Integrity of the game

Because there are three types of people in the world.

1. Those that always cheat.
2. Those that cheat when given the opportunity and when they believe they won't get caught.
3. Those that never cheat.

If you only ban those that always cheat then you send the wrong message to those that will cheat when they think they won't get caught. You encourage more cheating if you don't ban.

 

I don't understand why people say this sort of thing. It's not like they are going to post source code. I'm talking about "We have a team of 4 people whose full time job is monitoring the game economy. They have access to buy/sell data. They will be checking players income and item totals." Not "For players.gold > 50000 { permaban(enderandrew)); }"...

 

Cute, so if *any* player has more than 50000 gold, we ban enderandrew ?

Sounds fair.

 

How did you get their source code?!!!!

It's a small development team. There's one guy checking the logs and probably a handful of guys casually checking the logs. I think that's a safe bet. Oh and the guy that has a "job" to check the logs, is probably doing like 5 million other things simultaneously.

 

To be honest it would probably be reasonably easy to sort the data to flag players that met certain criteria over key activities. Would all depend how the data is kept and what is recorded.......but from what I have heard they are tracking an awful lot.

 

So there's probably some giant splunk file somewhere that doesn't really get looked at until someone says "Has anyone looked at the logs lately?"

Sorry, it's my experience that development shops that have logging are rare, and development shops that look at their logs are even rarer, and development shops that know what to look for in a log are not so rare but that's not very exciting work and no one has money to pay someone to do that and blah blah blah.

 

To have access to that much data and writing an app to analyse activity and relationships between account....logins...frequency of sales, quests, transactions between players....average gold....projections.......omg it would be better than porn!

 

LOL, I agree. I'd personally love to have that job. I don't think most developers feel the same way though. Usually monitoring, report writing, and documentation are not what gets them excited.

 

Not to derail the thread further about economy, but this is exactly how the economy works in Elite Dangerous. Trading is done based on supply/demand that the star system needs and their prices they will buy or sell at will vary based on their local needs of those resources.

 

They have gobs and gobs of data. And no, they don't use Splunk (too expensive). They've got a different setup, but yes they likely log everything. The Oracle is watching and they mean that literally.

 

Ok. So Elite Dangerous designed a bad economy?

You do see the inherent problem with allowing players to buy something for X and sell it for Y (a higher price) to different parts of the game, right? What's the benefit to doing that? Other than giving a player free gold for doing nothing important?

 

Never used Splunk.... Although would loved to have had access. I used to write my apps in QlikView which is a fairly sexy tool.

 

That is the plan. All vendors have a "I will buy" and an "I will sell list". We just haven't yet populated them properly

 

grep / tail / sed are your friends

 

wait, so you support people finding mistakes in a game and exploiting those mistakes to get ahead at the cost of all the other players and think they should be rewarded for doing so?

I've agreed with you on everything I've seen so far but that one I just don't agree with... anyone who exploits should be banned... it was an obvious mistake and there were a handful of people who exploited the crap out of it and did it thousands of times to attempt to give themselves and unfair advantage over everyone else in the game... they had the chance to report it and not exploit it but chose to exploit it... they all got banned rightfully as the ToS stated they weren't allowed to exploit (like I hope SotA will say).

that's my thoughts but I'm also an Anti-PK so... see you on the field!!!

 

I think the key phrase here is "doing nothing important". You're assuming that it took zero effort to move that supply to the location that demanded it more than another location. Factors such as regional resources, control points, roving encounters (especially along trade routes), and other neat stuff that will make moving that supply a non-zero effort. So why should gems sold right next to the Graff gem mines be the same price as those sold on the other side of the world given those factors? Does that make any sense at all to you?

 

I thought they decided against this and if you were to sell to a vendor that is a ... say alchemist... you'd get better prices and pay less for ... say reagents... than if you purchased/sold the same things to... say a blacksmith.

hmmm... I must go back and find more details here but I thought that was said during a hangout... it was a DLMB though but... anyway... either way works fine just that I thought it was different than stated here.

 

Players charging more makes tons of sense. NPC's selling at different prices does not.

You're confusing the two as if they're equally impacting the game the same way. If you want a player driven economy, you can't have people gaming the system so the NPC's ruin it for the players.

 

I don't know anymore. I wish the devs would draw us a chart or something.

Or better yet just remove NPC's completely.

 

Player vendors will undoubtedly sell higher the further away from the source of the supply. NPC vendors can and should do the same.