Easy solution to low bids... Require a buyout price and have the fee based on the average of the minimum bid + buyout.
Sure, if people want to they could still somewhat cheap the fees by setting low minimum bids, but no one would be willing to set buyout prices below what they were willing to take for an item.
There would also be the added byproduct of a smaller AH footprint. If everything had a buyout price, less would stay in the AH for that 4 day period because people would buy it way before the timer could run out, unless it was something worthless in the first place.
As a matter of fact, those trying to find exploits and use cheats are just very pathetic individuals who really, really need to get a life. Because, seriously...
As a matter of fact, those trying to find exploits and use cheats are just very pathetic individuals who really, really need to get a life. Because, seriously...
the irony in this is strong.
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kaltxxMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero UsersPosts: 8Arc User
edited May 2013
To all those who support a wipe? I'm curious how many of you actually paid anything at all. I see countless saying they paid for founders pack blah blah blah but don't have a guardian or hero of the north tag on the forums. Supporting the wipe is only to save your cheapo mindset. Trying to get on a level playing field? Haha sorry man grow up. Life is never fair even in game.
And you pretend to troll without knowledge of my life whatsoever. But mayhap it fulfills a void in your life, where you need to think of yourself as sharp and sarcastic, because, hey, in real life you're just used to bow your head to other people. But enough, let us not quarrell among ourselves, because the only ones worth of contempt are the poor fellows who try to ruin the fun for everybody else.
To all those who support a wipe? I'm curious how many of you actually paid anything at all. I see countless saying they paid for founders pack blah blah blah but don't have a guardian or hero of the north tag on the forums. Supporting the wipe is only to save your cheapo mindset. Trying to get on a level playing field? Haha sorry man grow up. Life is never fair even in game.
Buying Zen and founders packs are two different things.
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kaltxxMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero UsersPosts: 8Arc User
Did I say buying Zen? I said and quote myself "paid for founders pack"
No. "I'm curious how many of you actually paid anything at all." I have spent money, not on a founders pack, so obviously I won't have a stupid tag. doesen't mean I dont spend money.
You think you got more of a say because you got your precious tag? **** you man.
so, is that difficult to write a piece of code which freezes the AH timer when the AH is down?
Something tells me you aren't quite understanding how auctions are stored on the server.
While I am not a Cryptic programmer, I think it's safe to assume that they would follow a fairly standard procedure for storing data in a relational database for things like your auction. That being the case, the record that stores your auction *probably* has an identifier for the item itself (an id #), an id to your character, the starting and buyout prices you set, and either a timestamp of when you created the auction (which code then adds to the duration of the auction, from another field in the record), or a timestamp of when the auction expires. A timestamp is a number that represents the number of microseconds (or 1/1,000,000 of a second) since the Unix Epoch (which is defined as midnight on January 1st, 1970 UTC). In either case, there is no way of "stopping the timer", since there is no timer as it were; the system simply looks at the timestamp and compares it to now (on some defined frequency, probably every 5 minutes but perhaps more frequently), and if now is after the timestamp, your auction is over.
It is possible to write code that would go through all auctions and change the timestamp to maintain the duration past the downtime. However, that is fraught with peril - one accident and a auction suddenly has an invalid timestamp and now the auction is in limbo and you NEVER get your item or the AD. The risk, however minor, isn't worth the percieved benefit. When you consider that there are likely hundreds or thousands of auctions in the system, 1% accidents are dozens of support requests of "WTF HAPPENED TO MY AUCTIONZZZZZES!!!!!!!!!!11111". I wouldn't want to deal with that, and can't imagine Cryptic does either. And none of this takes into account the possibility that Cryptic's various games use a shared DB, which would compound the complexity of things.
Obviously, there are other ways of storing your auction data than what I've described, so I could be way off. But this is pretty standard throughout the computer software industry, so I'd be surprised if they did things THAT different.
