Hajji Pajji RJ: Trade Merchant CO: VonDutch Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 194 Karma: 8 Joined: Oct 21, 2012 |
Posted on Nov 21, 2013 Sounds like I'm trolling or being insulting, but you both are overreacting.The only effects I have seen you mention is 1) he can grow faster than "poor" people and dominate a market and 2) he makes $7 electricity First,neither of those ruin this game Next, there's a lot of electricity producers that keep dumping cheap power to help you and hurt the cheater... The worst case here is you have to stock to survive the famine and wait a while for the cheap stuff... Is always bounces back. Point 2, I have been aroun long enough to exploits this bad... Comes and goes. One good thing about this game, he can't pay to make expansion any faster than the next guy,& he can't dominate the market, it's to big and there's to many.... Just adapt and play your game, have fun! |
Company Man RJ: Don Draper CO: Don Draper Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 17 Karma: 10 Joined: Jun 16, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 22, 2013 Being able to grow faster isn't the problem, it's being able to do it orders of magnitude higher than anybody playing normally because of a glaring exploit. There is no mathematical way to compete with someone utilizing these methods, and no limit to the amount of cash they can generate.$7 electricity has nothing to do with this, that was just an observable benchmark that people caught on to because he wasn't doing this efficiently. The ability to perpetuate this requires no interaction with the outside market. You are correct that you can't pay to make expansions any faster, but you are wrong about not being able to dominate the market. Look at the amount of companies that our friend Henry King is owner or chairman of, and imagine being able to invest 92 quadrillion dollars in each of those companies in as many iterations as you desire. You can acquire research that is impossible for anyone else to match and instantly destroy the market in whatever product line you desire. Established competitors could keep up for awhile with a lead in infrastructure but it's a losing battle in the long term. And with no observable limit no the number of companies that can be controlled it would be entirely possible to have companies producing and selling every single product in the game. There is no adapting and playing your game if the entire game structure can be undermined by one person acting entirely alone. That's a design flaw that needs to be addressed to treat this as anything but a meaningless diversion. |
Hajji Pajji RJ: Trade Merchant CO: VonDutch Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 194 Karma: 8 Joined: Oct 21, 2012 |
Posted on Nov 22, 2013 What you are saying is correct, I cannot debate facts.But I once had 30 companies and enough money to do anything I wanted with them... Eventually you either quit, burnout and downgrade or hire an assistant. But you cannot corner the market, I'm telling you. For example, I just causally game here now (because Scott died) and I only focus on wine, I've been in the wine business for months and am quite large at it.... But if you started a wine business right now you could make a profit and compete with me.... |
Theodore Clark RJ: RV RollbackRequester CO: Annoyed About Bugs Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 11 Karma: 11 Joined: Jul 29, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 22, 2013 I agree with Don Draper. The free money Vance-Brian exploit is deadly to the game. No other exploit is very serious. Selling back inventory? Whatever. It makes a few small players a little richer, but it won't destroy the game. The Vance exploit - that is a very bad one because it makes a LOT of cash come into the game easily.
