Integer Overflow Bug Leads To Diablo III Gold Duping 160
Nerval's Lobster writes "Online economies come with their own issues. Case in point is the Auction House for Diablo III, a massively multiplayer game in which players can pay for items in either in-game gold or real-world dollars. Thanks to a bug in the game's latest patch, players could generate massive amounts of virtual gold with little effort, which threatened to throw the in-game economy seriously out of whack. Diablo series publisher Blizzard took corrective steps, but the bug has already attracted a fair share of buzz on gaming and tech-news forums. 'We're still in the process of auditing Auction House and gold trade transactions,' read Blizzard's note on the Battle.net forums. 'We realize this is an inconvenience for many of our players, and we sincerely apologize for the interruption of the service. We hope to have everything back up as soon as possible.' Blizzard was unable to offer an ETA for when the Auction House would come back. 'We'll continue to provide updates in this thread as they become available.' Diablo's gold issue brings up (however tangentially) some broader issues with virtual currencies, namely the bugs and workarounds that can throw an entire micro-economy out of whack. But then again, 'real world' markets have their own software-related problems: witness Wall Street's periodic 'flash crashes' (caused, many believe, by the rise of ultra-high-speed computer trading)."
It seems likely the gold duping was due to a simple integer overflow bug. A late change added to the patch allowed users to sell gold on the Real Money Auction House in stacks of 10 million rather than stacks of 1 million. On the RMAH, there exists both a cap ($250) and a floor ($0.25) for the value of auctions. With stacks of 1 million and a floor of $0.25, a seller could only enter 1 billion gold (1,000 stacks) while staying under the $250 cap. When the gold stack size increased, the value of gold dropped significantly. At $0.39 per 10 million, a user could enter values of up to 6.4 billion gold at a time. Unfortunately, the RMAH wasn't designed to handle gold numbers above 2^31, or 2,147,483,648 gold. Creating the auction wouldn't remove enough gold, but canceling it would return the full amount.
Limit checking (Score:5, Insightful)
And this class, is why we use explicit type casting and do sanity checks (checking limits) prior to processing. Now, if you'll look on your screens, you'll see another example of this. Here is a failed mission to Mars, caused because the wrong unit of measurement was put into the computer, a problem caused by the lack of the human brain's compiler to make use of any data type except 'variant' and 'object'... So, what have we learned?
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Well, I suspect that you're being snarky, but you have a point. Sort of, in the sense that "If we can't trust the programmers to write good code, always, then we can force them to use a language that at least forestalls the worst of their blunders."
The real issue, of course, is NOT technical, at the programmer/developer level, for such a project. It's administrative, in the sense that, regardless of the chosen programming language, bad code that would allow this should NE
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Re:Limit checking (Score:4, Insightful)
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tat puters' is hard.
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So, what have we learned?
That C is scaryscary and we're too lazy to do type checking, so we'll keep using the trendy, make-money-now languages, treating this as an outlier that won't happen to us, since we're so smart?
Re:Limit checking (Score:5, Funny)
So, what have we learned?
That 2^31 gold ought to be enough for anybody?
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That 2^31 gold ought to be enough for anybody?
Gryfindor loses 50 points.
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When you type 'Gryffindor' and use two f's, Gryffindor has two f's.
But when you type 'Gryfindor' and use one f, then Gryfindor has one f.
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How very existentialist of you!
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But when you type 'Gryfindor' and use one f, the sentence has 2 f's, so it is right.
However my above sentence is wrong because I added "the sentence has 2 f's, so it is right." making it have 3 f's.
However my above sentence is now correct because it only has 2 f's.
Thus we conclude that to type 'Gryffindor' we instead type "However my above sentence is wrong because I added "the sentence has 2 f's, so it is right." making it have 3 f's." This make the original statement read as follows:
However my above sente
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Ask Joseph Smith; his mor(m)ons apparently figured that out.
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That begs the question: Can God dupe so much gold that even He couldn't lift it?
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So, what have we learned?
That next time when we launch something headed to Mars, we should duct tape you to it, with a sign that reads:
if (ego > INT_MAX) // Just to make sure there's enough to make it back
airsupply = INT_MAX+1;
Let us know what Mars is like, and take some pretty pictures while there. Try not to upset the rovers too much, once their clock overflows they get quite moody.
