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Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug

minimaxir.com

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Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug

#41

Post by sveiss »

archgrove wrote: post #31

I remember a similar bug in the original Asherons Call (amazingly, still running with regular content updates!). Three or four years in, they added a new, very expensive object to the game (a "Pyreal Scarab" for anyone who cares). It cost a lot, so the idea was that people wouldn't be (at that point in the economy) buying many. Now, in Asheron's Call, the world is huge . There are hundreds, if not thousands of vendor…

That was the first thing which came to my mind when I read this, too. Of course, Asheron's Call didn't have an (official) real-money trading system to deal with too.

A nightmare scenario for the developers in both cases.

Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug

#43

Post by astrodust »

unwind wrote: post #5
ebbv wrote: post #2

420,081,335,014 is 420 billion not 420 trillion.

English is handy enough to have two "scales", where these words have different meanings. In the short scale, you'd be right, but the author probably uses the long scale. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_scale#Comparison . It's one of those things that makes English ... interesting to learn as a foreign language. :) EDIT : Actually no, I mis-read the table on the Wikipedia page. The author was simply mistaken, an…

Long-scale should be officially retired, it's needless. Keep rocking with fortnights and stone if you must, nobody else is laying claim to those.

It's things like having three different "gallons" that all mean wildly different things that make communication difficult.

Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug

#44

Post by oxide »

shardling wrote: post #39
dangoldin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Diablo 2 and probably spent a good portion of my high school hours playing it. I was very excited for Diablo 3 and tried to get into it but just couldn't. I felt that they just took a ton of ideas from WoW and implanted them into Diablo. Sure it may have made them more money but it made it a lot less fun.

I've heard Path of Exile is a worthy successor to D2. For this very reason I must on no account ever install it.

its a great game with its own economy issues. since the open beta started its gone downhill.

Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug

#47

Post by yoster »

Heh, this reminds me of when I played Diablo 2. I duped so many sojs/items that I had multiple accounts just filled to the brim. I rarely play Blizzard games nowadays, but as long as there are games with any type of currency that can be sold, it will always be exploited.

Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug

#48

Post by tikhonj »

This is what happens when we let machine constraints trump semantics.

When you say int, you usually want an actual integer, not an integer with an arbitrary limit. In this day and age, having that limit there is simply premature optimization.

I think having a nice bignum type--one that looks and feels just like a normal numeric type--is very important. It should also probably be the default; you should only switch to a machine type if you have a good reason. With gmp, big integers perform well enough to be used widely.

Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug

#49

Post by illuminate »

apetresc wrote: post #30
seanalltogether wrote: post #20

The fact that the diablo economy has reached the point where users are running around with 6 billion gold shows its been broken for much longer.

Why? It's just a matter of scale. Until very recently, Romania's currency was such that most middle-class families had 8-10 digits in their bank account at any given moment, and the economy is relatively healthy. Good items sell for hundreds of millions. The number of zeroes doesn't matter, as long as the balance between items and monetary value is stable.

"The number of zeroes doesn't matter"

Did in this particular case ;)

Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug

#50

Post by illuminate »

ebbv wrote: post #13
minimaxir wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixed. I suck at numbers. :P (or rather, fixed, but the server is getting hammered enough that it won't let me flush the cache) There was another screenshot which has an account balance in the trillions that Blizzard argued was fabricated. Given the ease in which this trick was performed, I wouldn't be surprised if it was authentic.

If Blizzard says it's fabricated they're probably right. They're certainly in a position to know and have no motive to lie.

Probably. I'm not a huge fan of Blizzard's business model and design choices as of late, but I do trust that they would not straight-faced lie versus fakeable screenshots. They know their back-end.
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