I think the GF OHK exploit is a bit of a long-term non-issue, even though that is probably an unpopular statement. My reasoning is that it "only" shifted existing legitimate AD from one group of people (the buyers of the epic items) to a smaller group of players (the sellers), but it didn't change the total number of AD in the economy. The majority of AD are, however, still held by a relatively small number of players (the majority of players could not afford the epics even at the lower prices). Those players can afford anything from the AH, but there needs will also be saturated quickly. The only mid term result is that items get cheaper, but since this affects both what you pay and what you get for items, the net result isn't so different (e.g. it doesn't really matter if that Amazingly Powerful Sword of Amazing Power +10 sells for 2M or 1M, if everything else also costs half of what it would have cost without the GF OHK exploit). It is also a state that would have been reached anyway as more and more people unlock the content. This only sped it up by a few weeks or months.
So, I never suggested or expected a rollback for those exploits. But what happened yesterday created AD out of thin air. AD that were not made through quests or from founder packs, which really would have impacted the economy for a long time if they had not rolled back the database to a point before the majority of the damage happened. This isn't a 100% solution, but it's probably a 90% solution and I think that is sufficient. As Perfectindigo mentioned, it's also a customer satisfaction issue. (I need to mention here that the past almost-25 years I worked in community and customer support management, not in development, but programmer herding (I think the PC term is "interfacing") has always been part of the job description since my employers have mostly been smaller firms where there is a lot of overlapping of tasks going on.)
I guess PWE gets a lot of flak, but they would have gotten that anyway, no matter what they did or didn't do. Personally, I think the 7 hours rollback is a near perfect compromise and the best they can do. But this is also what I would have done, based on the very limited information that is available to us, so naturally I agree with it.
It can't be fixed because the integer overflow exploits were down repeatedly in small ammounts to mask them for a single large transaction, so they can't be differentiated from legit players. Furthermore, they have been occuring longer than they think, as is becomming apparent in this investigation. You only hear about bugs like this because the gold farmers have multiple exploits that make it very easy for them to amas currency and sell it for USD's
So question, I know that this just happened in Diablo 3... Almost the exact same thing actually (it was a bug that allowed the duping of gold from the real money auction house, only a select number of players had enough gold to do it), and Blizzard was able to go through the game logs and ban those that took part in the exploit, no roll back was done.
I didn't follow the D3 situation with much attention to the details (I stopped playing in the first month after release), but from what I gather is that not doing a rollback left the economy in an even more dire state. There are some editorials floating around that make that claim.
But more fact-based: One major difference is that D3 is not F2P, so every account has been paid for and is associated with a unique serial key. You also cannot use the RMAH without authentication (mobile phone, with prepaid phones usually not being accepted). In Neverwinter, you can make as many free accounts as you wish, and just banning an account used for exploiting is rather meaningless if we assume that the average exploiter has half a brain and used newly created accounts for the exploit after changing their IP address (takes zero effort). F2P games have a much tougher time to really ban someone than pay-for games do. (Basically, in a F2P game you really can't ban anyone reliably. In case of D3, an exploiter may come back, but at least it means Blizzard sold another copy of the game.)
D3 also only uses one currency in addition to actual cash, and you can't easily convert between the two, like you can here in Neverwinter. The level of complexity was much lower in D3, from what I understand, in part because there weren't so many "innocent" profiteers.
To the OP: This is my first Cryptic game. I invested in both founders packs and about 800USD in zen. I have a level 60 with 90% of the shown achievements and all t-3 gear. I'm in favor of a wipe over a rollback and here is why: The seven hours is a nice gesture. The bans are even better because I think the large scale mules and exploiters will go and lose most of the benefits they made in that time. This makes for a good reverse on the economy. I was asleep for those seven hours so I missed out on all of that and the free cats, etc. So the roll back doesn't really hurt me where I'm standing.