Class guardian extends fighter{
var threat = 0;
var dps = 5;
var usefulnessInEndgame = 0;
function main(){
if(!dead){ die(); }
}
}
sure its different if you buy founders packs the costumes and companions are ACCOUNT wide.... f you buy zen its per character (though account wide mounts is a step forwards). soo one would think that people who bought founders packs have more at stake because all their...stuff gets spread to every character. also a purge would lose founders our 3-5 day headstart which will upset those race to 60 ppl.
where if someone has just as much spent but its spread over 3 or more accounts maybe did some lockbox gambling they lose less if one of their account gets banned. they lose less and one would assume if they knew they were doing something bad they would probably use the account that didn't have a lot of stuff on it and just mail profits to their alts. sure someone who had a founders pack could have an exploiters account but they wouldn't be able to access all their founder stuff.
so its really a matter of if people have all their stuff in one account it is more risky and more painful to grief. which is why they need more account based services/purchases. if you are a zen buyer and have all your 80$ of purchased zen in one account ect then I feel for you cause you don't get a cool forum title
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angelicdevil90Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 4Arc User
edited May 2013
I'd just be happy with taking a bit of time to fix everything you can as best as possible, wiping everying and returning the original zen money spent being returned along with founder packs refreshed (diamonds, ect).
No. "I'm curious how many of you actually paid anything at all." I have spent money, not on a founders pack, so obviously I won't have a stupid tag. doesen't mean I dont spend money.
You think you got more of a say because you got your precious tag? **** you man.
As a matter of fact I do. And don't be so butt hurt? feeling insulted just by simple words. Why? do you have to steal your mom's cc so you can buy Zen?
Simple word to the wise. If you're not prepared to see an item sell at your minimum bid, then you have set the wrong minimum bid. This is how real auctions work too. We all know you're just trying to game the system to avoid fees by lying about how much you're willing to accept (otherwise you wouldn't be complaining, because you would have at least got the minimum you were seeking).
The account service is temporarily down, please try again at a later time.
Hey All - That was an unanticipated outage. Sorry that you did not receive notification regarding this. Fortunately the issue was resolved relatively quickly.
As a matter of fact I do. And don't be so butt hurt? feeling insulted just by simple words. Why? do you have to steal your mom's cc so you can buy Zen?
Pathetic how you think you're better than everyone because you wasted 200$ on a broken game.
Something tells me you aren't quite understanding how auctions are stored on the server.
... snip ...
It is necessary to store at least some timestamp, because you cannot guarantee a regular polling interval to update the auction time remaining. A timestamp means you can always calculate the time remaining when necessary whereas storing a timer/counter means a delay in processing can throw out the calculation permanently.
It is possible to code around this, but the designers probably didn't consider it necessary or it may not have occurred to them when designing the system.
The simple fix is to store a timestamp of the last time the remaining interval was updated and the remaining interval itself.
On each poll compare the current time to the last update timestamp, get the number of seconds from that and remove that value from the remaining interval.
When the servers go down for maintenance the updates will stop, and just as you bring them up you update the timestamp for all the auctions (but not the interval). This means auctions will then "pause" while the system is down and resume when the system is up.
Every Patch notes there are about 10 point to the stupid gateway... how about fixing stuff ingame then this useless gateway -.-
Fixing the gateway is a lot easier, and hence changes can be completed more often and more quickly given a smaller number of man-hours invested. That is to say... if you have 1 person working on the gateway and 5 on the game itself, the 1 person working on the gateway may still complete his work before the other 5 can finish theirs.
Say what you want. Not everyone can afford to lose all the money spent on the game. I have myself supported the game by buying Zen equal to what a retail game costs. If they decide to wipe, they gonna have to do a refund. I am not gonna say "go ahead and wipe all the stuff I bought for 70$, when I have been plyaying for two weeks". That is wrong. They gonna have to do a wipe at some point, I fully agree, but I am not supporting money spent to be lost forever. Money back or fill up my Zen wallet with what I bought in the first place so I can spend it again.
