Recently there has been a good deal of money exploiting going on...

I collected a total of 70999999 credits from various people, you know who you are, thanks for the honesty. The account name was "Alexis Duran" and the character name deleted was "Exploited Money Collector" If a dev has the time to verify this to everyone, I'd appreciate it.

Meanwhile, I want to know what is being done about the person responsible for this. He was deliberately warned not to do it, but did it anyways, fully aware of the consequences. It would have been one thing to find the bug, and keep the money to himself, after reporting it, but he did not, instead, he ran around giving random 10-20mil contrubutions to everyone, placing obscene bounties on vets, and massively overstocking the lottery. This will probably pretty much force a reset. What disciplinary action is going to be taken on this indivudual, if any? It'd also be one thing if this was my 9 year old brother, who didnt know any better, but he's been around since 3.1... sigh...

Well, at least 70+mil has been taken care of, but who knows how much more there is.

This isn't directed towards you or anyone, but why exactly is everyone responding to this so negatively? It's a bug and apparently someone thought it would be amusing to exploit it. It's not like it hasn't happened before. And seeing how everyone else has millions of credits now, this is hardly an offense worthy of banning someone. We're talking about virtual money in a public beta test of a game, not someone hacking into the Guild offices and attempting to steal the game's source code.

As long as it's reported it won't be a problem. The devs will eventually fix the bug and there'll be some full reset later down the line (hopefully next update). There you go, problem solved. The exploiter can no longer exploit anymore and most people will be happy to get another fresh start. What's the big deal?

Well arolte, the economy WAS balanced, IE, nobody that knew about the bug had exploited it, but then this individual found out about it. I like the guy IRL, but his ingame actions lately have made me really question what the heck is going on. He's apparently also shared it with people that DO continue to abuse it, as well as giving massive amounts of money to people. He's a 3.1.x vet, and knew a lot better. I'm very, very dissapointed.

The fact that I worked/played like hell to get my 5 mil and now plenty of new people, especially some 'space quake' types have 10, 20...50mil is quite upsetting.

In defense of what Arolte said..... the economy never had a chance.

Within a couple days of the reset, a group of Itani vets had over 10 caps a piece. Do the math, that's 5 million. Yeah, they probably traded for 30 minutes to get their valks, but once they had em, they went capping. Once this money-bug is fixed (the fix is simple, make inventories automatically save when /givemoney is used), we can have a full reset minus capping.

I fail to see how that's relevant, since most of these "itani vets" promptly moved back on to serco as soon as they had the capping money. Even if that's not true, what was stopping Serco or Neutral vets from capping like mad also? Nothing.

The point is, this guy should NOT have exploited at all, he has NO excuse, and cannot justify himself no matter what he says. Nobody had dirty money before he exploited, and it should have stayed that way.

Okay, lets all breathe for a second.

The persons responsible have been dealt with. The specifics are really not anyone's business.

The economy was not up to standard in the first place. The money exploit certainly didn't help matters, but a reset was inevitable. I do understand people's point about how hard they worked for their credits.

Nobody was caused to LOSE money by the exploit. It is literally created out of nothing.

That the manner in which the exploit was triggered did inconvenience others, and that the specifics of the problem were not immediately communicated to guild are both areas of concern.

Let us deal with it please.

I disagree sherpa. People did actually lose a lot from this.
You're rewarding the people that have abused a game function to their own advantage, and you're essentially punishing those that play fair, dont exploit, and actually work for money. You think the large number of players that Camps told are going to play like they have anything to lose? hardly...

Several people have known about this form of money bug for a good long while, and yet nobody...NOBODY used it.. now all of a sudden some punk comes along, finds it by whatever means, and ruins the lot of the game for the rest of us. You might have taken his cash in his first account, but what about the countless bounties, lotto, and contributions? He's just caused a reset! Forgive me if I don't just "drop it"

Not to nag or anything but...
"The persons responsible have been dealt with. The specifics are really not anyone's business."

THE PLURAL OF PERSON IS PEOPLE.

Actually, no SL, the plural of "person" is persons. You don't say "three people," because how do you say "one people?" You say "one person" and "three persons."

But I go off-topic.

I think everyone needs a general apology from me for this whole fiasco over the money bug. I was told the money bug by a certain unnamed person who is being rather vocal about it like it was common knowledge. I got the impression that this person was not going to report the bug, so I bug-reported it without having actually used it. I exploited it several times in Sector 40 with "Evoli" when there was one of many big wars in 7 that resulted in about 5 crashes to make sure it actually worked. We turned about 990,000 c into 43 million. Later, several days ago, I was spacing (for fun) when the server crashed. I put two and two together, and figured out the spacing crash, although I did not publicly post it on the board as red cactus did. If you were wondering, that's how I crashed the server.

Yeah, it was exploiting, and not fair to the ones that did it, but realize that this isn't the end-all exploits. There are still other facets of the game that are easily exploited. Perhaps this wouldn't have been dealt with as quickly or known as quickly if this didn't happen--judge for yourself. I was wrong to exploit the bug and it goes against how I usually treat exploitable bugs.

That said, a reset is probably coming. Hopefully flag-capping will be taken out and we can truly test the economy.

I think its sad if people justify their exploiting with us capping. Capping is actually difficult, requires skill, teamwork and timing. On an average cap with defenders, I loose money. Just because you don't have the skills or team to cap, it doesn't mean it should go. Its a fun part of the game and I hope it stays.

Well.

It pissed me off when he decided to crash the server SEVEN TIMES IN A ROW, which was 11 times overall. But it turned out to be immensely helpful to have that kind of repeatability.

That was a little excessive. I took away all your (plural) money after I saw that. [Side note: the parties involved accumulated over 3 billion credits all told] Then I was able to write a test case that duplicates the behavior, and now the server won't crash as a result of spacing, so I gave you some money back as a "reward" although I was probably way too generous.

I'm pretty close to discovering exactly what the issue is; for some reason it's triggered more readily when a priority, through integer truncation, reaches 0. I limited the minimum to something small but greater than zero, and that magically fixes it in any tests I've been able to do.

So, the server still has this bug, but it's not as easy to trigger -- you can't do it through spacing, it's much more random and rare.

The plural of person is people. It's only when you are referring to a spefific group of adjectivized people that you use persons. IE: I saw three people today. The enslaved persons were unhappy.

Fair enough.

Not to SirCamps in particular, but just in general: please note that the proper behaviour for discovering a bug is to report it. Experimenting to "prove" an exploit is ok, up to a point, that point being right after you proved it works. If the exploit could have a major impact on gameplay (like this one), we would prefer if people didn't spread it around. The point of this test is to improve the game as quickly as possible. If we have to clean up after 50 people who exploited something, that's time we could spend adding some feature on your wishlist.

So.. if you find a bug, please report it (via the web bug reporter) and leave it be. Thanks.

I consider this matter closed and am now locking the thread.

{I get to sneak in}

Right, "persons" was wrong in this case. I originally had it "person" but then realized there were a few people involved, so I stuck an "s" on and changed the tense of the verb. Thats what I get for hurrying.

...

Anyway, I found the problem. Woo. The server should be pretty solid now, so feel free to try to break it.