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World of Warcraft Gold Limit Reached, It's 2^31
Mitch writes "Blizzard apparently used signed integers for their World of Warcraft gold values as some people have recently hit the limit of 2^31. "Apparently that amount is 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper. After you reach that lofty sum, you'll no longer be able to receive money from any source in the game. While some responses to the original posts claim that this exact limit had previously been theorized to exist, there have been no reports of anyone in the game actually achieving this amount via legal means." I guess Blizzard didn't expect anyone to ever get close to that much gold in game."
2^31 should be enough for anyone...
Go get a life. 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15
Somehow I think only 'News for nerds' apply for this one.
On three level 70s and one level 61, I still have trouble breaking 3,000 gold between them. How does one get that much gold together in the first place?
It could have rolled over :)
All your gold are belong to us.
if there's nothing to spend it on! That's the reason why the cap was hit, there's no large mansions, yachts, or expensive prostitutes.
Seriously though, since all the beset equipment is earned, not bought (and usually bind on pickup/equip), there's little point in money in WoW in the late game.
Since the money is fiat, i.e. not backed by a fixed standard in the game, have people seen monetary inflation causing price increases in the game, or has the population of players offset any growth in money?
I don't play WoW (played it a few times and have watched some addicts^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfriends play it), so I'm not familiar with how pricing works.
I would assume, though, that if money growth exceeds population/player growth, prices would tend to rise. Is this the case?
Are there any online games that have a relatively fixed amount of money in the game?
At market value of 1000G for 31$ he can sell that amount for 6657.188$.
http://sparter.com/web/shop.jsp#market=WWU01A&quantity=500
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Reminds me of when I was using a hex editor to "help myseslf" to some extra gold in Civilization I - I remember I could only up my gold to 3000 pieces, that was the Civ Is upper limit. Very off-putting, when you have to leave the game and start the hex editor just to replenish your reserves!
;o)
How short-sighted of Sid
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Programming error or intern. Maybe it's an internal flag that it's time to get the ball rolling on WOW II. But wait, with that much gold, and the current price of it, they could sell it, and actually move OUT of the mom's basement and get a place of their own. ...
At least it means there won't be a "Who wants to be a millionaire" in WOW.
A signed 32-bit integer can not store 2^31, but 2^31-1, which would be 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 47 copper.
c++;
But why not unsigned? It's not like you can get negative gold in a mmo, or?
:)
Maybe they plan to open banks in Azeroth that can lend you some gold
This isn't the first time a signed integer has been used to store the amount of money a player has (and I suspect it won't be the last, either) - years ago when I played MicroProse's Railroad Tycoon, I found an interesting bug (feature) with the way cash was stored:
For the game, a negative cash made a small bit of sense (overdraft) and so a signed integer was used. If you just bought up >50% of the shares in your railroad company (to ensure that you couldn't be fired), and then ensured that you had lots of expenditure but no income every financial period, you would end each financial period with more negative cash until it eventually overflowed and became positive. Once positive, with lots of income, it refused to overflow back negative.
I found it interesting, that although a positive overflow was checked a negative one wasn't. The assumption must be that the programmer never really expected the limit condition to be met and so only put a cursory check in - checking for a positive overflow to prevent sudden negative cash (in both games) and the problems that could cause the program and game play, but in MicroProse's case, not bothering with the negative overflow as it was an extreme case not expected - the game play was possibly meant to prevent it and I found the 1 in a whatever chance to get it to happen (I was trying to see how negative a rating I could achieve without being "fired").
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
On a side note, GuildWars has an artificial limit of 1.000.000 Gold in chest (aka "bank"), which is "worth" only 60 bucks. It took me > 2400 hours of casual gaming to achieve this amount of Gold.
I am not great with signed integers, but wouldn't it make sense for blizzard to use a 32 bit integer, thus
2 ^ 32 = 4,294,967,296 / 2 = 2,147,483,648 - 1 = 2,147,483,647
It seems like the story and summary are wrong
Is it possible to have negative money? If not it would be a simple hack to double the limit by making the gold counter unsigned. Well... you' d have to change every variable that stores gold but it would be easier or at least as easy as changing it to a longlong or something.
An alternative is to purposely let it roll over. Blizzard would be doing those players a FAVOR. ;)
Presumably they didn't use a 64-bit integer to save on bandwidth costs.
Warning: Geekish Post Ahead
If you put a lot of emphasis in controlling inflation in your game then you can keep a game going with the ability to bring new players in cold and they have a better chance of staying. Economics of a game needs to have more of a priority than just killing mobs, crafting new items and completing the quest. Here's why.
