Dupping - any word on roll-back?

[Yroc Morf]

You go find the money and take it away so that the dupper cannot benefit.

I am not suggesting the entire problem be rolled back on individual accounts. I am simply suggesting that SoEs policy of not doing anything in these cases is part of the problem. Because nothing is done, these types of problems are larger than they should be.

There was a vendor on my server selling 30 haversacks last night. GMs can do something in these cases but I doubt they did. Take the haversacks and follow the money trail undoing the transaction to the source and ban the source. If they did this for even 5% of the cases, people would think twice.

Right now, it is more likely those who did not cheat are second guessing their choice and will not make the same mistake next time.

[Catweazel]

I reported a number of people with /petition that had suspicious quantities during this dupe.

One in particular, I warned in advance that I was reporting him (he was selling 8 AAAA boxes and 2 Scrindite Holepokers).

The sequence of events after my tell to him was fairly quick:
1. He insulted me, swore at me and told me the AAAA boxes were lore "how can I possibly have 8"?
2. He deleted or off-loaded 7 of the AAAA boxes.
3. A GM logged in immediatley following my petition and checked out his inventory for the dupes.
4. The duper told me his main made the boxes and why was I reporting him. The fact that the GM did "nothing" to him immediately justified that everything was legit.
5. His main according to eqplayers was a 173 level Tinker as of late June.
6. I put the duffus on ignore as he had already told a bunch of lies.
7. He then reported me to my guild officer (who I had previously asked to verify he was selling 8 boxes). The whole event was captured in screenshots between us.
8. Turns out his "main" was kicked out of his previous guild for using MacroQuest.
9. I have not seen his bazaar mule or his main online for almost a week.

I am happy that the system works well enough for the worst offenders. He might well be back, I really could care less. A snake is a snake and one way or another they get what they deserve. In the end, it's a game and you cannot let stuff like this bother you. If you want to "join" them, go ahead. One day soon you will be on people's ignore lists too.

[Bobaten]

The biggest thing we as players can do about these things is not talk about them. I would be willing to bet that the discussion in this thread resulted in someone duping bags. Nearly all of the details on how to do it are here, and there is even a dev statement saying that punishment is not likely for low level offenders.
The same as previous exploits, this grew over time. While the bug was around for over a month, for most of that month it had no impact. I suspect the vast majority of the duping occurred in the last week, after people starting talking about it (mostly in outraged threads to the tone of "FIX the duping now!" Because for every 10-20 people that read those threads who think "Thanks for letting me know so I can be on the lookout for duped bags" there is one who things "Thanks for letting me know, now I can go make some duped bags." Personally, I have millions of plat, and most of the toys I want for my characters, so I wasn't tempted (the only temptation I had to resist was giving Yeli coin purses to all my twinks). But for someone with a couple hundred k, the temptation to be able to get to millions of plat with all the toys you want for your characters can be really high.
So if you find an exploit, or suspect you found an exploit, bug/petition/PM Devs. Don't post on a message board asking other players, you are just helping to perpetuate the duping. People love to complain about the heavy moderation over at eqlive, but really that is what allowed this exploit to remain relatively un-abused for weeks.

[mewkus]

Having large quantities of bags for sale doesn't necessarily indicate duping. I often make haversacks in batches of 15 to 20 at a time (depending on how many blue diamonds i can get a hold of). Going after whomever the current possessor of the pp from the sale(s) of the duped bags wont work either. More than likely most of the plat made from the sale of these bags as already been laundered through plat vendors (not that that makes it legit), but then has gone through several more transactions amongst innocent vendors.

