Gold dupe in new patch?

[Zamar]

Originally Posted by Yermum Onceme

If you know whats required to max engineering and that new skill, I can give you a good idea of what mats will sell great...

What's in max engineering anyway? from what I saw on beta it was quite useless

[Sancus]

Not only did they suspend people who received any gold at all, they're also zeroing people's gold out when they unsuspend. Regardless of whether any of that gold was legit or not.

Sounds like it's getting pretty messy.

[Elerion]

Originally Posted by Sancus

Not only did they suspend people who received any gold at all, they're also zeroing people's gold out when they unsuspend.

And worse, they haven't caught nearly everyone with "special" gold.

I really hope the reason they didn't just rollback fast and early was because they don't know the source of the gold.

[Tholan]

I'm glad I'm using Linux, that way I can get my gold back !

[Cadrid]

Originally Posted by Sancus

Not only did they suspend people who received any gold at all, they're also zeroing people's gold out when they unsuspend. Regardless of whether any of that gold was legit or not.

Sounds like it's getting pretty messy.

I don't understand why companies that rely on recurring payments from customers think it's alright to pull this kind of stuff. Would it be harder to just get rid of the bad gold and ban the sources of the dupe currency without screwing over players completely? Almost certainly. However, in any business that can have return customers, it's far tougher and more expensive to get a new customer than it is to retain an old one. For every one person that quits as a result of this poor management decision, it will cost them anywhere from twice to five times as much to get a new player.

Yes, I realize with 7 million players Blizzard doesn't really care about a few thousand annoyed players. They're top dog and they can afford to pull this kind of crap. SoE thought the same thing with EQ, though, and in the end it will always come back to bite them in the ass; when Timmy is looking to play an MMO after some upcoming releases, is he going to play WoW, even though his friend Tommy griped about being unjustly punished, or will they go try Vanguard/Conan/Warhammer/some other MMO together without such a stigma?

My bet is on the latter.

[Deris]

Originally Posted by Sancus

Not only did they suspend people who received any gold at all, they're also zeroing people's gold out when they unsuspend. Regardless of whether any of that gold was legit or not.

And whose word are you taking this on? :> I'm sure it isn't difficult to track gold for them, so something as arbitrary as this seems a little out of place.

[Sancus]

Originally Posted by Deris

And whose word are you taking this on? :> I'm sure it isn't difficult to track gold for them, so something as arbitrary as this seems a little out of place.

First person reports from multiple people on Mannoroth who had their accounts suspended, on the EJ forums. It may "seem a little out of place", but it's happening.

Really, though, as Elerion posted above, the WORST part of this is that some people are apparently unsuspended and walking around with tons of duped gold and haven't had anything done to them.

Mannoroth's economy is still completely fucked.

[Thhin]

I'm sure us players who've played a while will remeber server rollbacks when it crashes..... surely they can rollback the server a day or 2 rather then this mess of trying to sort out all sorts of crap (which seems impossible to do with a degree of accuracy).

[Big W Powah!]

Originally Posted by Requiem

I dunno but aparently they're too good for over 32gb of ram, 8 real procs, full hardware redundancy, cisco switching/load balancing, a 400 man vent server, a vBulletin license and a gigabit connection for free.

(I feel the need to say "real" because MY mysql server sits at 0.08 load average serving fohguild.org and dtguild.com, among other intensive things like the forumspy and the tracking system for the ads, even during the stress test. If they really do have 8 processors in place they are p2's or something - or maybe they just need alot more ram.)

If you don't mind me asking, what method of parity and what drive setup are you using?

(If you'd prefer not disclose it, then by all means, I understand. Just curious)

[Tuco]

I imagine they have a team of people or at least a bit of implementation designed to mitigate and manage the risk of a gold dupe. I mean, it's bound to happen in any MMO with gold and a large following (replace plat for gold in EQ

I'd be pretty surprised if they handled it as people are saying they are (semi-arbitrary of banning of accounts). Ideally you could assign each gold piece a specific address and some way to ensure its legitimacy, but I imagine that's unfeasible.

Either way I'm reluctant to believe in some of the bannings said until I see some further information about it, just because I assume Blizzard has a more mature way to recover from a gold dupe.