I've been an avid gamer for a long time and have always found that economics within the game are never up to par with any standard, let alone a true economic standard. While I understand that there would be too much work in maintaining a true economy in many cases, the fact that the developers of each game don't bother to put in enough money sinks to keep the flow of money in game vs. out of game in check is astounding, especially in the case of WoW with n million players.
One exception to this rule is CCP Games "EVE Online". The game is fundamentally an economics simulator in a space setting. While this sounds about as fun as counting grains of sand on a beach on a windy day, don't knock the premise until you try it. The whole game revolves around the flow of money into and out of wallets via new ships, replacement equipment, massive costs for new skills and upkeep costs for space stations etc. CCP even has an economist on staff to give reports on how the game economics is doing.
Again, this sounds like no fun at all, but EVE has been running for over 4 years, is still increasing in population (albeit slowly) and I still did not have trouble getting started in the game and buying new equipment without it being ungodly hard to make the money to buy it. Oh and it's a fun space simulator too.
Blizzard Exec #2: What kind of person would do this?
Blizzard Exec #1: Only one kind... Whoever this person is, he has played world of warcraft nearly ever hour, of every day, for the past year and a half. Gentlemen we are dealing with someone here who has absolutely no life.
What is the War of Worldcraft thing? I've seen it mentioned here a few times, but nobody actually explains what it does.
Is it a book?
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
At least they handled overflow right. I'm impressed. If it wrapped around to zero, or went negative, some small number of users would be screaming.
Back in the 1980s, the number of ticker symbols for stocks and funds passed 32767, and for a few days, no new companies could get on the exchanges.
Ok guys, who wants to break him the news that babies aren't delivered by storks....
Blizzard though they would have even the smallest amount of a life(if you can call it that)
As the good doctor never gets tired of pointing out, the problem with World of Warcraft currency is its artificial manipulation by the Federal Orlock reserve. This is why I support RP in his longshot bid for WoW sysadmin.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
It's time to convert to a BIGINT!
Brian.
"2^31 should be enough for anyone..."
You've never heard of Mr. Bill have you...
Runescape is written in Java, and the number of items is held in an integer. Gold pieces are an item, just like steel longswords. The difference is that nobody wants to accumulate two billion steel longswords.
There at least used to be rare items with market values in the hundreds of millions, and given the inflationary economy likely still are. This is arguably a more serious problem in Runescape than WoW.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Playing it as economics simulator is one option, but you can also ;-)
-grind NPCs. Not the most interesting thing for me but it seems to be fine for some players
-join an alliance and fight for territory in 0.0 space. EVE supports this by giving some privileges to corporations that manage to dominate a system. Makes for an interesting variety of realm versus realm.
-be a griefplayer and shoot newbies that venture into low security space
C - the footgun of programming languages
Did anyone else immediately think of the Southpark episode? I immediately thought of Cartman shouting "Mom! Bathroom! Bathroom!" with Mrs. Cartman running down the basement stairs with a bedpan.
If I fully realized the impact of kids on my life, I would never have had him. I'd cut off my dick with rusty scissors first.
Not kidding, either.
I remember the guy that rolled over Defender : Stargate......
That used to be the supreme badge of honor, turning a
coin-op over.
Steve was a total legend at the local 7-11 for being able
to turn games over. I think it had something to do with
his talent for "stringing" machines (tape fishing line to a quarter
and collect credits while someone distracted the clerk)...
Memories.....
music lover since 1969
Maybe the programmer thought it would be easier to detect overflow - e.g. if(x0) x= ((unsigned int)2)31-1
What I really wonder shouldn't he limit be an odd number i.e. 2^31-1?
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
This is clearly a mudflation indicator, i think blizzard designed the game with the 1 year expansion date in mind, and stepping the G cost up with the level advance, since they fail releasing the expansion in the time plan (i think to compete with War and make them hard to get big numbers) macroeconomics of the game are going fubar, since players are receiving too much Gs everyday.
Other important thing is that went ppl stop playing they give their items to some friendly playing, and Gs too, so this keep the money pumping even if they dont play.
The last Gold Sink thats dissapeared in the game are the 40 player pve raids, the repair cost of a evening wiping where massive
reducing the pve in favour of the pvp and the pve instanced players to 25, reduces the cost of gold and reagents in a global scale.
My opinion is that Blizzard manipulated their initial succesful game plan in a corporative scale to reduce the support cost in form
of 40 persons ready servers and pve development, and it goes wrong in the long term experience, cause it was not designed originally that way.
