Elder Scrolls Online Guild Banks Close Thanks to Dupe Bug

[Menigmand]

Hell is the others. Remember how nice RPGs used to be as single player games?

 

[neblogai]

A lot of people here are saying cheating is inexcusable. But in an RPG game where you normally KILL to gain gold, and, and very likely some character class is the THIEF- how can one know that a little bit of alchemistry is wrong?!

 

[c123456]

All these comments seem to be ignoring one of the first statements in the article. This bug was so easily encountered that it could have been done by accident. Banning people isn't the answer here.

 

[neon neophyte]

there is a difference between having something occur by accident and exploiting it.

 

[c123456]

If a person accidentally dupes a 1 million gold item versus a person who purposefully duplicates a million 1 gold items who committed the crime here?

Odds are, since this is a bug, detection methods were not put in place to test frequency of usage.

 

[beetlejuicegr]

Unfortunately i haven't seen a single MMO being above avg in ALL aspects yet, i will stick to WoW , as i did the last 8 years. And yes i have tried from warhammer online and conan, to everquest and dark age of camelot, from gw g2 and rift to swo and eso only on beta.
About the duping and how Zenimax handles it, i will just say that all involved users should get striped and perhaps they should find a way to ban some accounts but not all. Don't forget , this became widespread and that's why it was dealt with, perhaps accounts with certain criteria only should be banned. Excess gold or gear above a hidden number?

 

[neon neophyte]

duping one item isnt crashing the whole economy. the problem is people who dupe and dupe and dupe and dupe and dupe etc etc etc

the idea that there is no difference between an exploiter and someone who had it happen by accident a couple times is ridiculous.

 

[lilcinw]

Hmm...

We often hear economists on news programmes talk about the supposed
natural long term balancing effects of, "market forces". I think it would be
an interesting experiment if all those who have been cheating in this way
were simply moved into an entirely separate but otherwise identical MMO
where the bug is left in place, see what happens, see how that realm's economy
and structures evolve. Probably not feasible as it'd require twice the no. of servers,
etc., but it just intrigues me from the point of view of the way in which companies
create these virtual environments with a set of rules that are intended to control
the game world in various ways.

Sometimes the most interesting events in a game can come from aspects of
how the game can be played which were never intended by the game designers.
An old article explains what I mean:

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/reflections.txt

An example in the sporting world would be an alternative olympics in
which athletes could do whatever the hell they liked wrt body enhancement,
drugs, etc. The standard Olympics is of course supposed to be drug-free,
which really is a bit weird because normal people in everyday life typically
consume all sorts of daily additives, even if it's just vitamin pills. Which do
you think would be more popular over time? The normal Olympics? Or the
alternative in which someone can run the 100m in 5 seconds? I'm betting
the latter for sure. I'd be like seeing comic book heroes for real.

Anyway, just a thought. Don't ban the people who are cheating in ESO. Move
them into an identical but separate version where such behaviour is A-ok, let
that realm evolve in its own way, like an ESO version of Escape From New York.
That way, the players involved keep paying their fees to play the game, they get to
play the way they want, while those who want the normal rules can continue in the
standard realm. The time currently being spent by staff trying to identify offenders
could instead be used to run the other realm.

Ian.

I love this idea. Don't ban them and lose their subscriptions, just move them all to a separate server and let the cheaters cheat each other. It would be fascinating to watch the way the culture progressed on such a server.

As you pointed out the duplication of resources would probably render this untenable but it is more likely that the highest cost would be supporting the separate code paths that leave the various exploits in place rather than the physical cost of servers.

MMOs are ripe for social experimentation/research and I would like to see the results from them.

 

[TyrOd]

Hmm...

We often hear economists on news programmes talk about the supposed
natural long term balancing effects of, "market forces". I think it would be
an interesting experiment if all those who have been cheating in this way
were simply moved into an entirely separate but otherwise identical MMO
where the bug is left in place, see what happens, see how that realm's economy
and structures evolve. Probably not feasible as it'd require twice the no. of servers,
etc., but it just intrigues me from the point of view of the way in which companies
create these virtual environments with a set of rules that are intended to control
the game world in various ways.

Sometimes the most interesting events in a game can come from aspects of
how the game can be played which were never intended by the game designers.
An old article explains what I mean:

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/reflections.txt

An example in the sporting world would be an alternative olympics in
which athletes could do whatever the hell they liked wrt body enhancement,
drugs, etc. The standard Olympics is of course supposed to be drug-free,
which really is a bit weird because normal people in everyday life typically
consume all sorts of daily additives, even if it's just vitamin pills. Which do
you think would be more popular over time? The normal Olympics? Or the
alternative in which someone can run the 100m in 5 seconds? I'm betting
the latter for sure. I'd be like seeing comic book heroes for real.

