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Forums > Home› Neverwinter Discussion › General Discussion (PC)
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I am genuinely curious about this exploit shenanigans...

reasonpolicereasonpolice Member Posts: 0 Arc User
edited May 2013 in General Discussion (PC)
I am not trying to troll or flame with this post. This is genuine curiosity.
The main point of this post is in yellow, the rest can be safely ignored. Let's please have a real discussion here and not just a flame/troll war.

The most common post/response I have seen on these forums during last night and this morning is:
"The developers KNEW, you guys! And they did NOTHING about it! This bug has existed since closed beta! It's a conspiracy!"

You might say I'm exaggerating with that summary, but if you go look around the forums for a minute, you'll see that that really is the basic message behind roughly 90% of the negative posts.

Anyway, my question is... where's the proof, or at least some good evidence? Are their screenshots of this exploit being utilized in closed beta? Are there any links you can share pointing to some YouTube videos or professional reviews that demonstrate the use of this exploit? Any other kind of evidence I'm not mentioning here?

My point in asking these questions is to show that Cryptic/PW's response to this was actually pretty decent. I think they most likely would have done a full server wipe, but they promised no wipes, and they kept their word.

EDIT: I'm not really specifically trying to defend PW here (even though it seems that way), because I really don't like them... I've never given them one cent of my money and I never will. I'm moreso trying to defend game developers in general and how much negativity they get when they make mistakes. These people work really ****ing hard, even if they are greedy jerks. NW just doesn't seem to be money based no matter how hard I look at it. In only like 3 days, only being level 36-39, I earned enough AD to buy 500 Zen (at ~1:350) and get character slots. It's not that difficult.

I'd also like to point out a few things about this exploit:
  • 1. This happened on a weekend... Like 2am on a Sunday... A lot of Cryptic/PW exployees probably weren't working cause, ya know, they're human. My guess is it took them 12 hours to take the servers down because they were scrambling to get information on the full scope of this exploit.
  • 2. Others have said this but... the game is VERY NEW. Why does everyone expect it to be a perfectly polished game with no issues? People seem to be so used to high quality games that have been out for more than a year, and when they make the switch to a game in this stage (soft launch/beta/whatever), their expectations are way too high.
  • 3. If you have good database design (which it seems Cryptic does), all of the excess AD will be very easy to track. Most if not all MMO games today have a very robust logging system, and very easily queryable databases. Even if people are hoarding AD on mules, buying cats, etc., those logs will show up, and Cryptic seems to know what they're looking for.
  • 4. I have seen like 20+ posts/replies just in the last 45 mins I've been browsing the forums that say "All of that excess AD is still in the market! The economy is ruined forever!" This honestly makes me facepalm so hard. Please enlighten me, HOW exactly do you KNOW that all of that excess AD is 'in the market?' The AH is offline, the servers were rolled back, and Cryptic is tracking down and banning people who utilized this exploit before it was made widely known. Ergo, you can't know anything about it.

If there are any thought-out, relevant arguments to my points made here that actually make sense, I will be happy to edit them in to this post and cross my point out. Please keep the discussion civil.
Post edited by reasonpolice on

Comments

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    zorpennzorpenn Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 146 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    There is some SS showing bug report about that exploit 16 days ago.
    Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
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    reasonpolicereasonpolice Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    zorpenn wrote: »
    There is some SS showing bug report about that exploit 16 days ago.

    Care to post a link to it? And was it a player submitting the bug report that posted it?

    If you think about how many people are playing this game (which I don't know the exact number but we'll just say 10,000), and then lets say each player submits one bug report a week. Or let's say half of them submit one bug report a week. Or even a 10th of them. That's still A THOUSAND bug reports a week. PWE doesn't have a few hundred people going through bug reports, so they can very easily be missed - especially if only a few people were reporting it since it was not widely known.

    I'm not saying this as a fact, but it is a very likely scenario.
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    zorpennzorpenn Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 146 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    reasonpolice wrote: »
    Care to post a link to it? And was it a player submitting the bug report that posted it?

    If you think about how many people are playing this game (which I don't know the exact number but we'll just say 10,000), and then lets say each player submits one bug report a week. Or let's say half of them submit one bug report a week. Or even a 10th of them. That's still A THOUSAND bug reports a week. PWE doesn't have a few hundred people going through bug reports, so they can very easily be missed - especially if only a few people were reporting it since it was not widely known.

    I'm not saying this as a fact, but it is a very likely scenario.

