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Only a return from one player among others


Knight-Sevy

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On 4/13/2023 at 3:55 PM, BlindingBright said:

While I agree with you, every MMO beta/launch I've been apart of has suffered hard to track exploits regarding currency, and in game items... especially at launch. the 'standard' way of doing it, while can work has not worked in the 20ish years I've been playing MMO's. The last two 'new' mmo's I've beta'd through launch are DU and New World, both of which suffered from major exploits at launch... New World exploits just got more coverage as it had an actual playerbase. 

 

I quit DU largely after coming across how to do resource duplication, and realizing NQ had no proper way to track it or the items created through it. Also... why was I gonna grind for a game that has so many issues like that? When someone can just exploit wealth into existence. 

 

A proper chain of custody, along with a public ledger, would allow the general public, aka players to sniff out abusers much easier... and it'd make it easier to track for issues with money laundering, gold selling, and of course exploits. All of which a MMO devs needs to be aware of, and many don't put neatly enough development time into it ahead of launch. 

 

I'm not saying it'd stop exploiting or resource duping .. just that it could go a long way to reducing, tracking, and dealing with offenders. I'm sure a lot can be done with just checking database calls and logs, though from what I've seen it hasn't historically been enough.

All kinds of bad things would happen in a game as small as DU with a public ledger.  For example, if I sell you something like a beacon then I know which entity in the ledger is you and I know everything you buy and sell from then on.

Really one would need to have 10s of thousands of trading entities at a minimum to make it work properly.

And I don't think the blockchain adds anything here.  You still have to trust NQ to actually put all trades onto the blockchain and to track entities inside the game and ensure that only one in game entity is represented by each object on the blockchain.  At that point they might as well just keep their ledger in a database and give you an API to query it, the blockchain adds nothing at all besides noise, buzzword compliance and the illusion that someone is going to somehow magically create a tradable commodity out of it and make a lot of money from that on the side.

 

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On 4/15/2023 at 9:11 AM, Zeddrick said:

And I don't think the blockchain adds anything here.  You still have to trust NQ to actually put all trades onto the blockchain and to track entities inside the game and ensure that only one in game entity is represented by each object on the blockchain.  At that point they might as well just keep their ledger in a database and give you an API to query it, the blockchain adds nothing at all besides noise, buzzword compliance and the illusion that someone is going to somehow magically create a tradable commodity out of it and make a lot of money from that on the side.

 

It's a nice idea to burn a ton of extra carbon for the sake of mitigating "fraud" in MMOs when the devs themselves don't consider it a real issue. Seems like a wise use of resources, that... 😁

 

I agree 100% with this -- that blockchain adds nothing for this use case, but does have a steep cost. 

 

The issue with fraud here isn't technical at all...it's economic. Most people simply don't give a shit about how fair an MMO economy is...be it devs or consumers. 

 

They will not rework their entire QA pipeline to emphasize "security" for the sake of a few hardcores that mean nothing compared to background churn rates. That's what making a massively multiplayer game is all about -- understanding who you customers really are and how they engage with the product en masse. 

 

I'd assert that traditional methods do work for MMOs at scale today, not that "it's never worked". Clearly it does work as there are plenty of very successful MMOs; their definition of working is not "100% security", and that's for a good reason. 

 

It isn't worth dev time to work on "locking things down" 100%. It's far more efficient to patch things (quickly) after the fact than try to mitigate exploits/fraud/bugs entirely up-front through technology. It's far more effective commercially to focus dev time on content over edge case exploits etc. 

 

A lack of content is the number one driver of churn rates in this industry, not fraud. So that's where devs will spend their time...not trying to lock down a virtual economy that people only care about as a means to an end. 

 

Bugs are inevitable, and blockchain has shown that bugs living on a smart contracts can be even more destructive than with traditional infra. It's shown that giving users "ownership" of their data is an invitation for malicious parties to easily steal it because consumers are not security experts and don't often have the resources to secure their data.

 

So...blockchain giving "more security" isn't a given, regardless of the theory or use case.

