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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.
is this real money?
We got Saddam. Your evil overlords- those who run Islamic nations, Left-Wing Socialists experimenting with the lives of their countrymen, and Communists, killing human spirit and progress and legislating mediocrity - will be deconstructed and destroyed. You cannot impose your foul cults on the progressive world. You will be found and stamped out sometimes with force, sometimes under the weight of your own corruption (just like Nicolae Ceausescu.) Also, Communists and Far-Left Socialists, you will be shown to be the frauds you are and your failing systems will buckle under the system of economic imperialism and power. We will defeat you all until you capitulate into acting like human beings and worrying about your family, your children, their success and their future and human progress before your cults, religions and nationalism. We will expose the cults and the frauds you are and when you capitulate to the progressive west your standard of living will rise and the lies of your dictators will be exposed. FREEDOM from your cults and oppression, and you Socialist armchair assholes who think they can think for me and everyone else like Soros and other rich, communistic disgusting scum, we will triumph over you. We will not let you suppress our excellence, your drive to success and explore and to win in the game of life and to preserve the human species viability as an organism. Stand in the way of progress and either DIE or progress with us.
(Use a disposable account from a disposable IP before moderating this up. Editors generally watch and see who moderates controversial things like this up.)
When you are logged in,
Please *log out* AND use another browser before making your AC comments.
Your UID is being tracked, it's not Anonymous. Lots of people post lots of things to Slashdot as AC only because they believe it is really anonymous - it isn't. They hunt "trolls" (non-karma whores and non-group thinking bots) down.
This is true. I used to be a bit more freestyle and witty AC and be a nice guy logged in [basically a karma whore]. After a short while, I could no longer moderate. Slashdot does brand AC posts with IP and then map them back to users. They lie about AC, AC doesn't exist if you re-use ip addresses.
Big brother is watching. So while I might be a "troll" a lot of the AC things I said were to protect myself from Slash-bot groupthink. They punished me for voicing my opinion freestyle.
They also revoke moderation FOREVER - $rtbl it is called, for any moderations of any post that have been secretly flagged annoying [Slashcode has hidden flags viewable by editors]. If you *EVER* mod up something an editor secretly marked annoying you NEVER moderate again, ever - ever even if your karma is capped.
Also, Slashdot uses the friends system to track "trolls." Mark a troll you find funny as a friend *bang* $rtbl never to moderate ever again. My real account had many many good friends who had good karma, and a few funny trolls later, no more moderation for that account. Again, Slashdot is spying on its users to make the people who find certain things funny ineligible to moderate. You will never moderate again if you are a friend of a "foe or freak" of an editor.
FACT: This is in Slashcode CVS
Revision 1.7.2.5 / (download) - annotate - [select for diffs] , Thu Feb 8 13:12:32 2001 UTC (2 years, 9 months ago) by pudge
Branch: bender
CVS Tags: v1_1_3_0
Changes since 1.7.2.4: +18 -7 lines
Diff to previous 1.7.2.4 to branchpoint 1.7
log more AC info
So AC is a scam here. Hitler-Malda screws AC posts in the caboose. So now all you can do is go 100% AC, or , as they expect you to, KARMA WHORE. And it is so lame and unfair and probably illegal as they lie about anonymity.
Also, sometimes when certain information becomes an active thread, they bitchslap the thread much later so that people think its "safe" to participate and the whole thing gets slapped.
There is a presumption anonymous means something. They lie like rugs to the posting public by using the word anonymous. It is not. They brazenly lie though and the un-assuming poster is having everything he says correlated with him and stored in a computer just waiting to be subpoenaed by the people that Slashdot claims to hate but works for. They work for the fascist forces and components of the US government. I like the US and other Western governments but they have good and bad components - there are things you need to do to protect yourself from the bad components. Basically "covering your ass" so to speak. At Slashdot, in lying about AC, un-protects its posting public (seeding a de-anonymizing privacy stripping pandemic in their own "little" way). This makes Slashdot a very dangerous target for you the posters to have your "anonymous" information subpoenaed and you to be chased down and persecuted for speaking your mind. I think that it is a joke Slashdot editors post about SCO, MSFT, RIAA, MPAA, TIA, FBI, etc. They do the same fascist big-brotherly th
Top secret Slashdot document flowchart recreated for your viewing pleasure. This was taken with a micro camera like in the mission impossible movie, but I was dangling over a wet heap of smelly socks and unwashed bodies and they had just passed out from eating frozen pizza, they can't afford the real stuff. I took this picture and digitized it. I narrowly escaped this ordeal and am still mixing Chlorine Bleach and Battery Acid to produce Chlorine gas to get the smell of the Slashdot hovel out of my nose. Unwashed clothing, greasy matter hair, fart saturated furniture at every turn. Open cases of crappy K6 based white-box china-hardware strewn about, half ass 4 wire extra cheesy barely twisted CAT3 wire being used as CAT5 because "it works fine" 400 distributions of Linux lying around messily unboxed and documentation strewn about. The smell of feces was in the air, along with rotting food and marinating sweat from the foul underarms of the Slashdot team. Upon obtaining this evidence I now know more about things are done around here. It is a very interesting process that outlines the depravity of the programming here.