Each day i found more players that find pvp a never ending grind and miss the old scripted raids that maked you work like a family,
worse thing is the gear wiping each expansion that essentialy wipes your grind and leave you with a nice feeling of dissapointment.
Maybe a new main-pve raiding game is what people want and not this senseless pvp carnage.
Clearly, they weren't using a 32-bit signed int since as the poster says, INT_MAX for 32 bits is one less than the limit. Now, since the limit is INT_MAX+1, either they are being inefficient and using an unsigned int or are using a 64-bit int where most of the bits are used for something else. Possibly they are treating a negative number as INT_MAX+1 by special casing it, but that seems unlikely.
[nt]
you hang out in the forest and kill boars
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
in WoW you got no kingdom ... only the horse is left and an empty wallet ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Ok, first off, I'm going to say "get a life" so I can be invited to this magical hate fest.
Second, why are donating significant amounts of money to charity, donating time to charity, curing a disease, or otherwise "improving the world in general" YOUR qualifications for saying WoW players need a life? Because you have assigned some theoretical value to them that's higher than playing sports, drinking, partying, watching tv, watching sports, upgrading your car, buying new toys, etc, etc.
You created your list of other things that aren't worth a crap (and given your attitude and how lovely you must be in public, I'd assume the only one of those you've ever done is play video games) using the exact same rationale that someone who has IRL friends, loves working on their car, getting married, or has a baby would use to determine that WoW is about as low as you can go.
Your arbitrary decision that giving charity money is more "worth a shit" some other things is foolish. I could come in and explain how many charities only serve to funnel money into the hands of directors who get 6 figure salaries and only pennies of every dollar, if that, ever goes to make a difference.
Then, do you know how much charitable donations get soaked up by scammers (read about the post-Katrina "victims" who were miles away from the destruction, but still filed claims that they took with them on vacation, or about large companies like Subway claiming 9/11 benefits despite not actually having locations affected.) Do you need to consider potential racial issues? Like dedicating your life to curing a disease that primarily affects white people? Should that rank lower on your "worth a shit" scale than one that affects all races equally?
You can apply any random set of factors to determine what's worth a shit, and come out with any result you want. I bet I could make a housewife who threw a few bucks to the Salvation Army feel like the scum of the earth.
Why are charity and disease curing the top of your list? Because of lot of people think they're very admirable things to do, including yourself. Now, many members of that set probably also believe that physical exercise is more important than WoW because it means hopefully fewer tax dollars will be spent on homebound dorks who got too fat to leave the house so they went on disability and lived a life of diabetes and poor hygiene until the EMS could bust down the door to restart their heart. True or not? I'm not to judge... me being a healthy, fit person that does bits from BOTH sides of your give a shit scale.
Back to the set, they probably believe introducing a child to the world, one that they will love and provide for, one that they will give every opportunity they can to, and one that might end up following in mommy or daddy's footsteps by being a pillar of society, is BETTER than collecting gold online. Go figure.
A common theme in things at the bad end of your give a shit scale is that they're all for some personal benefit. Like buying a house, getting married, buying toys. I'd like to argue that the positive economic benefits all around of one person's $1,000 monthly mortgage payment (I know, that's not that much, but it's an example) far outweighs the economic benefits of one person's $10 a month online subscription. I can also arbitrarily pull out random factors to show that buying a house is "better" than playing Warcraft. Home owners are more likely to maintain their property so as not to be a nuisance. Home owners are more likely to install environmentally beneficial appliances than apartment managers. Home owners are less likely to be involved in almost all levels of crime than non-home owners.
Some of that is incidental (if I own a home, I'm less likely to jeopardize my house by going out and committing a series of petite larcenies and accruing enforceable judgments.) Even so, the fact remains that for a lot of the things you're saying, there are more associated pluses than minuses. Even using your most selective c
If they've written code to prevent it from rolling over backwards (spend too much money and you end up with a negative amount, spend too much more and you roll over to huge amounts of positive gold), it would seem logical that they'd do it the other way around at the same time.
Unless, of course, they were morons and simply used integers, instead of classes, to manage the Gold.
Side note: I play a game which has had its share of absurd bugs like this... but we actually run into the limitations of an unsigned int (not a signed int) with things like experience. The total amount of experience needed to get to level 99 is not going to be more than about 3 billion, but past that, you start trading experience for stats (20 million exp = 100 vitality or 50 mana). At about 4.29 billion experience, you have to stop hunting and go trade it in for stats.
No one's gotten above a few million vitality, that I know of, but I have to wonder if there's bugs in which vitality can roll over. I can just imagine some absurdly buff character getting that last 100 vita and ending up at 5.