Now time for my funny/amusing/depressing story about one of the dupers on bristlebane...
A gnome starts /ooc'ing in the bazaar that he's selling AAAA, tae ew, and haversacks. People start accusing him of duping.
His story number 1: He made them himself. He's anonymous to hide his class/level and such. I look on eqplayers and see that he's only a level 12 magician and ask how he's able to make the AAAAs when he's only level 12.
His story number 2: He made them with his main who's a higher level gnome. He refuses to identify who his main is. Then I start asking him how he's able to make haversacks if his main is a gnome. This seems to have caught him off guard as he must not have realized that only halflings can make haversacks.
His story number 3: A guildmate/friend made those for him. When still pressed to identify who the gnome and halfling are that are making the stuff for him.
He proceeds to story number 4: He transfered from another server with all this stuff.
When pressed further he shifts to story number 5: He bought all this stuff real cheap earlier and is merely reselling it now with only a small mark up. A little bit of background here, I am in the business of haversacks on BB, I check other people's supplies and prices 3 or 4 times a day for the past 3 months. No one has ever been selling them cheap enough for him to resell them for 4k (half of the going rate). He then reverts back to a combination of stories 3 and 4 where a friend/guildmate made them for him on another server and he transferred over. Then I lay the clincher on him, I ask him why then he bought one of my haversacks the night before for 8k (apparently they need an initial bag to seed their duping).
Story number 6: His brother bought that bag from me the night before not knowing that he already had a stash of haversacks and tae ew bags sitting in the bank.
It was kind of satisfying that we (several others were questioning him too) were able to demonstrate that he was in fact cheating, it was also depressing knowing that twenty minutes later someone totally unaware of what was going on could easily walk into the bazaar buy up his bags (instead of mine) and line his pockets with plat that cost him nothing (other than a minute or two to do the dupe).
Additional depression came when I asked Fairan about this at the fan faire and he said that they're not going to be banning people (because they were only taking advantage of a bug rather than actually hacking something) and reluctantly agreed that they could (not necessarily would) go back and swap out the various tae ew and haversacks for toolboxes or disenchanted bags.

I'm just hoping that they're are in fact doing something behind the scenes to correct at least some of this.

[Bobaten]

The real "damage" to the tradeskill community is the stuff that isn't obvious. It's not caused by a few people people selling 20 bags cheap, but rather by the (likely) many more who just duped for themselves. Someone who bought 2 haversacks (you had to have 2 seeds) then duped themselves and their twinks a dozen more is a customer you will never get back.

[Yroc Morf]

The biggest thing we as players can do about these things is not talk about them.

This is about as silly as statement as there is. You should apply for a job at SoE. These problems should be announced and fixed ASAP. Those who take advantage post annoucement should be dealt with in the most harsh manner possible. The problem here is that $$ is running the show.. not equity. The player that looses sales and quits EQ is worth less than the guy who buys cheated goods and is pissed off when they are taken away. The reason this all happens is because of the silence.

[Catweazel]

I would tend to agree that silence has basically wrecked the AAAA market for some considerable time. The bazaar marketplace on CT was going through 2 or 3 AAAA boxes per week. With at minimum 30 seen on (not usual) traders at various points and presumably a greater number hidden around on alts, I doubt that the market will recover for 6 months or more. With such a unique market demand (a guild has to be in demi or don, lockouts on stone carrying mobs etc) I am surprised that more people are not upset over this fiasco. Tinkers who spent millions of plat and hundreds of hours raising their skills over many months are perhaps the hardest hit of all. The same could be said for the Tailors, but they have many other items they can switch to for income.

[Itek]

Yroc Morf-

You propose, several times, that there is a simple straightforward solution to a rather complex problem. This is a logical fallacy, which I attempted to point out with humor before. Having seen your complete lack of understanding of the situation, and lack of tact and hardheadedness in replying to people attempting to adjust your illogical point of view I will be more direct.

Duping has been around for more than 20 years. Exploiting has been around even longer. MUD-developers have been trying to come up with a "solution" that is workable and fair for a LONG time.

Several situations were pointed out to you where "simply ban anyone that benefited" is not going to work. They cannot "simply follow the money" for similar reasons. (Transactions with merchants, Ngreth revealed, are logged. In all likelihood toon to toon transfers are not.)

