Dupping - any word on roll-back?

[Tobynn]

I got my big laugh of the week last night, when I was actually harassed in game for posting on this very thread. Of course, the tough guy didn't have the sand to hassle me on his 'main' rather he chose to hide behind the safety of some vague alias. I was crackin up!! Apparently, it doesn't take much to get under the skin of a nitwit

[Frango Mint]

assuming no fails an all drops are "free" (you got em "yourself", etc.) about 18k.

You should expect some fails in there though. There are many combines.

The store bought items for the AAAA sit at something like 16K or so. Add on top of that the 19 unique farmable items (totaling 43 actual drops), along with the crazy amount of smithing combines and the "high" tailoring and fletching combines, all before the 5 351 tinkering combines and the final 252 tinkering combine, I find the pre-dup price on the Nameless server of 250-300K as being reasonable.

For my guildmates, I feel that my offer of 20K and 10 Clockwork Gnome Bolts for 1 AAAA (assuming they are using it for themself, and not selling it) to be a square deal for those in my in-game family.

[Lidori]

If you are feel AAAA are overpriced, make them yourself. Tradeskills are in reach of everyone: the required levels of fletching, tailoring, JC, smithing, brewing, etc and tinkering do not require an end game guild or rare drops. Just time! Go for it.

[Taaxi]

I could not recall the name of one player on Bert who was selling them in /auction only the other day.

Woot! Does this finally mean the end of {names removed} spams in every channel on the Bert server? That guy needs to go back to the sweatshop making Nikes and leave EQ alone.

[Zolina]

I've made 10 AAAA's on my own, hiring a tinker for 10k for the tinkering combines. Farm Corathus Creep creep reapers and gnome robots until you get five clockwork gnome bolts and you should have enough of everything from there you'll need. The only thing that might be tricky to farm at level 70+ is the shadowmane pelt, and there are usually a few of those on sale in the bazaar. I make all my blocks of high quality steel first, then just work my way down the EQTraders recipe. When I get to a tinkering step, I put the stuff I need tinkered into its own toolbox on my mule; I do all the other combines myself.

Once you have everything farmed and have memorized the combines you need, it only takes about an hour to go from farmed pieces to final combines.

[Ngreth Thergn]

My price quote is definitely only considering vendor ed stuff, and in no way estimates cost of "time spent" farming some difficult to get parts.

[larryc22]

Frankly my only answer is the one Nolrog implied. Send a petition, like the interface or not, it is the only method.

....
to make the bags unsellable might have been possible, but would have been a total nightmare... I can think of a few solutions... make the bag no-trade, which has its problems, and would have taken the servers down for 4 to 6 hours, punishing innocent people. Or I could have altered merchant markup on all bags to a ridiculous level, say 10k, which again would have taken the servers down for 4 to 6 hours, and made it difficult to buy any bags or tradeskill containers for a while.

There just ended up being no good solution for a "Right Now" fix

Actually, you don't have to make all bags expensive, just those that are likely be duped or have biggest impact. E.g. make the AAAA 300k, the weight reducing bags 10k, and leave other bags as is.

[Bobaten]

It got fixed with today's patch .

[Dea]

Is it just the duping that was fixed? I am still seeing 30 AAAAs for sell in the baz 25 of them at 69k and less.

Did they not remove the dupped ones?

I only ask because I don't know if I should report/petition again.


Dea

[Yroc Morf]

I would say they did nothing to resolve that problem. 30 haversacks for sale on Bert still remains.

Step one fix root problem. Step two put head back in sand.

[Zolina]

I'd imagine the hot fix was to prevent further duping.

Punishing the offending parties will probably take time to track down and, if history serves correctly, most of the worst offenders will have been clever enough to use level 1 new-account mules to do the duping, so their mains will avoid the punishment.

I don't anticipate SoE will be doing any rollbacks, just some account bans for the worst offenders. Rollbacks punish too many innocent people and harm the game more than duplicate items in the system.

[Ngreth Thergn]

Unfortunately, again, without punishing the innocent, there is not likely anything that can be done about the actual items that are on the market.

What can be done is a ban stick for the people that abused the bug, because what do you know... merchant transactions are logged, and this showed up in logs... so we can very easily find the people that abused it (at some threshold) and poof they are gone.

But people are right in suspecting that in some cases it would be traded to a bazaar mule that may not be related to the account that duped, there is where we have the hard time. I do not feel it is safe to assume "everyone selling an AAAA cheap is a sploiter, ban them" because frankly that is NOT likely a safe assumption. Nor is it really safe to say "anyone with 10 or more, ban them" because again... not safe. For all I know someone saved up combines.

And yeah, Rollbacks do MUCH more harm to the game than the temporary market fluctuation due to extra items and/or money.

[Dea]

Thanks Ngreth,

I understand why it isn't publicized that an exploit was fixed in a patch and I assumed that was the hotfix fix. As long as the root is fixed the rest will even out eventually.

I got caught somehow in the infamous char rollbacks of the beta npcs fiasco (still not exactly sure how I got infected) and the thought of getting rolled back still gives me nightmares. (I was babysitting Thelin as a chanter in the hedge when rolled back O.o)

But back to my thank you mostly for simply keeping the trader community so well informed.

Dea

[Yroc Morf]

The problem with this approach is there is no reason not to exploit.

More needs to be done in my opinion. Find the duppers and take the money and or items regardless if they transferred said money and items or not.

[KyrosKrane]

See, that's where things get real murky real fast. Let's say that Sploiter is a new level 1 toon on a fresh account. Sploiter gets his hands on an AAAA, dupes it 500 times, and sells them in the bazaar at the cheapest price. Ubernewb is a toon that some high-end player PL'ed, and he's got eight Last Blood drops saved up. So Ubernewb comes along and buys eight AAAA from Sploiter, having never heard of this dupe issue. He gets the other items needed, and one by one, he sticks his shiny new Last Blood drops in the AAAA's he bought. One trip to the Augment Sealer later, he's got eight uber new augs for his cultural armor.

So along come the GM's. They see that Sploiter duped his bags and ban him, then they start chasing down the folks he may have used to dupe or otherwise hide his nefarious activities. In their search, they see that Ubernewb bought eight bags from this account cheap.

Now let's say you're the GM. You don't know the back story I posted above. All you know is that Ubernewb bought eight AAAA from Sploiter -- maybe an attempt to hide the illicit origin of the AAAA. What do you do to Ubernewb? Do you ban him? Do you warn him? Do you roll him back? How can you tell whether he's just an innocent caught up in the scandal, or a main who used a new level 1 toon to exploit?