The character wipe is a better option though. I'll explain what Ive gained from the exploits and what I don't like about the economy that existed when I went to bed, before the catapolooza that supposedly occurred today. People were already exploiting long before that. The best example is my own gear. I didn't farm any of it. I paid for it all, cheaply, with legit earned astral diamonds. It was FAR too inexpensive and I believe I got most of it from Guardian Fighter-1 shot exploiters selling it on the AH, which have been farming this stuff for over a week. In fact that was the topic of the day up until...this game crashing exploit. The economy took a huge hit there and it kind of caused this effect without people realizing it, mostly lower level or casual players: The rich got richer. Myself included. I didn't really need to do any sort of 5 man dungeons, other than for achievements or to help other players out. (And as a guardian, even with T-3 I don't think I can help them better than say..a 2-t equipped CW or DC, but that's another topic)
Now to be transparent with you, here is what I GAIN if they end up doing a wipe:
Reroll of class and race, reroll of attributes. Refunded Zen and Astrals from founders packs which I can spend smarter, even with the "new" economy "inflated" from the "current" economy we are about to get back. And finally a big one: longer interest in the game as end game is trivial right now. (And Crypic if youre reading this, the intrest to spend more money on the game) It's PVP or raid for stuff I don't need or the achievements. I choose PVP because it's more fun for me.
A full wipe gives a better economy in the long run, or at least until another exploit is discovered, which let's be honest here IS a possibility which i've discovered after today as supposedly this has happened on STO A year ago.
I still vote for the wipe. It is a beta and really I feel like the mistake here was that Cryptic said we would have no more wipes after beta. I can forgive them for back peddling on that as I felt it was a pretty bold statement to begin with, having played in all the beta weekends and dealing with a lot of bugs going on then. (Best example some of the main questing are STILL buggy and make it difficult to progress for some players). Hopefully this comment contibuted to the thread in a positive manner.
I didn't follow the D3 situation with much attention to the details (I stopped playing in the first month after release), but from what I gather is that not doing a rollback left the economy in an even more dire state. There are some editorials floating around that make that claim.
But more fact-based: One major difference is that D3 is not F2P, so every account has been paid for and is associated with a unique serial key. You also cannot use the RMAH without authentication (mobile phone, with prepaid phones usually not being accepted). In Neverwinter, you can make as many free accounts as you wish, and just banning an account used for exploiting is rather meaningless if we assume that the average exploiter has half a brain and used newly created accounts for the exploit after changing their IP address (takes zero effort). F2P games have a much tougher time to really ban someone than pay-for games do. (Basically, in a F2P game you really can't ban anyone reliably. In case of D3, an exploiter may come back, but at least it means Blizzard sold another copy of the game.)
D3 also only uses one currency in addition to actual cash, and you can't easily convert between the two, like you can here in Neverwinter. The level of complexity was much lower in D3, from what I understand, in part because there weren't so many "innocent" profiteers.
That makes perfect sense, didn't think about it that way. Thanks for th explanation...
Keegan I think internally they are covering their butts and fingering pointing issues have arisen that alone takes time and extravagant excuses.
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.
This and other statements like this are just plain false. Being a database administrator myself this can be traced and corrected with moderate work for any average database system. I would imagine they use standard practices and should be relatively easy to query what transactions have happened per account. I would remove anything bought, sold, traded from these accounts and any accounts that made transactions against them for culprit accounts. I highly doubt there were many innocents among them. What's the worse that could happen a bunch of cheaters gets mad and leaves? Seems like a win win for the community.
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So, I never suggested or expected a rollback for those exploits. But what happened yesterday created AD out of thin air. AD that were not made through quests or from founder packs, which really would have impacted the economy for a long time if they had not rolled back the database to a point before the majority of the damage happened. This isn't a 100% solution, but it's probably a 90% solution and I think that is sufficient. As Perfectindigo mentioned, it's also a customer satisfaction issue. (I need to mention here that the past almost-25 years I worked in community and customer support management, not in development, but programmer herding (I think the PC term is "interfacing") has always been part of the job description since my employers have mostly been smaller firms where there is a lot of overlapping of tasks going on.)
