You can pick up infinite amounts of the regular melee weapons from the racks...
Which you can then "discard" for ECs in your inventory and then pick up another one. The weapons in question are not the end-mission rewards but something you grab on the map and then proceed to the rest of the mission.
Member since November 2009... I think. (UFP) Ragnar
This wasn't just a matter of EC acquisition, but more importantly a matter of server stability. A small number of players had chosen to undertake this method of EC earnings, and were picking up & selling such large quantities of items that their "buyback" bags were bloated to the point of database instability.
If EC earnings was our concern, we would have just set their sell value to 0EC.
sever stabilty? for EC realy Bort come on you can do better than that server stability is to many players on i it
This is a slippery slope, and a bad precedent to set for earned equipment. I hope other alternatives were considered. I do not practice the above mentioned vendor trasactions with rewards from the Coliseum episode, but it is disturbing that any reward turned in to often to vendor may be worthless in the future and not much of a reward at all....
sever stabilty? for EC realy Bort come on you can do better than that server stability is to many players on i it
He gave you very specific reasons why the issue was happening - the "buy back" tab had no hard limit and a few characters repeat picking-up/selling ad infinitum was causing it to grow too long.
I mean I'm no programmer but one of the easiest ways to crash a system is to have a number grow larger than that system was designed to handle.
This is a slippery slope, and a bad precedent to set for earned equipment. I hope other alternatives were considered. I do not practice the above mentioned vendor trasactions with rewards from the Coliseum episode, but it is disturbing that any reward turned in to often to vendor may be worthless in the future and not much of a reward at all....
You're misreading it. The item wasn't made unsellable because too many people were selling it - it was made unsellable because a specific group of people were standing next to the rack of items on the map, picking them up, selling them, picking them up, selling them, and so on and so forth, and the game couldn't handle the size of the "buy back" tab on the player's replicator. Plus, it was basically an exploit.
And reducing/limiting the buyback bag size wasn't an option?
Buyback bad limit isn't a bad thing until you realize that you just sold off that Purple Mk XII Reputation items that you spent a week of effort (or insert any one of a kind non-replaceable item) was the Nth+1 item you had sold (where N is the bad limit). I'm actually a fan of the lmited static buyback bag limit instead of volatile bag (i.e. poof when you leave the zone). But that corner situation I first described reminds my why I "unlimited" volatile bag vs the limited static bag are better.
This is a slippery slope, and a bad precedent to set for earned equipment. I hope other alternatives were considered. I do not practice the above mentioned vendor trasactions with rewards from the Coliseum episode, but it is disturbing that any reward turned in to often to vendor may be worthless in the future and not much of a reward at all....
They didn't case that players were getting rewards and selling them. The problem was HOW they were doing it. The problem may make more sense with an thought experiment. Open up a web site that has the complete text of the novel "War and Peace" as a simple (HUGE) web page with fancy HTML formatting, nice graphics and illustrations. Next go a Select All of that web page and copy into your computer's clipboard. Now see you computer start to get a hernia trying to TRIBBLE all of that stuff into the clipboard along with that huge web page. The Windows clipboard is theoretically unlimited but the reality may be that you system can't handle it w/o slowing to a crawl. Now imagine a lot of users doing that on a Windows Terminal Server (i.e. a much larger server setup that allows multiple Windows users on the same hardware.) These few users would be impacting the rest of the users on that Terminal Server.
Now, I hope, you get the gist of what's happening to the game server.
First, I see nothing in here about fixing the weapon racks dropping an infinity amount of these weapons, so you're trading one database issue for another, kinda.
Second, it says that you can't sell these to vendors. I assume that includes the replicator, since I've seen that refered to as a vendor by the game. Does this mean that you can't get rid of these weapons? If so, I guess that's another database issue, keeping track of all the "worn" weapons that someone might have in the inventory, bank, mail system, etc.
Third, I don't see anything here about selling on the exchange, so exactly when did the first one go up for 10 million? And you know it a place where people sell frequency remodulators, it happened.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't have done something, but from what I can see, I don't think this was a good idea.
First, I see nothing in here about fixing the weapon racks dropping an infinity amount of these weapons, so you're trading one database issue for another, kinda.
Second, it says that you can't sell these to vendors. I assume that includes the replicator, since I've seen that refered to as a vendor by the game. Does this mean that you can't get rid of these weapons? If so, I guess that's another database issue, keeping track of all the "worn" weapons that someone might have in the inventory, bank, mail system, etc.
Third, I don't see anything here about selling on the exchange, so exactly when did the first one go up for 10 million? And you know it a place where people sell frequency remodulators, it happened.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't have done something, but from what I can see, I don't think this was a good idea.
I think they made the weapons into Tribbles. Tribbles can't be sold to a vendor or end up in your Buyback bag.
Well, if that's the case, that solves issue 2. Still sounds like a lazy way to fix this, unless this was a quick and dirty patch until they can figure out something better with the weapon rack drops. Given past history, I don't think thats likely though.
I've been wondering for a long time why Colosseum was lagging and rubber banding so badly, if that is because of players just loading up and discarding the melee weapons for EC that's just sad. If it makes the mission more playable great.
That said, was this of such paramount importance that it was given priority over much more serious problems plaguing this game? It seems of late that the "economy" of this game is taking priority over everything else and I can't help but think there is a bit too much tunnel vision in this respect. Thankfully this blasted event is almost over so attention can hopefully return to more important problems than whether or not some dimwit can figure out where Q is.
If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.
It's not that this doesn't take priority over other issues, it was just that it was a quick fix (rename and set them to handle like Tribbles when discarded) that a dev probably did it in some spare time between fixing other issues.
