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Huge problem with duping and macroing within EQ right now

Started by concernedeq, December 04, 2005, 09:28:57 AM

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concernedeq

This is a very important issue that needs to be let out of the bag.

I ask please if the mods feel this is inappropriate, could you let me know what I need to change to get the point across. I tried to be as careful as possible to conform to the board requirements and respect the community here.



Hi there, many of you may remember me, some may not. I posted two years ago on The Safehouse forums regarding what was going on a the time, which was massive duping and macroing of platinum flooding the economy with plat and inflating bazaar prices to crazy levels. If you remember, ornate armor patterns at the time, the hot items out there, were selling for 10k to 20k each, but after all of this happened prices on them went up to 100k or more. Most everything else went up in price as well.   Within the week of my posting, a patch came about with a letter from on of the higher ups at Sony stating they had banned massive amounts of accounts, and fixed some exploits and loopholes.   The very same day, mysupsersales.com, the main contributor of the problem, had no platinum.

Well, it is happening again. Have you been a bit puzzled as to why, on most servers, the prices of items which usually gradually fall over time, have not? Because since the middle of the summer, or perhaps earlier, there has been an artificial influx of platinum into every server economy. If what is going on continues, expect prices to actually start going up and up, and forcing anyone who likes to buy their items in the bazaar or enjoys the more casual playstyle, twinks, etc, to have their only option be to buy platinum from those who are bleeding this game dry.

The main offender here is Gamingnook, a company which sells and distributes platinum for real life money. They used to buy and sell platinum, but around early summer they closed up all their plat buying, and no longer bought any more at all. Immediately after this, they had for sale, over 2 million platinum per server overnight. If they sold 1 million, or 2 million, or 3 or 4 in a day, they had it right back up again the next day.

Something was obviously wrong. There are several ways to make platinum in game. The main one being through normal play. At the high level a group member might come away with 1000 platinum in sellables after an evening of fighting. Secondary is collecting items and selling in the bazaar. This is unreliable, and though you can make large amounts of platinum, you certainly can't make millions per day with it, even with a full group pooling everything they get and selling it, coming away with a million or more platinum would be exceptional. Selling it all in the bazaar without over flooding the market with the items is about a 1 in a million chance.

Now, tertiary are the little less known things like for profit quests and tradeskill combines. These can net a good amount of coin if someone were to sit and repeatedly do them over and over. Maybe a few thousand with a human at the keyboard. With a macro, though, these are limited only by the speed of your connection and how fast your computer can buy, sell, and combine. Since things in the infamous macroquest program allow you to use vendors and world combiners like the forge and oven from across the zone, a macroer only needs to write a macro that will buy and sell and combine, and do it at the fastest speed possible. A macroer running a simple 6 platinum profit combine every second doesn't sound like much, but when you look at what this does over the course of a day, then things start to get crazy.

Consider

6 platinum per second

360 platinum per minute

21600 platinum per hour

518400 platinum per day

Now consider that the macroer could run 2, 3, 20 of these at once, and you have 1,000,000 to 10,000,0000 platinum easily entering the server per DAY. Now multiply that by all the servers....

With 3500 people online in an average day, varying levels, varying amounts of coin, assuming the average player made 500 plat in the course of playing that day, which is generous, the players legitimately contribute about 1.75 million platinum per day to the server. Now consider a SINGLE macroer can introduce this simply by running 3 accounts at once. ONE person, not even at the keyboard, can make as much as 3500 people playing about 4 hours each. For about 5 minutes of one person's time setting up their characters to macro, the equivalent yield for them is as much as 14,000 hours of other people's time.

And I am not even saying it is a macro right now. That's just one option. It could be a dupe. Dupes would be far worse, as a duper can and will take 10,000 plat and turn it into 20,000 plat, then 40,000, then 80,000, and so on and so forth.

And it is not just Gamingnook which has access to this. IGE, though they may not have direct access to it, are overstocked to the gills with platinum. This is almost certainly due to the exploiters selling to them and keeping their stock high. The normal workings of the platinum for cash business is supply and demand. When things are working properly Gamingnook and IGE and all the other resellers out there have increasing and dwindling stocks of platinum available. Often they will have none on a server. Again, this has not been this way since midsummer.

Enter October. 4 or 5 sellers now have platinum on every server in unlimited quantity, most of them based in China. Keep in mind please, that even if you hired 100 kids mashing buttons a day in china they could not make millions and millions of platinum per day reliably like these guys had.

Enter the patch at the end of October with the new UI. Gamingnook has no platinum after this patch. The chinese sellers vanish overnight. IGE no longer has platinum on 3/4 of the servers.

