| Author | Thread: Hiding Resources on Market |
| Dilt Posts: 167
Location: Fellin
Magus Age: 112 years old
| Message #33023 Posted: Jul 4, 2009, 5:17 pm |
This is a problem in the current game. Due to this bug, abusive PvPers can hide away their resources safely away with no repercussions while tormenting other players who don't rely on such underhanded techniques to escape consequences for their actions.
The question is, how can we fix this? I've seen several ideas, such as prohibiting cancelling of market offers, or limiting how much one can offer + how many offers one can have up. Another idea is to not have the market auto-withdraw the supplies, and instead check to see if the player still has the item/resource in question each time an item's status is changed, or resources are spent/lost. If they don't have it anymore, the trade autocancels. The resources/items are otherwise withdrawn when the trade is successfully made.
How do you guys think we can best fix this?Last Edited: Jul 4, 2009, 5:18 pm |
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laidanPosts: 1158 Location: Mottonsborough Magus Age: 113 years old Clan: OASIS | Message #33025 Posted: Jul 4, 2009, 6:07 pm |
| Heh, accept their ridiculous offers, then beat the tar out of them to get your stuff back? |
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| Dilt Posts: 167
Location: Fellin
Magus Age: 112 years old
| Message #33027 Posted: Jul 4, 2009, 6:25 pm |
That does not work. Mainly, it seems that accepting their offers doesn't increase their coffiers until they're active. Once they're active, they can just hide the offers on market again.
Also, they can ask for things like 100 premium tickets, or something otherwise insanely high and impossible to get back. |
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| Xlrate Posts: 232
Location: Rildesjan
Magus Age: 108 years old
| Message #33035 Posted: Jul 4, 2009, 7:40 pm |
Well I am limited to 25 offers up at one time. Surprising to some of you but I actually use all 25 of them about half the time.
Of course I have opted out of PvP so I dont know. |
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PeggaPosts: 702 Location: Jaaron Magus Age: 122 years old Clan: ADV | Message #33045 Posted: Jul 5, 2009, 4:23 am |
Were the penalty (ie, losing everything in the storage bin) for having a guard out lowered, you might see less hiding.
One way would be that once a workshop has been looted, the guard prevents it from being looted again until the owner logs on. Otherwise, once the guard is down the workshop gets looted over and over until everything is gone. And that's the reason for the hiding of resources. I know I've used it, especially after getting 8 looting raids after my guard and clan guard were knocked out.
Another option would be to make the hidden room bigger, especially for basic resources. Instead of hiding 5k of resources, maybe one could hide 100k? I'd probably leave the secondary still at 5k, tho. I'd probably keep resources in the workshop rather than dump everything into clan coffers (yet another method of hiding resources) if I had any chance of actually keeping a reasonable amount of primary materials around.
Now, obviously, either would be a big change. But to balance that back out some, I'd say up the amount of goods that the looter could carry. Maybe twice as much, or maybe even three times. Call it a golem adrenaline rush or something for knocking out the other golem. |
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| Dilt Posts: 167
Location: Fellin
Magus Age: 112 years old
| Message #33046 Posted: Jul 5, 2009, 4:40 am |
Dumping it to clan isn't 'hiding' in this respsect - that's a one-way transaction that can't be canceled once it's been done. Market hiding allows for instant withdrawl of large numbers of resources at once while they're prefectly safe from looting.
I can see hidden room being upped to 25k-50k primary resources, but that's an upper bound. There has to be some penalty for losing a fight. Otherwise, why keep a guard out in the first place? The only reason fleshies are even kept out right now is to prevent XP/Score loss. With resources being threatened as well, perhaps people will get serious about their defenses. |
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| Mist Posts: 291
Location: Rimesvin
Magus Age: 107 years old
| Message #33051 Posted: Jul 5, 2009, 6:28 am |
Perhaps the only real option is to allow the market place resources to be looted. That is to say that if the guards are penetrated, then the whole resources are available, not just whats in the workshop. (After Hidden Room taken out, of course)
And if that means there's an offer in the market, it would be withdrawn immediately. Whether it would be replaced automagically with a pro-rata deal, or whether it would just cancel (dumping all "hidden" resources back home, for further looting). Only enough deals to cover the losses would need to be cancelled off the market.
I found it a real bugbear. All that needs to happen is a broken guard left out (or no guard if they're willing to wear the little XP loss) and there's no damage to be done. Sure I can see how being munched might not be a lot of fun for the target - but its not being much fun for the little guys Tackt is hitting at the moment...Last Edited: Jul 5, 2009, 6:29 am |
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PeggaPosts: 702 Location: Jaaron Magus Age: 122 years old Clan: ADV | Message #33054 Posted: Jul 5, 2009, 2:25 pm |
| Dilt said:
Dumping it to clan isn't 'hiding' in this respsect - that's a one-way transaction that can't be canceled once it's been done. Oh, you might be surprised.