"Log every transaction" is the typical naive response to this situation. It's unworkable. Logs take time, processor and disk, and slow the system down. A lot. And run behind. (Like when a zone crashes and you find that the last 10 items you looted didn't get stored to your account. Because they are pushed to a "transaction log" on the server and haven't been processed when the computer waiting to process them crashes. Why didn't those transactions get processed you ask ?? Because THE SERVER CRASHED!! It's the fact that the computer running the process fell behind, lost track of what it was doing and crashed that cause the transactions not to be handled properly.)

"Why didn't the computer handle the data properly?"
"Because it crashed."
"But that doesn't explain why it didn't handle the data properly..."
"Yes, actually it does, because CRASH means 'the computer stopped handling data properly' after all right ?"
"OHHHH."

You DO NOT WANT to give people who dupe/exploit a reason to attempt to crash the servers. You DO NOT WANT to triple lag. You DO NOT WANT to punish the innocent.

Would banning 100 dupers bring 100 more people to the game ? No.
Would banning 2 non-dupers by accident make 8 other people leave ? Quite possibly.

SOE is a business. I don't agree with the Customer Service department, nor it's leader, in nearly every case. I agree that if you can catch someone IN THE ACT of exploiting they must, for the good of the game, be banned. But supposition and logs are not proof. They never have been and they never can be. It makes poor long term financial sense for them to take a "hard line" on exploiting at the probable expense of harming revenue disproportionately to the harm to the game.

Stomping your foot and saying "they should take these guys to the woodshed" is childish and naive. Yes, they should. But your proposal should take context and nuance into account, as the situation is not nearly so straightforward as...

"Well I know these 3 guys have been selling AAAA for months, and these 2 guys just started and under priced them and have several so they MUST be CHEATING, so ban them."

What if they were part of a guild that was in Demiplane 6 months ago, they got rotated to Iraq and let their accounts go inactive, their wife logged them in, the guild died out or is no longer in Demiplane, and they are selling off old stockpiles for quick plat so she can twink up her baby paladin ?

Can YOU _-PROVE-_ that is not the case ?

What if someone duped 8 of the AAAA and someone else saw them priced at 65 and though "TYPO!! Score !!! I'll buy them and resell them!!" And now is offering them at 85 (which is still well below most market prices, and explains why they don't have the skill to make them themselves, are below price, and got them from someone the LOGS SAY duped) .. should they be banned ?

What if you just take the AAAA away ? Will you refund the money they spent ?

What if one of the resold AAAA has made an aug? Will you return the last blood ?

What if instead it's a Hide Sack ? Will you transfer the items in the sack to a new sack ? What if it puts a monk over his weight limit ?

GM: " I saw you dupe 8 AAAA. You are banned."
Duper: "oww sh" (banned)

GM: "You have 18 duped Haversacks on 3 of your toons. You are banned."
Triality-Raid-Tank: "What? No I bought them in bazaa" (banned)

Imagine the fallout. Had this been like the Beta-NPCs in PoK event it's simple. Turn the server off (hit the big red switch if you have to) immediately and restart from the tape backups. The uptime after the first patch never happened, no one is actually hurt. (which I still maintain would have been less painful and better customer service than what actually happened) But they simply could NOT just turn the servers OFF till they found the mechanics for the problem and a solution. And they can't just track every duped bag and treat it like contact poison. "You touched a duped bag, you get banned."

It's like any problem. A sufficiently complex issue will never have a one sentence solution. No matter how much you wish it did.

"A man build a house and that house fall down and kill the owner, that man shall be put to death." The oldest building code in the world. Simple, just and straightforward.

How long AFTER the house is built before the builder is no longer responsible if it falls down?

What about if there's a tornado or earthquake? Will there be mass executions of general contractors ?

If something that simple has nuance and subtlety the correct CS response to exploiting is gonna be even thornier.

