f13.net

Looks like WoW has its first widely-known dupe bug.  Won't post the link to where I saw it (posting bugs like this before they are fixed is verboten here, right?), but it is probably everywhere (it's not like I have l33t sploiter info, I saw it in a pretty public place).  Hopefully some bans will be incoming.  I have a hard time seeing Blizzard pull a rollback; the outcry would be deafening. 

Damn kids and their water-filled barrels...

Yup, something to do with Mauradon and dupes that occur upon zoning and re-zoning into the instnace.  Lovely.

I always thought there was a Dupe Bug in Gnomeragon anyway    :-D

Aw, and I just picked up my painreaver band too. It was only a matter of time before this game got hit with a dupe bug, right? Wouldn't be the first MMO to have one.

Already seen notes on this exploit discussed on the official forums, and casually mentioned in some of the uberguild boards, like FoH.

I guess now we'll have to see what Blizzard entertains as a "fix" to this problem.  Like I allluded to in my first sentence, a rollback is probably the most obvious way to fix the bug; track people who are making huge purchases all of the sudden, ascertain that they're duping/exploiting, and then ban them into the ground.

They had a dupe bug just before US release as well, dunno if it ever made it live. If you traded stuff to somebody and had the trade window open just when the server was going down, both people would have the items when the server went online again.

Really they must have some morons over at blizzard because the present bug actually comes from a bug concerning rollbacks. When you get rollbacked actions aren't affected, just toon specifiic stuff such as xp, money etc. They don't even rollback items correctly which you have in inventory. For example if you turn in a quest and get the quest item, then when you get rollbacked you can very often have the item from the quest, but get the quest it self rollbacked. Because of this there's people with double carrot on a stick etc. Trades aren't recorded either, so if you trade über items, cash etc and then force a rollback, you will be rollbacked a couple of minuts with your friend still having the stuff and you as well. Stuff like this happend to me personaly during the firsts days of release over here in europe when the servers were really unstable, you weren't exactly happy when the addiction made you log on and play just to be rollbacked a couple of lvls when the servers went down.

I blocked all the entrance bridges in Vesper with those. People were just too stupid to figure out they had to empty the water out of the barrels.

Nice.  It'll be interesting to see how this kidney punches the economy.

I love it when games make themselves less attractive to come back to.

I don't understand how someone could halfass this.  Why isn't everything in the same db... nevermind.  Pointless question.

I have to say I'm glad to hear this too, the lack of teeth gnashing and actual patches recently have made me consider comming back but now not so much.

In other news, Blizzard takes waaaay too fucking long each week to do "maintainence" on their servers.

And then they can't even keep their web servers up so I can check the estimated time on the servers coming back up.

Asshats.

(http://www.firepacket.net/duppe1qa.gif)

Front page story on /. right now. Downtime is extended, mutterings about rollbacks rampant.

I hope they don't rollback too far...I didn't play at all yesterday, so it won't hurt me Too badly.

Why did they censor the fuckheads name? lame.

At least the dupers are being subtle.

Damn, my rogue could have used a cheap Krol Blade.

Yeah, that is a real criminal mastermind at work.

I do not fear rollbacks, for I have played Ragnarok Online.

I gained a shitload of AV rep last night, but blizzard needs to do whatever it takes to fix this shit.  Dupes murdered D2, they can do the same here if blizzard doesn't take decisive action.  I dont care if the servers have to be down for 2 days, they need to perform a comprehensive search of all accounts involved in this and perma-ban these fags.  If its possible to delete all the duped shit, do that.  If not, rollback.  Valuable non-bop items are a mistake to begin with.

Dupes are ok in a free game because, well, you get what you pay for. However, that $15 offers a lot of entitlement to Blizzidiots who will make your life a living hell as a dev if you let dupes go. So, I agree server rollbacks may be needed, bannings are definitely appropriate, and a hotfix is absolutely critical.

I like this thread.

Also:

(http://www.pritchettcartoons.com/caricatures/nixon.jpg)

I am not a crook.

Yes there were dupe exploits in the US release (and in Beta as well) and I've been whining about their fundamentally broken character state syncronization/saving architecture since December. This dupe exploit is the same one that people have been doing "inadvertently" for a long time now except this one is more easily reproduced. It's highly unlikely that this will be fixed permanently in the short term and depending on how bad their code is they may never be able to fix it.

