Something like this used to work in Sim Farm too: buy and sell a piece of land and watch taxes grow until they flow over and you get a bunch of money instead of paying. If only this worked in real life :-)
Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug
121–129 of 129 posts
Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug
#122Something like this used to work in Sim Farm too: buy and sell a piece of land and watch taxes grow until they flow over and you get a bunch of money instead of paying. If only this worked in real life :-)
Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug
#123Something like this used to work in Sim Farm too: buy and sell a piece of land and watch taxes grow until they flow over and you get a bunch of money instead of paying. If only this worked in real life :-)
Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug
#124Something like this used to work in Sim Farm too: buy and sell a piece of land and watch taxes grow until they flow over and you get a bunch of money instead of paying. If only this worked in real life :-)
Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug
#125I 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…
Haha - I was the one who was responsible for adding the Pyreal Scarab. I remember freaking out that night when I was playing and went to Teth's vendor and saw what was happening. I called up the producer at the time at 2am and said there was a "problem". "Oops." --Devilmouse
Awesome man! Asheron's call was an inspirational game for me growing up, nice to see one of the original devs :) (Sorry for being totally off-topic!)
Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug
#126This 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 t…
Completely agree about big integers. I expect that the next generation of programming languages will offer a "number" type that's big integer or decimal by default, and then allow engineers to refine the type as an optimization. One trouble is the data storage layer - typical database fields are fixed size and don't naturally accommodate big integers. Thus where MMOs are concerned, using big integers will still requi…
python has this now after 2.5, iirc. it's handy when you want an unbounded calculator =D
Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug
#127Kingdom of Loathing had an integer overflow bug way back in 2004. It let players set their currency (in this case: meat) to the max value of a 64-bit integer. The game spent the next several months setting up meatsinks in an attempt to reduce the amount of meat in circulation. http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Black_Sunday http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Bugmeat http://kol.coldfront.net/thek…
It's nice that they resolved that mostly in-universe. They didn't go and ban everyone, but instead changed the gameplay to compensate.
Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agree about big integers. I expect that the next generation of programming languages will offer a "number" type that's big integer or decimal by default, and then allow engineers to refine the type as an optimization. One trouble is the data storage layer - typical database fields are fixed size and don't naturally accommodate big integers. Thus where MMOs are concerned, using big integers will still requi…
Sounds like common lisp (though I doubt it was the first to have a flexible number type).
Lisp before Common Lisp had it. But the Common Lisp language sorted it out, such that other languages copied it partly.
Re: Diablo III Economy Broken by an Integer Overflow Bug
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time that I've been blown up in Eve, it's happened so quickly that the fight didn't even render on my screen. Just one second I'm in a spaceship, and the next I'm back at my home station. That feeling doesn't make me want to learn combat!
And you were probably travelling in a simple shuttle or cheap frigate, against multiple players or smartbombing idiots. Likely not consensual, and you were probably not expecting combat. Yeah, it sucks, but that too different from other MMOs (WOW, I am looking at you). Many of my small-scale engagements took several minutes to resolve, one way or the other. Not to mention fleets. In fact, one of my fondest memories w…
Mirrors what I experienced when I played. EVE teaches strategy and tactics to a level that is unmatched in pretty much any other game i've seen.