I can see hidden room being upped to 25k-50k primary resources, but that's an upper bound. There has to be some penalty for losing a fight. Otherwise, why keep a guard out in the first place? The only reason fleshies are even kept out right now is to prevent XP/Score loss. With resources being threatened as well, perhaps people will get serious about their defenses.
I've seriously considered putting out a fully defensively armored L5 Iron. But the penalty for losing the fight is too great. The golem is shut down, or destroyed, I start getting negative XP AND I return to an empty workshop with no materials to make replacement parts and repairs (save what I've got in storage). Better to put up a fleshie which more or less says "Go ahead, there's nothing to steal". Which there isn't.
However, getting back to your hidden room amounts, maybe the better way to resolve that is for it to be a percentage of your storage bin and not some fixed number. For a 400k storage bin, 25k of materials is tiny. That'll barely repair all the L5 parts during my normal XP farming. But for people without that huge bin, it is probably a lot. So, I'd suggest making the hidden room be 2.5% of the storage bin for each level (thus 25% at L10). |
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| Mist Posts: 291
Location: Rimesvin
Magus Age: 107 years old
| Message #33072 Posted: Jul 5, 2009, 11:27 pm |
I put out fleshies because then people can destroy them and I'm not too upset, and I get 10XP every attempt they make :)
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| deathpunk Posts: 154
Location: Nournsland
Magus Age: 117 years old
| Message #33081 Posted: Jul 6, 2009, 3:47 am |
| I didn't know looting was even still a problem, but I guess iron is scarce for some. All you need to do to deal with this is to get your whole clan to pound the douche into the ground. The xp lost from any one attack isn't much, but if you get 10-20 guys pounding on you with even 4 or 5 high-level taking it seriously then you'll quickly be out of xp and will be unable to pvp, assuming that's still how negative xp works. |
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| Namebreaker Posts: 83
Location: Rildesjan
Magus Age: 114 years old
| Message #33094 Posted: Jul 6, 2009, 3:44 pm |
From what I've seen with other similar on line game platforms with PvPing resources with a market, being able to loot market deals is pretty much the way to go. The deals on the market should be linked to the resources a person has, anyway, not taken from their storage and put in to a nebulous "vault" somewhere else.
This solves two problems immediately: You can't dodge your storage resource cap by stowing resources on the market, and you can't hide your resources on the market from PvP combat. If an attacker/looter manages to dip in to the resources "tagged" to be sold in the market, it's a simple matter of when someone attempts to buy it on the market, having a response that says the person attempting to sell you this item does not have the resources necessary to complete the transaction, ala a bank ATM, or check bouncing for insufficient funds.
This gives the added benefit to PvPers of being able to ascertain individuals wealth based on what they sell on the market. Which is how it should and would work in RL. If you're willing to show you can sell massive amounts of item A or B, you should be willing and/or able to defend it through whatever means.
Not to mention indirectly raising the need for both aggressors and defenders of PvP combat to put out higher level golems for defense. I know I'd be much more diligent about putting out something that can take a hit if someone could get 395,000 of each resource out of me with no way to hide it.
I'm honestly surprised that Arkham hasn't come straight out and said this is an exploit anyway.
The flip side of this is that I whole heartily agree that the Hidden room is next to worthless for a storage room at the higher/highest levels (IE 100k storage and up). Either alternative is viable: Either up the Hidden room to be able to eventually achieve 50k-100k protection (my vote's 50k), or, make it a percentage value of protection based on the level of the Hidden Room, as Pegga suggested. I think the % protection is probably the most viable and useful of the Hidden Room concept change suggestions, personally.
~Namebreaker |
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laidanPosts: 1158 Location: Mottonsborough Magus Age: 113 years old Clan: OASIS | Message #33096 Posted: Jul 6, 2009, 4:35 pm |
| My recollection (too lazy to find the post) is that Kep had said he doesn't like the way it is now, but wants to completely redesign the market at some point, to allow for lootable offers and all. Course that was a while back, maybe he changed his mind. |
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[ADMIN] ArkhamPosts: 902 Location: Mallow Magus Age: 124 years old Clan: AGOMC | Message #33102 Posted: Jul 6, 2009, 6:40 pm |
No, I hadn't changed my mind. I did a partial rewrite (which in effect only resulted in a market upgrade), but held off on the rest of the changes for the time being.
I do not like the idea of shoving resources into the market to avoid looting. I'd prefer to change the market so that resources only transfer upon acceptance (items and golems will continue to work as they do now).
Of course, that means buyers would have the occasional annoyance of clicking accept offer only to find that the person no longer has the resources available.
