In all honestly my friend and I thought it was just a bunch of rich players quitting. (like a big guild) It would be entirely possible for a few players to setup this themselves and ravage the market for a short time. So I really thought nothing of it as a bug and shoved my 3500 ce into the market at 35x50k. And oddly enough the time the next spike hit I had 1.6M crowns in my inventory. Yeah, just 1.6M. There are players in this game that have 10-20M+ so it wasn't a big surprise to me. So I bought my CE back and did it again. Another spike hit and I gained another mass of crowns but only about another 600k instead. So in the end I myself gained 2.2M which is easily out shadowed by most high end merchants and run farmers. I really though nothing of it and fully expected to see a post from a GM saying it was just a wave of players smashing the CE market.
CE market
Wow it's just one thing after another with this game isn't it? People stop raging about one thing, then something else comes up and the raging ensues once again. I'll just stick to Borderlands 2 for a while...
Well I would hope my little quote about how FUBAR OOO's situation was wouldn't cause too much trouble. Shall I remove it Eury?
Anyway, about Pawn being banned, weren't there a similar outbursts like this?
Everyone acts like nothing is supposed to go wrong, we don't live in that kind of world people...
Many players are asking why OOO took an entire of FOUR hours or so to stop this problem.
Many players don't know how programming and coding work.
I think this is proof enough that a free market exists and that players can drive up the prices however they want.
If this was a rigged market, you would never see this happening. >=3
I saw the CE prices go up to 34k. But my friends claim that it managed to go up to 100k! Honestly, I feel awfully sorry for those people who just started the game, and wanted to craft something. I don't remember any tier run (unless you do it from beginning to end, even then I doubt it) rewarding more than 9,000cr. Lets say your just started the game and you are in Tier 1, about to get your Tier 2 certification. You just need 100 more CE to craft that Wolver Coat of yours. You have 10k which took you about a week to earn, after opening the CE tab the only though that comes to your mind is "WTF?" Honestly, 100k???
Still, I'm relieved that the CE price was back at a reasonable 9k the last time I checked.
Makes you wonder how CE prices were only 3k during beta.
Look, I can cut OOO some slack for mismanagement. (Especially since I supported not doing a rollback earlier, when I didn't know there'd been a hack/exploit involved. I imagine even OOO needed some time to confirm this.) But they should cut players slack for their understandable anger, too. Pawn did not deserve this ban.
Lol, this is still going on?
re Pawn: there's a difference between being angry about something that hardly affects you, deciding to whine, ragequit etc...and deciding to blame everything bad that ever happened in the world on the Devs who he's now in a huff at. Plenty of people here were upset and never got banned because they kept civil and rational about it. He threw a tantrum and got banned; consequences happen. Who cares, he was quitting anyways, right? *shrug*
Am I the only one who doesn't care about this at all? Oh well, someone got few millions for free, so what? Most players in the game don't even know what happened or/and it didn't affect them in any respect, market was back to normal within few hours. I guess the reason why people are angry because they weren't online at the right time.
I don't know why do you think Pawn didn't deserve his forum ban, perhaps insulting admins is a regular practice here? Just read his posts again, what would you do in their place?
Cronus made this thread worthwhile.
I abused it also and wouldn't of had a problem with a rollback if I got my $10 back.. Yeah I had to rush buy a ce package because I had nothing to sell.
And there's our reason OOO doesn't bother. I wonder how many ce transactions above normal occurred during this time period. I believe the term for not adhering to principles because the money is good is "selling out."
Giving people their money back on a rollback would be ludicrously simple. OOO definitely has mechanisms in place to track when exactly you buy ce, so they can do any refunds for the effected timeslot. But that would mean giving... refunds. That is something they would only do when getting completely wasted on rakk ale.
...Though reading farther into this thread, I'm certainly not the only one who's thought of this. Good to see.
Wait, what? You don't care but read through all 5 pages? Wait!! Why did you come here to begin with?
@Guyinshinyarmour: That's not the issue. Even if they rolled back the game, they wouldn't refund the ce purchases, so that's not the issue. Even if people thought the market was a legitimate happening, it was still their choice to buy ce at that time and in no way do they deserve a refund of money. That just doesn't factor into it at all, because people can cry about refunds all they want but...well "you bought ce to abuse an exploit in game. Why the hell should we refund your money now that you lost the exploited crowns?"
If they got more ce purchases than normal (which, I don't see being a very high amount, considering the whole fiasco was over in under ten minutes) then OOO win out because of player greed, whether they rollback or not.