The problem with WoW is that its character state saving transactions are not "atomic" within a single character nor are they atomic between characters. An atomic transaction means that if one part of the transaction fails the entire transaction fails. If a transaction isn't atomic then some parts may get saved to the database while others do not. A simple example is transfering money between bank accounts. If one account is debited then the other account must be credited (and vice versa). If either part should fail then the state of the two accounts before the transaction started must be restored. If your banking system doesn't have atomic transactions then you can either lose or "dupe" money when transferring money depending on which part of the transaction is peformed first (the debit or the credit).

So what's happening in WoW is that before the disconnect or character "reset" happened some parts of your character state were stored but others were not. For example in your quest example, the inventory state got stored but the quest log status did not and therefore they were able to complete the quest again and get the reward a second time. For the gold dupe between players one character's gold state is being saved but the other's is not. If the trade transaction was truly atomic then either both characters' gold states are saved or both not saved (just like the bank transfer example above). So all of the problems people have had with their character state getting messed up stem from this fundamental design flaw.

Now this confuses me.  Oracle has good support for transactions and rollbacks and commits and stuff like that - ie the nitty gritty to make a functional unit of work atomic.  Hell, make the 'trade stuff' transaction a stored procedure, pass in the various character IDs or whatever they use, the ID of the traded item, and roll back if any part of the transaction fails.  It doesn't seem that complex to me.

Of course, if they don't use stored procedures and transactions, then why the hell did they buy a big powerful expensive DBMS and not use all its functionality?

Actually that krol blade pic is a fake. If you zoom in, you'll see evidence of the photoshop job ( someone on the general forums made this http://img251.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fake3ss.jpg ).

But the gold 'sploit is very real, and probably introduced in the last patch. It only works when the instance server is down, so the farmers have been using creative ways to crash the instance server (apparently by having a level 30 zone into maraudon via scepter?). The MC guilds on my server were not amused.


-- Z.

For some odd reason I'm all giddy about this.

I'm not.  I just got my Shanker on the day this was announced.  Which would mean a rollback might force me to kill plugger again ?  Oh FFS...

There won't be any rollback, I think.  They wouldn't have bothered bringing the server back up last time if they were going to do that.  What would have been the point?  A dupe is pretty serious, and maybe a very, very wee, tiny little rollback would be acceptable to most.  A rollback after all this time?  I don't think even Blizzard devs would be that stupid.

No it definately sounds like Blizzard is going to go the "not do anything" route.  At best you might get some tolken bannings of a few people per server but whatever damage this does to the economy is here to stay I'd wager.

I might agree with that statement, but I hate raiding and do not like the BG's as they stand.  There really isn't any other way to get the really shiny stuff in the endgame right now.  Even crafting is borked since you first have to raid to get into a position to even craft decent things and then you can still find items better than those that are made.  The effort isn't worth it from what I can tell.

Make all the truly important items bop, but make crafting a lot more viable and you might have a good system.  Although, if this dupe can be applied to gold or items used for crafting you are right back in the same boat.  From what I can tell, gold is the thing being duped more often which makes a lot more sense.  That is what is sold for real money most of the time anyway, not items.

I don't understand how that proves anything, please explain.

I know jack and shit about Photoshopping.

The space between the icons isn't even. Since the AH is set to seperate each icon/name by a certain amount of space it shouldn't be spaced awkwardly like the photoshop picture is showing (the tan lines.) One, I think, is 3-4 pixels tall and the other is 5-6. In other words, he cut the blade pic, pasted and dragged it down until he thought it looked real.

Thanks. Makes perfect sense now.

If you play in windowed mode the aspect ratio isn't accurate since windows has to fits it own little bar in there at the bottom of the screen, that causes some lines of pixels to vanish.

Unless I missed something, I've seen one easily photoshopped image to confirm this wild rumour. In fact, if you look at the parchment pattern behind the Krol Blade, you'll notice that the same pattern repeats for each instance of it. So far all I see if a bunch of people freaking about this supposed dupe bug. I have yet to see any impact of it on the servers I play on.

Can't say one way or another if this applies to the picture cause the guy didn't do the sizing to more than 2 of the entries.

We can also look at this

http://www.miatia.com/dupe/

Blizzard is now saying that no duping is going on:

http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general-en&t=405951&s=blizzard&tmp=1#blizzard
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=4115633&p=1&tmp=1#post4116480

This one definately proves it  is a fake. There is one large pattern to the background of the ah window, not that repeating pattern in the fake pic.