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Exploit with mining units


DannyUK

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I have noticed that there is an exploit with mining units which I hope is removed or fixed in some way. To get around calibration time waiting 24hrs all you have to do is pick it up and put it down again then you can calibrate. 

 

Doing this can give you unlimited amount of the bonus ore under the mining unit. Now I'm not sure if it is supposed to be like this but to me it seems an exploit in gaining ore. Once placed you should not be able to calibrate again until the timer runs out, even if you pick it back up.

 

I'm sure some will disagree or be unhappy with it taken away but it all has to be fair for everyone.

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Hi, Danny_UK!

Thanks for letting us know about this. What you described is not considered an exploit.
This is a trade-off for an immediate chunk of ore that costs players ore in the longer term. It’s also limited by the number of available calibration charges.

We’d also advise that you use our support ticket system when reporting potential exploits. Thanks!

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3 hours ago, NQ-Nicodemus said:

Hi, Danny_UK!

Thanks for letting us know about this. What you described is not considered an exploit.
This is a trade-off for an immediate chunk of ore that costs players ore in the longer term. It’s also limited by the number of available calibration charges.

We’d also advise that you use our support ticket system when reporting potential exploits. Thanks!

It would be cool to have an override rather then lifting it each other. That is unneeded taxation on the server anyways tbh. Just a random idea anyways :) Or if you are like me you are just too lazy to be bothered by it period haha.

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14 hours ago, NQ-Nicodemus said:

Hi, Danny_UK!

Thanks for letting us know about this. What you described is not considered an exploit.
This is a trade-off for an immediate chunk of ore that costs players ore in the longer term. It’s also limited by the number of available calibration charges.

We’d also advise that you use our support ticket system when reporting potential exploits. Thanks!

Thank you for clarifying that, it just seemed wrong that you could replace it and gain 4k ore at a time as i've tried it myself. I think when you replace it it should not let you calibrate it over and over, you should wait for the timer of 24hrs or whatever it is but if it is part of the game then so be it.

 

I did not know where to post about this but good to know I can use support tickets I shall do that in the future.

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22 minutes ago, DannyUK said:

Thank you for clarifying that, it just seemed wrong that you could replace it and gain 4k ore at a time as i've tried it myself. I think when you replace it it should not let you calibrate it over and over, you should wait for the timer of 24hrs or whatever it is but if it is part of the game then so be it.

 

I did not know where to post about this but good to know I can use support tickets I shall do that in the future.

You still need calibration charges to do that. If you're maintaining enough mining units, you won't have any extra.

 

It's a nice boost early game.

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11 minutes ago, Emptiness said:

You still need calibration charges to do that. If you're maintaining enough mining units, you won't have any extra.

 

It's a nice boost early game.

Ah ok I see now, so once you use up all the charges you won't be able to do it anymore even when replacing it down? That makes sense then.

 

I was under the impression you could keep doing it over and over without penalty gaining ore all day long. I haven't tried it past the charges but yes makes sense now.

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It's still kinda screwed for high-tier ore.

On 10/7/2022 at 12:25 AM, NQ-Nicodemus said:

This is a trade-off for an immediate chunk of ore that costs players ore in the longer term

I don't think this can't be considered as a trade-off if you only have 1 hex of 1 l/h tier 5 ore.

you would get only 24 liters per day in normal circumstances.
But if you have 10 accounts, you can have around 70,000 liters per day considering harvesting talents from this single hex with a single mining unit.

So you gain 3000 times more ore doing it this way instead of intended way

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That is an interesting thought. Since the bonus ore is independent of the base mining rate this actually leads to a scenario where this technique is preferred when restricted to low outputting territories. Although the ideal scenario would still be to obtain several high yield tiles and then spread out your charges across multiple mining units. As for the use of multiple accounts, I still just see this as a tradeoff between immediate and longterm gains when viewed at the individual account level. The only potential issue I see with this whole technique is that it allows the playerbase to selectively turn up the tap (ie: global extraction rate) on a particular ore beyond what may be intended. Realistically this should not be a problem thou as the market will eventually self-stabilize if one resource type gets over produced.