    You are missing the point. I dont care if someone saw that ticket, im just saying that 7h rollback is a joke if atleast one player knew about that exploit 16 days ago.
    Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
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    surv1vor1surv1vor1 Member Posts: 7 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    From what I have heard, outside of these forums and through sources I have known for years, people have been using this exploit for quite a while and transferred all of their AD/Zen to other accounts long before the roll back. So nothing has been done to fix the economy.
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    flakelessflakeless Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    reasonpolice wrote: »
    Care to post a link to it? And was it a player submitting the bug report that posted it?

    I'm not the player who posted the ticket, I just had the link copied already ^-^
    http://s17.postimg.org/tu8qd0cyn/lolfail.jpg
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    reasonpolicereasonpolice Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    Well flakeless, can't really argue with that! Though it does say "We are experiencing issues with our reporting system" so I'm still not entirely convinced that PWE/Cryptic would have seen it. If I had discovered this bug I'd have probably been submitting a couple bug reports about it every time I played, and PM'd a moderator/admin on the forums instead of posting it publicly. I can understand that people might not have seen this as an issue that would blow up like this but yeah they definitely could have taken some action sooner.
    zorpenn wrote: »
    You are missing the point. I dont care if someone saw that ticket, im just saying that 7h rollback is a joke if atleast one player knew about that exploit 16 days ago.
    EDIT: This also pertains to your response, surv1vor1.
    You seem to be forgetting that it was a very small number of people who knew about the exploit, and PWE/Cryptic has stated that they are tracking down specific accounts that have used it. I'm not being condescending here, so don't take it that way, but if you know about how databases and SQL work, you would know that no matter how many cats were bought, no matter how many mules were made, all that stuff is trackable from the original account. Also, the bans are going to happen over time, they're not going to happen overnight. Yes it is hurtful to the economy even with the rollback, but it will recover. They promised no character wipes and they're doing their best to keep their word. (I wouldn't have made the promise in the first place, though).
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    zorpennzorpenn Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 146 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    reasonpolice wrote: »
    Well flakeless, can't really argue with that! Though it does say "We are experiencing issues with our reporting system" so I'm still not entirely convinced that PWE/Cryptic would have seen it. If I had discovered this bug I'd have probably been submitting a couple bug reports about it every time I played, and PM'd a moderator/admin on the forums instead of posting it publicly. I can understand that people might not have seen this as an issue that would blow up like this but yeah they definitely could have taken some action sooner.


    EDIT: This also pertains to your response, surv1vor1.
    You seem to be forgetting that it was a very small number of people who knew about the exploit, and PWE/Cryptic has stated that they are tracking down specific accounts that have used it. I'm not being condescending here, so don't take it that way, but if you know about how databases and SQL work, you would know that no matter how many cats were bought, no matter how many mules were made, all that stuff is trackable from the original account. Also, the bans are going to happen over time, they're not going to happen overnight. Yes it is hurtful to the economy even with the rollback, but it will recover. They promised no character wipes and they're doing their best to keep their word. (I wouldn't have made the promise in the first place, though).

    So? They will do another rollback when they track down all of them? It wil be too late imo, damage is done.
    Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
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    mortishimortishi Member Posts: 13 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    http://s17.postimg.org/tu8qd0cyn/lolfail.jpg

    5 seconds of forum search ...

    I guess when you read "color font to make you seem less ignorant for dummies" they didn't cover forum search options ..

    thanks for playing!
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    filcfilc Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    real picture for sure :D
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    reasonpolicereasonpolice Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    zorpenn wrote: »
    So? They will do another rollback when they track down all of them? It wil be too late imo, damage is done.
    So it seems that you DON'T know how databases and SQL work, which is fine, because most people don't lol. So allow me to explain what they can do. 1. Search all AH transactions for negative bids, joined with the user table by @handle (the JOIN command will return all rows from the user account table that correspond to the AH transaction table results). 2. For each user account in those results, search the trade/purchase transaction table, also joined with the user account table by @handle. That will return a comprehensive list of all player accounts and mules that were involved in the exploit. 3. Permanently ban all of those accounts, effectively removing the trillions of AD generated from the economy. Prices will then stabilize over time.

    Also, the buying cats thing is irrelevant, since they can just track trades, mail, and AH bids.

    EDIT: This is just an example of how SQL works. If their database design is even halfway decent, they can do this. If they have ****ty db... then they will fail and this game will fail. Either way we'll know in like two weeks.
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    reasonpolicereasonpolice Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    mortishi wrote: »
    http://s17.postimg.org/tu8qd0cyn/lolfail.jpg

    5 seconds of forum search ...

    I guess when you read "color font to make you seem less ignorant for dummies" they didn't cover forum search options ..

    thanks for playing!

    1. Your link is dead.
    2. You very obviously have not read any of my posts, or have not put any thought into the points I have made. I DID see the screenshot before it was dead. It is not convincing evidence to anyone who's ever had a rational thought.
    3. Thanks for playing!
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