@Hellophippo: Shav-vi meant that s/he didnae care about the market fluctuations and would likely be more bothered by a rollback than not, seeing as the whole event had little to no effect on him/her, not that s/he didnae care about the thread. Honestly, this whole thread is gold with the amount of tantrums being thrown~
I don't know what side to pick. Oh wait, yes I do. I choose the ____ side.
To be honest, it seemed to me this was like the crystal bomb update or perhaps lottery..?
I wasnt online at that time when the update mail came up. If not, I will ragecraft crystal bombs, sun shards and radiant sun shards to get the free uv tickets!
Was I angry..? A little but feeling more of unfair and A LOT MORE of a pity.
Was it an exploit..? Maybe..? It can be seen as exploit since players who made a big fortune made good use of this chance.
But strictly speaking, these players DID NOT do anything illegal. They just crafted and benefited from it while others missed the chance.
For this time round, exploit?
Maybe.. earning crs from unknown source..?
These players DID NOT do anything illegal. They just simply traded CE with crs which is part of our daily SK activities.
The mastermind has been punished and if any of you DID NOT REALISE, there is a POST SAYING THAT HE WAS THE ONE WHO DID THIS WITH 500m crs AND HE IS GOING TO DO IT AGAIN.
Maybe this is what our dear GMs and fellow SK mates should focus on?
As much as I am envious of the 70m crs, I just see it as a stock market which burst at that time and the richer players get richer (isnt it same as our current world economy today?) It doesnt affect me as a no-body in real life but the rich is getting richer. So what..?
I think I learnt alot about economy from SK. Thank you OOO!
"In all honestly my friend and I thought it was just a bunch of rich players quitting. (like a big guild) It would be entirely possible for a few players to setup this themselves and ravage the market for a short time. " I very rarely actually agree with Wodanct, but that is what I thought when I heard about it also. I did not make anything off of the 10 minute or so thing that happened, I was actually sleeping at the time. :p And I know for a fact that a few players can do that kind of thing to the market with the right amount of funds. I have a friend that completely emptied the Energy trade (buy and sell) back in beta.
I will admit I was wrong on the post I made on another topic, turned out it was a bug after all... although via a technicality I was right also. It was a rich player's last hurrah. Got rich off the exploit, and promptly banned. C'est la vie for him.
Anyways, Eury has told what happened, and the outcome of it. From the sound of it one guy found the exploit and kept the knowledge to himself, meaning the information wasn't available for everybody to go hog wild with. If it had been then we'd see more bans from it and possibly a rollback. For one person that's really not practical. I highly doubt the OOO staff will change their mind on re-compensating, rollback, etc. The issue is fixed, the guy is banned, and maybe 100-200 people have more crowns then they're used to (for all of 2 weeks most likely, amazing how fast money can spend).
~Gwen
500m crowns is about $15000. That's 30 times $500, and I'm sure it's probably pretty easy to find 30 people who have spent $500 on the game. $15k is 1/4 to 1/6 of someone's salary. OOO has about 30 staff, and of them maybe 15 work on Spiral Knights. Assuming they make ends meet, which they probably more than do, divide that by 12 and we see OOO makes about $100000 a month off the game. So 500 million cr is about what OOO makes in 4.5 days. That's probably a gross underestimate, too. Furthermore, it's crowns, and from OOO's perspective crowns have meaningless value. The CE market will value them at whatever they're actually worth, and the value of CE will never change, but crown value can fluctuate wildly.
So from OOO's perspective, and the perspective of the economy itself, it's kind of just a blip.
It does invalidate the $500 that those 30 people have spent on the game a bit. It devalues the meaning of in-game money. There's already a pretty heavy backlash from a lot of the community of "Oh you're P2P, so you didn't work for your stuff," but now it's like "Oh you have good stuff, you probably just profited off that CE market thing."
And just the idea that somebody could have gotten three times that off this and gotten to keep all of that money is disheartening. You could really just convert it to CE and buy a set of some of the game's most coveted weapons: CTR VH Blitz, Voltedge, Shivermist; ASI VH Flourish, Polaris. And while you're at it, pick up type-max armor sets, too. That's probably 6 pieces of armor. And then you'd STILL have enough money to buy about two and a half more of all that. Those are big ticket items, and players value them. The idea that people can have them without having done anything to deserve them bothers us. Especially when it's 15-20 people.
In the end, I don't think OOO had much of a choice here, but I hope they do understand why this is such a big deal to us when it barely affects the economy in any significant way.
Those are big ticket items, and players value them. The idea that people can have them without having done anything to deserve them bothers us. Especially when it's 15-20 people.
That's the key line that matters here~
oh my.. i think this trend is going into whining of some ppl just becoz they cant benefit from the ce trading instead of solving the real problem.