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There has also been noise on here lately that you don't need to pay the tax on your hex to use Calibration (or run Industry). So if it's an HQ hex, and you don't care about the hourly yield, you don't need to pay the half mill a week.

 

I can't test this yet, but several people have mentioned it as something that has changed, and that would have impact on high Tier mining approaches.

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@W1zard

A couple of points:

- With max skills you can get ~50 charges per week, per account. That's 500 charges or 500 times you need to play the mini game per week, during beta I did this (for a while) with 4 accounts (200 charges per week). That took me around 7hrs/week (including travel time, excluding harvesting ore). Here you need to do the mini game, pickup the unit, place the unit, repeat. Doing that 500 times per week is ~17.5hrs, then you need to harvest the stuff, double that amount. That is almost a fulltime job (35 hrs) doing that 'trick' with 10 accounts...

- You also make mistakes during the minin game, so that 100% yield isn't 100% (although it can be very close to that after getting the hang of it).

- I don't know exactly the numbers on T5 ore (automining yield), but with your numbers and the price of T5 being 330+q/L, I had more profit mining T2 (during beta) the intended way then doing it the 'hacky' way. I need to do some math, but maybe that even can be done with just T1 on Alioth...

- If you produce almost half a million T5 per week (extra), what do you think it would do with the prices? They would plumet even more, the market/industry isn't geared to so much T5!

 

Can it be done? Sure! Is it fun/wise? Probably not... Does it limit price coughing, absolutely! 😉

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22 hours ago, W1zard said:

It's still kinda screwed for high-tier ore.

I don't think this can't be considered as a trade-off if you only have 1 hex of 1 l/h tier 5 ore.

you would get only 24 liters per day in normal circumstances.
But if you have 10 accounts, you can have around 70,000 liters per day considering harvesting talents from this single hex with a single mining unit.

So you gain 3000 times more ore doing it this way instead of intended way

This is my argument for it being an exploit. I really don't think the people in charge of defining it as an exploit fully comprehend the issue, or why it's an issue even though your technically burning a charge. 

 

Only started abusing it once NQ sided with a streamer who was abusing it at an org level in Beta and publicy stated it was A-okay! They argued it wasn't an exploit, I and others reported it as an exploit. 

 

So I'm assuming instead of banning an entire streamers org for abusing it they decided it was OKAY! Because, your still burning a charge. I can see both sides, either way it WAS not intended gameplay and doing it arguably gives players an advantage over those that don't... specifically because you don't need a high throughput tile to get the ore bonus. Pro tip, look for other org/player owned tiles and grab a low output tile of high tier ore and just go ham!!! Get Dat ore, it's not an exploit!

 

 

Again for the class, a tile that gives 1L an hour of let's say T5, gives the same bonus as a tile outputting 80L an hour. Find tile/s with the map tool that have a flower of 2-3 or more claimed tiles, check the tile name. Check to see what level of autominer is on their outpost to see what tier of ore it's harvesting. Then just plop down a TU next to them and setup your 1 autominer if the same tier, not connected to a container, and just calibrate, remove the element,  backspace it in again with build mode, and repeat calibration. Pro tip, moving the auto miner into a slightly different position spawns the ore in a new spot so you can pile up a bunch easily for harvesting. 

 

 

Easy fix, just output a set amount of ore multiplied by the autominers hourly rate for that ore type. It's literally 10 minutes of dev time, less than a single line of code. Probably be able to fix the code and check in the fix faster than me writing this post on my phone while making chunky monkey. 

