I guess everyone heard and noticed the ban wave that hit a good amount of players (hundreds of hundreds from AGS words) due to exploiting either the Money Transfer bug (p2p trade) or the guaranteed 600-600 crafting possibilities due to trophy stacking.
Now, i want to focus on the crafting bug only here in this discuss.
Since all accounts who took advantage of it are gone - or at least banned i suppose for an amount of time (or perma), the next big question to my mind is:
“What would happen if someone smarter than the average traded through TP or p2p all items, multiples times in order to get them lost in the code?”
Were all those accounts banned as well? Because in Barri, those accounts (alts or mains to which other bug-abusing alts were trading) HAVE NOT BEEN BANNED.
Meaning, all those items and profits ARE still in those inventories and within the game environment and its market.
How do you actually fight against that?
I guess you cannot blindlly ban all traded players since maybe some of them are legit traders whom happened to TP like we usually do or even p2p.
So, my two questions are now:
What’s the point of banning people (which is still a good answer to discourage future exploits) if all bug-crafted items have been traded away from the banned accounts and are still sit in other inventories with 0 ban (at this date: 25/09/2022) to those accounts?
Is there an actual possibility that AGS runs through the code and erase those items + profits? How do you then tell to legit players that they paid a dupped item and they lost both gold and the item itself?
Please keep the conversation at a human level.
Just want to understand how to move forward from this and if there isn’t going to be a real solution to any bug-abusing players. I do believe that, if not addressed correctly, any player can just create an alt account in the future, proceed to cheat on that and then running free with his/her main as nothing ever happened.
I can’t think of a way to identify who received 600 gear from a banned player and who didn’t.
There is an MMO which identifies the crafter who made an item (made by ‘Playername’). I used it in that MMO to successfully prove that a member of the kinship took it from the Kin vault and sold it, which was a no-no. With that info the violator was thrown out of the kinship. Due to other shenanigans the same player was later banned by the developers. Bad actors tend to continue being bad actors.
If new world adopted a ‘crafted by Playername’ policy they might be able to track offending items in a case like this.
To be honest, most players who purchased from exploiters probably did so in good faith. There’s no way to know if they ‘knew’ whether they were buying from an exploiter even if they hold a full set of armor and weapons.
Even if a player watched the crafter hit first time Legendaries on every item on Twitch they’d probably be excited rather than suspicious. They’d most likely ask how the crafter did it, and the exploiter, being a cagy bastage, would probably assert they were ‘just lucky’. The buyer, thrilled with their ‘good luck’ would likely advertise that crafter to others without knowing they were enabling an exploiter.
Since the exploiters kept their cheat on the downlow so long, they clearly didn’t share their secret. They probably crafted gear for their buddies without telling those buddies how they did it just to protect their profits in future.
It’s not just crafted by. I don’t know why items don’t have “crafted by” yet, but I sure hope they have more than that.
Early after the game’s release there had been a lot of dupes and bans. I got banned not because of duping but because the entire company was IRL friends who traded me everything we crafted and AGS thought I was duping. It took a lot of back and forth via e-mails for them to admit that they had no way of tracking and that they were using heuristics, after which they removed my ban and admitted to their mistake. The issue was that trades and crafts weren’t tracked, so they had to use heuristics to determine who used a dupe: e.g. inventory snapshots.
I don’t suppose this is still the case. Those early incidents probably made it clear that they need to log every craft and every trade (would be nice if you confirmed AGS). After all, it’s Amazon, the world’s biggest cloud provider, so if anyone has the infrastructure to handle large volumes of data it’s them.
As someone coming from a big data background, this isn’t too complicated and is probably already happening. You track each unique item id ownership by assigning time slices, and in case of dupes, you keep only the item with the time series which holds the earliest entry for that item. The real question is: how do you compensate people who unknowingly bought duped items, and have them deleted afterwards?
Tracking items by time slice won’t do it alone unless it’s tied to a crafter and can be tracked by the game managers (not the Devs).
The problem was not item duplication, it was getting guaranteed legendaries by abusing multiple craft trophies in each house. The duplication issue occurred during trades/cash transfers.
I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to track players down (without any time slice/crafter ID mechanic currently operational), identify which of their GS 600+ items were crafted by violators, figure out what the purchaser paid for those items in cash, resources or whatever and come up with fair compensation.
I’m not sure they even have the tools to do the job. Even if they can track the offending items there’d be much wailing and gnashing of teeth over whatever compensation regimen they implement.
If I were running the show I’d focus on punishing the perps. Unless a player could be shown to have KNOWINGLY purchased multiple items from a known violator I wouldn’t spend the time and resources removing items and compensating (presumably) innocent players. It’ll be seen as unfair no matter how it’s done.
While it’s not just, letting players keep items they innocently purchased is really only practical. I’d rather have N.W. focus resources on anti-dupe and anti-trophy abuse measures and putting crafter tracking in place so they can ID violators in the future.
Or they could just stop introducing bugs? Oh wait, they can’t. A year into release and these issues keep happening. Makes me wonder how people are still playing.
This was my concern and I was waiting them to do rollback,but they didnt rollback. Best solution was rollback to where it started and perma ban who abused this.
Some people are afraid to buy an item at the moment because we dont know if its safe to buy or not,there are people making topic about how they got banned due to buying an item and I wonder how those people getting away with it.
If they didn’t rollback last October/November when it was chaos I don’t think they ever will. To be honest, they were working on revamping the new player experience as early as last year, and we were wondering why since everyone was level 60 already. I think “no rollback but fresh servers” was always the plan.