Re:Limit checking (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what have we learned?
Gamers gonna game, and real money auction houses are a bad idea...
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[...] real money auction houses are a bad idea...
Some of us knew this a long, long time ago. I have to admit, I'm feeling terribly smug right now.
Re:Limit checking (Score:5, Funny)
So, what have we learned?
To always use 64-bit numbers, duh.
Re:Limit checking (Score:4, Informative)
One bug, which I reported about WoW two years ago, shows an integer underflow on a character statistics page under certain conditions. It still hasn't been fixed. Minor? Yeah, but give a bit of a pattern.
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... So, what have we learned?
That Blizzard did a piss poor job in bug checking? That they didn't do enough QA assurance and brought this problem onto itself?
Nah... It ain't that. It is the PLAYERS that did all the wrongdoing!
ah the day of the diablo II trainer (Score:5, Funny)
I remember the day when you could strip the gear off anyone playing a multiplayer game with the trainer. I usually used it on jerks who came in collecting ears. If someone came in you could quickly look at their inventory and if they had several ears you could clear out their inventory and gear. They wouldn't know visually until they tried to hit you at which time they would be completely naked. It was really fun when they re-spawned and came back to loot their body and you started dropping some of the ears they collected on the ground.
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You mean the guy with the duped jacked up account that guaranteed that they could one hit you every time? Yeah I messed with his world. Now the guy without the duped jacked up shit I could handle myself. I had fun but I mostly used it to contain the guy who would come in at the 11th hour and whack all of us with his duped gear and finish the game to get some legit gear all to himself. So yes if they played the game like a luser I spanked them.
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Beginner's Mistake (Score:2, Funny)
What a beginner's mistake. I wonder what the rationale was for not using a 64-bit integer; "It's wasteful!"
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It's simple really...
They elected to buy 2 newbie programmers for the price of 1 experienced one! And the new guys will work all night! It's win-win!
Integer overflow you say? (Score:2)
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How quaint. I can't remember the last time I saw one of those (except where deliberately created for loop counters etc.).
well, this serves more as an example of how fucked up the game economics already were in D3, because the problem came up from having to increase stack sizing from 1 to 10 million.
I mean, wtf, is diablo 3 set in zimbabwe?
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Its a game where money is not really "destroyed", but created everytime a monster is killed. OF COURSE it has inflation.
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Bad PR? (Score:2)
What could Blizzard do? Performing a roll-back would wipe all progress obtained by players for the patch day, which would result in a lot of bad PR. But leaving the economy as-is will devalue all items in the game (and Diablo III is all about getting items).
In the end, Blizzard has not done a roll-back, but instead banned anyone who duped, and refunded anyone who spent real money. The bug was temporarily fixed by reverting the patch note which caused the entire mess.
Why would rolling back 1 day of gameplay be such a disastrous event?
Re:Bad PR? (Score:5, Insightful)
What could Blizzard do? Performing a roll-back would wipe all progress obtained by players for the patch day, which would result in a lot of bad PR. But leaving the economy as-is will devalue all items in the game (and Diablo III is all about getting items).
In the end, Blizzard has not done a roll-back, but instead banned anyone who duped, and refunded anyone who spent real money. The bug was temporarily fixed by reverting the patch note which caused the entire mess.
Why would rolling back 1 day of gameplay be such a disastrous event?
why? because people spent actual money and made actual money?
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IIs that even possible? Are they keeping backups of the game state for every single day?
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So far as I know, most online games have a transaction store, so they can roll back to any second they want.
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uh, are you kidding?
It's because people paid for a game, were force-fed always-online-even-for-single-player, and then may have spent hours playing on the day in question.
How is that not disastrous?
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Why would rolling back 1 day of gameplay be such a disastrous event?
So you wouldn't mind paying $250 for an item, and then lose the item due to Blizzard rolling back?
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Confused (Score:4, Insightful)
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Lazy programers with no foresight.
It is same reason people "assumed" a 32-bit IP address would be enough instead of just using 64-bit from the beginning.
There is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over!
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I think to be fair if most of us were developing a military network in the 60s/70s we might think that 16.7 million addresses is enough. The real blunder was assigning millions and millions to companies and institutions that didn't need them, but again when there is no management structure and no money to set one up and it's a research project anyway...