[Praetor]

Originally Posted by Tuco

Either way I'm reluctant to believe in some of the bannings said until I see some further information about it, just because I assume Blizzard has a more mature way to recover from a gold dupe.

Eh, well, this isn't a case of "hey my brother's cousin knows this guy at school who totally got banned and lost all his gold." There are recognizable players from major endgame guilds who are saying, directly and without any anonymity or secondhand elements to their stories, that they personally had their accounts locked, lost gold, etc. I find that fairly credible.

[RunningDog]

Originally Posted by Praetor

Eh, well, this isn't a case of "hey my brother's cousin knows this guy at school who totally got banned and lost all his gold." There are recognizable players from major endgame guilds who are saying, directly and without any anonymity or secondhand elements to their stories, that they personally had their accounts locked, lost gold, etc. I find that fairly credible.

I've not heard of anyone lose gold who didnt receive "tainted" gold. Once people realised something fishy was going on with the AH a lot of them put items up for sale at huge prices, and got several thousand gold in the process, followed by an account suspension and loss of all gold upon reactivation. Were they exploiting? Its debatable, since auctioning an item doesnt guarantee it will sell.

I read some people got gold in the post, or simply didn't set a buy-out limit on items. That's a tough break, since there's no way Blizzard can tell whether or not they asked for it, but it's a dirty trick by the exploiters who figured if they spread the gold as much as possible then Blizzard wouldn't be able to get everyone. A GM ticket or email to Blizzard might work to get original gold back, but I wouldn't hold out much hope if you auctioned your nexus shard for a 9k buyout.

There are reports that not everyone was caught. As Blizzzard have clamped down hard on discussing the problem it's difficult to say how many got away, but I'm guessing it's only a temporary weekend reprieve.

[frott]

Originally Posted by RunningDog

I've not heard of anyone lose gold who didnt receive "tainted" gold. Once people realised something fishy was going on with the AH a lot of them put items up for sale at huge prices, and got several thousand gold in the process, followed by an account suspension and loss of all gold upon reactivation. Were they exploiting? Its debatable, since auctioning an item doesnt guarantee it will sell.

Clearly your hand is on the pulse of every paying customer of Blizz. Drop the "there must be a valid reason for why someone got banned" stance, it doesn't make sense with how quickly this shit spread. One can only assume that it involves "having gold flagged as duped" but who knows what that entails? Is every piece of currency in this game serialized? How can you sort out what exchanged to get under the radar and what was innocent?

The only people you can reliably take out are those who suddenly gained X amount of gold for doing nothing. Any smart duper does it in trace, unrecognizable amounts at large intervals. Another method is to do a massive amount and send half to one person, half to another, each person then sending half to two people. By the end you have this massive amount spread over your 2,000 accounts on chars named Fghjahjjsjsj and can expect some major success rate even considering the bannings of the accounts (that you probably stole via ripping open boxes and gamecards).

By the time you realize duping is happening it has already spread through the econ. Thus the only people who can get nailed with any proof are the script kids who got a hold of it and thought it would be worth the price of admission to blatantly do this.

I have an AH bot, and what, if someone decided to spam buy my tons of marked up enchanting materials ($$$ with the new free epics pvp system, btw) and put a few K gold into my hands I should get banned? Yea, sure. I easily turn over 200-300g daily playing the AH...

pro-tip: people who have duped gold use it to buy things.

[Requiem]

Originally Posted by Big W Powah!

If you don't mind me asking, what method of parity and what drive setup are you using?

(If you'd prefer not disclose it, then by all means, I understand. Just curious)

The server dedicated to mysql has 6 300gb U320 10krpm SCA fujitsu enterprise drives in it which are managed using mdraid. The boot and swap partitions are raid-1(the swap partition is raid-1 to ensure operation even if a drive dies - the box has 16gb of ram so it's never swapping anyway) and the root partition is a 862gb raid-10 reiserfs volume. That box has 2 dual-core opteron 280's in it and it's running a really lean gentoo install. (~200k kernel)

[AladainAF]

I don't understand why companies that rely on recurring payments from customers think it's alright to pull this kind of stuff.

Because you keep paying them every month.