5 days later, Gamingnook has platinum again, all servers. Inquiring in the period they did not have plat as a buyer, got the answer that they did not have plat available, but they would soon. Inquiring as a seller, no, they refused to purchase platinum, period.

A few days later IGE had millions on every server. A week later 2 of the chinese sellers are back, and today, there are 6 new sellers total with millions and millions on every single server.

Because of this, the price has fallen by over 50% in a month, and continues to fall daily as these guys duke it out with their free platinum.

This may sound great for the guy who likes to buy plat, but consider that prices are not going to fall and will likely increase in the bazaar with so much platinum entering the economy, and the benefit is short lived. And the entire community who does NOT purchase platinum gets screwed by this. As these individuals fight it out with their price wars and their illbegotten platinum, the price will continue to fall, as quite simply "lowest price wins." Eventually they will turn to buying stuff in the bazaar with this money. If you think it is bad enough that it enters the economy at the rate people buy it with real life money, consider what is going to happen, and what exactly happened two years ago. The high price items will become the currency, and these exploiters will buy these items to sell instead. I'm sure you have all heard the expression often used when a currency becomes worthless, and that is that it is not worth the paper it is printed on. Well, the same can and will happen to any "virtual" currency.

It has been suggested to me that this is indeed the only way to get things fixed. To let the community know what is going on in your game, and allow you to weigh the facts, and decide whether or not you feel this is a real issue. If you do feel this is a real issue, I urge you, please send feedback and post making your voice known to the Everquest developers and community. Regardless of your feelings on selling platinum or items or powerleveling or any other service in EQ for real life money, set that aside, look at what is going on, and decide then on your choice of action. In my opinion, this has reached the point of emergency. The point which requires finding it, getting it fixed, and letting the community know that such activity will not be tolerated.

Essant

I don't get this post.  This is your first post on this board.  Are you on a crusade and just hitting all the boards? Or are you fishing for information?

Anyway, Chicken Little, the sky started falling a long time ago .. but believe it or not, its getting better.

AFAIK, there are no easily combinable tradeskill recipies that generate a 6pp profit per combine with easily obtained components as you have suggested.  There have been in the past, but the were nerfed.  SOE seems to be pretty conscious about that stuff these days.

There are other hacks that were present in the game such as some no drop transfer hacks, something called 'ghosting', and i think some zoneing and gate commands that have been nerfed.

I haven't heard about any real 'dupe' hacks in the game, I'm not saying they don't or can't exist .. I just simply haven't heard of any.  About the only time I've ever seen anything 'duped' was actually due to fault on SOE's part.  Bunch of people died right when the servers crashed .. people ended up dead in PoK with all their equipment, but a fully equipped corpse where they died.  It was a fluke, and it happens once in a blue moon, but I imagine its probably more due to database syncronization problems between the various servers that run the zones across the game.




Elder Essant Le'Fur
70 Vah Shir Beastlord of the Rathe
Brotherhood of the Spider
My Stuff!

Kenusten

About the same time as the banning of the accounts, Sony made it so that tradeskills loose roughly 10 to 500 pp per successful combine, thats on vendor purchasable combines, the loss is even bigger if you buy your components from the bazaar.

It would have been nice if they had let the tradeskillers at least break even on successful combines, the failures alone can rack up a significant cost.

iamweaver

Wildblood Lupic Wulfsib:  Member of Memento Reejeryn, The Seventh Hammer (Lanys T'Vyl)
Sugar Daddy: Berrew, Archon of Brell Serilis

Oiingo

While this may be a real problem, posting it on a forum that advertises EULA-violating platinum for sale (c.f. the Google adds at the top of every one of these forum pages) probably won't result in much action.  It's a shame too, because that's just one more reason for the developers to stay away.
Predator Oiingo Boiingo (80 beasty) of <Triality> on Maelin Starpyre

Nusa

While the original poster strikes more more as a crusader (notice the lack of verifiable details?), I am a little surprised to find we have plat ads in this forum. I had to turn off my firefox ad-blocker to see them, but they are there.

Jaeren

The ads have been in place for quite a while.  I've added many of them to the list of ones not to show but I haven't had time lately to add the ones that are showing now.

Frankly, they have been up for months with the occasional one getting through and until today, no one even noticed so I hadn't put much effort into removing them with the large amounts of other things I have to do, it doesn't leave much time for removing ads that no one seems to see anyway.

Edit: Also, once Sony made their own forums, they stopped visiting or listening to any other forums anyway.



