Shadowbane World Closure Due To Counterfeiting?

Thanks to Terra Nova for their posting discussing world deletions/consolidations in the PC MMORPG Shadowbane, analyzing rumors that the measures are "a fairly sophisticated attempt to clean the bad gold out of the economy." The piece informs: "The official reason [for closure] seems to be the fact that populations are too low", but it's pointed out that "...those being booted from SB's Scorn and Treachery servers are leaving with nothing but the clothes on their back: no bank items, no coins, no property", a drastic step which some say is down to the fact that "...much of the gold in [Shadowbane's] worlds is duped rather than earned." Is this a simple world consolidation, or desperate economy-balancing measures?

Similarities

[daeley]

Sounds similiar to the battle.net Diablo II life cycle where even the rarest of items became basically worthless due to duping. Kinda sad, in a virtual kind of way. Where's the fun in cheating like that? Sure, maybe it's thrilling for like a second or two, but then what?

Re:Similarities

[Babbster]

Then what? Well, then you get to tell all your friends what you did and how you did it, taking perverse pleasure in the trouble it causes not only the players, but the companies themselves when they try to fix things.

I'm sure that in Diablo 2, the first person who duped Stones of Jordan (uber rings for the uninitiated) on the Realm servers was quite pleased that people started using them as basic currency ([x] item equals [y] number of incredibly rare rings which suddenly aren't as rare anymore).

In short, the cheating is a goal in and of itself. People who enjoy cheating in multiplayer environments (as opposed to people who enjoy finding and then reporting cheats without taking advantage of them) have little interest in the rest of the game, and thus don't care how it ruins the game for anyone else - except in the sense that they have a twisted notoriety in the community. Any attention is good attention.

Capt. Kirk cheated.

[mactari]

What Star Trek was it when they talk about Kirk getting stuck in some computer simulation (academy training) where he essentially had to pick between two evils? Something along the lines of "Lose your ship or lose a world or innocents," or something equally nefarious.

What does he do? Well, he cracks the simulation computer and cheats his way into doing neither. Iirc.

Just to say there's at least one campy cliche story that would agree that cheating != evil and is a legitimate part of the game when you'r

Re:Capt. Kirk cheated.

[windex82]

There was one where they were kept on a planet by a computer who was controlling bots who could (of course) only think logicly. They tricked it into disableing the robots by causing each bot to lock up with simple logic questions. Then they all acted absolutly insane when they finnally got to talk to the main system. When the computer locked up they re-programmed it. They were brought to the planet by one of kirks old aquantences who was originally controlling the robots, and wanted to switch places wit

A winner is me

[Auburn_Jack]

That would be the Kobayashi Maru training scenario.

Re:A winner is me

[Colazar]

Yes. But you lose, because the question was, what movie was it in.

The movie was Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.

Perfect Solution

[Photar]

Get Greenspan in there to lower the Fed.

Part of the normal plan

[Drakino]

The SB developers were pretty clear at launch that they didn't intend to have 10 indentical worlds, but had to due to time constraints. They did plan on destroying many, and forcing people to move long before these cheats happened.

I do have a feeling the rampant gold duping might be a reason those two are going first, but, gold duping is a problem on every server.

Re:Part of the normal plan

[swdunlop]

Yes, the article author seems to have little actual clue about what is going on in Shadowbane right now, and is running strictly off rumors.. Population on many servers is down, considerably, either because one nation or another has taken control of the majority of the map. Wolfpack doesn't want to purchase more servers to host newer, more balanced maps, so they are simply rolling a couple of the lesser used ones.

In the bad old days, we were warned that this might happen if a guild achieved total domina

Re:Part of the normal plan

[AuMatar]

SB was a great concept, but has so many problems it isn't funny.

I played on Death. There was one guild which was so annoying the entire server went to waragainst it. They survived due to a series of exploits, specifically setting the times to defend their city to server reset every morning. Even if we had top run speed we couldn't make it to their city in time.

Then there was the duping- that nation, after recruiting from other servers and taking in eveyr malcontent on the server, somehow managed to hav

Re:Part of the normal plan

[Colazar]

LoD had 80 BILLION gold?!?! That explains a lot. After having helped build and run a city (also on Death), I can't even comprehend having that much money at one time.

The scary thing is, Death is one of the better servers.

I'm only semi-active at the moment, but won't drop entirely, because the things that they got right are still very cool. Besides, I have to hold on until Panther comes out, so I can actually fight in a seige for once. (That one is apparently an Apple driver problem--not a Wolfpack codin

Re:Part of the normal plan

[AuMatar]

Yup. And having run my own city on Death, I know exactly how hard money is to legitamitely come by. Even with a share of commanders it was hard.

Ya know, you can't dupe cash by moving it around between banks, so you know solving it is possible. They just fucked up.

Shadowbane should just die.. it's AWFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

I signed up for a full year subscription three months after Shadowbane had been released. All reviews I'd seen about it praised it. I tried to see what people who were playing the game on the site had to say, but those portions of the forums were only accessible to paying Shadowbane players.

