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

Similarities

[daeley]

Sounds similiar to the battle.net Diablo II life cycle where even the rarest of items became basically worthless due to duping. Kinda sad, in a virtual kind of way. Where's the fun in cheating like that? Sure, maybe it's thrilling for like a second or two, but then what?

Re:Similarities

[Babbster]

Then what? Well, then you get to tell all your friends what you did and how you did it, taking perverse pleasure in the trouble it causes not only the players, but the companies themselves when they try to fix things.

I'm sure that in Diablo 2, the first person who duped Stones of Jordan (uber rings for the uninitiated) on the Realm servers was quite pleased that people started using them as basic currency ([x] item equals [y] number of incredibly rare rings which suddenly aren't as rare anymore).

In short, the cheating is a goal in and of itself. People who enjoy cheating in multiplayer environments (as opposed to people who enjoy finding and then reporting cheats without taking advantage of them) have little interest in the rest of the game, and thus don't care how it ruins the game for anyone else - except in the sense that they have a twisted notoriety in the community. Any attention is good attention.

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.

Shadowbane should just die.. it's AWFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

I signed up for a full year subscription three months after Shadowbane had been released. All reviews I'd seen about it praised it. I tried to see what people who were playing the game on the site had to say, but those portions of the forums were only accessible to paying Shadowbane players.

After another three months (six months since the game was released), I canceled my subscription. Low server populations. Too much server down-time, database rollbacks, client/crashing problems, lag issues and just about everything else that you can think of that could suck about an MMORPG. The only MMORPG I've played that was worse was Anarchy Online - but they've improved whereas Shadowbane has not.

I only wish that I could have gotten the rest of my subscription fee refunded. Why should I pay for a game that it was almost never possible to play? And how can you play when there's nobody on! Shadowbane is horrid. Horrid! HORRID!

Duping only a factor

[laiquendi]

Scorn is known as a dupe server; some big and organized guilds got deep into the dirty money game. Treachery, on the other hand, was no worse off than any of the other servers.
The primary reason for the bank wipe, IMO, is to limit the effect that guilds will have on the servers they move to. Without the gold to plunk a town down on their first day, they will have to find a place for themselves within the existing system, instead of just jumping in as a brand-new major power.

I don't think they would lie about low population

[@madeus]

I don't think they would lie about having low population on the servers.

I think the last thing they would want would to admit was that the user figures were falling - I'm sure they'd much rather admit to a number of bugs that need addressing. This is probably just a convienent time to help remove some of the duped money/items.

It amazing though, so many of these titles have obviously been designed very badly indeed, or in some cases not at all - the developers have just sat down and started churning out code without any thought as to how to write it efficently and securely. I am still stunned by this, and I think impatiant unprofessional developers and poor managers are to blame. Some developers don't see why /they/ need to play anything, and they know that managers like 'results', and managers typically push for visible results right away.

In my experience, you should sit down and discuss plan this sort of software for about 3-6 months before you even write any code (and after that have regular meetings to dicuss tweaks to the design that become apparent once you start putting the basic API's in place). To be effective, it should be a proper discussion, between the developers, with no domination by any one developer and no large egos involved (apart from by the 'lead developer', where firm decisions need to be made one way or another).

I know it can seem wasteful to have people sitting around talking and making charts for 6 months, and it might not /look/ productive, but I've found it can pay dividends back in a year and a half, because you'll don't end up having to spend another year re-writing the game to fix all the bugs in the second year.

I've found, with 6 months planning and a year of development you can achive the same as in 2 years worth of simple 'plunge in head first' development, because you don't have to waste lots of time bug fixing and traking down problems and re-writing significant bits of code.

The only disadvantage with the planning stage is that it you are 6 months later to market, but I think having a product that is twice as 'mature' is much better in the long haul (and if your in it to build a stable product, which you should be - as even if you plan on a quick sale, you can't always count on one right away - then it just makes much more sense to be later to market in many instances, even if you have competitors hot on your heels, customers will soon get tired of them if they have a poor quality product).

I'd be interested to hear other developers/project managers experiences...

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.

Re:I don't think they would lie about low populati

[bmyers]

It is always more expensive to make changes and/or fix bugs once a system has gone "live". This has been shown so many times that it isn't funny. But for some reason, time-to-market is always raised as the counter-argument, even when being early to market actually causes the whole thing to fail. Or in the case of MMO games, to suffer irreparable damage to the company's reputation.

I hope as the game industry matures more that there will more examples of well-designed systems and games.

Personally, my company has been working on a MMO game for a few years, with the goal of getting a robust, reliable engine and network framework in place in parallel to getting the first game in place. We started with prototypes and then refactored and redesigned to get the final design, which is now pretty solid. If we had to get to market more quickly we probably would have crashed and burned and disappeared already, instead of having a better architecture that should handle a lot better in the long haul.

Of course, we'll see what happens come launch time, which is really when the rubber hits the road! :-)