Possible Bazaar Exploit

[Reorx]

Just a note about a new possible bazaar exploit (I have not tested it myself). If you are to believe this post on the official forums then selling stacks of items worth more than 4 million pp may result in you losing money on the sale.

The exploit might be obvious to some people but I won't spoil it until its confirmed and fixed or turns out not to exist. The barter side may well have a similar issue with sales of stacks over 4 million (I'm far too poor to test this unfortunately).

I'm half-surprised to see this sort of bug still in the game and half wondering how many more similar bugs are out there. Wasn't there a related bug/exploit like this fixed some time ago?

[Zolina]

Here's exactly what happened: they apparently store Bazaar prices as an unsigned long integer (in copper pieces). 17 * 300k plat = 5,100,000,000 copper. The maximum size of an unsigned long integer is 256^4 = 4,294,967,296. So if you try storing 5,100,000,000 in the unsigned long integer, it rolls over and you end up with 5,100,000,000 - 4,294,967,296 = 805,032,704 = 805k plat and change just like the Bazaar guy experienced.

Moral: don't set up more than 4,294,967 pp in any one stack of Bazaar items.

If the devs want a quick fix, put some code like this into the Bazzar purchase script:
double number, price;
number = get_number_purchased();
price = get_item_price();
if ( number * price > 4000000000.0 )
{
display_error("You can't purchase more than 4,000,000 platinum in items in one transaction.");
cancel_purchase();
}

[Ngreth Thergn]

Without looking at the code, I expect that Zolina is correct.