[Yroc Morf]

Itek

You outline all the reasons something cannot be done and give no consideration that in certain cases something can and should be done.

I have a hard time believing toon to toon transfers are not logged and if so, then perhaps that should be fixed.

[Catweazel]

A lot of stuff.

One issue was whether reports and discussion should be announced in "public". Threads raising the issue and the bug itself have been around for a month.

Don't tell me that SOE did not notice the first locked thread or the first petition. I guarantee you that MacroQuest subscribers knew about it the instant it happened.

SOE has the ability to track specific items in game. It has been stated before on this forum. It does not have to be permanent, it has to be visible.

A statement from SOE stating that an exploit has been discovered and that items resulting from the exploit will be tracked and resulting accounts banned or suspended followed with a warning along the lines of "Caveat Emptor" should be sufficient. They don't have to track every exploitable item. In this particular case one or two items would have been fine as it is obvious to everyone that WR bags (Leatherfoot and Tae Ew) and AAAA boxes were the items to go after.

Stating fairy stories about power levelling someones spouse's baby paladin adds to the drama and emotion rather than provide constructive input. SOE will not ever catch everyone. They don't need to. I would be quite happy if they caught one and added it to the wrap up publicity so that just perhaps, someone might think twice next time instead of today's situation where thieves and cheats live with impunity.

[Bobaten]

This is about as silly as statement as there is. You should apply for a job at SoE. These problems should be announced and fixed ASAP. Those who take advantage post annoucement should be dealt with in the most harsh manner possible. The problem here is that $$ is running the show.. not equity. The player that looses sales and quits EQ is worth less than the guy who buys cheated goods and is pissed off when they are taken away. The reason this all happens is because of the silence.

There is nothing gained by announcing the exploit. Yes, they should fix it as soon as possible, yes they should deal with the exploiters, but announcing it has nothing to do with the other two. This isn't the same thing as some new browser vulnerability, users don't need to protect themselves from "tainted" bags (because they won't do massive rollbacks again, that was a nightmare that caused as many problems (including duping) as it fixed). The people who were hurt are the ones who produce the bags, and an announcement wouldn't save them. Actions to correct exploits save them, talking about exploits just hurts them.
I don't think the MQers knew about this as soon as it was patched. I think you assume too much intelligence on their part. If I had been going to exploit this, I would have tried my hardest to cover my tracks:
I would have done my duping on a free account (Sony gave them out to everyone who bought anniversary).
I would have done my transfers between chars by dropping on the ground.
I would have done everything in the guild hall, since it is an instance.
I would sell 1-2 at a time, and sell them over time.
The fact that you can go to the bazaar and identify who is duping bags indicates to me that the dupers are not that bright (though I bet there are some who are bright that you don't notice). But the second someone says "Hey, there is a bag dupe going on" you can bet that anyone with an inclination to cheat tried to find out what it was.
Sure if there was an exploit where someone could open a trade window with you and put fake items in it that you don't receive when you hit trade, then by all means announce it. The players can take steps to protect themselves. But announcing a duplication exploit doesn't protect anyone.

[Itek]

Ok, you WANT a simple one sentence solution to the problem IN THIS SPECIFIC CASE ??

Disable the making of bags for the duration.

No bags, of any kind, can be made with tradeskills or converted to tokens, until we fix it.

(Of course, since the exploit is "fixed" for the time being, we have other issues to deal with, so this drops to the bottom of the pile... don't worry we'll fix it. Right before pathing and warping mobs. Promise.)

Real people, with real degrees, real experience and real knowledge of the code problems have examine this and similar problems for DECADES. I'm sure you can do better. Even though none of your "solutions" are workable, fair, or even close.

As for "well just announce it's a known exploit and then anyone who uses it after the post can be safely banned." ... Try explaining that to THIS POSTER when you ban his account because he didn't read the announcements for months on 2 or 3 separate boards or talk to any other people in the tradeskill community.