 

Though if they 'fix' it now, it signals it WAS an exploit/issue and sorta flies in the face of openly allowing it. Sorta expecting a silent 'nerf' if they do change things, and not explain the reasoning behind it.. and still allow you to do it... just not get the full ore bonus as before, effectively making the abuse of it pointless.... but that doesn't stop those with high tier/high amount of liters an hour from potentially abusing it... so... dammed of they do, dammed if they don't at this point as it's publicly stated as not an exploit. 

 

Meanwhile I've casually mentioned people can duplicate constructs the past 2 weeks, nobody cared. We've had a quanta dupe already. And half the major issues / exploits I reported in Beta are still an issue in live with no response from NQ staff to the ticket re-reporting them.... but gosh darn it, if someone builds a small tower next to a mission point and NQ allows it... everyone looses their mind!

 

Game is riddled with exploits at launch, several NQ has openly allowed... and many more that they haven't even commented on 

Or have had any public accountability over... as they should trying to cultivate a persistant single shard game universe where these issues were held as partial reasoning why they had wiped players progress in Beta.  

 

 

I love DU, ant I want it to succeed. Outright allowing exploits and remainig silent on others is not how to succeed, in my opinion. 

 

 

NQ can still release a public statement, and retroactively punish players found exploiting(especially quanta dupe, construct dupe, and element dupes) I've seen other MMO services punish players months later. I just hope NQ has the right data engineer/s to sift through their database to find the outliers and deal with them appropriately. And likewise for NQ to release a statement acknowledging the issues, and reiterate their stance on exploits and their policy, and ideally process, for dealing with them.

 

As a passionate player and at a time advocate for the game it hurts to see, though I know people at NQ are only human and judging by their team not many of them have experience in dealing with these sorts of issues in MMO development.... hope they can hire some extra hands to deal with issues their core team has struggled with. I hope the powers that be (CEO, investment firm, managers)  give their team the tools and resources needed to deal with it going forward. 

 

I tried to be constructive with this post, just hope it doesn't fall on deaf ears.... who am I kidding? NQ ain't got time to read my tickets, why would they have time to read this forum post? :(

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It's absolutely not an exploit, because NQ have repeatedly said it isn't. They've known that this is how it works since Beta, and they're "happy" to leave it as it is. I mean, it's had to make an Element retain "memory" of when it was used when you pick it back up into Inventory, innit?

 

Cruddy design? Sure, arguably. But hey, it's NQ. Expecting them to appreciate the consequences of their game systems is starting to become a naive standpoint. The "eruption" of ore ought to be proportional to the abundance of that ore in the tile, so recalibrating on a 1L/hour tile gets you 1% of recalibrating on a 100L/hour tile. That would make intuitive sense. You could make Haven an exception so newbies aren't shafted by such a change.

 

"Duping" constructs or Quanta is a whole different realm of exploit, and while you could argue that it's just as bad for the economy, replace-recalibrate has been drawn to NQ's attention enough by now that we can be confident it's just their usual nonsense.

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On 10/6/2022 at 10:25 PM, NQ-Nicodemus said:

Hi, Danny_UK!

Thanks for letting us know about this. What you described is not considered an exploit.
This is a trade-off for an immediate chunk of ore that costs players ore in the longer term. It’s also limited by the number of available calibration charges.

We’d also advise that you use our support ticket system when reporting potential exploits. Thanks!

 

Thanks for letting us in on the thinking behind this.  Are you sure that this is a good idea though?  I could get a tile with 1L of gold on it.  Then I could use a single mining unit and 20 calibrations per day to make a lot more than 1L of gold per hour.  There isn't much of a tradeoff there.  I could also charge friends, allies or whoever else I want to sell access to for the right to come and do calibrations on the tile because it costs me nothing and an unlimited number of calibrations can be run on my 1L gold tile.  If I trust the person doing it then I can even share the mining unit with them.  For them it is a way of using their calibration charges with no tile taxes and without the upfront cost of buying mining units.

 

And people are doing this.  I have actually stood in a queue on a tile waiting for my turn on the mining unit to do my calibrations.

