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What happens when bugs affect the in-game economy
Wandering Mist
Moderator, Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDXTEBKfoYUThis is a rather interesting situation. For those who can't be bothered watching the video the TLDR of it is that a bug was introduced to a game that allowed players guaranteed rare item drops that could then be traded to others. This bug pretty much crashed the in-game economy and the devs had to react quickly to deal with it.
In terms of the devs response to the problem, I feel they handled it well, with good communication to the players and a good solution at the end of it.
I would like to think that something like this would never happen to Ashes, but you never know.
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The bigger bugs are Item or Currency Dup bugs.. Those need to be squashed almost instantly or there can, ad would be, extremely long lasting effects on the entire game/economy.
There have even been a few instances where patches and even the game itself was rolled back hours or a day.. Everyone was pissed they lost that game time and progress but most understood why it had to happen..
MMO's keep logs of every action performed by players that requires server validation, it's A LOTTTT of information, but necessary for these kinds of events.
So let's say there's a bug with selling X item for a higher amount than usual or killing X mob for increased drops. They can write a script to parse the logs that tally each players count for selling/killing during the affected period, compare it to normal periods before and see unusual behavior. Say an average player might kill that mob 20 times a day. Well, it's going to look a bit off in the logs if someone suddenly has killed that mob 437 times in the last day.
Comparing this to team fortress is a non-factor in comparison. The huge issue with team fortress is that there was real money involved. People were suddenly paying out-the-ass for lootboxes via steams trading. When you start trying to track real money transactions... Things get complicated, especially when it's non-linear. How do you find out when the community actually found out and started buying these things? You have to pick an arbitrary point on a curve.
You might be able to punish the biggest offenders, but managing an in-game economy when it comes to exploits is much easier. If there was ever a system employed where you could sell real money items for in-game currency and there was a bug where the item was listed in-correctly, then I could see this scenario maybe happening, but Ashes doesn't use straight $$$ -> In-Game Currency.
As far as I know Ashes doesn't have a unified currency either, which further adds containment if something like this were to happen. It would most likely only affect a specific node or types of nodes.
Addon Developer
OG Backer
I agree that real world money being involved complicates things, but the concept is similar to what you might see in an mmorpg. And it's not about punishing offenders, but in stabilizing the in-game economy after the bug has thrown it out of balance.
I don't think that turning back the clock as it were is a very good idea in this scenario. The backlash from such an action would probably cause more problems than the bug itself did.
Total Bullshit example here, but it will demonstrate the point.
Say a recipe for a Siege Tower should be
1,000 Lumber
500 Iron
500 Stone
and 10 Siege Mechanic Devices (and this is the WTF expensive part)
So, a bug occurs where instead of 10 Siege Mechanic Devices you only need 1.
Now everyone is off to the races buying up all the Lumber, Iron and Stone and cause the prices of this to skyrocket. Every Tom, Dick, Harry, April, May and June with a pickaxe, a shovel and an axe race out to the woods and basically strip mine and deforest Verra to nothing.
Now, at this point what do the devs do to fix the problem?
Do they roll back to all the siege weapon makers and break down all their siege towers and return to them 1,000 lumbers, 500 iron, 500 stone and 1 Siege Mechanic Device? I mean that is doable, but now those people are going to be sitting on a fuck ton of mats. Granted they made the decision to buy those mats BUT
The prices they paid were only due to the inflation of the mad rush to produce Siege Towers.
Do you force roll back all of the Lumber and other mats back to the original sellers giving the siege crafters back their gold and the original suppliers back their materials? I mean this seems somewhat fair, but now what about the guy who needed to build 10 Siege Ladders during the time where the price was artificially inflated?
The Siege Ladder guy used to pay 10 gold for 1,000 lumber. During this inflation due to a bug he had to buy lumber but he paid 25 gold per 1,000 lumber. The only reason why he paid more was because of the bug, but he's not likely going to be compensated.
Do you do a full server rollback? Well what about the guy who found a legendary during that time. Now he gets fucked.
Its never easy to fix a player driven economy, too many moving parts.
Yeah unfortunately when a bug affects the entire game it's not just a matter of "fix it and move on".
May be keep the logs from that time period, and let people put in tickets for CS to reimburse rare item drops that people may have had drop in that time.
It would be a CS nightmare, but worth it to keep players happy while still keeping the game economy stable.
The faster an issue is found, the faster action can be taken, and minimize impact on others in the game.. I'd imagine newer game engines, devs can rip, patch, and fix effected players only and not those that are clean.. There really should be no reason to do a complete server rollback unless it is something massive.
it's happened in the past, it sucks, but it is understandable... a short term suckage is better then long term issues and inpacks on the game as a whole..
FLESH IS WEAK!