It's clearly NOT beta, if you haven't figured it out yet. Wiping everything now without some form of refund would create more problems than it solves, belive me.
PWE's general procedure is to reverse all purchases made with Zen during the period rolled back. So if the servers were rolled back a week (for example) and you spent 2000 ZEN during that week, you would get your 2000 ZEN back.
Pathetic how you think you're better than everyone because you wasted 200$ on a broken game.
Well, the game is in OPEN BETA so it should be broken. You can't improve things before you break them and later on fix them. And about that founder pack, i am getting it soon like kaltxx. And yes he needs to feel better than everyone else, because he is supporting the development of the game like every other person spending money in this game is supporting the game and that way they can improve and develop the game further.. You can also exaggerate, it should not be that you're going to hate him and other Founder stated players because you 'maybe' can't afford it.
Fixing the gateway is a lot easier, and hence changes can be completed more often and more quickly given a smaller number of man-hours invested. That is to say... if you have 1 person working on the gateway and 5 on the game itself, the 1 person working on the gateway may still complete his work before the other 5 can finish theirs.
their prioritys are just f..... up!
and if they do something then they do bs like that:
The quest “Retake What's Mine” has had its rewards reduced slightly.
The quest “Prisoners of War” has had its rewards reduced slightly.
Well, the game is in OPEN BETA so it should be broken. You can't improve things before you break them and later on fix them. And about that founder pack, i am getting it soon like kaltxx. And yes he needs to feel better than everyone else, because he is supporting the development of the game like every other person spending money in this game is supporting the game and that way they can improve and develop the game further.. You can also exaggerate, it should not be that you're going to hate him and other Founder stated players because you 'maybe' can't afford it.
you are stupid, the game isnt in beta... its allready launched or call it "soft launch" ergo the game shoule NOT be broken so bad!
Normaly there is a wipe after a beta, and perfect world normaly doesnt allow zen purchases while beta!
and if they do something then they do bs like that:
The quest “Retake What's Mine” has had its rewards reduced slightly.
The quest “Prisoners of War” has had its rewards reduced slightly.
Balancing is a valid part of the game development process. What's your problem with that? I think what you lack is an actual insight into software development in general. Progress is usually invisible to the end user until it's deployed. Changes that may appear simple to an end user can have significant impact on other areas of the code - if you have a common function that is used by many modules and need to change that function (for example to pass in an additional flag) for one fix, then you potentially could break code in other modules. Changes to the anticipated behavior of code can violate the expectations of other code. Every change must be tested, reviewed, pass through QA and then get put into the queue for release.
Some bugs are particularly hard to reproduce which makes identifying the core fault in the code even harder. That doesn't mean the developers are sitting on their hands. It means that it is better for them to spend a couple of hours fixing a bug that they can get deployed WHILE they are still fixing and investigating bugs that will take longer. This leads to an incremental improvement in the end user experience while ensuring that nothing is being neglected.
you are stupid, the game isnt in beta... its allready launched or call it "soft launch" ergo the game shoule NOT be broken so bad!
Normaly there is a wipe after a beta, and perfect world normaly doesnt allow zen purchases while beta!
So what does this all tell you?
It's not broken badly. Some things are out and out bugs, yes, but what we are dealing with is more about social engineering than correctness of code. You can test something in a small team for years, but you will never find as many bugs and exploits or find them as quickly as subjecting that code to the inventive and devious minds of a large player-base.
Edit:
That said, you should always bounds check your expected inputs where necessary. Not doing so is sloppy coding.
Where remote clients (such as web browsers) communicate with your server, you should perform all necessary sanity checks on the server side.
Edit Edit:
What does it tell me? it tells me they are trying something new this time and if it works, future games will probably be offered in the same way.