 

There are valid use cases for blockchain, but IMO this isn't a good one. Even setting aside everything else about the technicals, it isn't worth the cost in carbon for the sake of online video games that already use enough energy as a luxury good.

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2 hours ago, blundertwink said:

 

It isn't worth dev time to work on "locking things down" 100%. It's far more efficient to patch things (quickly) after the fact than try to mitigate exploits/fraud/bugs entirely up-front through technology. It's far more effective commercially to focus dev time on content over edge case exploits etc. 

 

 

 

I will slightly disagree here, i often seen dev just yodel along with out giving security even the slightest though. I think it is important to have security in mind when you code 100% of the time, but not necessarily as your main objective.

(Semantics perhaps?)

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In the meantime already fully suspended my stuff and i just want my money back but that is probably a big no even though european law is at my side.

Amateuristical stuff like not acting on some people who break the rules but not on others is no way near any professional business. With that they killed their own game and the only thing left to save anything has to do with what all large companies do when personal causes the company to loose a great deal of money or prestige.

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5 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

In the meantime already fully suspended my stuff and i just want my money back but that is probably a big no even though european law is at my side.

Amateuristical stuff like not acting on some people who break the rules but not on others is no way near any professional business. With that they killed their own game and the only thing left to save anything has to do with what all large companies do when personal causes the company to loose a great deal of money or prestige.

 

 

So, you honestly think that "personnel" are causing the company to lose money?  You think upper management (and you) have this perfect plan.  But there are just these darn unruly NQ employees who are doing whatever they want, and messing everything up?

 

I'm sorry but that's just funny.

 

The only prestige that NQ has is the work that's been done so far, by the people who work there.  They've never done anything else, they've never made any other money to lose.

 

It's not the people who work there's fault that the people in charge think they can just snap their fingers and produce a game like nothing that's ever been done before.  And when they don't get it fast enough, they just start trying to sell whatever they have.

 

They started making "professional business" decisions when they still needed to be making the game.

 

You can't really judge the product or the people making it, when they haven't been allowed to finish it yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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10 hours ago, Atmosph3rik said:

You can't really judge the product or the people making it, when they haven't been allowed to finish it yet.

 

We sure can, we have 8 years of experience with NQ/DU, plenty of time to see how they operate. On top of that the game IS finished, they did a launch and it is sold as finished on Steam.

 

 

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17 hours ago, Atmosph3rik said:

You can't really judge the product or the people making it, when they haven't been allowed to finish it yet.

 

allowed?   And what does this have to do with breaking their own rules?

 

And your not sorry, your just trying to hide a toxic response

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6 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

And what does this have to do with breaking their own rules?

 

You seem to think they are making decisions that you aren't happy with out of spite, or by mistake or something.

 

These decisions aren't mistakes, they're stone-cold capitalism.

 

The personnel at NQ are just trying to do their jobs.  It's the people who are concerned with money and prestige who are cutting corners and funneling money into other projects.

 

 

 

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I didn't expect my topic to make the discussion last so long and address all these different subjects (which remain very interesting, so continue).
 

I hope that NQ's next project will completely detach itself from the "emergent gameplay" side or the metaverse.

They proved that they were completely incompetent, not on the technique, which I cannot judge, but on the very principle of this operating system.
 

Jean-Christophe Baillie, even if he certainly had a huge share of responsibility in the failure of the project, was the person who had the vision that corresponded to the reality of what emergent gameplay should be.
 

I will have for proof of it the multiple DevBlog edited years ago with mechanics described in detail and more than deepened. Nothing was respected.
 

And here we are before this bitter failure.
 

BUT 2023 seems to be a good year for MMOs, there are new projects with veterans coming out. Maybe elsewhere, a vision close to that of JC will hatch on another theme.

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from IQ to NQ

.. is a bit overbearing

 

no doubt they are skilled programmers but the lack of avoiding the previous problems and the obvious inability to monitor those problems with a solid "role back individual data" plan - is not far beyond a Banana skin in regards to "IQ"

 

the word popping up in my mind, to describe the damage to the game and any possible playerbase-future is:     irreversible

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