The real problem is that the guy is challenging OOO about doing it again and none has actually talked about this.
My dear GMs, please work towards protecting us from this challenge posted!
I support you!
I wish something was done at the beginning when they first found out about it. Maybe stopped all transactions somehow. I don't know. Something should have been done IN THAT MOMENT.
They did find the source and ban that person and hopefully they are fixing the issue that it stemmed from, itself.
As for all the rage, yes. This is VERY disappointing, very upsetting. That's a lot of crowns that has been flushed into the market.
I will gather that a lot of the crowns were wasted on rolling, and accessories. Notice I said wasted.
I don't know what all I can say about the test server, and I hope this doesn't get me in trouble but I want to point out something.
On the test server we found a way to sort of.... exploit the crowns. Where we could get a lot of crowns for like nothing because we get unlimited ce. You can't do this "exploit" on the main server because it wouldn't be worth the trading. But we found the little thing where we could buy stuff from the depot with our unlimited ce and then sell it back to the vendor for crowns. I will say this again... THIS DOES NOT PROFIT IN THE MAIN SERVER. THIS DOESN'T WORK IN THE MAIN SERVER. You would be losing more than gaining so it would be silly.
ANYWAYS. So... i think i had wracked up around 15-20 mil crowns, and it took me about 10 mil crowns to even get a double max on something. And that was when we could chose to lock the UV. I'm just saying they will have to waste a lot of crowns just to get the ones they want. If by some lucky chance they don't have to waste a lot then... lucky them. But chances are they will blow through their crowns very quickly.
As for banning pawn, well I don't think a perma ban was necessary. Maybe a week ban from here would have been good enough to let the rage pass a bit to where he could talk more calmly. He has been such a good figure in the game and forums that I am a bit bothered by his banning. I ask three rings to reconsider his perma ban for the time being. He is wanting to quit anyways. Just give him an outlet to say good bye and let it be.
There is nothing that can be done about all this crazy now. Nothing. So lets just step back. Take a break from the game something and move on. This might hurt us for a couple of weeks. But just know that we have a guild update coming up and i bet you some of them we'll waste even more crowns on the guild update. So we'll see.
So just stop attacking each other and especially the three rings staff. It's not doing any good to anyone. Eury is doing her best and she can really only say what they have told her about the situation. So attacking her really isn't necessary. So I agree with her... please keep things civil.
Also, thank you Cronus for clarifying that kids post. I was really skeptical about his story sounding so.... innocent. Like they had no idea what was going on but kept doing it anyways. I see what you're saying about the ce prices happening today is very different from that glitch. I agree with you COMPLETELY. It is totally possible that a person or a group of people could make ce prices like that on their own without it ever being exploiting from a glitch of sorts.
So lets just all take a step back and get away from it. I have, too, spent quite a bit of money in the game and I am upset that people could get more than a half of what I got in over a year and a half in like a few seconds so easily. We'll just have to wait and see what this does to the economy.
I don't like Penny Arcade or PvP.
But I'll be damned if that awful Trenches comic isn't an accurate depiction of every MMO ever.
"What, so it doesn't matter if you see someone breaking the rules as long as no one reports it? Or did you miss the post?"
I remember seeing that. I lol'd.
If someone commits a murder, and no one tells the police, does that make it legal?
It wasn't deemed acceptable because he didn't report it, they just didn't know about it at all *because he didn't report it*. They can't police everything all the time, it is up to the people who witness it to report it.
And honestly, if [whoever it was, I forget] really didn't think it was bad enough to report it, he shouldn't be complaining about it now.
If you're gunna go on a hate campaign, at least stop and think about your argument before you do, k?
What happened was very sad but OOO probably did the best they could.
Rolling back would be a bad thing, I did not get a single crown from it but I still don't support that. Those who just sold their CE for crowns didn't do anything wrong and rolling back would penalize those who bought CE with real money to do it.
The biggest mistake was maybe OOO hesitating for so long and letting it happen for hours without doing anything. Every passing minute literally injected millions of hacked crowns into the game.
Also, most of these crowns weren't rage-crafted into Punch. I'm very far from knowing everyone in SK but I alone know about a dozen players who did not roll their free crowns away and just kept their money.
Maybe next time something like that happens, the GMs or OOO will think about instant crashing the servers while they figure out how to fix it.
That exploit will be affecting the entire CE economy, the AH featured and the item market for a while.
So again, please OOO... If it happens again, it's okay, just nuke the servers and toss in a free elevator day, we won't be mad...
Hey Rommil When u have time can I talk with You in game plz It's urgent
You really think attacking them is going to get your point across?
