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Can someone please explain why this cannot be fixed?
keeganfox
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 0 Arc User
I hear a lot of talk but no real logic behind this problem. Just demands and baseless accusations.
This is an economics problem involving technology in an environment over which a company has full control. That said, I'd like to hear someone explain why this cannot be undone manually?
This post requests an audience of a slightly more intellectual level than the average Internet user. Many of you will be bored by it and are welcome to take my advice and ignore it now.
That said: As someone who works with SQL, PHP and PERL for a living I'm questioning what would prevent them from reviewing transaction and combat logs and modifying (see: removing) excess funds from the market. Requires some grunt work to do, but the queries shouldn't be that complicated.
I recognize some items can have been sold to others who were not exploiting, and typically purchasing stolen goods is a 'Too bad, so sad' scenario for the buyer, but that doesn't have to happen in this situation. Any AD->Zen transactions can be traced from flagged accounts and removed. The original buyer of the zen made a transaction at an agreed upon price, inflated or otherwise, so that deal is still valid, or perhaps PWE would agree to compensate them. *shrugs* A rollback would fix that; I don't see as many people flipping out over the idea of a rollback. So what ill-gotten gains could exist in the game that could not be resolved?
The only situation I cannot see being resolved is a transaction of Zen for real world money. I'm not aware of anyone doing that, since you can buy Zen from PWE, and I'm not sure it's within the terms of the EULA.
So...apart from a simple lack of faith in the abilities of PWE and Cryptic staff to properly perform the task, can someone please explain why, in technical and logical terms, this cannot be fixed without a wipe?
This is an economics problem involving technology in an environment over which a company has full control. That said, I'd like to hear someone explain why this cannot be undone manually?
This post requests an audience of a slightly more intellectual level than the average Internet user. Many of you will be bored by it and are welcome to take my advice and ignore it now.
That said: As someone who works with SQL, PHP and PERL for a living I'm questioning what would prevent them from reviewing transaction and combat logs and modifying (see: removing) excess funds from the market. Requires some grunt work to do, but the queries shouldn't be that complicated.
I recognize some items can have been sold to others who were not exploiting, and typically purchasing stolen goods is a 'Too bad, so sad' scenario for the buyer, but that doesn't have to happen in this situation. Any AD->Zen transactions can be traced from flagged accounts and removed. The original buyer of the zen made a transaction at an agreed upon price, inflated or otherwise, so that deal is still valid, or perhaps PWE would agree to compensate them. *shrugs* A rollback would fix that; I don't see as many people flipping out over the idea of a rollback. So what ill-gotten gains could exist in the game that could not be resolved?
The only situation I cannot see being resolved is a transaction of Zen for real world money. I'm not aware of anyone doing that, since you can buy Zen from PWE, and I'm not sure it's within the terms of the EULA.
So...apart from a simple lack of faith in the abilities of PWE and Cryptic staff to properly perform the task, can someone please explain why, in technical and logical terms, this cannot be fixed without a wipe?
Post edited by keeganfox on
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They cannot simply wipe without tracing first the transactions, fix the major exploiting bugs and punish the honest playerbase that hasn't done anything.
Some people don't value their progress enough and can afford a restart, but I do not. If they wipe the servers, I'll pick my things and leave as it means that they value more a virtual economy that I hardly use to my experience as one of their players.
I've been promissed that there would be no wipes and invested my time and money with such expectations.
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Plus, lets get real here they can never fully trace where this and that went. The amount we are talking about is massive and with today's applications that can fake IP's and disguising hardware etc etc... The economy is wrecked in so many ways I don't think we can fully measure it. In the middle of all this innocents are probably involved that have no clue.
I feel bad for the staff but they were clearly warned in advance a long time ago and they simply dropped the ball..
Ya, but how far back will the rollback go? I'm prolly gonna lose everything and get screwed-jobbed.
Loki < The Illuminati > 60 - Control Wizard
Protocol 60 - Great Weapon Fighter
If I give you $100, it's easy to reverse. If you get the $100 and give 20 to your friend, 20 to your co-worker, 40 to a restaurant, 20 to the gas station, it's still easy to reverse. Now continue this pattern and see how quickly it branches out and becomes overwhelming.