|
Theodore Clark RJ: RV RollbackRequester CO: Annoyed About Bugs Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 11 Karma: 11 Joined: Jul 29, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 22, 2013 To make a point about this, lets say I were to decide to do a BT strategy of having 30 companies (which seems pointless to me since the current bug makes the game unsustainable without a reset or rollback). I could even without much effort estabilish 10 companies without buying any of them, and build aircraft production and sales and research on 32 lands in each company. I could afford to invest more in research than any other company in the game as well, with more than 184 Quintillion in cash to invest. Sure, it would take me a few months to have decent sized factories, but in less than a year, I could have the highest research and the largest market share in the entire game by far.I don't see much point in doing it, since it is easy enough to just say that I could and be done with the process, as there is not much challenge in winning by using free money. I'm not planning on educating you on how the Brian-Vance bug works, as I don't particularly want to encourage everyone to use it, but I did use it myself after figuring out how it worked to make more money in less than two weeks than every other player in the game has in their accounts combined. I liked this game until it became clear that Vance was somehow making free money and messing up the markets and generating massive profits and cash in the process. I thought about just giving up and walking away then, but I felt that it would be better to make a clear point about how harmful this bug could be to the game, so I used the bug to do that. I'm joining with Stormhammer in requesting a rollback. If that can not be done, then a rest of the entire game. I don't think the game should continue as it is with the amount of free money that is now floating around in the game. |
Theodore Clark RJ: RV RollbackRequester CO: Annoyed About Bugs Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 11 Karma: 11 Joined: Jul 29, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 22, 2013 Don Draper said : "I don't think stupid is grounds for a ban."I agree with that, but cheating and trying to get away with it and getting caught at it because of being stupid should be grounds for being banned. As for my case, I don't think I should be "banned", but I do believe 100% of my gains from abusing the bug should be wiped out. That would probably mean wiping out all my companies and leaving me with about the amount of cash I had before I started the efforts to show how easy it would be to copy what Vance-Brian has done. As for Vance-Brian, I do not believe his actions were an effort to demonstrate a bug, as if they were, he would have messaged developers (as I did) to report how it was done and to ask that the problem be fixed. Based on Scott's reply to me, it does not appear that anyone had previously notified him about this bug before I brought it to his attention. |
Tiny Hogwaffle RJ: Caligula CO: Tiny Hogwaffle Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 128 Karma: 10 Joined: Jun 3, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 23, 2013 I disagree that we should have a "rollback" or a reset. It's not fair to the people who have legitimately built up their companies to have it all wiped just because a few have cheated.As Hajji has pointed out, it's just too much work to dominate the game, no matter how much money you have; those with ill-gotten quadrillions never make more than a temporary disruption of the game. |
Henry King RJ: Business Tycoon CO: BusinessTycoon Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 83 Karma: 13 Joined: May 31, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 23, 2013 At the VERY least, those companies created with stolen money should be wiped out. That includes all of the Brian/Vance companies, which are a variety of companies in which cash has been moved in addition to only the most obvious ones. For example, the company "Your Choice" is a Brian / Vance company that was "endowed" with 99.9999% of its wealth by a creative trick moving in money to the company by selling water or electricity at insanely high prices to Vance to get cash into that company. I saw that, because it was a company bought from me, and the transactions were publicly visible with that huge trade very obvious as a fraud transaction. Oh, one other interesting point. Vance bought "Your Choice" (symbol WELL) at a stupidly high price from me (which is were most of my cash came from so indirectly from Vance, but not something I asked him to do, and probably based on a mistake on his part, since he had a 9,999,999 price up for stock in a company where the stock was only worth a small fraction of that price). After Vance bought it, that company was owned 100% for a while by Edqmaster, and then by Artael, and now by the owner of Brian (which is a nonsense set of letters like a number of other similar companies in the game). I am not 100% sure that Edqmaster and Artael are the same as Vance, but stock in another company that I own majority shares of, GAS, also has also from time to time been owned by both Artael and Brian's owner, and Vance's owner. While they may not be the same person, there are definitely a number of stocks that have moved between those companies, and to other companies, but not traded to the public in general. Related trades, of some sort, and something that warrants investigation if there is not going to be either a rollback or a reset. At the very least, money from the Vance bug should be removed from the game, regardless of where it ended up. If that means taking it from me because Vance bought a company from me at an insanely high value, then do it, but make it fair and broad in effect, and try to fix whatever unfair gains have resulted from using this Vance exploit/bug. |
