Sounds like through the night? Um, based on what?
I didnāt realize how much I used the trading post till it was gone. I lost the desire to log in
5 Likes
Permaban everyone who used this exploit. Even then, I still might be done with this game.
Taking $40 from around 900k people. Itās called ethics and standards.
Maybe this is just a lack of experience and lack of a good QA department. I work in IT myself, even tho not a developer - i do support and communicate with clients daily.
With critical issues we always alarm developers and they are usually fixed within minutes and we have a 24/7 environment that is pretty sensitive to outages of any kind.
We even have a system that automatically calls developers on their phone with an alarm if something critical is down.
While we are smaller and still fight bugs daily, the disruption of core components of the service is not tolerated and rollbacks, hotfixes etc. are very common. The customer deserves a functioning product, if a new release is not functioning - it will be fixed or rolled back if a fix is not in sight. The timeframe here is minutes, sometimes hours - we canāt afford to turn this into days. Even during weekend/nighttime.
Even worse, if you are in the town when it expires, it comes to inventory, so if shed is full, and you get a bunch to inventory and canāt move. Guess what - you start tossing it on the ground.
They should have froze the AH, so no items expired. That saved our fees, over flooding sheds etc.
you are always āworking hardā
They didnāt take it, you gave it.
2 Likes
Im also a dev, and donāt you think AGS as a child of Amazon should already got good practices, gitflow, deploy processes etc? Cuz I think they should, even if they donāt for sure they have resources to do this. For some reason they donāt
Take the quickfix as example. Thjey disabled all monetary transactions ALL of them cuz that was the easiest, not really player friendly. And I wonder if they knew what they doin or they wasnāt really aware that disabling all coin transfer will lock ppl out property tax, companies tax etc. For me it looks like some intern said āI got an idea, lets do thisā without even knowing codebase of the game or how players react. For example I think 90% of the playerbase use Trading house on everyday to get rid of extra mats, to server as additional storage etc. This was super player unfriendly
2 Likes
A patch again? Now Iām really scared. Will it break the little things that still work and add more dupes?
Well they are related to Amazon but that does not mean that they have the same skills and knowledge that people running AWS for example. With AWS such behavior would ruin them as big companies using AWS would not tolerate outages or disruption to the service for such long periods of time.
But yeah they can learn about it since the parent company has all the resources in house essentially to provide what ever is needed in this case to improve the flow and uptime of the game and deliver well tested products.
And disabling all transactions instead of specific ones that affect the gold duping indicates that they have not found the issue - otherwise you would not block an entire function, when only minor parts of it can be exploited. Same indication i get from not hotfixing the issue and let it sit overnight.
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In short, their actions are very unproffesional for such a big company with software dev experience. Some freelancers provide better communications with their clients than AGS
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900k was only the peak concurrent player count at the start, millions purchased the game of their own free will.
Now we are down to about 350k concurrent players at peak, and still have probably a couple million or more coming and going.
Broken or not I put in more then enough time to be worth $40, as did most of these forum rats.
6 Likes
What ever you do dont wipe or take the gold/coins away from players who grinded that. Just bann all the dupes if you can. If you wipe after 500 hours i wil request REFUND and delete the game! I have wasted 1 month of my time to wipe no that life time is worth it to me so you cant just take it away without refund.
Itās all about context to be honest.
I work in enterprise solutions and sometimes you simply canāt fix issues within minutes or hours. It gets more complex too when youāre relying on other services, Iāve lost count of the amount of issues Iāve had to escelate to Microsoft Azure after weād spend the best part of a day investigating the issue to make absolute sure nothing was wrong with our product.
Somebody didnt read the TOS heh
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Yeah but in this case everything is related to the in-house products. And again you do not disrupt the service when you work on a fix - you set up a test environment and work on it without touching the live product and then you hotfix it and clean up the database.What AGS did here is the worst of all practices - taking down core functions of a live product without fixing them in any reasonable amount of time. A normal patch on Wednesday would be better. A normal hotfix with server restarts/downtime would be better. But no, we get neither.
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Yeahā¦ in an MMORPG that has VERY limited bank space and HIGH teleport charge, itās even more of a killer. You canāt even store things easily. Theyāre basically telling everyone to just quit until the game is fixed o.O
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ever heard bait and switch?