Now also consider that it's not always simple amounts that are given way. For example, the friend you gave the 20 to might buy something for 30 and use 10 of his own money in addition to yours. The person who receives the 30 may then buy something else for 25 and gift it to yet another person, who sells it for 19 and buys something else for 15, using the remaining 4 bucks to buy a cup of coffee ... and so on.
And then you have the element of people deliberately laundering money or objects, e.g. exchanging partial amounts of AD for Zen, then back again, then one more time in different amounts (some people buying portions legitimately while it is listed), then buying Zen store stuff and reselling it, where the buyer may pay with partly legitimate and party illegitimate AD. Plus the cats, where 1M is turned into 50g, and 30g of them are used to buy a bag that was also gotten that way, and so forth.
On a theoretical level this could all be reverted, on a practical level the branching complexity is so high that a rollback may be far more realistic, much faster, and less error prone. It's just a whole lot cleaner. Then, after the majority of the damage is fixed up, simply banning everyone who placed negative bids in the AH is trivial because you don't have to follow the trail after that. Anyone who placed a negative bid is, in essence, an exploiter (the few who may have done it accidentally, if that is possible, could contact support).
No comment from the rest of us drooling, imbecilic, moronic, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.
First, thanks for being the only (Edit: imivo replied while I was writing this. Thank you too) reply that actually stayed to the point of the post and didn't just come in here to moan. But I ask: Why can they not track all the transactions? Yes, IPs can be spoofed, but the accounts still need to be logged into. They can tell if someone traded one or two things with someone, especially through the auction house, but they can also see the difference between that and the person transferring massive amounts of wealth between themselves and their alt (to identify the mule, whether it be from another IP or not) or making massive conversions between AD and Zen. This is the part I don't understand and no one seems to be able to explain to me: How is it not possible to track this? Everyone spews that it cannot be done, yet no one will identify why it cannot be done. I cannot see any reason it cannot be done.
Unfortunately that IS the reason it can't be fixed.
Cryptic have shown over and over again that they don't have the skills or the manpower to do this kind of thing. Exploits plague all of their games, often the SAME exploits, and they simply don't fix them.
In the past their IPs have been small enough that it probably made more economic sense to just sweep things under the carpet. Sure, they probably lost a few players who were disgusted with bugs and exploits and blatant imbalances, but at the end of the day with games like STO they have a dedicated, hardcore fanbase, which while small isn't going to be driven away easily.
NWO is different, it's rapidly pulled in a huge number of players and this time the rampant exploits have been widely reported. However it's still the same old Cryptic running the show, and while they are highly skilled in some areas, dealing with exploits and managing large game economies is NOT one of those areas. They will not track down all of the AD from this exploit, the Zen purchased with it will stay out there, I guarantee it.
There aren't economic or technical reasons for this, just ones of competence.
The rest of your post was OK, but your real life analogy is false, for one thing I expect every transaction within the game to be logged and therefore traceable with some queries, which wasn't going to happen with the analogy used.
/thread
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I guess where I'm confused is, if someone who has illegitimately obtained, lets say, 1 million AD (for this example), if they launder it back and forth between other users, be those other users legal or not, in the end all those transactions result with a different form of currency (or items) in the original account of the exploiter. If anything, the exploiter should have gained currency of some sort. So, apart from damaging the exchange rate of AD and Zen I'm confused how deleting the funds that reside with the exploiter (and it's mules, and any transactions on the market) does not solve many of the problems on the market. How were non-exploiters gaining from this problem in a way that would need to be reverted to save the economy of the game? Were the exploiters somehow making legitimate players wealthy?
You'd expect that, yes. Sadly... this is Cryptic.
The analogy was just there to give people an example they can more easily grasp because it's a familiar concept. Just imagine every RL transaction is logged. Just having the data somewhere doesn't make it "manageable", and then you have the problem of how to handle it. You would have to start at the very end of each trail, but it branches all the time, is interconnected and laps over with other transactions, and even with modern computers you quickly arrive at a level of complexity that is quite overwhelming. They don't have weeks to do this.