Yes, I saw that post. But making post after post attacking them does NOTHING. When someone sits there and attacks you constantly, even if you know you're in the wrong, aren't you going to fight that? Because they are attacking you and you will just do it to get back at them. You don't listen to anything they have to say.
Three rings listened to us at the beginning by looking into the problem. Yes, it should have been handled just a bit differently. But now... they can't do anything about it. So either quit the game, shut up about it, or risk getting banned for a few days or permanently.
Attacking them isn't going to work. What else did you expect? This is their game and they don't have to sit there and listen to you attack them so what do they do? They ban you. lol. It's like saying this is my house and if you're going to come to my house respect my rules and respect me. If you're going to be in my house and be disrespectful then I don't have to listen to it. You can either change your attitude, leave, or I'll make you leave. Take your pick. But you are not entitled to staying inside my house.
Whoa, I seem to not have noticed all this o_O I also read all this (in the end skipped a bit though) but.... this is crazy. So, what happened is:
1 - Someone exploited something and materialized an humongous amount of crowns.
2 - The exploiter bought lots and lots of CE and the market exploded, with it going as an image showed up to 80000 crowns.
3 - Then, people who had CE sold it and made lots and lots of crowns.
4 - These people who made lots of crowns purchased lots of things and Unique Variants through Punch.
5 - Meanwhile, somehow CE market recovered itself in a few hours from the madness that happened.
Then, GM post that "the exploiter has been banned, and we won't have a rollback due to the crowns having been burnt in purchases, mainly UVs". Ok, then:
A - Why won't we rollback when there is now a market filled to the brim of UV'd equipment that is CLEARLY illegal?
B - How did the market go back to the current price with no GM manipulation? We have to revere such magnificent fanbase, unless "A". Which would mean then that many, many people sold lots of CE for crowns to then burn it on UVs and such.
So, please, it is common sense, even if we lose a day or two of progress, ROLLBACK, because the market now is OVERLY corrupt.
Aumir, don't skip half a discussion and then chime in with your off-the-bat suggestions.
Hey, please don't assume I didn't even look at what you discussed. I didn't outright skipped it, and that doesn't "cancel" what I said. I DID look at it, ok?
I just wanted to read what happened, but I see attacks to OOO etc and that is what I am not interested. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough.
Am I the only one that couldn't care less right now?
So, please, it is common sense, even if we lose a day or two of progress, ROLLBACK, because the market now is OVERLY corrupt.
It's too late to do a rollback. 24-48 hours is a lot of progress in an MMO when you take the whole userbase into consideration. Doing so now would be more destructive than what that exploit did. Sure, the small number of people that profited off of this would be back to square 1, but what about all of the other players that had nothing to do with it? Their CE purchases, trades, rare item/mat drops, etc. would be erased.
Absolutely no one here is qualified to speak on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of innocents who were not affected and would lose over a day of progress and activity in a rollback.
The rich became richer, the rest were unaffected, the one at fault was punished, and the market stabilized itself.
But that's my take, overall. The needs of the many, etc.
Not at all. GMs should only need to compensate if possible (and it is not needed, with such a situation - remember, now the market basically is how ONE user with an exploit shaped it) to the ones who made CE purchases in this time.
Also, I think that many people are holding right now their wallets because they DO expect a rollback.
@Dukeplatypus: The market didn't stabilize, the market now has a overly inflated amount of rolled weapons that didn't exist before, which generate inflation. These must be erased.
@Aumir
Where? I don't see anything different than before the CE Market inflation.
And seriously what's so horrible if there are a bit more UV rolled Items in the game? I don't care at all.
Agree with Duke.
What happened, happened, and no one is to blame but the guy that decided to go all out weirdo and let the CE market crash and burn.
And it is certainly not Three Rings' fault. Bugs happen in all games all the time, and they couldn't really know that said bastred was exploiting a bug either. This wasn't something anyone was expecting.
Sorry, but the UV market was already depressed. VH UV Sealed Swords are going for 15k and everyone and their mothers have ragecrafting brandishes for several months now. A great many things are over 10k cheaper than what they were months ago.
First of all, I believe in what Eury said about where the "dirty" money went (to Punch). Why? That's the most obvious and effective way for money laundry. If you keep that cash in your account, the GMs can trace it down and take it away. But if you invest it into a good UV item, you can keep it for a bit until the UV market recovered. The money is still in the pocket, just the cash out period is longer.
Second, I also don't think this is the GM's fault because they have been doing what is the best the system could offer, with minimal impact to the gamer base. In this case, it's to do nothing.