You can pretty much tell that this was how it happened given that it was a late addition to the patch notes that they snuck in.
Wouldn't it be easier as well as morally balancing just to give these people exactly one warning and then permabanning their IP from the game for non conformance?
Exploiters are bad, deal with them harshly and with extreme prejudice.
Wouldn't it be easier as well as morally balancing just to give these people exactly one warning and then permabanning their IP from the game for non conformance?
Exploiters are bad, deal with them harshly and with extreme prejudice.
Wouldn't it be easier as well as morally balancing just to give these people exactly one warning and then permabanning their IP from the game for non conformance?
Exploiters are bad, deal with them harshly and with extreme prejudice.
IP banning causes problems for people who aren't exploiting and can be negated by most people.
Plus banning stops people playing and therefore paying, whereas all's we legitimate players lose is 200-300 EC.
Then made me think... Dang, I could be one of those folks. :eek:
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
This wasn't just a matter of EC acquisition, but more importantly a matter of server stability. A small number of players had chosen to undertake this method of EC earnings, and were picking up & selling such large quantities of items that their "buyback" bags were bloated to the point of database instability.
If EC earnings was our concern, we would have just set their sell value to 0EC.
Would it not have been more sensible, consistent and fairer to simply limit how many item were in the loot table to that map?
Special one off exception rules such as this are in of themselves sever bloat, particularly when already existent methods, such as limited loot tables, already exist and are widely use in the game.
Comments
You can pick up infinite amounts of the regular melee weapons from the racks...
Which you can then "discard" for ECs in your inventory and then pick up another one. The weapons in question are not the end-mission rewards but something you grab on the map and then proceed to the rest of the mission.
(UFP) Ragnar
sever stabilty? for EC realy Bort come on you can do better than that server stability is to many players on i it
He gave you very specific reasons why the issue was happening - the "buy back" tab had no hard limit and a few characters repeat picking-up/selling ad infinitum was causing it to grow too long.
I mean I'm no programmer but one of the easiest ways to crash a system is to have a number grow larger than that system was designed to handle.
You're misreading it. The item wasn't made unsellable because too many people were selling it - it was made unsellable because a specific group of people were standing next to the rack of items on the map, picking them up, selling them, picking them up, selling them, and so on and so forth, and the game couldn't handle the size of the "buy back" tab on the player's replicator. Plus, it was basically an exploit.
Buyback bad limit isn't a bad thing until you realize that you just sold off that Purple Mk XII Reputation items that you spent a week of effort (or insert any one of a kind non-replaceable item) was the Nth+1 item you had sold (where N is the bad limit). I'm actually a fan of the lmited static buyback bag limit instead of volatile bag (i.e. poof when you leave the zone). But that corner situation I first described reminds my why I "unlimited" volatile bag vs the limited static bag are better.
They didn't case that players were getting rewards and selling them. The problem was HOW they were doing it. The problem may make more sense with an thought experiment. Open up a web site that has the complete text of the novel "War and Peace" as a simple (HUGE) web page with fancy HTML formatting, nice graphics and illustrations. Next go a Select All of that web page and copy into your computer's clipboard. Now see you computer start to get a hernia trying to TRIBBLE all of that stuff into the clipboard along with that huge web page. The Windows clipboard is theoretically unlimited but the reality may be that you system can't handle it w/o slowing to a crawl. Now imagine a lot of users doing that on a Windows Terminal Server (i.e. a much larger server setup that allows multiple Windows users on the same hardware.) These few users would be impacting the rest of the users on that Terminal Server.
Now, I hope, you get the gist of what's happening to the game server.
Seriously, unless you're using a macro or something you have much better ways to earn EC.
First, I see nothing in here about fixing the weapon racks dropping an infinity amount of these weapons, so you're trading one database issue for another, kinda.
Second, it says that you can't sell these to vendors. I assume that includes the replicator, since I've seen that refered to as a vendor by the game. Does this mean that you can't get rid of these weapons? If so, I guess that's another database issue, keeping track of all the "worn" weapons that someone might have in the inventory, bank, mail system, etc.
Third, I don't see anything here about selling on the exchange, so exactly when did the first one go up for 10 million? And you know it a place where people sell frequency remodulators, it happened.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't have done something, but from what I can see, I don't think this was a good idea.
Nouveau riche LTS member
I think they made the weapons into Tribbles. Tribbles can't be sold to a vendor or end up in your Buyback bag.
Nouveau riche LTS member
That said, was this of such paramount importance that it was given priority over much more serious problems plaguing this game? It seems of late that the "economy" of this game is taking priority over everything else and I can't help but think there is a bit too much tunnel vision in this respect. Thankfully this blasted event is almost over so attention can hopefully return to more important problems than whether or not some dimwit can figure out where Q is.
You can pretty much tell that this was how it happened given that it was a late addition to the patch notes that they snuck in.
Exploiters are bad, deal with them harshly and with extreme prejudice.
That would take care of the forums for good
This made do a real LOL.
IP banning causes problems for people who aren't exploiting and can be negated by most people.
Plus banning stops people playing and therefore paying, whereas all's we legitimate players lose is 200-300 EC.
I chuckled too.
Then made me think... Dang, I could be one of those folks. :eek:
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Would it not have been more sensible, consistent and fairer to simply limit how many item were in the loot table to that map?
Special one off exception rules such as this are in of themselves sever bloat, particularly when already existent methods, such as limited loot tables, already exist and are widely use in the game.
They don't provide anything for the game except grief, be it this latest server destabilization or ruining the Fountain Event.
Maybe just make the offenders Toons flagged for PvP?
Strongly opinionated posts in the forums are not exploits.