Complex problems have no simple solution. Saying the problem ISN'T complex doesn't make it so. Saying there IS a simple solution doesn't make it so.

I love the "make a public example" idea. Who cares if one or ten or twenty dupers get banned ? They are dupers. They will be back. It's what they LIVE for, and being proven successful at duping to the point of being banned is a BADGE of HONOR for them.

There are people that FRAME their tickets for speeding over 120 miles an hour. You can't fix the psychology of broken people.

YOU live in fear of being banned, because you don't want to be banned. So you can't imagine someone WANTING to be banned. But I assure you that in the 300 thousand people that play this game there ARE people who WANT to be banned. If 99.99 percent of folks don't want to be banned that's still 30 that do. Even if the odds are half as much as catching meningitis (2.1 in 100,000) that's still 3 folks that would be happier if they got banned.

[Bobaten]

This exploit had nothing to do with making bags or converting to tokens. Disabling the ability to make bags would change nothing.

[Reorx]

Yroc Morf-
...
"Log every transaction" is the typical naive response to this situation. It's unworkable. Logs take time, processor and disk, and slow the system down. A lot. And run behind.
...

I would say its not so much unworkable within the scope of EQ but more inefficient, and thus mostly worthless for the purpose we're discussing.

Remember that EQ splits up every world into multiple servers so you're not talking about one big machine being responsible for logging *everything*. Rather for the 2000 players on a world at a time there are 20-30 physical servers being used (according to this article). That's a 'mere' 100 players per machine on average.

Consider if we wanted to log all transactions (trades, buys, sells). Assume each 100 players made 1000 transactions per day and each entry consumed 100 bytes. That works out to around 10MB per day (1 transaction/sec) which is close to nothing. I have a low-end web server logging 1GB/day (35 transactions/sec) which shows no measureable benefit if logging is disabled.

Depending on the type of logging the bottleneck involved is usually the disk IO. If the rest of the machine is doing heavy IO then logging, even minor, can definitely have a significant impact. My guess is that EQ servers don't use the disk much and would be more CPU/memory limited than anything.

As I said the main reason not to extend logging is simply because it is inefficient. If you wanted to catch duppers you'd have to either manually dig and trace items or create some sort of automated program to help you. Either way you're left with the issue of not being able to track individual instances of items. Again I'm guessing here (I seem to be doing a lot of that), but from what it seems the game does not distinguish between multiple instances of items. The Hand Made Backpack I just made has the exact same data as the one you just made.

In other games (Morrowind/Oblivion for example, not sure if other MMOs do this) multiple instances are given unique IDs. So the Backpack I made would be given a unique ID of 12345 and yours would be 12346. If I sell my Backpack to a vendor it keeps its ID of 12345. This makes tracking an individual item trivial but requires the game engine to be designed to handle from the ground up....which EQ most probably doesn't have (and asking a dev to add this at this point will likely result in derisive laughter).

Of course this is mostly (all?) speculation but I would wager we don't see more things being done simply because the effort is not worth the gain and not because of technical issues.

[Marissas]

As far as the fair and marketable price for AAAA:

It may only be *roughly* 17k for vendor items, assuming EVERY single other component is dropped not bazaar purchased (which is nearly impossible to do and entirely untimely) but the amount of clicking (even if its saved in your UI) and level of skill required in the numerous different tradeskills by far outweighs the actual cost of making it IMO.

If I pay 17k to vendors pay another 20k for items in bazaar and farm the rest of the components for six weeks, I've actually spent 37k in plat and priceless amounts of time to create 1 AAAA.

After making my first AAAA I decided that niether was it worthy of my *priceless* time but it wasnt profitable either. The only time I will EVER do this combine is for a guildy who needs it, and never using my regeants or money.

If this was Sony's ill attempt at "pimping" out the true tradeskillers in game.... it fell way short of the mark IMO.