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9 minutes ago, Cergorach said:

I just did some math and even doing T1 on Alioth the 'intended way' will net you more profit then 'hacking' it...

It depends on how you define 'profit' though.  What you can do with the 'calibration only' method is:
- pay no tile tax!  You don't need an active tile for calibrations
- manage a small number of tiles.  One of each type of tile is all you need.  It doesn't even have to be a good tile.

- share with a group.  You can all use each others' tiles essentially for free.

- generate large amounts of ore on a rubbish tile.  No need for a good one, adjacency bonuses, etc.

- reduce upfront investment.  If I want to do 20 calibrations per day on an advanced, I should, at minimum, need 20 mining units with an upfront cost (currently) of 40 million.  Right now I can just use one.

- reduce transport.  I used this method (after it was confirmed not to be an exploit) to bootstrap industry by calibrating T1 on a single tile.  I could just generate the ore right next to my factory and scoop it right into the input container.  I could choose the ore type and spawn in/collect 50k of it in well under an hour.  If I wanted to efficiently use 20 calibrations per day 'the right way' I would have to have about 80 units on 20 tiles?  They would all have tile tax.  I would be doing a *lot* of hauling and I might have problems when the bot orders run out.

 

Sure, there are pros and cons here.  But this just feels a bit game-breaking to me because it reduces the value of various other ways of playing.  'flowers' are worth less, for example, and the value of ore from PvP asteroids goes down if people can trivially spawn in large quantities of it on planets.  Preventing the 'pick up/put down' method would certainly limit the worst effects of this on high tier ore.  More ideally there would be a limit on the total amount of ore per tile per day which calibrations can generate and that would be linked to how good the tile is, adjacency bonuses, etc.

 

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7 hours ago, Zeddrick said:

If I wanted to efficiently use 20 calibrations per day

Am I missing something, or are you assuming 4-5 Alts here?

 

I sometimes think NQ doesn't consider how Alts change time-gated features in the game.

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1 hour ago, Kezzle said:

Am I missing something, or are you assuming 4-5 Alts here?

 

I sometimes think NQ doesn't consider how Alts change time-gated features in the game.


I'm using alts.  But I think you can get that many per day with talents on a single character too?

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Are you seriously concerned about this feature?
As mentioned above, the market will very quickly adjust the price of over-extracted ore. And the only thing this will lead to is a drop in the price of these ores. If T1 and T2 ores can be disposed of quickly and a lot, then if you fill yourself with T5, what will you do with it in such quantity? It will simply become cheaper and more accessible on the market. And will open access to many other players in the production of T4-T5 components.
Therefore, I consider all the arguments that this is an exploit solely as an attempt to protect my investments in already explored tiles with T3-T4-T5 ore and fear of market competition))). I understand your desire to sit on unique tiles that are scarce on planets and collect rent. But apparently it won't...
Otherwise, all these arguments about the exploit would not exist.

P.S. And yes, even recalibrating 20 charges makes you hate mining units. And if 500 charges a week ... You have to be a very diligent person to play the calibration simulator for so long.

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2 hours ago, ColonkinYT said:

Are you seriously concerned about this feature?
As mentioned above, the market will very quickly adjust the price of over-extracted ore. And the only thing this will lead to is a drop in the price of these ores. If T1 and T2 ores can be disposed of quickly and a lot, then if you fill yourself with T5, what will you do with it in such quantity? It will simply become cheaper and more accessible on the market. And will open access to many other players in the production of T4-T5 components.
Therefore, I consider all the arguments that this is an exploit solely as an attempt to protect my investments in already explored tiles with T3-T4-T5 ore and fear of market competition))). I understand your desire to sit on unique tiles that are scarce on planets and collect rent. But apparently it won't...
Otherwise, all these arguments about the exploit would not exist.

