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World of Warcraft Duping Bug Found
Over the course of this morning several people have sent me tidbits talking about an exploit on WoW that allows duping of items. Apparently forum posts are being removed on official channels, but there are a few places where you can learn about the exploit and see
screenshot evidence. In equally exciting news, my Rogue on Azjol-nerub is probably 2 hours away from 60 and since Blizzard will undoubtedly fix this bug soon, I'll have to finance my epic mount the old fashioned way!
All it will take is for Blizzard to parse their logs to look for this. I'm hoping to see some accounts banned.
Every server also went down for maintenance this morning and the web is being flooded with news of the exploit. Wonder how long it'll be before the exploit is fixed and the exploiters are banned. Good job blurring the name on the screenshot, but it won't take long for Blizzard to see who has that many epic items for sale on the auction house and put 2 and 2 together. Maybe it's just me, but when I agree to a terms of service, I tend to abide by it the same as I would any other contract. Does nobody care what they put their name to or agree to anymore?
For every single dupefix, three new dupes are created. Goodbye, WoW economy..
/goes back to playing Shadowbane.
In Shadowbane, the dupes didn't quite kill the game like originally thought. Instead, they reinforced the idea that 'rare' items needn't be that rare for a good pvp game. Rare items usually just mean someone spent more time to get them - and better pvp'ers don't necessarily spend more time playing the game.. So in Shadowbane, if your guild is a good experienced guild, you can completely stock your guilds' characters and many alts with the best pvp gear. Then, it all comes down to organization, experience, and how well each character is built to win in pvp.
PVE is lame. Anyone who has pvp'd in any decent pvp mmorpg knows that. Maybe if Wow's economy gets totally fucked, I'll give it a try. But, hell if I'm gonna spend hours and hours to make a perfect character with decked-out gear that doesn't involve pvp.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
SWG had a credit dupe and from what I understand a large majority of the credits in the game were there because of the dupe. There were billions of duped credits.. well lots of people's accounts got banned, the entire economy was ruined, and I cancelled my account.
All in all. MMOs suck
They can still probably catch the people abusing the bug for gold. I know that less than a year after EQ came out, the GMs had available an economic report that showed them who had accumulated an unusual amount of money in a short amount of time.
;)
As their machines got faster and they got more hard drive space, they started logging a *lot* more details. I'll go out on a limb and say Blizzard is doing something similar. I don't know how long the bug was being abused, so it's hard to tell whether anyone at Blizzard actually dropped the ball or whether it was just now being abused to the point where it was easily detectable.
In any case, they certainly know about it now
I assume you're being ironic...
FFXI has hyperinflation at the moment due to gillsellers, plus there are key items which are *only* available from them via IGE, not in-game, since the mobs that drop them are camped 24/7 by gill sellers.
For a few days, people have been sitting in Ironforge just giving away gold. I assumed then, and now feel 99% sure, that these were people who'd used the dupes and were trying to muddy the waters - make it so that Blizzard would have to either completely screw over legitimate players who thought they were just getting a nice gift from people on "their side" etc.
So, what can be done to remove this stuff from the environment? Some are suggesting a rollback to the last maintenance spot, making people lose a week of progress (and, presumably, pissing off legitimate people/losing accounts) in order to get the duped stuff out of the economy. Does it even need to be removed?
I, personally, don't really care if it's there or not - the "economy" as it is seems pretty random anyway, and I'm not terribly bothered if some other player has things I don't.
Clearly they need to fix the actual exploit/bug, and hopefully remove the accounts of the people who actually did it (not that that will accomplish anything other than getting rid of a few suburban teens while the people who make real money off this just go buy a few more copies) but is it really that big a deal to the average player?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
WoW seems to track a lot of money related things.
It certainly tracks when you vendor items because if you accidently sell a nice item while selling a bunch of items, you can have them get that item back for you. It isn't the same EXACT item though, since you lose all enchants and whatnot. They pretty much just seem to create a new one for you.
I imagine it tracks a lot more as well.
Although, who knows, this still could break WoW. I hope Blizzard isn't going to be so stupid as to let that something like that happen.
The other day on the Mannoroth server someone was selling mounts at a discount.
He was selling undead mounts for 50g he said he had enough for "everyone who wanted them".
I was like, how can someone stock up on hundreds of mounts and sell them at a discount ?
Now I realize he bought one duped it to hell and sold it at a discount. A nice way to make money and a way for poeple to get their mount cheap !