Better luck getting a sensible one from Charlie Sheen after a 2-week bender.
If you have no faith in the competence of the company producing a game you are playing, especially one you've seen having problems in the past...
...I'm really at a loss. Why play any games made by them? That's not an argument for why this cannot be fixed. That...is...uh...well that would mean that every bug of this scale will require a wipe to create an 'acceptable' solution.
Are there thresholds? Levels of problems where you believe Cryptic can fix things? Do they need to hire an 'Anti-exploitation' team with all the new funds for this new project? (Since it's apparently so popular in theory they could afford to hire them? Especially given our poor economy here in the States)
Yes. Before the server shutdown, exploiters were giving away billions of AD, cats, other AD-purchased items, stuff from the Zen store, and so on. They deliberately complicated the situation by obscuring it. If I had to guess, I would say that the majority of the exploited currency (and what it was converted to) ended up in the possession of people who themselves did not exploit, either directly or indirectly (person A gets cat from exploiter and pays 20g for it, person A now sells it to person B for 30g, and person B gifts it to their girlfriend, who doesn't like the skin and trades it to person C for a bag from the Zen store that had been purchased by person D with Zen, 75% of which had been converted from 40% exploited AD ...).
If we do not try, we will never succeed.
You base everything you say off of wild guesses and claim it as fact later. Stop lying please.
I'm afraid I can't say I'm an expert on the market value of Cats. You're saying they were dumping the ill-gotten goods because the "jig was up"? Some got exceptionally good deals on items because the exploiters didn't care about the value of items gotten as it was of lesser value to them?
Would you say then, in those circumstances, it would be unreasonable to undo those transactions? Legitimate player A would clearly be upset they no longer had the cat, but honestly if I bought Rolls Royce off a stranger for $1,000 and three days later a police officer told me it was stolen, yet I was getting my $1,000 back I can tell you I'd be disappointed, but not completely surprised.
Frankly, I'd be happy I didn't lose my character just to get all those stolen cars back out of the system.
Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying? Sorry, I'm still looking at this from a database perspective. This is, of course, all assuming that the transactions can be 'rolled back' in a similar way transaction logs on an Exchange or Oracle server can be recovered. Undoing commerce through time. Clearly it would get more complicated as it goes through multiple people via many transactions, but if person C (or person Z for that matter) still has their zen or bag at the end of it...well, you didn't get the steal of the century, but you still have all the time you spent leveling up that character, yes?
But yes, clearly if they cannot put all this together in a timely manner to address at least, say, 80% of the offenders...a rollback that encompasses the start of when the 'SHTF' (If it did in this situation) might be a good compromise. We're really guessing at the capabilities here (of course) but...given my knowledge of the technology (and granted, yes, how it should have been implemented) it should be possible.
But the user input on the gateway should have been sanitized, so...
It is easy to check their SQL database to see who inserted a negative value and ban him, but it's harder to find all his toons/accounts that helped him with money laundry, some of them could even be his friends who pretend to be "victims" of that laundry.
And as Imivo said, the branches are a lot on this one.
I am just hoping that they will clean it as much as possible, though i have a "feeling" that there are gonna be a few that will be lucky and keep their AD or Zen at their laundry chars.
But yes, I will concede their results rely heavily upon the wizard writing the spells...
Of course, I say all this and couldn't tell you how many times I've looked at a problem and said "Oh this will be easy to fix with a little script..."
Cue the "3 days later..." card.
It is theoretically possible to reverse every single transaction. But "possible" isn't necessarily the same as "feasible", especially if you consider the time constraints. On a theoretical level, scripts can reverse anything and restore the original state, but this may take a long time -- certainly more than a few hours, and there are so many exceptions that there is also a realistic potential for errors. The difficulty is the complexity. (If you shred a document, you can theoretically put it together again and read the text on it. If you have 20 minutes to do it, you will probably not be able to even though theoretically you are able to.)
I think half of the problem is how many non-exploiting people seized the opportunity for profit. Those who saw 500:1 and exchanged legitimate Zen for illegitimate AD, those who begged for cats, those who asked for handouts. There was a lot of this on Dragon. The number of actual exploiters is probably very small (and could be dealt with easily), but those who voluntarily or involuntarily got associated with the exploiters is presumably huge. It's the pebble and the ripples.