Of course, there are other things which, it's painfully obvious, are chars. I wonder why no one uses bigint libraries for this sort of thing?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
2^31 is the max amount of copper, not gold.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
it's = it is
Why do game economics need to be more real, or more complex? It's a game, lots is simplified, why not the economy? Who cares if it is realistic so long as it is fun?
Your point with regards to EVE is self defeating since while EVE has been growing, WoW has been growing far faster.
You also have to remember that a game universe doesn't have to have real rule apply because it isn't real. For one, there is no real scarcity. While the game can be set up to have something be harder to get or only have a certain number, that isn't because there is only so much available, it is an artificial constraint. Everything is virtual so there can be an unlimited amount of anything. Also in a game universe there are real, active, deities. The developers are gods in their universe and take an active hand in shaping it. So they can change things as needed.
So for something like inflation one answer that works just fine is to refactor the economy with an expansion. Just change what new things cost. Blizzard did it once already, they'll probably do it again.
I'm not saying that it is a bad thing to make a game with a realistic economy, there is room for many kinds of games out there, but I think it is a false idea that these simple economies are problematic. So people can obtain shitloads of gold, so what? That makes some people happy, and if it makes them happy it is fine. The economy needn't be realistic, and it can be changed at any time it needs to be.
I don't play WoW, I play Nexus TK. It's a small enough community (roughly 500) that there is actually one, unthreaded, in-game board called the "Community Board". This is where people go to bitch and whine about everything, including the economy.
And the economy is not entirely stable, but it is interesting to watch.
Prices are usually relatively stable. Money enters the economy through crafting, mostly -- I can make weapons which are useless to players, but which sell to NPCs. So, over time, the overall amount of money in the economy would tend to go up -- except that money also leaves the economy through NPCs. Example: Most items can be repaired by an NPC, for a fee. NPCs will also sell you various items (which they will only buy back for half-price).
That's going to be the basis of just about any in-game economy -- it enters the game through NPCs, and leaves the game through NPCs. But it's obvious that they've had problems with inflation, as there continue to be quests added which are designed to take money out of the game. Also, as the community generally starts to have more and more items, money, and power, they have to adjust all of these things for the newbie in order to make the game still playable early on.
One way this has been done is, there is a class of weapons available at level 95. These used to cost 100k or so (from players), and they were break-on-death. Level 95 also used to be quite an accomplishment, so this made sense -- a person who made it that high should have money.
In fact, they probably started out costing quite a bit more, as they were originally only dropped by various bosses. When I started playing, they were also available as prizes in Carnage (player-vs-player games). Carnages don't happen every day, and each one is for a specific range of levels or stats, so you might go a week or more without seeing a carnage you could get into. They also cost money to enter, at least 10-20k. The winning team (usually half or a third of those who went to play) got their choice of level 95 weapons. They still sold for 80k or so.
Now, the Foxhunts have been revamped. Instead of being a two-round tournament (you have to beat two teams, so 1/4th of the Foxhunts result in a win), they are now one-round, and have the same prizes. But they still only cost 1k to enter, and happen almost every day, sometimes several times a day. So now there are tons of 95 weapons, and they cost 40k or so.
What generally happens in these games is, the most active 5% players -- people who have no life -- have 95% of the gold and power. (Political power, too -- for example, most in-game crimes are handled by in-game courts and judges.) If a huge amount of money enters the economy, the lower-level or average people like me are still not going to see very much -- and what we do see, we'll immediately want to spend on stuff, usually buying it from these have-no-life players. So, in a sense, the amount of money that's actually in the economy stays about the same, while the amount of money that various bastards have goes up exponentially.
So, considering what I just told you -- I've played the game for over a year, and right now, I have roughly 500,000 gold. Now look at this page. I'm honestly not sure what you would spend 83 million gold on in the game. There are a number of unique items, but still, the most expensive single item I know of is maybe 20 million, if you can get anyone to sell it. (I'm honestly not sure why anyone would; it is the best armor in the game, and there are a limited number of them in the game (less than 50), so I really don't see why you would want the money -- what would you buy with it?)
So, the short answer is, it's complicated. And it doesn't necessarily fit any real model, because if the economy completely explodes, someone can throw a switch and reset it. Example: The Cataclysm was an event in which a bug allowed two people to cooperate and literally double the amount of money they had.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You can brake the habbit! Joyn Gremmer Nazy's Anonimouse today! Inn just 3 weaks yule never have to worri about that brain itch that cums from watchyng totyl ideots butcher the engrish wangwage!