Third, who should take responsibility in this case? The developers of course. They were the one who created Punch, the perfect money laundry machine. Now that Punch has become part of the instrument of an exploit, are you guys going to do something about it? e.g. limit number of CR you can spend on Punch within a given period of time, so the GMs have enough window to reclaim these dirty money.
...we shouldn't rollback because the market is screwed even more so than it was already? What should we then think of the current market? Now Rommil and Pawn posts make even more sense. Still, the system must be cleansed even if the system wouldn't want to.
Fast edit: What Eltia said.
They didn't handle it in the best way but it's too late to change it now anyways, I guess we can only leave it at that and put a plus on the list of OOO's bad decisions.
"Now there's this guy in game claiming on the trade channel that he made 56m crowns and 30kce out of this bug (or whatever you wanna call it).. and bragging about it. But everything is fine .. no need for OOO to do anything about that.. it's only 1700$+ worth of Crowns and CE."
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
OOO tracks Punch transactions, apparently. There'd be no difficulty in deleting those items if they so chose.
No, the reasoning is two-fold:
1) The players who benefited did nothing wrong. They were just lucky. The wrongdoer has been punished.
2) Most of the cr injected has been drained into UVs anyway. Thus, the long-term effects will be minor.
I am not necessarily agreeing with OOO's reasoning, just summarising it.
First point is your personal opinion. The money is obtained through an exploit and people obtained it (w/o prior knowledge) and are using it now. Think counterfeits. If you use counterfeits, you break the laws. "I don't know they are fake" won't hold in court.
Second point. That seems to be what the GMs are hedging on (and I agree with them). The problem is the Devs have said nothing so far as to how to reduce the impact from this kind of exploit in the future. (Or to improve the system so that it gives a bigger window for the GMs to take action.)
Let's not be mistaken here. Punch is designed and created by the Devs. It is their responsibility to take care of their own design and creation. Blaming on the GMs won't accomplish anything.
@Rio --- People care about silly things best thing is to sit and laugh. *P2p players are apparently so mad about this, but it is funny most of the p2p players I know dont really mind, so much since like others already said it had no lasting impact in the game*.
@Derpules --- You are correct the players who did profit did nothing wrong at all they were just lucky to be online and notice this. The long-term effect of this will be nothing. The Ce market like I already stated 5000+ times is always going to go back to its original supply/demand price. I tested this theory out in Beta, and well this individual who just got banned tested it out yesterday lol.
@Elita --- When did Spiral Knights become a mafia/druglord style game.....I think it is time for me to call my good pal Saul.
It's the devs opinion, as expressed by Eury. Scroll back a page or two, you'll see it.
I was quite explicit about my post being a *summary* of their reasons, not an explanation of my own stand.
Whoever did this was smart in the way they went about it. As Bogga found out, if you simply exploit a glitch and keep it to yourself, OOO will find out. And he only took 20 mill. Now if you find an exploit that gives you 800+ mill??? They WILL find out and ban you. So what do you do? Transfer a large sum of crowns to an alternate account? They would notice the transaction. And sitting around with that many crowns in your inventory is a ticking bomb. So you do the one drastic thing that actually works. Have your alternate price a bunch of ce at 10 mill crowns or so and spam the buy now button til it reaches it and you trade a large sum of the illegal crowns to your alternate account, while hundreds of other players scramble to get in on it as well. End result? Hundreds of transactions of large amounts have suddenly taken place with no way to track a sole recipient. They ban the other account, sure. But it doesn't matter now that you suddenly have 10's to potentially hundreds of millions on your other account. It's an ingenious plan really.
@Njthug
Well, I only see much ranting about that in the forums and nowhere else. So yeah.
A rollback would be so overkill. Pretty much cutting off the nose to spite the face. A few people got richer than what we could ever imagine but the net change in all left none of us hurting. Meanwhile a rollback would undo a lot of progress and luck.
If a rollback happened what would be lost? All the hours farming Krogmo coins or heat? Or for example I bought a surge box and got a triple UV ticket that I made as a present for a friend in this game. Thing is this game is full of luck and accomplishment and it would really be a bummer to have to undo all that because there's a few more UVed items.
The exchange is almost 9k per 100 energy which was what it has been for about a month. This has already equalized. :/
As no one lost anything because of yesterday's events a rollback was never warranted. To all the players calling those who oppose a rollback selfish; I want to know how you justify the loss that even a best case scenario rollback would have caused to thousands of innocent players.
Yes I was just throwing that out there to be mulled over, and as I have no proof I am not going to pursue that theory. It was mere conjecture. However, I am completely serious about why they took so long to respond, which was the main point of my post.