They announced a 7 hours rollback, and I feel that this is probably the very minimum they needed to do. The exploit had been (according to posts from exploiters, if they are credible) around longer, but it didn't become popular. Saturday night, the exchange rate on Dragon was 360:1, which seemed fine. It wasn't until a few hours before the shutdown that it shot up to the maximum of 500:1, so this rollback probably undoes most of the damage while inflicting as little inconvenience on the player base as possible. I think it's probably a very good compromise. The "rest" can be sorted out in more "manageable" quantities, which is presumably why they are keeping the AH and the exchange offline for now (this prevents further complication while stuff is being worked on in the background). I think they handled this well.
@hurk97: Unsure why you dish out personal attacks. The topic starter asked a technical question and I provided an answer from my perspective, based on experience and observation (and PWE's decision to roll back seems to confirm it). The numbers are of course only examples, not "facts", since I obviously have no access to their transaction logs. They serve to illustrate the complexity of this issue, they are not literal. If you have a different take on the issue, go ahead and post your explanation, either in technical or figurative terms.
I would say they are capable of doing said queries but for time constraints and customer satisfaction they chose the easy road. If they arent capable of doing the queries IE the stored procedures and others not being written in a way to allow that in depth and specific, they should look into fixing it so it can be.
The system I work with is for an efiling/bank provider for different tax software companies to give you an idea of the sensitive tables I work with. Our queries have to be very specific if an ERO gets audited, we have to be able to provide a digital trail to show where the return was filed, how it was set to go ie bank or no bank product, which MEF center picked it up and so on, while its tedious to do this for a tax office that has quite a few customers which some of ours had it has to be done.
The ad to zen exchange was inflated. A player could see the rate, decide it was a good deal for ad, and buy $10 worth of zen to exchange for it. They didn't exploit, but they benefited from ad inflation. So ... what do you do? Remove the ad they got, remove whatever items they bought with that ad, remove whatever they posted on the ah that was funded by ad, return whatever items were purchased by people on the ah from that person? Should their zen purchase be automatically refunded? That's going to cost PWE a lot of money. How far should you follow the transaction chains and nullify transactions?
Or do you decide that the people who exchanged the zen for ad get to keep the ad and just punish the primary exploiters? How do you know those exploiters didn't create the inflated rate and then take advantage of it by laundering to other accounts? The logs don't show intent, so PWE isn't sure what do with the accounts that acquired the inflated ad from the exploiters.
How do you deal with people who saw the high rate but bought zen and traded it for ad anyway and bought goods from the AH at inflated prices? They got ripped off if you just leave them with the items they bought at inflated prices.
If players are left with vast amounts of exploit ad that they acquired legitimately, then those players are still a danger to the economy. For one, they don't need to buy more zen to convert to ad, so they hurt the business model of the game. For two, they can dump that ad back into the economy, which prices out regular players who are grinding ad.
The customer service problem is more complicated than identifying some transactions and undoing them.
I couldn't understand why so many were calling for a wipe of the server. I think many believe that the ongoing OHK bug that's been around longer is more significant than it is. Those exploiting the AH will be a lot easier to track with a quick query, and I doubt PWE is just going to ignore all of those who used it. I suspect the logs of those users will get specific queries written just for them.
I'd love to look at their logging system.
sinamon: Aye, but this is an online game dealing with small claims court transactions, if that. Much of it would be covered under the fact that the EULA required to be signed by everyone that plays (for free) makes them immune to suits as the person owns nothing. PWE could ban them tomorrow and they're in the clear.
Not sure why that couldn't be done here.
I don't think is that it can't be fixed, I think the issue is there is no way to do it without one group getting outraged.
I assume it would take time to fix it which would cause an uproar with people who wish to play now, silly, yes, it takes times to fix things, but at this point they have to satisfy the many (lets say from a company point of view)
Anyways, I am sure it could be fixed...it just the time frame in which to do it and the man power it would take would be hard to reach...yet again I do not work in this field so this is an uneducated estimate.