11,177 Shaped Taafeite on Merchant Tekrama

[Amparo]

2/10/2008 on Tunare server. I am looking at the vendor right now.

So, what is the nature of this particular exploit/hack? Is it a known issue?

[Orelli Virbonus]

I came across the same issue on Povar, only it was 6,880. Same item, same vendor. I did a bug report to bring it to someone's attention, because it seemed pretty suspicious to me.

[Minky]

Same on the Nameless... up to 14,427 last I saw, same merchant in the bazaar.

[Tobynn]

I checked every merchant in bazaar on Bristlebane, zero shaped taffies on any of them except for Tekrama .. he's got a couple thousand (and bazaar crashed about 10 hours ago so its a very recent couple thousand).

[Orelli Virbonus]

Checked again on Povar. Tekrama has 5000+ (so he must have been reset since last I checked his inventory.) The vendor to his immediate right had another 300. Even though a lot of the pther vendors had plenty of space, I didn't see anything suspicious. (I did find a single shaped taaffeite on one of the other vendors, but he also had a couple shaped nihilite and a real harmonagate (!) so that was probably someone off-loading some loot.)

/uptime says the bazaar went down 20 minutes prior, though I don't know for sure if vendors stock gets reset on every single crash.

[Ngreth Thergn]

We are aware of this. I am not sure what steps are currently being taken though.

[Maevenniia]

I saw a coupel of merchants with 190 and 484 shaped taafeeite respectively on Quellious, I submitted a /bug while targeting the one that had 484, as I was suspicious, given the patch had just happened, I suspected another exploit similar to teh the one with the various sorts of diamonds from a few months ago. I see I was correct.

Thank goodness exploiters are greedy and not too careful about selling too many items to the same vendor, makes them easy to detect, lol

[Tobynn]

Since earlier this morning, Merchant Tekrama's inventory of Shaped Taffies has increased by approx 21,000 pieces. That's 12 million platz paid out for vendor trash in a few hours. I hope someone is doing more than just being aware of it.

Not Ngreth's baby, this I know ~

[Maevenniia]

Well, since we know Devs are aware of the problem, hopefully that new activity you see was monitored by whatever tools the GMS/Devs use to catch exploits....like I said before, thank goodness exploiters are DUMB and obvious and greedy, lol....makes em easier to catch.

[Roanne]

The devs have a bad track record in this regard and all signs indicate nothing has changed.

Remember when AAAA were being duplicated?

I dont really trust the devs to do more than eventually getting around to closing the loophole making the exploit possible. The economy will then live with the inflation caused by all the "free" pp that entered the game because it will become too cumbersome to figure out what pp is legitimate against what isnt as it is traded around over time. Its probably already too late even if they intervened today.

[Bobaten]

Just out of curiosity, 6 months later, has there been any lasting change to the AAAA market on servers that were affected? Prexus didn't have any blatant dupers, and I was always expecting someone to server transfer over with a few dozen AAAA to make some plat based on our prices, but it never happened.

[Catweazel]

On CT it took a month or more for the duped AAAA's to finally disappear. The dupers made a killing during the crazy early days of cultural materials dropping with abandon. One particular person who has since run out probably sold 30 or 40. I would estimate over 100 duped boxes were sold during this time, probably twice more exchanged hands outside of the bazaar.

We are now down to the regular crew plus a few new Tinkerers I assume - about 4 or 5 of us. I do not really bother any more as I make enough for guildees and the occasional one to recoup my costs.

Opal, Basic and Golden boxes hardly sell at all.

In hindsight it is interesting that a bug related to tradeskill drops helped wipe out the dupe bug supplies sooner than if everything had gone in as planned.....a case of two wrongs making a right!!

[Sharrien]

Question I have is whether or not honest traders are at risk while all this illegal plat is at play. Like 2 years or so ago there was some exploit (plat duping?) that triggered a bunch of bannings and also a ton of rollbacks of those who had transactions with the exploiters.

Should I be worried that I might get rolled back if some jerk without morals buys some stuff from my baz trader before he gets caught and banned?

[thomenthechanter]

See Roanne's post, Sharrien --- it'd be a devil of a time to figure out what transactions were legitimate and which ones were money laundering.

[Xenephex]

Question I have is whether or not honest traders are at risk while all this illegal plat is at play. Like 2 years or so ago there was some exploit (plat duping?) that triggered a bunch of bannings and also a ton of rollbacks of those who had transactions with the exploiters.

Should I be worried that I might get rolled back if some jerk without morals buys some stuff from my baz trader before he gets caught and banned?

The one I remember from a couple years ago was when someone (who will not be named ) accidentally left a bunch of beta vendors up in PoK who had an endless supply of a variety of items that were normally either dropped or foraged.

The exploiters bought up a ton of these and then sold them in the bazaar at 'bargain' prices. The rollback, if I remember correctly, hit people who happened to buy any of those items from those bazaar vendors, innocently or not.

I don't recall any instance where they attempted to 'follow the money' and rollback people who had sold something for 'dirty' money.