Validation of Off-line Activities in a Persistent World.

Lots of folks have been asking about how offline activities will, or could be validated in an on-line world. The general premise is that fairness from other users is something people would like to see enforced so as not to interrupt or deter 'legitimate' game-play.

After a discussion in the forum chat, it seems this issue had some general interest with SotA crowd. I thought it might be a good idea to include that conversation and encourage feedback and questions on this potential 'feature'.

Also, as a point the interaction of these two types of worlds--offline and online--has not been confirmed to my knowledge. Any argument made either way here is simply exploratory and limited to speculation.

That said, any comments on this topic would be welcome. How you feel about the subject, any potential issues you think might be important, how do you think this might be accomplished, etc.

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Lord Viator
March 14, 2013 - 4:47 am
Another quote on the subject "we have several ways to prevent hacking/cheating. For the most critical instances, we'll host the instance. For most, we have metrics per scene so we know what can happen, best and worst case and we'll be sending frequent "transactions" to verify everything is within expected bounds"

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cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 4:50 am
Right, so it is sometimes possible to validate offline actions using something called 'zero-knowledge proofs'; have you guys heard of this?

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cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 4:50 am
It's a tool used in Cryptography.


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RelExpo
March 14, 2013 - 4:51 am
and yes @cs2501x. It's possible to verify things like that. I'm sure they have the know-how.

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cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 4:55 am
@RelExpo: Well, it's a tool in cryptography that's pretty computationally expensive. I'd be surprised if it was something that was explored internally; their suggestion of bounding is also a so-called 'hard' problem within computer science. There's an entire field of study dedicated to this area of study called, aptly, "Constraints".

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RelExpo
March 14, 2013 - 4:56 am
@cs2501x: Do you mean to say that it won't be able to check things on the central server?

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cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 4:57 am
I'm not making any claims about how they can or will be able to validate offline actions. I'm simply stating that bounding is a problem that could pose immense challenges in terms of validation.

cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 4:57 am
How do you know how much, say, gold a person can make in an hour, max?

RelExpo
March 14, 2013 - 4:58 am
and that's why I said WoM will be king in this type of setting. As it was in UO.

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cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 4:58 am
It's arguable that the userbase will discover a mechanism that outstrips the expectations of developers--and implementing a 'softcap' of some kind, for example, would cause an issue.

RelExpo
March 14, 2013 - 4:59 am
Oh it's possible to get those metrics after a certain amount of testing though you never do know in the end because people do fluctuate but the again, that's why GMs pop in and view behaviors or WoM spreads.

RelExpo
March 14, 2013 - 4:59 am
WoM = Word of Mouth

cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 4:59 am
Those are reactive approaches though, right?

cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 5:00 am
If a dupe bug is found then the damage is already done... and you're in a tough spot.

Reiatsul
March 14, 2013 - 5:00 am
@RelExpo: nothing travels faster then gossip

cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 5:00 am
Do you take away items? What about people who traded legitimately with others not knowing they were getting a dupe for a real item, or gold or whatever?

cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 5:00 am
You'd punish innocents.

Bowen
March 14, 2013 - 5:01 am
hmm will have to formulate some thoughts on this post.

cs2501x
March 14, 2013 - 5:01 am
Hmm. This seems like a topic for a thread.

RelExpo
March 14, 2013 - 5:01 am
@Reiatsul: EXACTLY! And no you wouldn't punish innocents. With databases nowadays being able to track to quite a specific time/activity, it's possible.

RelExpo
March 14, 2013 - 5:01 am
of course that takes man hours....

Lord Viator
March 14, 2013 - 5:01 am
many* man hours

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COOLness, Can a Quote myself

 

I'd just like to state this was taken late into the night... and delirium may have prevented me from further explaining myself but it seems it was still understood lol

I believe that regardless of what you do in the offline mode, it will NOT affect the online persistent world. I can't go into details of how exactly they will prevent exploits because I don't know their methods but WoM travels rapidly, especially with forums, social media and whatnot (and hopefully even within game somehow).

The devs seem to want to do updates weekly, so hotfixes shouldn't be much of an issue.