble, there’s no benefit in it”, or even, if you could, delete more than what they scammed. This would teach them about how losing your belongings feels like…

Thus, both the victim and the scammer learnt their lessons, it’s up to them to either proceed “falling into the same hole” or change.

[Ephus]

I agree with deleting the item from the scammer, then banning them (if possible). The player who got scammed also learns a lesson to not believe everything (Unless it’s a bug or hack, where the victim has no control, in which case he gets the item back if possible)

The problem in these kinds of situations is, that it’s hard to verify a story through the logs and everything, due to these happening hundreds of times each day. And the team probably has other things to do than to return/delete stolen/scammed items from/to gullible players/scammers.

Once a scammer, always a scammer. That’s what I have learned. No matter how much a person claims that they have changed, they haven’t. They may stop it, but they are still going to scam in the future. The only thing we can do, is prevent them from doing it again (Punishing them more often, handing out harsher punishments as an example to others).

And of course spreading awareness of different kinds of scams that are occurring in the game.

[Bluvox]

As rare as it is, people actually do change, but that takes years though.
I once knew someone on Growtopia who had scammed when they were younger and they later turned out to be a pretty chill friend.

[Shawn]

I believe support does return items which were lost in legitimate glitched or hacking situations where the fault is out of the players hands.

Situations like that, it is right to return the items.
The developers showed that when there was that gem duplication glitch and they returned all the items to players who email about their issue