So who's playing Neverwinter

[Serpine]

You mean the mail courier so you can pull out attached items from an email? If so there is one near the auction.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Yes, that's what I ment. Thanks again!

 

[Jester David]

Is anyone familiar with the webcomic done by the people who do Penny Arcade and PvP known as The Trenches:
http://trenchescomic.com/

The second season revolves around an exploit that cripples the economy of the game and results in the game being wiped. Funny thing.... Neverwinter is currently having a similar problem. There's an Auction House bug that has flooded the game's economy with illicit Astral Diamonds which have been used to skew the AD:Zen purchase ratio and purchase a large amount of Zen. Sadly, it (and a number of other bugs) were reported in the closed beta but not fixed.

Life imitates art?

This has pretty seriously hurt the game's economy. How badly remains to be seen but the damage might be irreparable. There simply might be too many Astral Diamonds in the economy for prices to recover. A server wipe might be coming...

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

That would explain why the server is currently down...

 

[Jester David]

Some exploiters made a heck of a lot of money:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Neverwinter/comments/1eebyi/an_exploiter_claims_to_have_made_almost_six/

 

[Jester David]

Update

Neverwinter's twitter feed is saying they do not plan on wiping servers at this moment.

Apparently the exploit works by bidding in an auction with a negative value, say -1000 astral diamonds. You then get the value sent to you. In this case, 1000 AD. You can see this can quickly generate thousands of AD making that currency essentially worthless.

Amusingly, this exploit also popped up in Star Trek online before being fixed. So Cryptic evidently copied the AH code but neglected to fix the exploit.

The bug was widely known since launch, so exploiters have had several weeks to generate diamonds and spread the currency among mule accounts. This starkly divides the economy into people with billions of AD and everyone else. It will be very hard to regain control of the economy.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Speaking of the server being down, I discovered another annoying thing about it. Been doing the pray every day for celestial coins (and other goodies) thing for a couple of weeks. Spent 5 a week ago to see what I'd get, then started collecting again. Got up to six and was going to buy the 7 cc box yesterday. But the server went down and by the time I could get back in, guess what I didn't have any more? In this case being a casual gamer is probably better than being hard core. I'd hate to think what anyone who had a couple dozen saved up was thinking!

 

[Jhaelen]

Update
Amusingly, this exploit also popped up in Star Wars online before being fixed. So Cryptic evidently copied the AH code but neglected to fix the exploit.

Ouch.

 

[Serpine]

I'd hate to think what anyone who had a couple dozen saved up was thinking!

Well, you can't accumulate more then 7 of the self-destructing coin so it can't ever get that bad...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Update

Neverwinter's twitter feed is saying they do not plan on wiping servers at this moment.

Apparently the exploit works by bidding in an auction with a negative value, say -1000 astral diamonds. You then get the value sent to you. In this case, 1000 AD. You can see this can quickly generate thousands of AD making that currency essentially worthless.

Amusingly, this exploit also popped up in Star Wars online before being fixed. So Cryptic evidently copied the AH code but neglected to fix the exploit.

You mean Star Trek online? Or were you just speaking figuratively, because Cryptic is not doing Star Wars online and so they'l likely won't be able to copy any code over from there.

But if it happened in STO, it makes sense. Cryptic uses a common software basis for all its games.