After another three months (six months since the game was released), I canceled my subscription. Low server populations. Too much server down-time, database rollbacks, client/crashing problems, lag issues and just about

Re:Shadowbane should just die.. it's AWFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

You played the fool by signing up for a whole year. History has something to say about MMORPG launches...

it's a sad attempt

[the_greywolf]

really, this is going to continue unles they can fix the net code. after i was told how easy it was to dupe gold, i said, "shit, that's easy to fix."

really, i don't understand why they don't fix it. whether they see it as being hard or not, it should be fixed. immediately. otherwise, the unbalanced economy will simply destroy the game beyond where it has gone already.

Love the mirroring

[Hardwyred]

Am I the only one that loves to read these stories about these massive SIM type games having the same problems as real life? Their has got to be some way to capitalize on this and use it as a predictor of human behaviour. I say we hunt down the perfect SIMS neighborhood and model it in reality somewhere in Oklahoma.

Re:Love the mirroring

[Ah!Kenshi]

The only flaw in that unfortunately, is that online games have the highest concentration of pure idiocy and stupidity. The level of purility in some games is just staggering. Although I still haven't explained how that is much different than real life, the concentration of 12 year olds or basement ridden 35 year olds is much lower.

Duping only a factor

[laiquendi]

Scorn is known as a dupe server; some big and organized guilds got deep into the dirty money game. Treachery, on the other hand, was no worse off than any of the other servers.
The primary reason for the bank wipe, IMO, is to limit the effect that guilds will have on the servers they move to. Without the gold to plunk a town down on their first day, they will have to find a place for themselves within the existing system, instead of just jumping in as a brand-new major power.

I don't think they would lie about low population

[@madeus]

I don't think they would lie about having low population on the servers.

I think the last thing they would want would to admit was that the user figures were falling - I'm sure they'd much rather admit to a number of bugs that need addressing. This is probably just a convienent time to help remove some of the duped money/items.

It amazing though, so many of these titles have obviously been designed very badly indeed, or in some cases not at all - the developers have just sat down and started churning out code without any thought as to how to write it efficently and securely. I am still stunned by this, and I think impatiant unprofessional developers and poor managers are to blame. Some developers don't see why /they/ need to play anything, and they know that managers like 'results', and managers typically push for visible results right away.

In my experience, you should sit down and discuss plan this sort of software for about 3-6 months before you even write any code (and after that have regular meetings to dicuss tweaks to the design that become apparent once you start putting the basic API's in place). To be effective, it should be a proper discussion, between the developers, with no domination by any one developer and no large egos involved (apart from by the 'lead developer', where firm decisions need to be made one way or another).

I know it can seem wasteful to have people sitting around talking and making charts for 6 months, and it might not /look/ productive, but I've found it can pay dividends back in a year and a half, because you'll don't end up having to spend another year re-writing the game to fix all the bugs in the second year.

I've found, with 6 months planning and a year of development you can achive the same as in 2 years worth of simple 'plunge in head first' development, because you don't have to waste lots of time bug fixing and traking down problems and re-writing significant bits of code.

The only disadvantage with the planning stage is that it you are 6 months later to market, but I think having a product that is twice as 'mature' is much better in the long haul (and if your in it to build a stable product, which you should be - as even if you plan on a quick sale, you can't always count on one right away - then it just makes much more sense to be later to market in many instances, even if you have competitors hot on your heels, customers will soon get tired of them if they have a poor quality product).

I'd be interested to hear other developers/project managers experiences...

Re:I don't think they would lie about low populati

[bmyers]

It is always more expensive to make changes and/or fix bugs once a system has gone "live". This has been shown so many times that it isn't funny. But for some reason, time-to-market is always raised as the counter-argument, even when being early to market actually causes the whole thing to fail. Or in the case of MMO games, to suffer irreparable damage to the company's reputation.

I hope as the game industry matures more that there will more examples of well-designed systems and games.

Personally, my c

Re:I don't think they would lie about low populati

[Colazar]

Not arguing with anything you said, but it is worth noting that by the time they released, Shadowbane was *long* overdue. They'd gotten to the point where they had to release *something*, no matter how many bugs it might have had. (And it had plenty. Though it is a lot better now.)

I solved this problem on MUDs long long ago

[XO]

I had a system on the MUD that I had created, whereby every object had a serial number, and if
any two objects with the same serial number ever
existed at the same time, they were both (or all if there were multiples found) destroyed, and that was it.

As far as for numeric issues, like coins, which were not really an object, just a number to keep track of, there was a "money daemon" object, which kept track of how much money was in the world (there was a set limit) and all requests by the game program to add

Re:I solved this problem on MUDs long long ago

[Godeke]

Which of course assumes that the duplicate flaw doesn't issue a new serial number. Every mud I ever coded for has object IDs which were unique. Must dupe bugs occur because of some timing issue with handling create/destroy state during which the user would go link dead. Because of a flaw, the create step would execute non atomically from the destruction step. The create step created a new (legal) ID, but the destory step (for example, the removal of a sacrificed item) would fail, because the user had left t

Re:I solved this problem on MUDs long long ago

[XO]

I sure couldn't find any way to dupe things. The initial code base had a way to dupe things, from linkdead restoral, but the serial number for the objects solved that initially, and then i solved the entire problem by changing the linkdead code to replace the connection to the original object.. shrug.