Duping
 

its now fixed. also, you can remove the drop confirmation, it's in the options tab under general :):):):)

Now once Era resets again, we can find more glitches and Era will reset again. Yay!

yay !!!

It's about time this were properly fixed.

Fixing isn't enough. Like all bugs, they are nearly always oblivious to the creator, so almost always go unnoticed.
There could be other duping bugs hidden away, and you'll never know until it's too late and it's time to reset again. Avoid this and making an economy log. Track every single transaction of items and money.

If it was. Nice attempt, but doesn't look all too promising.

We do already.

I don't understand... You track every single transaction but you're resetting the server?

Probaply too much to redo every transaction.. 30-50 players trading items the whole day can make a nice sum of transactions.

Exactly that. There was once a case of a duped Sten switching owners 8 or 9 times in 1 or 2 days. Have fun tracking that down.

Hire someone to specifically keep an eye on economy logs. I find it quite useless for you to waste the server's resources to track stuff if you're just going to say 'too much work' and 'have fun trying to actually do anything about it'.

I'm sure there must be some way for you to tell if an item 'appears' out of no where, which you should log immediately in a separate log. I don't know if it's possible, but I'm sure something could be figured out.

Really though, if you're going to claim the system is there, it should be used and the logs should be checked over every few hours a day. It might not be fun but at least you'll be able to catch this stuff and avoid resets.

Cant you script a system which auto bans or detects the first owner/duper?

The way my mud lib system works, it's nearly impossible to duplicate (tight security). However, if a bug were found which allowed you to (I think there aren't any ...) I can check the logs for that certain ID and see where/when/who created it, everywhere it went, etc. Basically, if you duplicated something, it would have the same ID ... and therefor the item is placed under a lock.

Might be possible to assign each item an ID like this so you can track it? I don't know how well this would work without some major rescripting though.

I might do that, I'm not sure yet though. I wanted to rescript the whole item system anyway, to fix duping. Because the way it is now, it is just friggin unsecure. The fix Andy added is pretty hackish.

hmm no its not? lol

It is. You left the main problems open. The actual functions handling items are in a class joined to the player, and items are stored in clientr.vars. You cannot say this isnt insecure.

That is why I don't play Era anymore. The resets are annoying.

It happens most everywhere, besides most classic servers.

Well that is true also I think Classic Graal has only been reset maybe 4 or 5times at most since 1999.

This worked. I've personally tested it and had a few others test it to be 100(percentsignhere) sure.


But in response to some other posts in the thread, the duplication of an item was not at all possible 100(percentsignhere!) of the time. You had to actually wait for the server to completely lag out or crash before it became possible (Often caused by classic backups being created/zodiac going down when it was hosted on the same terminal), and even then, it didn't always work.

On the Mac client (the current PPC one; haven't tried the new unreleased one) it is possible to cut your Wi-Fi or however you are connecting, and drop something, and then put it back in and it would produce the same effects (at least on Utopia before I fixed this; on Era I never tried it). The Mac client does not cut you out of you lose internet for around 5-10 minutes.

The servers that are based around an economy seem to have to reset. Zodiac has had to reset because of it too.

That's because economies have to be managed, and can easily, and quickly, spin out of control if a bug is found.
Servers like Classic don't tend to ever need resets because the only things offered are weapons... and there really is no need to duplicate them. Gralats aren't all that important, and doesn't directly effect a player.

i rock he he he he he he he

I agree :p

But to ckbud, you can't dupe just by lagging yourself, the NPC server itself has to be lagged out.

Where did ckbud come from? :confused:

In theory it works the same way, to my knowledge. Your client trys to drop something once; when it does not drop, they try to drop it again. Then, when you connect, it's like the NPC-Server just woke up, and it drops two items, if your scripting sucks.

Sorry, mixed you up with someone else.

Anyway, it doesn't work the same way. Basically, what happened (before it was fixed) was that, players would drop an item, and since the NPC server wasn't quite connected, when the player reconnected the item had never left their inventory.

It wasn't possible when the server completely crashed, and it was more based on timing than it was anything else.

Yes, my former account before it was renamed ;) Before it was cbkbud.
Hmm, it should still work though, as in theory the same thing is happening.

Can't you just introduce unique id's for items, and when the npcserver detects two items with the same id, it deletes both (as punishment)?

Punishment shouldn't be automated... especially for bugs/glitches. It would be way too harsh for someone who may have just done it at the wrong time. Just delete the duplicated and log it.

The problem with the lagging npcserver has been fixed, so that duping problem should not happen anymore.

Oh yay, NPC-Server no longer lag.

That'll be the day.

I don't think that this will be the last bug or chance, there are always bugs or ways.. it should be technically prevented (like stated before).

The problem here was that the modifications done by the npcserver were not saved to the account. Introducing unique ids doesn't work for items that can be stacked - either you give one id for each of your 10 million coins or so, or you have the problem that when splitting the coin stack that stuff gets duped or so if the player tricks the system. The only way to prevent it is to make all transactions atomic.