The biggest failure has been our inability to do anything about it. My ISP hasn't even heard of IPv6 and they are one of the largest.
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Well, back then, we used
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Lazy programers with no foresight.
Yes, it couldn't possibly have been the result of time pressure the developer was under...
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Well, IPV6 uses 128-bit addresses. That's enough for 2^128 addresse / 2^48 m^2 = 2^(128-48) = 2^80 IP addresses per square meter of the Earth!
Another way to look at how big that is, even with 7 billion people using 32 devices each, 2^33 * 2^5 = 2^(33+5) = 2^38 that still leaves room for 2^(128-38) = 2^90 IP addresses.
I seriously doubt we'll be running out IPV6 addresses anytime soon assuming my back of the napkin math is correct. :-)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth [wikipedia.org]
The surface area of earth is ~510 mill
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In general, it's a good idea to used signed ints whenever possible.
Here are the only 2 reasons I see for unsigned ints:
- matching hardware or wire spec
- You need the extra range afforded, and don't need negative numbers.
And the reasons for using signed integers otherwise:
- It prevents other overflow and comparison problems. Ie, fixes other dumb coding issues like "if (my_gold - your_gold > 0)" becomes a bug when the gold types are unsigned.
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Re:Confused (Score:5, Informative)
You couldn't be more wrong. Signed ints are usually the best way to go in C/C++.
>in C an unsigned int must behave in a very predictable manor
"unsigned int x = -3;" generates no compile errors or warnings.
If you don't believe me, listen to the creator of C++ (Bjarne Stroustrup):
"The unsigned integer types are ideal for uses that treat storage as a bit array. Using an unsigned instead of an int to gain one more bit to represent positive integers is almost never a good idea. Attempts to ensure that some values are positive by declaring variables unsigned will typically be defeated by the implicit conversion rules."
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Too bad you're an AC. This post is spot-on.
Mixing signed and unsigned values can result in unexpected behavior. Trust me, don't mix them if you can avoid it.
You get a bit of a larger upper range (2x more, not all that much really), while introducing a whole new set of problems at the bottom end (what if you underfow?).
Avoid unsigned unless there's a good reason to use it. There are definitely good reasons -- it's a pain that Java got rid of unsigned! -- but avoid in general. Don't just use unsigned if y
Re:Confused (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, he's not wrong at all. He said signed integers don't behave in a very predictable manner, and he's right. Signed integers have undefined (actually, to be more precise, implementation-defined) behavior for mod and div of negative values. You cannot be sure whether -4 / 3 is -1 or -2, without knowing how your compiler implements it. Some round toward zero, others toward negative infinity. Recent drafts of C++ are trying to fix this.
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"unsigned int x = -3;" generates no compile errors or warnings.
This supports the point of the poster you were referring to. The code is correct, predictable, and generates no warnings.
If you don't believe me, listen to the creator of C++
C and C++ are different languages. The implicit conversion rules and the promotion rules are different in C++ to C. In C, unsigned types always promote to unsigned types. But in C++, unsigned types may promote to signed ones, if the value fits in the signed range.
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"unsigned int x = -3;" generates no compile errors or warnings.
Yes, but it always generates the same binary value, the same number. It is 100% consistent, where as, for example, the result of dividing a negative signed int is compiler dependent.
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In general, it's a good idea to used signed ints whenever possible.
Says who?
In C, signed ints have a whole lot of problems associated with representation and overflow. But unsigned ints have well-defined behaviour in every circumstance. They wrap around in case of overflow or an out-of-range assignment. You can safely test, set and reset individual bits.
With signed ints, you can raise a signal (triggering a signal handler, or aborting the program if there is no handler) if there is overflow or underflow. Using '^', '|' or '&' on signed values can trap due to creating
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The summary is wrong, they used an unsigned int and the overflow occured at 2^32.
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if( gold_max 2^32 ){
Re:Confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Integer underflow. Imagine a situation where a player has 100 gold and a bug in the code subtracts 101 gold for whatever reason. If you use a 32-bit unsigned integer, that player now has 4,294,967,295 gold. A 64-bit unsigned is even worse, of course.