In base 2, that is exactly 10X10^30
Ed, sign off, you're making an idiot of yourself. What's with all this alcoholic and assholes business? You're not making any sense.
"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? NO, says the man in Washington, it belongs to the poor. NO, says the man in the Vatican, it belongs to God. NO, says the man in Moscow, it belongs to everyone."
no text
Medium cat is MEDIUM.
2^31 -1 seems like a more than generous limit for real life too!
Ah, the joys of limitless possibilities. Wait, never mind. ;)
"Teach a man to build a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
10 years ago, I used to do the same thing on Tomb Raider 1 savegame files, to get more ammunitions for various weapons. I was such a noob at the time that when I discovered the number were stored in little-endian, I thought it was some kind of obfuscation the developers came up with to confuse people trying to hex edit the files.
In my day a signed int only went to 2^15, and 2^31 was a signed long.... and you better had a good excuse for using one of those.
46137
I remember doing the same with and editor and saved mechs from the old MechWarrior series on DOS (and later Win95). You could put something like 20+ lasers and 20 heatsinks per apenditure into your mech and blow up everything and everybody with one hit with the heatbar not even budging. Very neat. But it got boring after 5 minutes. :-)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Ok, so after reading this and the responses there is still one thing that I have always questioned regarding any game where you can build a stash of something. Why on Earth are there actual limits to how much you can acquire? If I wanted to acquire 10^10000 gold why can't I? (Time issues aside of course) I understand that back in the beginning there were limited resources in terms of memory so things could only go so far but in todays uber PC's can't programmers find a way to allow for large quantities of whatever?
WoW > Making Babies == Natural Selection
I still don't have my elite flying mount ...
True, but 2^31-1 is so much cooler. It's prime after all.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
In Dark Age of Camelot. So what? I don't know. :(
Will you delete my comment?
No. We believe that discussions in Slashdot are like discussions in real life- you can't change what you say, you only can attempt to clarify by saying more. In other words, you can't delete a comment that you've posted, you only can post a reply to yourself and attempt to clarify what you've said.
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Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 7/10/02
Property is theft.
Yes, go read Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations". At LEAST read book .
I use to play in a wow guild on illidan (Blood Legion). The Guild Master (Zxtasy) hit this limit a few months ago. I believe he was the first to do this. http://www.bloodlegion.com/wow/screens/691k3KN.jpg
Hes definitly not an engineer...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
- May limitless supplies of fill-in-the-blank fortune-cookies be supplied in Your convenient future; preach the word as they seem to thine convene!
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
Every now and then someone on the eve-forums complains that his wallet is like -430 million ISK. When CCP finds out that someone bought ISK out of game from some website, which is not allowed by the EULA they will withdraw that amount from the players wallet.
Now that is some tough cookie to get that amount of ingame money back, since you won't be able to buy any ammo to go out and shoot NPC's and earn it all back.
Always a funny thing to read thou
My friend is a GM on a hacked server, and he tried giving himself a vast amount of gold. I immediately recognized the resulting cash as that magical 32 bit unsigned integer.
So it is something that has been verified for a while.
Spoken like someone who has never given birth!
Why don't you wear a fat-suit for several months, and then pass a softball through your penis for 6 hours, and then set your alarm clock to ring every 2 hours all day and night for a year, and every time it rings, you have to go smell a pile of feces. Then you tell me how much fun it was.
You've got to be the world's stupidest person if you're having a baby for *fun*. That's right up there with "I want to be a monk so I can meet girls" or "I want to be an air traffic controller so I can take it easy".
Every Saturday morning at college, with nothing better to do, and not having stayed up late on a date or drinking or something productive, I would go down to the arcade and play games, primarily Mystic Marathon, a cutsey game where you ran a marathon through mystical things.
I got pretty good at it, but one day I found I could play it indefinitely. I guessed they had set it slightly easier to attract other business, who knows.
Anyway, after about an hour and a half on the same quarter, I was getting bored, so I just left it and went to get some Big Macs at McDonald's, then ate 'em back in my dorm room and cried myself to sleep, as being a video game star didn't get me any girls.
Losing weight over the summer sure as hell did tho, but that's another tale.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Dude Mystic Marathon is one thing, but Defender: Stargate is a pretty gnarly game......
Steve turned it over twice, every kid in the neighborhood came by to watch.
Steve didn't have a girl either, but that was because he was 15 and smoked pot and marlboros, played defender too much, and rode a bmx bike.
He also lived next door to 7-11 and knew how to string the games....
music lover since 1969