EQ - Morell Thule / Erollisi Marr (Retired):
[75 Beastlord] Jaeren (Barbarian)
[72 Cleric] Velissia (High Elf)
[69 Shaman] Sotar (Vah Shir)
  
WoW - Medivh (Retired):
[60 Rogue] Draeven (Undead)
[60 Priest] Lifesaver (Undead)
[56 Rogue] Klaien (Human)
[51 Paladin] Keidian (Human)
  
VSOH - Flamehammer (Retired)
[34 Disciple] Daevien (Half Elf)
[33 Bard] Pastorius (Kojani)
[26 Dread Knight] Draeven (Kojani)


Koullyn

That first email is almost exactly what was posted about 2-3 years ago by some other person that had zero evidence or anything at all to back up the claim. Getting PP in EQ now is so easy that even with a dupe it doesn't really matter.

As for the ads the list of sites to ban on our Adsense is a mile long, they just keep popping up new sites after new sites. It is not against the EULA to have those ads up there, it is only a violation if you use them. :)
-- Retired Level 70 Beastlord --
http://www.wowgamers.com
http://www.wwm.net

Merescata

#8
I had actually noticed those ads back some time ago.  I wondered why they were there.  They mess up the streamlined effect of the site, but I'm fairly good at ignoring content I don't like or care for.  I'd love to see them gone, but.. *shrug*

below:  remains to remind me I din do it proper....

/shrug    (Tas?  did I shrug properly?   :-P ) 

above:  remains to remind me I din do it proper....


edit: fixed *shrug* per Tas' suggestion...or was that an order?  *shrug*   :-P
Merescata
75 Vah Shir BST
Tribunal
Clan McEye

Essant

What ads?  I seriously dont see them .. guess Firefox + Adblock works pretty good =)
Elder Essant Le'Fur
70 Vah Shir Beastlord of the Rathe
Brotherhood of the Spider
My Stuff!

Bananea

. Since things in the infamous macroquest program allow you to use vendors and world combiners like the forge and oven from across the zone,

Untrue!

Chickennuggets

It almost seems like a really creative ad.  The OP talks about how easy it is to get piles of plat from this website, or that, and these people, and also throw out a program or two.  Fact is... there is cheating, and always will be, not sure if it is as rampant as the OP suggests.  Either choose to take part or not.  Every security measure sony can come up with can/will be hacked, sadly that's just how it is.  It's a game... stay away from the stuff you don't like.
Chickennugets  http://www.magelo.com/eq_view_profile.html?num=1226640
Lvl 70 Beastlord
Steel and Honor
Saryn server

Koullyn

Yea the previous letter like this was against Yantis and IGE, it was almost exactly the same dribble being posted.

As for the ads they aren't harmful and the admins here deserve to get a little something back for the $$ and work they put in.
-- Retired Level 70 Beastlord --
http://www.wowgamers.com
http://www.wwm.net

Jaeren

At this point, I'm just hoping to get enough from the ads to pay for a renewal of the domain at some point ;)

I really don't care if you block the ads or not. They are just there in the hopes they might prove useful to someone and be clicked. I can't & won't tell you to click them (google has rules against it and i dont want to tell people just to click on crap ads anyway). I've tried tomake the ads blend in some, mostly on the default skin at this point. Just got too many projects on the go and haven't gotten everything updated here to try and make the ads less noticable / intrusive.



EQ - Morell Thule / Erollisi Marr (Retired):
[75 Beastlord] Jaeren (Barbarian)
[72 Cleric] Velissia (High Elf)
[69 Shaman] Sotar (Vah Shir)
  
WoW - Medivh (Retired):
[60 Rogue] Draeven (Undead)
[60 Priest] Lifesaver (Undead)
[56 Rogue] Klaien (Human)
[51 Paladin] Keidian (Human)
  
VSOH - Flamehammer (Retired)
[34 Disciple] Daevien (Half Elf)
[33 Bard] Pastorius (Kojani)
[26 Dread Knight] Draeven (Kojani)


Tastian

Yeah I'd randomly noticed some of the ads getting through, but all things considered I was pretty impressed how well they were being handled.

As for the shrug, I prefer the doube * approach.  like...

*shrug*

the *'s reprsent both shoulders being used in the shrug to really make it clear just how shruggy of a shrug it is.

Going with the / appraoch just makes it seem like you got a weenie one shoulder shrug going which looks like a really bad dancer trying to keep up with a beat.  Either that or some guy in a relationship trying to semi-block the incomping attack from their other half.  *shrugs*  8P