Anyway, just a thought. Don't ban the people who are cheating in ESO. Move
them into an identical but separate version where such behaviour is A-ok, let
that realm evolve in its own way, like an ESO version of Escape From New York.
That way, the players involved keep paying their fees to play the game, they get to
play the way they want, while those who want the normal rules can continue in the
standard realm. The time currently being spent by staff trying to identify offenders
could instead be used to run the other realm.

Ian.

I love this idea. Don't ban them and lose their subscriptions, just move them all to a separate server and let the cheaters cheat each other. It would be fascinating to watch the way the culture progressed on such a server.

As you pointed out the duplication of resources would probably render this untenable but it is more likely that the highest cost would be supporting the separate code paths that leave the various exploits in place rather than the physical cost of servers.

MMOs are ripe for social experimentation/research and I would like to see the results from them.

It would be tough to get this implemented in ESO because of the way guilds and the megaserver work. You'd have to split them off from the megaserver and from the PvP campaigns and ban them from forming guilds outside of the split off server. Unlike in games like Titanfall where you don't get any notice that you've been put in the "cheater" pool, in ESO you would know right way and it wouldn't work well for the amount of resources it would require to maintain a third megaserver.

 

[Kurdain1]

To be fair any game without item decay will have no real economy anyways.
Once you buy your end game gear/item you're done, you end up with a reverse economy where end game mats/items are vastly cheaper than beginning gear due to the end game glut of items.

 

[gm0n3y]

So when does the next Elder Scroll single player game come out?

 

[TyrOd]

To be fair any game without item decay will have no real economy anyways.
Once you buy your end game gear/item you're done, you end up with a reverse economy where end game mats/items are vastly cheaper than beginning gear due to the end game glut of items.

This is true and most games that get on this kind of "gear treadmill" have the problem of delivering on the content quick enough to satisfy players at endgame.

If we get craglorn size content every 6 weeks I don't expect them to have this kind of problem, but until we see how much they'll be able to deliver, no one can say for sure.

 

[TyrOd]

So when does the next Elder Scroll single player game come out?

Usually takes them ~5 years between titles, so maybe 2016.

 

[Lunatic Magnet]

Ban players for a bug that Zeni failed to catch? They should ban themselves from releasing unfinished games. That's where the action should be taken. They almost deserve it asking $15/mo. for unfinished product.

Since when is an MMO ever "finished", at launch or otherwise?

 

[TyrOd]

Ban players for a bug that Zeni failed to catch? They should ban themselves from releasing unfinished games. That's where the action should be taken. They almost deserve it asking $15/mo. for unfinished product.

Since when is an MMO ever "finished", at launch or otherwise?

I wouldn't have even responded to this kind of post. People seem to think that launch means "bug free" or that everything can be tested in beta, or that a newly launched MMO is somehow going to be mostly similar to other MMO launches.

All of those things are false and even if they were true there would still be many factors beyond the devs control well post launch.

 

[Kurdain1]

To be fair any game without item decay will have no real economy anyways.
Once you buy your end game gear/item you're done, you end up with a reverse economy where end game mats/items are vastly cheaper than beginning gear due to the end game glut of items.

This is true and most games that get on this kind of "gear treadmill" have the problem of delivering on the content quick enough to satisfy players at endgame.

If we get craglorn size content every 6 weeks I don't expect them to have this kind of problem, but until we see how much they'll be able to deliver, no one can say for sure.

Yeah,
Sad thing is that only works for a while.
Epic, ultra-rare, fabled, super-duper items become CRAP with the next patch.
"Yo I have a shield with +999,999 hit points"
"Dude that's crap you noob, I have one with +1,000,000,000 hit points"

Few games, EVE for one, actually have a real economy that works...because stuff gets lost all the time, thus creating a healthy demand across all aspects of the game.
DAoC was another one, at least at lunch when I played, but haven't played in what, a decade so I can't comment what it is now.

 

[TyrOd]

To be fair any game without item decay will have no real economy anyways.
Once you buy your end game gear/item you're done, you end up with a reverse economy where end game mats/items are vastly cheaper than beginning gear due to the end game glut of items.

This is true and most games that get on this kind of "gear treadmill" have the problem of delivering on the content quick enough to satisfy players at endgame.

If we get craglorn size content every 6 weeks I don't expect them to have this kind of problem, but until we see how much they'll be able to deliver, no one can say for sure.

Yeah,
Sad thing is that only works for a while.
Epic, ultra-rare, fabled, super-duper items become CRAP with the next patch.
"Yo I have a shield with +999,999 hit points"
"Dude that's crap you noob, I have one with +1,000,000,000 hit points"

Few games, EVE for one, actually have a real economy that works...because stuff gets lost all the time, thus creating a healthy demand across all aspects of the game.
DAoC was another one, at least at lunch when I played, but haven't played in what, a decade so I can't comment what it is now.