Kep |
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| Mist Posts: 291
Location: Rimesvin
Magus Age: 107 years old
| Message #33108 Posted: Jul 6, 2009, 10:01 pm |
Is it not practical to trigger a check and cancel market offers on a looting event?
However there is a question of do we want to let "barracks justice" into the game?Last Edited: Jul 6, 2009, 10:02 pm |
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| Shejali Posts: 9
Location: Dethsfell Rest
Magus Age: 122 years old
| Message #33126 Posted: Jul 7, 2009, 10:23 am |
| Arkham said:
Of course, that means buyers would have the occasional annoyance of clicking accept offer only to find that the person no longer has the resources available.
Kep
Honestly, the annoyance wouldn't be that big of a deal if you couldn't code around it. My suggestion would be to just check for any trades someone has when they are looted and verify they have enough resources left for the trade... You'd also have to check every time they wanted to spend resources on repairs/crafting/etc.
Another possible variation on this would be to temporarily cancel a person's trades for a certain amount of time after they were looted. Then when that time period is up, verify that they have the resources necessary for the trade, and put the trade back up on the market.
From a realism perspective this makes some degree of sense; your trade routes are interrupted, people are afraid to come pick up their goods and you can't get out to trade to them for fear of being attacked again.
This might help improve performance for when people are attacked 10+ times in a short period of time. You would only need to run the 'do-they-have-enough-resources-for-trades' check once for all those attacks.
Possibly the best option would be to maintain an extra set of variables/fields for each player that represented the cumulative amount of each resource they have on the market at any given time. Then display their 'in-market' resources [in green, or blue or w/e] next to the current display of resources... then when an attack occurs, if the player doesn't have enough resources, check the value of their 'in-market' resources. If they have any, cancel enough trades to complete the looting...
I think that last option is the best/easiest for programming and interface. It also has the benefit of allowing the user to see just how many of each resource they have available for repairing/building.
-Shejali |
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PeggaPosts: 702 Location: Jaaron Magus Age: 122 years old Clan: ADV | Message #33135 Posted: Jul 7, 2009, 12:45 pm |
The problem with canceling a market trade is if I have various valued trades out. For example, 25k of flesh for 1k money, 2k money, and 3k money. I get looted, and the loot chosen is flesh. Which of those three trades gets canceled? I suppose that it could be simple to select the one that was oldest or youngest.
However, I feel that making it so the trades can't be canceled (except for the first 2 minutes or so, to correct errors) would solve a lot more in the way of shielding resources. If the time gets extended to 48 hour or maybe even 72 hours, and they can't get the resources back until that time is up, people will not put up what they will be needing shortly. Unless of course, they start scheduling a constant stream of those trades. But I doubt a lot of people will have the forethought to do that on a consistent basis. |
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| Namebreaker Posts: 83
Location: Rildesjan
Magus Age: 114 years old
| Message #33146 Posted: Jul 7, 2009, 2:53 pm |
From what I understand of coding, the easiest solution will be to verify availability of funds at the time someone wishes to buy them against the resources you have in your storage. It's a one time check that only occurs *if* a transfer of funds is requested. Putting a minimum cancellation time or anything else would require a lot more to work around without really killing the problem: hiding loot, or dodging the storage capacity.
~Namebreaker |
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| Shejali Posts: 9
Location: Dethsfell Rest
Magus Age: 122 years old
| Message #33159 Posted: Jul 7, 2009, 5:42 pm |
Yes that would be the simplest way to do it, but it leads to several problems;
* number of sales = number of operations = number of database queries... Doesn't seem like much, but as the game grows the number of queries will begin to take a performance toll on the database.
* leads to trades on the market that can never be completed / people putting up trades then spending resources and not having enough resources for the trade.
When I said "easiest" in my post I was referring to the other options I'd suggested. :)
-ShejaliLast Edited: Jul 7, 2009, 5:43 pm |
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| Mist Posts: 291
Location: Rimesvin
Magus Age: 107 years old
| Message #33175 Posted: Jul 7, 2009, 10:44 pm |
I'm guessing that since a list of a persons own trades is available on the selling page, then there might be a list of the trades linked to the mage (rather than just lumped in in a market collection).
If a raid event is triggered by Mage-X attacking, with Named-Mage as target, then is it hard in php to get the Named-Mage to scan through that list of market offers to validate/cancel as required. This would require, at most, 25 checks and only 1 list traverse. (no searches).
If the market-offers List is an Ordered List, with the oldest offers at the lowest positions in the order, then the loop would only need to run until resource level is zero or positive. And the result would be cancellation of oldest offers on the market. No bad scans (and screen refreshes) for customers viewing the market, no new folk complaining thta all the good offers are blank and that it takes several screen searches just to find a valid market offer. AND no hassles, programming wise when the market offer expires and the system attempts to dump invalid sales back to the resource queue. (ie all market transactions would still be computer-kosher and not tampered by other subroutines.) |
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