Theodore Clark RJ: RV RollbackRequester CO: Annoyed About Bugs Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 11 Karma: 11 Joined: Jul 29, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 24, 2013 I agree that a reset would not be a good outcome, as years of personal effort playing the game could be wiped out in a second. A "rollback", however, could be a viable option, losing at most a few months of effort in building up a company, and reversing many of the abnormal effects of 5 dollar electricity and huge buyouts of other product inventories at inflated prices, as well as the distributions of huge amounts of stolen cash across the game to many different players in one way or another.Doing nothing and leaving things as they are is probably more unfair to the majority of players in the game than a rollback of a few months of time to eliminate the effects of the bug use and game abuse that has taken place over the past two or three months. |
Karl Demeulemeester RJ: CO: Brainiac Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 10 Karma: 10 Joined: Oct 26, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 24, 2013 A rollback will probably make all new players leave. A reset would then be the better option - however that could make old players quit. Setting up a third server maybe... but then again, that could split up the user base.My choice would be a reset. But as the user base is small, either option is a risk, and we cannot know the outcome |
Henry King RJ: Business Tycoon CO: BusinessTycoon Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 83 Karma: 13 Joined: May 31, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 24, 2013 I doubt a reset versus rollback would make a lot of difference to new players. One option is to merge the existing normal server into the test server, so that we have one "legacy" server with the big accounts that have some players who used exploits. We could combine that with a few targeted account removals or bans to fix the worst exploit issues, and then have the normal server start with all new accounts, but that might not be popular. |
Company Man RJ: Don Draper CO: Don Draper Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 17 Karma: 10 Joined: Jun 16, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 24, 2013 That's probably the most sensible outcome. I don't think popular should matter much considering this game is still being advertised as a beta. For every person that stomps their feet and vows never to come back I'm sure there will be at least one or more who stays and becomes more engaged that otherwise wouldn't be.
|
Henry King RJ: Business Tycoon CO: BusinessTycoon Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 83 Karma: 13 Joined: May 31, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 25, 2013 Vance/Brian is active again, and messing with electricity markets. He also sold stock in the "Your Choice" company at 0.01 per share, and did a Secondary Offering of stock, probably to get rid of the company. I have a hypothesis that his goal is to cause frustration for other players in the game on purpose to ruin the game for others. I suspect he also would like to see me get banned along with him if he does get banned.I do not think he is doing these tricks to make money and be more successful in the game, but instead, his goal is to cause frustration and disrupt the normal functioning of markets. Sadly, he effectively has unlimited money available from using bugs or exploits, so he can spent it messing up the game for others if that is what he wants to do, and that appears to be his goal. I hope that Scott comes back soon and fixes these problems, and does some bans as well. I'd be very happy with a rollback, if the bug were also fixed so it could not be repeated again. I'd lose time and some advantages, but it would be worth it to get the game back on a stable foundation without these massive exploits ruining it. |
Hajji Pajji RJ: Trade Merchant CO: VonDutch Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 194 Karma: 8 Joined: Oct 21, 2012 |
Posted on Nov 25, 2013 Some of you must be really petty in life. This stuff happened before, it'll happen again, I'm sure when it does happen again Scott will be MIA (either still or again).What's the point of resets (and a rollback is more pointless work) for a game, from an admin, who doesn't have the time to police it.... I'm sorry that I don't write whole pages and support what i say, but I've seen this "the sky is falling let's reset" bologna before..... Look, this game is the Wild West with no admin, enjoy the pieces you can, until Scott is here full-time anyone can do anything they want.... Get over it. Why would "I" play if every Q we reset because another but has run rampant for months....... Take the guys accounts, fix the bug, play a FREE GAME |
Henry King RJ: Business Tycoon CO: BusinessTycoon Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 83 Karma: 13 Joined: May 31, 2013 |
Posted on Nov 25, 2013 As long as there are bans of the most serious abusers, and their closely related accounts (which are many in the case of Vance/Brian/Edqmaster), and as long as the bug is fixed, then we might not need a "rollback" or reset.But, we definitely need some action to remove tons of free money that the bug has created for a few players who were the worst abusers of the bug and also the beneficiaries of that free cash that was moved to other players from those bug users. |