Shadowbane World Closure Due To Counterfeiting?

Thanks to Terra Nova for their posting discussing world deletions/consolidations in the PC MMORPG Shadowbane, analyzing rumors that the measures are "a fairly sophisticated attempt to clean the bad gold out of the economy." The piece informs: "The official reason [for closure] seems to be the fact that populations are too low", but it's pointed out that "...those being booted from SB's Scorn and Treachery servers are leaving with nothing but the clothes on their back: no bank items, no coins, no property", a drastic step which some say is down to the fact that "...much of the gold in [Shadowbane's] worlds is duped rather than earned." Is this a simple world consolidation, or desperate economy-balancing measures?

Comments

Part of the normal plan

[Drakino]

The SB developers were pretty clear at launch that they didn't intend to have 10 indentical worlds, but had to due to time constraints. They did plan on destroying many, and forcing people to move long before these cheats happened.

I do have a feeling the rampant gold duping might be a reason those two are going first, but, gold duping is a problem on every server.

Re:Part of the normal plan

[swdunlop]

Yes, the article author seems to have little actual clue about what is going on in Shadowbane right now, and is running strictly off rumors.. Population on many servers is down, considerably, either because one nation or another has taken control of the majority of the map. Wolfpack doesn't want to purchase more servers to host newer, more balanced maps, so they are simply rolling a couple of the lesser used ones.

In the bad old days, we were warned that this might happen if a guild achieved total dominance. On some servers, it has happened. The new maps are supposed to make this both more difficult, and more rewarding, by introducing passes, chokepoints, and easier to control discipline drops.

Re:I solved this problem on MUDs long long ago

[Godeke]

Which of course assumes that the duplicate flaw doesn't issue a new serial number. Every mud I ever coded for has object IDs which were unique. Must dupe bugs occur because of some timing issue with handling create/destroy state during which the user would go link dead. Because of a flaw, the create step would execute non atomically from the destruction step. The create step created a new (legal) ID, but the destory step (for example, the removal of a sacrificed item) would fail, because the user had left the data structures when disconnected. Serial numbers or no, a bug will allow for duplication. Check the Envy codebase from around 1999: you will see several dupe bugs based on linkdead state handling.