Furthermore, I would like to state, I'm a pretty avid gamer. I have over 1700 hours on Diablo 3. My preferred method of farming is usually the path to the quickest profits, in Diablo, I farm Demonic Essences from the same spot over and over. I tried playing Neverwinter this way. I was doing quite well until today, my account was banned. I was not exploiting maps, I was not cheating. I would simply run the same spot over and over and over. It's what I do. Apparently this is ban-worthy. I received no email, and I've sent an email to Customer Support to get to the bottom of the issue. The area I was farming happens to be one of the areas they are patching (there was a a reason I was doing it). However, I still feel like I've done nothing wrong, I wasn't chest farming or exploiting, I was clearing out the nodes in an instance, and then redoing it. Oh well. I got what I paid for. lol. Second awesome from you guys today. Keep up the good work!
Comments
Sure, if people want to they could still somewhat cheap the fees by setting low minimum bids, but no one would be willing to set buyout prices below what they were willing to take for an item.
There would also be the added byproduct of a smaller AH footprint. If everything had a buyout price, less would stay in the AH for that 4 day period because people would buy it way before the timer could run out, unless it was something worthless in the first place.
the irony in this is strong.
And you pretend to troll without knowledge of my life whatsoever. But mayhap it fulfills a void in your life, where you need to think of yourself as sharp and sarcastic, because, hey, in real life you're just used to bow your head to other people. But enough, let us not quarrell among ourselves, because the only ones worth of contempt are the poor fellows who try to ruin the fun for everybody else.
Have a nice night, son.
Buying Zen and founders packs are two different things.
Did I say buying Zen? I said and quote myself "paid for founders pack"
lol sure, you keep telling yourself that...
Closed
[SIGPIC]i100.photobucket.com/albums/m23/jjeshop/ooo-1.png[/SIGPIC]
No. "I'm curious how many of you actually paid anything at all." I have spent money, not on a founders pack, so obviously I won't have a stupid tag. doesen't mean I dont spend money.
You think you got more of a say because you got your precious tag? **** you man.
Something tells me you aren't quite understanding how auctions are stored on the server.
While I am not a Cryptic programmer, I think it's safe to assume that they would follow a fairly standard procedure for storing data in a relational database for things like your auction. That being the case, the record that stores your auction *probably* has an identifier for the item itself (an id #), an id to your character, the starting and buyout prices you set, and either a timestamp of when you created the auction (which code then adds to the duration of the auction, from another field in the record), or a timestamp of when the auction expires. A timestamp is a number that represents the number of microseconds (or 1/1,000,000 of a second) since the Unix Epoch (which is defined as midnight on January 1st, 1970 UTC). In either case, there is no way of "stopping the timer", since there is no timer as it were; the system simply looks at the timestamp and compares it to now (on some defined frequency, probably every 5 minutes but perhaps more frequently), and if now is after the timestamp, your auction is over.
It is possible to write code that would go through all auctions and change the timestamp to maintain the duration past the downtime. However, that is fraught with peril - one accident and a auction suddenly has an invalid timestamp and now the auction is in limbo and you NEVER get your item or the AD. The risk, however minor, isn't worth the percieved benefit. When you consider that there are likely hundreds or thousands of auctions in the system, 1% accidents are dozens of support requests of "WTF HAPPENED TO MY AUCTIONZZZZZES!!!!!!!!!!11111". I wouldn't want to deal with that, and can't imagine Cryptic does either. And none of this takes into account the possibility that Cryptic's various games use a shared DB, which would compound the complexity of things.
Obviously, there are other ways of storing your auction data than what I've described, so I could be way off. But this is pretty standard throughout the computer software industry, so I'd be surprised if they did things THAT different.
Class guardian extends fighter{ var threat = 0; var dps = 5; var usefulnessInEndgame = 0; function main(){ if(!dead){ die(); } } }where if someone has just as much spent but its spread over 3 or more accounts maybe did some lockbox gambling they lose less if one of their account gets banned. they lose less and one would assume if they knew they were doing something bad they would probably use the account that didn't have a lot of stuff on it and just mail profits to their alts. sure someone who had a founders pack could have an exploiters account but they wouldn't be able to access all their founder stuff.
so its really a matter of if people have all their stuff in one account it is more risky and more painful to grief. which is why they need more account based services/purchases. if you are a zen buyer and have all your 80$ of purchased zen in one account ect then I feel for you cause you don't get a cool forum title
As a matter of fact I do. And don't be so butt hurt? feeling insulted just by simple words. Why? do you have to steal your mom's cc so you can buy Zen?
