OH GOD THE RUSSIANS ARE ATTACKING

tru.pairadocs · Posted: Wed Nov 23, 2011 5:23 pm Post subject: OH GOD THE RUSSIANS ARE ATTACKING

In case you are too lazy to read the below links, here is the summary: some people found a way to duplicate items, so far they have done Max Heads and some God-Tier unusuals. This is the reason why in-game trading is currently disabled (as in-game trade was how they were able to duplicate the items)

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2248396

http://sourceop.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=93893&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
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Vlad Piranha · Posted: Wed Nov 23, 2011 11:36 pm Post subject:

Unlike Blizzard, Valve seems to care when foreigners try to break game economies and scam the hell out of people.

Messy Recipe · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 12:22 am Post subject:

Damn, wish I'd been able to use this to duplicate refined and keys
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ABC News wrote:

Birds can disable planes, Ostrom said, by flying into the engines and shutting them down.

atatme · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 10:15 am Post subject:

Vlad Piranha wrote:

Unlike Blizzard, Valve seems to care when foreigners try to break game economies and scam the hell out of people.

What is this statement based on? Did someone break WoW again or something?

Nugget · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 10:22 am Post subject:

atatme wrote:

Vlad Piranha wrote:

Unlike Blizzard, Valve seems to care when foreigners try to break game economies and scam the hell out of people.

What is this statement based on? Did someone break WoW again or something?

I don't know anything about WoW, but in D2 duping is rampant. There might be an insider that allowed these dupe methods to go unfixed or some shit like that and make some money from third party stores.
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Stealth · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 10:55 am Post subject:

In WoW, Blizzard doesn't do anything to eliminate gold farmers and it thus lowers the prices of all crafted items exponentially. As well as lower the prices of initial mats so low, that making a profit off of them is impossible unless you farm like a gold farmer.

In the economy, there is NO stability and the prices fluctuate so rapidly that you can barely judge what an item is actually worth.

While although this helps consumers for the most part, if you're wanting to sell, you will have a hard time doing so. Gold farmers will spend hours farming and as long as the item doesn't drop below vendor status, they will undercut you.

Legitimate crafters can only cut so low before they lose a profit when they're crafting an Epic, which are already most certainly undercut so low as it is. Most of the time, a profit of 100g on a crafted epic is common, which is peanuts compared to the high prices of "extreme" items on the server.

Ex: Basic gear that is essentially useless: 250g.
Epic Required to be decent at raiding: 40,000+g
Average gold a player carries: 1-4k gold

Before they started to give away free trials, the economy was far more stable.
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Motherfucking Triangles! Being all three sided n' shit, who do they think they are?!

tru.pairadocs · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 11:11 am Post subject:

Vlad Piranha wrote:

Unlike Blizzard, Valve seems to care when foreigners try to break game economies and scam the hell out of people.

I can personally vouch for that,

If you all remember when the Steam forums were defaced a few weeks ago, multiple high profile unusual trader accounts were hacked as well. Long story short I was friends with one of those people and traded one of my unusuals to him but it turned out that day that it was not the real dude but actually some Argentinan hacker. The hacker ran off with my unusual hat and that guys 100+ unusuals and the unusuals of 10 other people he scammed. Steam quickly locked the account and reversed all the trades/replaced my hat and all the other guys items without duplicating them (because if they duplicate all those guy's god tier unusuals the market would crash).

Basically Valve makes a shitload of money off its item store and the like, so they are doing everything possible to keep it secure/stable.

Also random note on how they were duplicating items: The people ingame and steam traded at the exact same time, and the items would be traded but would also stay in their backpack, thus being duplicated. This has since been fixed so dont bother trying Wink

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Erwin Rommel · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 11:56 am Post subject:

How did people not abuse that sooner?
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-=|CT|=-Descartes

Eugene · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 12:36 pm Post subject:

I love Blizzard as I feel they are the best at balancing RTS. (WC3, SC:BW, SC2) however there responses are slow and extremely dumb. Since both stealth and Vlad have explained the gold farming situation I want to explain some of the other Blizzard is slow to respond situations:

SC2:
A drophack is someone who when you get into a game with causes you to drop and give him a free win. I don't know the mechanics behind it but its cheating so I honestly don't care. Anyway, in September a drophacker got to #1 on the NA ladder with a record of 103-0. He was reported and his account was suspended, after a week of being #1, because Blizzard wanted to wait and watch. Furthermore he was not removed from his number one slot, and was left there for 2 weeks before the GM idle system demoted him to masters. A cheater was #1 for 3 weeks.

WoW:
This one is from personal experience. Now for those of you who have played WoW, you know what the CTF map is, and I was sitting in it leveling my mage. (One win=1/3 total exp for the level, and I was quite good at that game) Anyway, I happen to meet a hacker who was speeding across the map and could go from his base to out flag room and back in less than 10 seconds. I met this individual 3 matches in a row, basically my friend and I who happened to be the top DPS were forced to sit in flag room and as soon as we saw him cap the flag we stunned/rooted him to death. I reported this individual and he was no on for two weeks, then he was on and getting gear and level again. A blatant cheater was not banned from their game, which John Stewart Mills would agree with is not the moral thing to do. (sorry for the philosophy throw in but, I have a paper on him due Tuesday.)

TL;DR: Blizz can balance RTS, but their response to hacking fucking blows.