I guess PWE gets a lot of flak, but they would have gotten that anyway, no matter what they did or didn't do. Personally, I think the 7 hours rollback is a near perfect compromise and the best they can do. But this is also what I would have done, based on the very limited information that is available to us, so naturally I agree with it.
I didn't follow the D3 situation with much attention to the details (I stopped playing in the first month after release), but from what I gather is that not doing a rollback left the economy in an even more dire state. There are some editorials floating around that make that claim.
But more fact-based: One major difference is that D3 is not F2P, so every account has been paid for and is associated with a unique serial key. You also cannot use the RMAH without authentication (mobile phone, with prepaid phones usually not being accepted). In Neverwinter, you can make as many free accounts as you wish, and just banning an account used for exploiting is rather meaningless if we assume that the average exploiter has half a brain and used newly created accounts for the exploit after changing their IP address (takes zero effort). F2P games have a much tougher time to really ban someone than pay-for games do. (Basically, in a F2P game you really can't ban anyone reliably. In case of D3, an exploiter may come back, but at least it means Blizzard sold another copy of the game.)
D3 also only uses one currency in addition to actual cash, and you can't easily convert between the two, like you can here in Neverwinter. The level of complexity was much lower in D3, from what I understand, in part because there weren't so many "innocent" profiteers.
The character wipe is a better option though. I'll explain what Ive gained from the exploits and what I don't like about the economy that existed when I went to bed, before the catapolooza that supposedly occurred today. People were already exploiting long before that. The best example is my own gear. I didn't farm any of it. I paid for it all, cheaply, with legit earned astral diamonds. It was FAR too inexpensive and I believe I got most of it from Guardian Fighter-1 shot exploiters selling it on the AH, which have been farming this stuff for over a week. In fact that was the topic of the day up until...this game crashing exploit. The economy took a huge hit there and it kind of caused this effect without people realizing it, mostly lower level or casual players: The rich got richer. Myself included. I didn't really need to do any sort of 5 man dungeons, other than for achievements or to help other players out. (And as a guardian, even with T-3 I don't think I can help them better than say..a 2-t equipped CW or DC, but that's another topic)
Now to be transparent with you, here is what I GAIN if they end up doing a wipe:
Reroll of class and race, reroll of attributes. Refunded Zen and Astrals from founders packs which I can spend smarter, even with the "new" economy "inflated" from the "current" economy we are about to get back. And finally a big one: longer interest in the game as end game is trivial right now. (And Crypic if youre reading this, the intrest to spend more money on the game) It's PVP or raid for stuff I don't need or the achievements. I choose PVP because it's more fun for me.
A full wipe gives a better economy in the long run, or at least until another exploit is discovered, which let's be honest here IS a possibility which i've discovered after today as supposedly this has happened on STO A year ago.
I still vote for the wipe. It is a beta and really I feel like the mistake here was that Cryptic said we would have no more wipes after beta. I can forgive them for back peddling on that as I felt it was a pretty bold statement to begin with, having played in all the beta weekends and dealing with a lot of bugs going on then. (Best example some of the main questing are STILL buggy and make it difficult to progress for some players). Hopefully this comment contibuted to the thread in a positive manner.
That makes perfect sense, didn't think about it that way. Thanks for th explanation...
This and other statements like this are just plain false. Being a database administrator myself this can be traced and corrected with moderate work for any average database system. I would imagine they use standard practices and should be relatively easy to query what transactions have happened per account. I would remove anything bought, sold, traded from these accounts and any accounts that made transactions against them for culprit accounts. I highly doubt there were many innocents among them. What's the worse that could happen a bunch of cheaters gets mad and leaves? Seems like a win win for the community.