Hey All - That was an unanticipated outage. Sorry that you did not receive notification regarding this. Fortunately the issue was resolved relatively quickly.
Any update on ETA?
Pathetic how you think you're better than everyone because you wasted 200$ on a broken game.
It is necessary to store at least some timestamp, because you cannot guarantee a regular polling interval to update the auction time remaining. A timestamp means you can always calculate the time remaining when necessary whereas storing a timer/counter means a delay in processing can throw out the calculation permanently.
It is possible to code around this, but the designers probably didn't consider it necessary or it may not have occurred to them when designing the system.
The simple fix is to store a timestamp of the last time the remaining interval was updated and the remaining interval itself.
On each poll compare the current time to the last update timestamp, get the number of seconds from that and remove that value from the remaining interval.
When the servers go down for maintenance the updates will stop, and just as you bring them up you update the timestamp for all the auctions (but not the interval). This means auctions will then "pause" while the system is down and resume when the system is up.
Fixing the gateway is a lot easier, and hence changes can be completed more often and more quickly given a smaller number of man-hours invested. That is to say... if you have 1 person working on the gateway and 5 on the game itself, the 1 person working on the gateway may still complete his work before the other 5 can finish theirs.
PWE's general procedure is to reverse all purchases made with Zen during the period rolled back. So if the servers were rolled back a week (for example) and you spent 2000 ZEN during that week, you would get your 2000 ZEN back.
Well, the game is in OPEN BETA so it should be broken. You can't improve things before you break them and later on fix them. And about that founder pack, i am getting it soon like kaltxx. And yes he needs to feel better than everyone else, because he is supporting the development of the game like every other person spending money in this game is supporting the game and that way they can improve and develop the game further.. You can also exaggerate, it should not be that you're going to hate him and other Founder stated players because you 'maybe' can't afford it.
their prioritys are just f..... up!
and if they do something then they do bs like that:
The quest “Retake What's Mine” has had its rewards reduced slightly.
The quest “Prisoners of War” has had its rewards reduced slightly.
you are stupid, the game isnt in beta... its allready launched or call it "soft launch" ergo the game shoule NOT be broken so bad!
Normaly there is a wipe after a beta, and perfect world normaly doesnt allow zen purchases while beta!
So what does this all tell you?
Balancing is a valid part of the game development process. What's your problem with that? I think what you lack is an actual insight into software development in general. Progress is usually invisible to the end user until it's deployed. Changes that may appear simple to an end user can have significant impact on other areas of the code - if you have a common function that is used by many modules and need to change that function (for example to pass in an additional flag) for one fix, then you potentially could break code in other modules. Changes to the anticipated behavior of code can violate the expectations of other code. Every change must be tested, reviewed, pass through QA and then get put into the queue for release.
Some bugs are particularly hard to reproduce which makes identifying the core fault in the code even harder. That doesn't mean the developers are sitting on their hands. It means that it is better for them to spend a couple of hours fixing a bug that they can get deployed WHILE they are still fixing and investigating bugs that will take longer. This leads to an incremental improvement in the end user experience while ensuring that nothing is being neglected.
It's not broken badly. Some things are out and out bugs, yes, but what we are dealing with is more about social engineering than correctness of code. You can test something in a small team for years, but you will never find as many bugs and exploits or find them as quickly as subjecting that code to the inventive and devious minds of a large player-base.
Edit:
That said, you should always bounds check your expected inputs where necessary. Not doing so is sloppy coding.
Where remote clients (such as web browsers) communicate with your server, you should perform all necessary sanity checks on the server side.
Edit Edit:
What does it tell me? it tells me they are trying something new this time and if it works, future games will probably be offered in the same way.