Well I think DAoC has been shut down for a while, though there are rumors of a reboot.
I agree though, I would say that the fact that crafting allows you the ability to produce and recycle materials with a lot of flexibility in ESO helps solve that problem because stuff does eventually get destroyed voluntarily because it is cheaper to replace and Deconstruct than to repair in many cases. If anything that's a positive balance for the health of the economy.

Edit: DAoC is still running but there are studio changes coming not a reboot.

 

[Zombie615]

None of this matters because this game is just another money grab piece of crap. - THE END -

 

[cats_Paw]

This is Curious.
Personally I gave up on Bethesda after skyrim was poorly ported to PC in the first place (before high resolution pack and mods to fix the horrible inventory system), but this is something that might doom the game as far as high amount of people playing it is concerned.

MMORGS usually are a hard to pull off endevour, and over all After I tried a few, I only sticked with Guild Wars 1.
Not that its the best game ever, but few things there really made the game unplayable for me.

On the banning side, I dont think it matters that much, You are supposed to pay each month for this game so I assume Bethesda will soon allow free entry for like a week or so, If you just pay the monthly fee.

One thing I dont understand is why people are surprised that most people exploited the bug.
We live in a world of people with rather low morality, everyone out for themselves and so on. I dont really know what will happen to TES Online from this moment on, but it will be interesting to watch it unfold.
I still think however that an MMORG by bethesda was not a smart choice. Id go for multiplayer and CO-OP first and leave as many single player elements in the game as possible, but I assume bethesda wanted some of the WoW piece of cake that blizzard as been engulfing for the last years.

 

[neon neophyte]

poor coding or not, bethesda makes some of the greatest single player rpgs every made. hard to give that up.

and yes, all we wanted was skyrim co-op. not another damn mmo.

 

[TyrOd]

This is Curious.
Personally I gave up on Bethesda after skyrim was poorly ported to PC in the first place (before high resolution pack and mods to fix the horrible inventory system), but this is something that might doom the game as far as high amount of people playing it is concerned.

MMORGS usually are a hard to pull off endevour, and over all After I tried a few, I only sticked with Guild Wars 1.
Not that its the best game ever, but few things there really made the game unplayable for me.

On the banning side, I dont think it matters that much, You are supposed to pay each month for this game so I assume Bethesda will soon allow free entry for like a week or so, If you just pay the monthly fee.

One thing I dont understand is why people are surprised that most people exploited the bug.
We live in a world of people with rather low morality, everyone out for themselves and so on. I dont really know what will happen to TES Online from this moment on, but it will be interesting to watch it unfold.
I still think however that an MMORG by bethesda was not a smart choice. Id go for multiplayer and CO-OP first and leave as many single player elements in the game as possible, but I assume bethesda wanted some of the WoW piece of cake that blizzard as been engulfing for the last years.

This is not really Bethesda, they are only publishing the game. Zenimax Online Studios was created to create online games starting with this one.
There's no reason why Bethesda won't have a Co-OP TES:6 game mode. It's not either/or, they just started a new branch of TES thorugh an MMO.

 

[Zombie615]

poor coding or not, bethesda makes some of the greatest single player rpgs every made. hard to give that up.

and yes, all we wanted was skyrim co-op. not another damn mmo.

my opinion exactly

 

[martel80]

Why the hell do they need other people to report speed hacking? Are the developers so retarded that they can't implement some basic automated hack detection?

Something like... periodically take a snapshot of everyone's position and calculate distance from their previous position, then compute average speed. In case the speed exceeds maximum possible (and the player did not use teleport), start sending automated warnings to the player. Multiple warnings = ban.

 

[TyrOd]

Why the hell do they need other people to report speed hacking? Are the developers so retarded that they can't implement some basic automated hack detection?

Something like... periodically take a snapshot of everyone's position and calculate distance from their previous position, then compute average speed. In case the speed exceeds maximum possible (and the player did not use teleport), start sending automated warnings to the player. Multiple warnings = ban.

"Something like..."?
That's an absurd oversimplification. The whole concept of "basic automated hack detection" is an oxymoron.
It's an ongoing process in all software environments to combat hacks as they are developed. There can be no "basic" process that doesn't immediate get circumvented. It's a battle of resources against the hackers in the community, and it's an uphill battle at that.

Making light of it is just silly.

 

[InvalidError]

The whole concept of "basic automated hack detection" is an oxymoron.

When you deal with a server-based multiplayer games, there is a simple way of preventing several if not all obvious hacks and exploits: server-side checking. If the player's client tries to do anything that should be impossible such as moving at 1000% speed when using a 300% speed mount or moving through impassable walls, log the context and action then reset the client's state to the last known-good state on the server or disconnect the client.