A simple if statement would catch this as well, right? But think of how often you do addition and subtraction (and everything else) throughout your code! Do you put an if around each one? Can you handle the error situation in each case? How do you ensure that you found every addition and subtraction, including future changes?
A better solution is to make a Money class with well-defined operations, and throw an exception if you try to exceed the boundaries. Sounds easy ... but it has to be flexible enough to handle all situations (the class has to be used for all intermediate values -- it's no good to resort to an int, where problems might come back) while still being robust. ("I know, I'll use a class!" ... now you have two problems. "I know, I'll use exceptions!" ... now you have three.)
This is not an easy problem to solve for non-trivial software, which is why bugs like this come up periodically.
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A simple if statement would catch this as well, right? But think of how often you do addition and subtraction (and everything else) throughout your code! Do you put an if around each one?
I use a program to automatically put a try-catch-finally statement around every line of code including my try-catch statements. When I'm contracting, no one can read my code so they'll have to hire me to fix or update anything. When I'm a permanent employee, then the number of lines of code I generate grows significantly so the bosses think I'm a great and productive programmer. Profit!
Re:Confused (Score:4, Funny)
Baldur's Gate stored various things as unsigned shorts, IIRC.
There was a monster called the nishruu that would drain charges off your magic items. So after one combat, I found I now had a charged magic item with 32,000-ish charges on it.
Since the gold value of magic items was proportional to the number of charges remaining, I sold it and never needed to worry about money again in the game.
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I mainly program in Java, so my natural reaction was using BigInteger. [oracle.com] I'm pretty sure someone already made something like that for C++ too [stackoverflow.com]
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Sorry, the above stackoverflow link wanted to be this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/124332/c-handling-very-large-integers [stackoverflow.com]
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The 'x' is the problem. If you just make it a primitive type, then all you did was move the problem elsewhere. All intermediate values need to have the same checks.
Trolls can't read or write (Score:2)
Calm down! You missed the point entirely!
My argument is not that signed values should be used instead of unsigned. My argument is that unsigned values don't help, and you need to look elsewhere for a solution.
I find it fascinating that the financial industry can solve this, while the gaming industry seems to have so many issues. Part of it, I think, is that games allow much more flexibility in how money is used than you see in real life. Also, the fact that game money isn't real money means that mistake
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2^32 = 4 294 967 296
2^31 = 2 147 483 648
A signed 32 bit Int is bound by -2 147 483 648 and 2 147 483 648 and an unsigned int is bound 0 to 4 294 967 296. I don't get your point, 2^32 / 2 = 2^31 or is the same as giving the int a signed bit in the MSB.
Luls. (Score:4, Informative)
Basically this exact thing happened to Kingdom of Loathing... like 9 years ago... at a time when that game was basically still in beta, and was basically the work of two people, neither of whom would actually have called themselves "programmers" at the time... as opposed to the work of a giant team of professionals releasing a triple-A title... that is mega hilarious.
(Black Sunday: August 8th, 2004, someone discovers that using a particular item, "meat vortex", which under normal circumstances subtracts a handful of the game's currency from your inventory, if you had 0 meat would instead wrap around and give you max meat minus a few, because the game was storing meat in an unsigned int. Fun times!)
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Those who froget the past are doomed to repeat it: Asheron's call had a similar issue back in 99-2000 era.
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Re:Luls. (Score:4, Interesting)
Macintosh Pirates, circa 1989 (Score:4, Funny)
I discovered a bug with the gold in Pirates! while watching somebody play on my roommate's Mac (we were stationed in Okinawa on Camp Kinser)... he went into port with damage, and while he did not have enough money, it offered to repair his damaged ships for more money than he had.
Needless to say, the underflow was done to a UINT16 used to track gold (in 10-gold increments), so you'd end up with around 655350 gold after the transaction. That kept your crews happy, and let you buy lots of things.
I also enjoyed the mental image of 1200 pirates hanging off a sloop after I sold off my fleet.
We put in ungodly hours into that game.
Diablo III is NOT an MMO (Score:1)
Diablo III is not an MMO. You are capped at what, 4 people in a game at once? A massively multiplayer online game allows a lot more than that.
Fiat Simulated Money! (Score:1)
If they had used actual bitcoins instead of simulated fiat gold, their simulated economy wouldn't be having simulated inflation.
