Ultima Online Patch Introduces Economy-Wrecking Bug?

Thanks to PlayMoney for its weblog post revealing a recent Ultima Online patch designed to shore up the economy may have introduced new problems, as "the very same game patch... also [seems] to have introduced a gold-gusher of a bug, allowing some people to conjure themselves up a few hundred million gold pieces in the space of a week." The author references a thread on UO Stratics which includes allegations about "one guy that claimed to have made over 700mil to date on [a particular game server] with this bug", a total of $9947 under current dollar exchange rates if successfully auctioned. Although the other new economic rules "seem otherwise to be working out fine", and this exploit was "fixed last Friday [5th]", the author is concerned that "by the time the new money gets fully circulated, gold will be selling for $7 per million", half of the current $14-per-million auction price.

Comments

er

[truffle]

Origins will probably just track down the exploiters and close their accounts, retrieving 90% of the bad gold in the process. It's not too hard to look for people who have disproportionately high gold reserves. Once you identify those people, you can on an individual basis check out what kind of gold reserves they had a few weeks ago, and compare.

It's possible Origin can't do this kind of detective work, but seems unlikely.

Re:er

[That's Unpossible!]

It's somewhat like someone playing the stock market really, really well in real life.

No, it's nothing like that, it is wealth created by a bug in the system. If the stock market systems had a similar bug, and you were able to take advantage of it like this, the money would absolutely be returned. What's more, if they could prove you took advantage of this bug to make money, you would likely go to jail.

Imagine going to an ATM, requesting $20 and getting $200. Once the bank finds out for sure, you will find a $180 deduction from your account.

Re:er

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, while it may not be difficult to track down the people exploiting the bug themselves, it's usually quite difficult to find the money. To most of the people doing this sort of thing, accounts are disposable. They'll pick up a pre-paid gaming card, open a new account, dupe gold to their heart's content, then distribute it to their friends or alternate characters on other accounts. The company shuts down the exploiting accuont, they just buy another pre-paid card.

Close all the accounts that traded with the person in question? The exploiters will start giving out free money to get innocent players banned. Go after anyone with over a certain amount of gold? The exploiters will make sure their gold is below some reasonable limit when they spread it around their characters/friends/accounts, plus you'll be punishing some of your most loyal players who might have spent years accumulating those sums.

Maybe a check of total money against the time the account has been active--at least that would limit the usable "drop-boxes" to old accounts, so you'd be making some progress if you could find and ban those. That kind of punishes "twinking" and helping out new players, though (which may not be a bad thing in the case of twinking).

Re:Capitalism making a fool of itsself

[Anonymous Coward]

In a world where A LOT of people starve to death every day...

Well then, it's good to know that you've sent your money to those needy starving people. I mean, imagine if you had spent some money watching a movie. That's virtual entertainment right there. Same with attending theatre productions. No material reward there, so you've obviously taken steps to avoid them.

Own any aggregated investments? I didn't think so, because you surely know that these things generally involve technology-based businesses dealing with non-material services.

MP3s? Didn't think so. You'd never put your own enjoyment over the survival of others.

In fact, I'm amazed you managed to type your post at all. I mean, having done it without using software and all. Imagine if you had put money toward a particular sequence of binary digits!

Simple Solution

[BurritoJ]

The solution to this problem is to remove some of that money from circulation. The most straight forward way would be to make available at auction a few unique expendable items. These items may need to be powerful enough to unbalance other parts of the game, but with limited uses (maybe even just one) this should correct itself rather quickly. If the item is powerful enough it may never be used because some enterprising soul will see it as an 'investment' to be sold on EBay when his real-world life needs a capital infusion.

Joe