Crackers Slam EQ2 Economy

Gamespot.com is reporting that third parties are manipulating the currency in EQ2, leading to massive inflation on the Station Exchange. From the article: "The players then began trying to sell the ill-gotten plat on Station Exchange, the official auction exchange for EQ2 weapons, armor, currency, and other virtual goods. 'The amount of money in the game increased by a fifth in about 24 hours,' Kramer said. 'We have a lot of alarms for this kind of thing, and they all went off on Saturday.'" Thanks to some exhaustive data tracking, most of the duped currency was removed from the economy by Sunday.

Re:How did Sony

[Harlockjds]

via the EULA which expressly says soe is not responsible for changing in value of in game items for any reason whatsoever.

Re:some things they left out

[OrenWolf]

It's interesting what they left out of the story. Item duping (done by exploiting bugs in the in game broker system that allows charters to sell items between each other for in game gold) really caught on weekend before last causing an emergency shut down of all servers on 8/7. Since then brokering has been either disabled or enabled for short amounts of time until someone noticed that the bug is still in the game. Also a ton of accounts were banned mainly because they were considered to have 'too much money for their level (lots of guilds lost their guild bank mules in this sweep)

Of course, you leave out the rather important fact that most of these accounts were reactivated by the end of the weekend. In fact, any account that had received "duped" money (even innocently, by a duper bying one of their items) was locked while they corrected the issues over the weekend. The speed that they were able to fix this problem, and the fact that they essentially were able to "roll back" the economy without rolling back the game-world is worth kudos in it's own right.

The interesting thing is that people noticed issues in the broker system months ago and mentioned it in the eq2 forums but nothing was done.

Galliente (Scott Hartsman, EQ2 Producer) already answered that one, and it was basically "mea culpa" - they plugged some holes, others they used to hone their tools. He points out they will not be doing that un the future, as the explosion of duping in such a short time proved that *any* amount of time a vulnerability is left "in the wild" can lead to extreme damage in a very short period of time.

software developers take note. :)