The problem is they can't get rid of some duping exploits without allowing some players to potentially lose their characters completely by refusing to restore them if they potentially become corrupted. Forcing and improper disconnection from battle.net has a similar affect on Diablo II (restore lost XP from deaths, restore items etc etc)
"There's no economy in WoW to speak of anyway, so flooding the servers with gold won't do shit all to break it. So some people get easy mounts and don't need to worry about the cost of repairing their gear. Big. Fucking. Deal."
There is an economy...it's just bad (read: inflated). This will take it from bad to abysmal. In fact, if you're not a duper you're pretty much fucked at this point because you'll never be able to compete moneywise with everyone else...which means you'll never be able to afford gear (gl getting all the drops you'll need). Other games have delt with this by increasing money sinks to sieve money from the economy. This is fine if your a duper with tons of cash to spare but the average player just takes it up the ass even more. So it is a Big. Fucking. Deal. you fucking moron.
Also, your no rollback required concept looks nice on paper but the fact is to do it right would take a lot of time. Finding duped items may not be too difficult (presuming blizz ain't a bunch of fucking noobs in database design) but duped gold is MUCH harder. The easiest solution is to perform a rollback.
In short, your post is about as insightful as my right ass cheek while sleeping.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Am I the only one who thinks its absolutely retarded that a link was included with instructions on how to perform the dupe?
Way to go Slashdot. Its always nice to see (semi) mainstream news sites helping people cheat at the online games they play.
The vast majority (like World of Warcraft) have devolved into places where it's only fun for the kids who can play for hours and hours each day
That is why I like Guild Wars so much. Lvl 20 max so you don't have to play constantly to reach max lvl. There is still months and months of playtime after reaching max as well as more item drops, etc. I love being able to just jump on any time i want knowing people aren't a couple of weeks ahead of me in lvls now.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Secondly, news spreading faster will guarantee a more timely fix. Blizzard has demonstrated numerous times that they'll allow bugs that hinder players to sit around for long periods of time without being addressed, while bugs that are exploitable to help players get hotfixed as quickly as possible.
Similarly, obscure exploitable bugs tend to stay around a lot longer than highly visible common knowledge exploitable bugs.
OH NOES teh economy is rooined!!!11
Seriously people--what game are you playing? There is no economy in WoW once a server reaches even just adolescence.
Epics go for hundreds of gold while their similar rare counterparts sell for 20%. Medium or heavy leather doesn't even sell. The market is totally saturated.
Just enjoy the game and don't worry about this kind of crap. Blizzard isn't going to roll anything back--they know from previous MMORPGs that controlling an economy is a feeble effort at best. You can't create a fair environment when the players aren't on level ground, and they're not trying to make it fair. They're just trying to make it fun for both casual and hardcore gamers. A rollback is not going to help that purpose and it's not in their best interest.
Also keep in mind that while Krol Blade is a good weapon, the "best" stuff (the items that will turn you into a 1 man asskicking machine) is not even available for purchase. The best sellable equpiment is UBRS level gear (lv 50-55 epics) which any dope with 2 weeks to run UBRS will get something comparable anyway.
Anyone who has played WoW past 60 knows how often the auction house gets used.. It's primarily a source for sub-60 items and equipment; most of the higher level stuff is privately traded among friends.
I don't see this ruining the economy. Gold was already very plentiful without having to give it away. Scarcity was always a part of WoW, but there is a point at which you outgrow the economy right around the middle of Molten Core, and I think a lot of players are at or near that point.
They are on the servers.
:-) Then we need 1 trillion bytes of storage for them - that's nearly 1TB just for gold piece IDs.
Consider: A 32-bit number is not nearly large enough to count the number of GPs in a game, so let's say each ID has to be a 64-bit number. That's 8 bytes per GP, right?
So let's say there is a total of 125 billion GPs in the world. This is probably a low estimate - I don't know the actual figures for MMORGs but I'd bet it's an order of magnitude more for popular ones like WoW - but for the sake of our calculation let's say it's that, and it makes the numbers easier.
And now suppose a character gives 1 million GPs to another character. 8MB of data needs to be transferred. That's a fairly significant data hit. How long does your PC sit and think when you copy an 8MB file? A few seconds? Well suppose this is happening every second - and it will be, maybe not single characters transferring 1 million, but many characters earning/spending/giving/dropping smaller numbers of GPs. Kiss your server bye-bye...
In short, unique IDs for GPs would be *very* heavy where it counts, and where it counts is on the servers of the guys running the game.
Grab.