The interesting thing about this.... (Score:3, Insightful)
As I see it, this has been Blizzard's only metric for success with Diablo 3, not profitability, as we will see later. They claimed that by breaking the existing mould, they were providing a 'more fun' experience. So, the question then becomes, does the AH or RMAH make the game more fun? Interestingly, Blizzard don't appear to be packaging these components with the Playstation 3 edition. Is that because it turns out all of the changes to Diablo 3 were 'not fun', or is it because Playstation 3 users don't deserve 'as much fun', or is playing with a controller rather than a mouse and keyboard 'so much more fun' that their combination with the AH/RMAH turned into a 'fun overload' that had to be dialled back in order not to blow our puny little minds?
It also asks another important question about the business model. Is always-on net requirements 'more fun', particularly when they don't add anything to play beyond what a direct/lan connection might provide. When you try to enumerate the pros/cons, you see something like:
Pros: Everyone uses the latest version all the time if they want to play
Everyone playing has to have a working key
Cons: Internet Connection must be working to play
Need a server farm in every retail country so that paying customers can play (well, they don't even now, and charge people in those countries more money per copy so that they can have a game that they don't have local server access play)
Servers have to be working in order to play
User account has to be working in order to play
If we rolled out a dodgy patch, everyone will be broken at once
We have to know the product life-cycle prior to release in order to cost all of our servers' TCO correctly.
We have to keep talking to everyone to make sure the game is working to their expectations and forever hear about shortcomings
Economically, I don't understand how game companies are able to turn a profit on a title with those kinds of restrictions and ongoing costs. As a small example, lets say one of your servers can host 200 users at a time, but the server cost $20k, thats $100 per concurrent user before you turn the thing on. Maybe it can host 2000 users at a time, sure but thats still $10 per concurrent user before you turn it on or pay any support personnel, or for space on the floor. Surely, over the life of your product, you would be operating a negative margin without some sort of subscription service. I have read other places that, while you can't place a cost on piracy, you can place a cost and a metric on product returns. Diablo 3 is one of the few games I've ever returned, it was unusable for the first week, and is still, in most parts of the world (outside the US/EU/ASIA) mostly unplayable. Despite that, the parts of the game that were modified to provide 'more fun' actually provided, for me, a fan of the Diablo franchise, 'a lot less fun'.
So, to say that another way, by insisting on Always-Connected, Blizzard not only have to pay a bunch of additional ongoing expenses to run (apparently) necessary infrastructure, its also alienating their core user-base which must be very costly to their bottom line. I don't understand how this course of action renders any kind of net commercial advantage.
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Economically, I don't understand how game companies are able to turn a profit on a title with those kinds of restrictions and ongoing costs. As a small example, lets say one of your servers can host 200 users at a time, but the server cost $20k, thats $100 per concurrent user before you turn the thing on. Maybe it can host 2000 users at a time, sure but thats still $10 per concurrent user before you turn it on or pay any support personnel, or for space on the floor. Surely, over the life of your product, you would be operating a negative margin without some sort of subscription service.
They do it by selling hundreds of millions of copies worldwide and assume that not every user will log in simultaneously 24/7, and that some users will abandon the game shortly after purchase. Oversubscription leads to higher profit margins at the cost of release day meltdowns.
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Back in my day... (Score:1)
We duped our gold the way God intended: by pulling an item out of our belt as we picked it up.
Kids these days....
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It works because the examine butterfly implicitly takes the butterfly out of the goblet for the rest of the command string (so that the examine functions), but you can sell it in the same command string. The butterfly's value doubles every time it escapes from the display case, but you have to avoid the overflow because they used a signed int for zorkmids.
And nothing of value was lost (Score:4, Insightful)
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You couldn't handle Inferno huh?
i didn't know goldman sachs did programming. (Score:1, Troll)
Another precedent (Score:1)
Diablo 3 hack? (Score:2)
I'm not sure how this is a big deal?
After all, pretty soon the only other person still playing is going to know what's going on.
Ben Bernanke is behind this! (Score:2)
There's only one answer to every problem, that's create more money! There wasn't a bug in the servers, Blizzard just consulted with the FED.