P.S. And yes, even recalibrating 20 charges makes you hate mining units. And if 500 charges a week ... You have to be a very diligent person to play the calibration simulator for so long.

What I'm concerned about is that this feature creates too much of the higher tier ores, massively reducing their value.  This is what happened in beta -- mining units were introduced and the value of the ores dropped massively right afterwards.  T2 sometimes sold for less than T1 (because no bot orders).  T3 priced under 50h, etc.

 

NQ have reduced the amount of ore per tile, reduced the number of high-tier flowers and taken away planets to limit the amount of ore generated by mining units.  Presumably this was, at least partly, to limit their effects on the economy and try to balance things a bit more.  For the moment it's pretty healthy with people doing asteroids, etc.  But people are scanning a lot now and the cat is out of the bag regarding calibrations.  We even have someone from NQ up there at the top of the thread telling us the calibration-only method is OK.  So now those changes to limit the amount of ore mining units generate are completely meaningless.  A single tile with a tiny amount of T3 can easily generate hundreds of thousands of L of ore per day so the player base can trivially collectively generate a lot more high ore than the game can use.

 

I think we're headed for the same situation we had in beta where all the ore values drop too far for certain activities to be viable or appealing, people stop doing things like asteroids, flowers are not worth very much and everyone has to constantly run missions to make money or constantly calibrate to get ore.  How many Aileron Parts do they really need at market 12?

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2 hours ago, ColonkinYT said:

Therefore, I consider all the arguments that this is an exploit solely as an attempt to protect my investments in already explored tiles with T3-T4-T5 ore and fear of market competition))). I understand your desire to sit on unique tiles that are scarce on planets and collect rent. But apparently it won't...


I don't own any flowers or T4-T5 tiles BTW.  I own one T3 tile with a very low yield which I can use for calibrations and have access to tiles other players hold to calibrate different types of ore.  It feels way too easy and a bit game-breaking, but if everyone else is doing it ....

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1 hour ago, Zeddrick said:


I don't own any flowers or T4-T5 tiles BTW.  I own one T3 tile with a very low yield which I can use for calibrations and have access to tiles other players hold to calibrate different types of ore.  It feels way too easy and a bit game-breaking, but if everyone else is doing it ....

I understood you.
Let's be honest. The problems are not in these tiles, on which you can get high-tire ore in this way.
The real problem is in an unbalanced economy. Resources simply have nowhere to spend. The developers spent a lot of time on the mechanics of mining and processing, but that's why we forgot to do all this.
Many people rely on PVP but it won't work. When armor played a role, a lot of resources went into armor and overcoming it. And also for a large number of engines, fuel and scrap. With the introduction of shields, armor has been nerfed. As a result, the consumption of resources for armor (and there were, among other things, ores of high tiers such as gold) also went away.
There is no PVE mechanic (at least with minimal bots) where you could spend fuel and ammo. There are no sensible territorial wars (and most importantly, there is no reason to wage them).
Here is just a small example.
Now the last orders of T1 ore will be sold to bots and severe deflation will come... We have already gone through this...

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On 10/6/2022 at 11:25 PM, NQ-Nicodemus said:

Hi, Danny_UK!

Thanks for letting us know about this. What you described is not considered an exploit.
This is a trade-off for an immediate chunk of ore that costs players ore in the longer term. It’s also limited by the number of available calibration charges.

We’d also advise that you use our support ticket system when reporting potential exploits. Thanks!

 

If the goal is for the T4 to reach the price of the T1 then it's found you are in the right direction

 

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7 minutes ago, Knight-Sevy said:

 

If the goal is for the T4 to reach the price of the T1 then it's found you are in the right direction

 

So it will be. The crisis of overproduction ends with this. And if T1 and T2 ore has somewhere to be disposed of, then starting from T3 and higher, the need for it is greatly reduced.
But I'm afraid that in 2 weeks the price of T1 ore will drop to 10-15 quants per liter.

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