DOCUMENT_DISTRIBUTION:
_____________TOP_SECRET___:_(GROUP_SLSH-1)
_____________EYES_ONLY____:_(HARD_COPY_ONLY)
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SLASHTEAM_FEATURE_PLANNING_FLOW_CHART
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___________________V
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|Ha_s_the_feature_been_implemented_before|_yes_
|__on_Kuro5hin_or_another_weblog_site?__|_____|
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____|Was_the_feature_implemented_or|______yes_|
____|_suggested_by_a_known_Troll?__|__________|
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__+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--+________|___ _______________
__|_Have_hundreds_of_users_suggested_|____yes_|___ ___/___________\
__|the_feature_to_CmdrTaco_via_email?|________+-_- ->|_WON'T_SCALE_|_-_--_--+
__+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--+________^___ ___\___________/_________|
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____|Will_the_feature_make_Slashdot|__yes_\|Can_ja mie_or_krow|_____________|
____|___even_more_like_a_game?_____|______/|_hack_ it_for_me?_|_____________|
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___+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+______/__THI S_FEATURE_IS_PERFECT_\___|
___|Can_CmdrTaco_use_his_limited_Perl|_yes\/__FOR_ SLASHDOT._IM_SO_GLAD__\__|
___|____knowledge_to_kludge_it_in?___|____/\___I_T HOUGHT_OF_IT!!!_TIME__/__|
___+-_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_--_-+______\____F OR_SAILOR_MOON!______/___|
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Just out of curiosity (never played UO, probably never will) does anyone know what the exploit looked like, what you had to do?
I remember Star Control 2, being able to sell more shuttles than you had, so your amount of cash 'wrapped around' to a large positive rather than negative value....frankly, I was just as happy to avoid all the semi-tedious mineral collecting and just go to work on the main story. (Which I used a walkthrough for...sigh, I'm such a wuss gamer. Still, I loved that game.)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I know this has been discussed before, but I just can't hold it in. In a world where A LOT of people starve to death every day, other people will invest money in virtual objects that are nothing more than rows in a database or a line in flat file somewhere. Business plan: 1) Create table CashCow(Owner char(30), Qty int(4), EntityName char(30)) 2) Open paypal account 3) Profit!
The reminds me of an Artificial Life example. A scientist was simulating evolution using some little virtual animals. Built into the simulation was an energy cost for moving -- the virtual creatures were supposed to evolve efficient strategies for finding food and mates. The creatures quickly evolved the ability to move backwards becuase this was counted as negative movement which meant negative cost, so that actually gave the creatures more energy.
For every clever policy created by some scientist, game designer, economist, corporate manager, or clever politician, there is an even more clever counterstrategy that someone is bound to discover.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
---
I support spreading santorum
Wait a sec... Are you sure that the bug was in Ultima Online and not recently introduced as a new fiscal policy by the government in the real world?
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
Once again Mike Hawk proves to be a prophet. But hey, it might have been an accident.
being a currency trader is a risky business to begin with, but trading in FAKE currencies, where the government (in this case, UO patch team) can cause massive (in|de)flation at any time? There's a lot of money to be made, but the traders shouldn't whine so much when they get burned.
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Even a broken watch is correct twice a day.
Please, hubris on slashdot is sooooo 1990's.
A few days later he got a nasty call from the bank telling him that he owed them money.
So yeah, you might find a bug and think that you've gotten away with something, but they will catch you.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Just read that Stratics thread. All the players are going apeshit on something that really doesn't matter. But you know what? Suddenly it does matter because they're shelling out $13 a month for that game. Money does funny things to people. Just read the damn thread. People talking about wiping everyone's money, other people begging and pleading not to do that, god. And look at the first post in that thread. The moderator is participating in active censorship, as if talking about the exploit is going to damage the "community" beyond repair.
Before you go flaming me and modding me down, I speak as a former participant of that exact community. I left Stratics and stopped playing UO for many reasons, but the fanatical obsessive player community was high on the list. There was a time when you could have an intelligent discussion on those boards. You could even freely speak of exploits and even post screenshots of yourself using exploits. But ever since EA made Stratics into the official forums for UO, it's gone downhill.
It's like a Nazi state. Active censorship and a fanatical frantic population willing to do drastic things to save a lost cause.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
What I've never understood is the ongoing concern about how little $GAME $CURRENCY_UNIT sells for on eBay. What matters is how it effects gameplay.
The blunt and simple fact is the massive influx of currency has far less effect on the game than most Chicken Littles seem to think. Sure the price of super rares goes up, as do the prices of other 'trophy' items, but these effect the day-to-day pricing of items used by the normal gamer little, if at all. Smiths don't pay more for the ingots my Miner produces. No one pays more for the potions and seeds my Alchemist/Gardener produces, nor for the scrolls my Scribe produces. Nor can my Tamer sell beasts for more than long stable prices...
If the 'real' economy of the game was as badly affected as predicted, then the BOD/Deed bug earlier this year should have massively changed how my virtual business runs. It didn't.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
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Congratulations from Afghanistan! Here
in my village when I was telling all
the people that Saddam was captured
there was much rejoicing! we are loving
the Americans so much and so all the
people of the USA are dear to us. We
the people of Kazdakistan wish you the
peace and nice life you deserve and
any years of happiness. May the taste
always remain as sweet as the milk of
the Goat
... because ever since they pussified UO, it's really just been IRC with a virtual economy attached to it.
From a real-world perspective this out-of-game trading is simply cheating, and on that level it might ruin the game for some people. But putting aside the fact that Ultima is a game, from an in-game point of view the real world is a sort of otherworldly plane, where strange things can happen. For example, the game gets recompiled. I mean, if the idea of divine intervention is acceptable in RPGs then I see no problem with mysterious ethereal benefactors compelling characters to give each other stuff.