Diablo 3 is not a game (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO, this is why bitcoin has a max limit of 21mil (Score:2)
2^31 = 2,147,483,648 = $21,474,836.48 when counted in pennies. I once worked for a software company where a call came into the support desk from one of our customers accounting departments. Once their sales reached a certain point, their books were suddenly off by exactly that amount (minus 1 cent). While everybody else was scratching their heads about the missing 21 million dollars, I recognized the number, and knew exactly what the problem was. They were storing the number as a 32 bit signed int wh
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Yeah, I'm sure the Chinese government is very upset with these hackers who just made them lots of American dollars.
Re:Arrests will be made... (Score:5, Insightful)
And several arrests - this is computer hacking of exploiting a known bug to your advantage.
It will actually be interesting to see. Historically, people who come up with glitch exploits, even in multiplayer and MMORPG contexts, just get banned for some ToS reason. Blizzard's precious little 'Auction House', of course, might change that. However, I suspect that Blizzard really doesn't want to push the idea that 'in-game items are legally real value' too seriously, both because that could complicate things if players end up 'owning' them, rather than the current "Everything in this game is just intellectual property of blizzard...yadda yadda, licensed not sold,etc.", and because it would be a real blow, to the US customer base, if it were decided that Blizzard was running something closer to a very complex flavor of video poker, rather than a mere video game that you can buy some DLC for.
Obviously Blizzard won't be happy, and the banhammer will see some use; but they might want to tread lightly.
and then when the IRS drops in and says it's incom (Score:4, Insightful)
and then when the IRS drops in and says it's income then all kinds of other laws drop in.
Re:and then when the IRS drops in and says it's in (Score:5, Funny)
and then when the IRS drops in and says it's income then all kinds of other laws drop in.
The epic hilarity starts if they decide that you'll probably have to account for different sorts of loot in different ways... Did you get the Helm of Epic Bashing while you were wandering around and slaying monsters(self employed), while doing a quest for the Mysterious Feckless Questgiver NPC(Independent Contractor), or should it be reflected in the W-2 that the Ratslayer's Guild submitted to cover your work as an employee with them?
You should probably also get an opinion from your tax lawyer on whether the depletion of the charges stored in your Staff of Fireball is simply part of the depreciation of that capital good, or whether charges are just a business expense like copier paper or potions of stamina...
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It's too bad every organization that flips a few bits and creates tens of billions out of nothing doesn't go to jail.
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The US Government can't all be fit into a jail.
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This bug "threatened to throw the in-game economy seriously out of whack", yet some people had over 2.1 BILLION gold to throw on the AH?
yeah the game is basically a joke already.
the wall street flash crashes have NOTHING AT ALL to do with this though. NOTHING.
because the wall street would be really out of business if someone managed to dupe shares.
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Agreed.
Auction House Simulator, aka, Diablo 3, is boring.
Path of Exile is the true spiritual sucessor to Diablo 2, not that piece of garbage called Diablo 3 with cardboard cutout characters. The PoE designers understand the ONE word that made Diablo 2 fun: itemization.
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Path of Exile is the true spiritual sucessor to Diablo 2
That title goes to the Torchlight series.
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Technically the Blizzard North developers went to Flagship Studios and then to Runic Games (makers of Torchlight) and while Torchlight 1 & 2 copies some of the D2 mechanics IMHO PoE embodies the spirit of Diablo 2 far, far, more then any other ARPG.
i.e. There is NO gold in PoE. It uses a 100% barter multi-tiered currency system. It really is the next gen of in-game economies.
Now if we could only get the Guild Wars 2 Dynamic Events into PoE ...
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagship_Studios [wikipedia.org]
* http://en. [wikipedia.org]
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because the wall street would be really out of business if someone managed to dupe shares.
Sorry. What you call "duping shares" they call "naked short selling", and they are still very much in business.
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I suspect that the desire to get people plunking down real money didn't help; but MMORPGs have a long history of economies that render their currencies nearly entirely obsolete after a short time, at least for anybody who isn't a level 3 newb saving up for stuff that the NPC blacksmith actually sells. Even 'open world' single player RPGs frequently succumb to "I have more money than the world has things to buy"-itis after a few levels.
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So is it a sitcom that is gay and about asses, or an ass sitcom that is gay, or a sitcom about gay asses?