Anti-dupe system (the ID thing) - why could it work, and how?

#21

Seeing as the IDs would be server-side, no, it wouldn’t.

You overcomplicated this for absolutely no reason. How you managed to get seven upvotes is beyond me. The Loot Drop system is not affected in the slightest by an id system, as they’re completely independent of each other. Someone gets a drop? The random number generator goes and creates a new id for it, if they can go and tag every item as soulbound within a week, they can most definitely tag every item currently in the game with a random id.

You underestimate the power of Flash, for years it has managed some pretty profound feats. You assume it’s just some niche thing that Wildshadow picked up on, but even some big name titles were created on Flash. It is common for people that have no idea what they’re talking about, to say that changing the source code is going to automatically make the game 10x better, but that is like saying Lost Halls is a good dungeon or Shatters is a bad dungeon, it’s false, completely and utterly false, it shows that you have minimal to no knowledge of coding.

In Short: To Fix the game, it isn’t going to be a promise of maybe or tomorrow, you have to do something now or you will lose the playerbase. The ID system would work, but sadly Deca treats this game as Kabam treated it, a side-project that has a limited lifespan. They give it 10 Years, I’m not too sure about that.

#22

The thing to remember is this would be fiendishly complicated to implement, for a number of reasons.

First the item system pervades every aspect of the game. Not only vaults and trading, but as you play it is forever checking what items you have equipped for your attacks, defence, stats and abilities, especially as you can equip and un-equip items at any time. Stat pots are items, HP pots and other restoratives are items and they would all need IDs.

Second it would make every transaction more complex. I don’t mean every trade, I mean every time an item is moved, whether from your vaults to your inventory, from your inventory to an equipment slot, within spaces in you inventory. IDs would need to be preserved and tracked every time. Right now e.g. your HP potions need only keep track of the number. But with an ID system each needs an ID which needs to be tracked (it may seem redundant for them but even they can be traded).

Third it would happen in the background. Right now if something goes wrong with the item system, if items go missing, or are wrong (wrong rewards from a Mystery Box say) users notice, complain and it gets quickly fixed. But with IDs they could go wrong and no-one notices. Until a few days or weeks later and trades start failing, or even objects disappearing, because their IDs are invalid long after the initial error that caused it. And unfortunately it’s one of those systems that can’t really be tested e.g. on the test server, it needs to go live on the actual game to see how it works.

Not only is the game code already written, but it’s badly written code. Very badly written code according to many reports. This makes it especially hard to make large scale, wide-ranging changes such as this.

#23

Tagging items with IDs is easy. You have to add a few lines of code to many places but it’s very straightforward. The hard thing is to check for dupes. Under what circumstances do you check a player or two players have duplicate items? What do you do if you find them? Until anyone can come up with any meaningful solution to these questions this discussion would be rather shallow.

Go a bit easy on Toastrz. It’s clear he doesn’t have much coding experience but you were unnecessarily harsh.

I disagree with you on this. Realm still remains one of Deca’s major sources of revenue. They have been taking on more games but giving up on their first game would be really bad for the kind of reputation they are trying to build. Instead I think that Deca devs are simply incompetent. On the game side they introduced a number of hugely unpopular fixes or updates which showed a appalling lack of understanding of the community. On the technical side it often took them weeks to fix well known bugs or exploits. But for the salary their devs are paid, perhaps this shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

#24

Glad you agree with me mostly. I suppose you’re correct in saying they seem to ‘care’ about this game, and I agree with you on the incompetence aspect, but the utter lack of disregard for player opinion makes me think they aren’t treating this game like they should.

#25

It’s not just adding shit there and there you also have to think about performance and memory costs.

#26

So the solution should be to re-write the entire game. Even if it takes time and effort, I would vastly prefer it over getting terrible band-aid patches and a structurally unstable game that RotMG currently is. If DECA isn’t even attempting this, I don’t see how DECA’s rhetoric of continuing the game for at least 10 more years makes any sense.

#27

The obvious problem with re-writing the entire game is the cost and disruption: a game like ROTMG any interruption in its operation loses revenue, both immediately (hard to spend money on it when the game is down) and long term as players lose interest.

Now, we all know that in 2-3 years time they will have to re-write large parts of the game due to Flash’s EOL. Arguably that’s their one chance to introduce IDs, but even then it’s not an automatic decision. They will want to make the transition. from Flash to Unity say, as smooth and painless as possible. Probably they will want them to run alongside each other for a while, for polishing and to get feedback on them.

They don’t want to do anything to complicate this, by introducing new content or systems at the same time. And I would count IDs as such a system, potentially disruptive and gamebreaking so the last thing you want as you coax players across to the new platform.

Most of the ID code would be server-side anyway, so would need to be addressed separately from any client coding.

#28

I should have been more clear.

that don’t put too much strain on the server.

#29

Guys, the important thing isn’t that it’s hard to implement, but the important thing is that it’s hard to maintain. Think of this, every time some guy uses an item, DECA’s servers has to add an extra function to check for validity in, let’s say a file of a million (long shot) item IDs to check if its valid. And that takes processing power. This means that using an item will not just trigger the usual “check if char has item in inv” but a longer more extensive check, which DECA just doesn’t have the resources for. Also, removing an item when it’s used from the list and adding EVERY NEW ITEM would be a pain.

An alternative way to use this would be to put this only on white bags, but that would still be stressful. If DECA would ever be to implement an OP item like revival or something like that, it would be the only items I would ever implement this for, because even thousands of white bags takes lots of processing power.

And DECA’s servers are potato enough.

#30

Maybe not for few players, but we are talking about rotmg here handling i’d say over 1000 players all the time.
those 1000 players moving their items, dropping, picking and so on.

#31

The server is already logging this and much more, hence how duping got started in the first place.

#32

Cmon you don’t have to be so picky with semantics. Even in a math paper people are sloppy with their wording at times.

#33

Can’t help but throw out my old thread killer on this subject. Pardon the copy/paste.

This is always coming up, and it’s always the same answer. People are never going to get the technical details of “why not” in relation to what the developers would face implementing such a system. The devs would never share the internal structure of how loot is managed. We can infer and guess based on the personal programming knowledge some of us have, but in the end we just don’t know and will never know.

What we do know is that Kabam had looked into this thoroughly in the past. Here’s a public statement from SGT_Sunshine where he clearly explains that it’s not going to happen. I highly doubt Deca would take a different position.

Qa1zuvY.png992x621

And here’s my old post that got quoted often looking at the financial side of this. It’s dated a few month’s before SGT_Sunshine’s, which I like to interpret as vindication my statement was right.

fThwQsT.png992x482

Here’s one more where I went in depth on my educated guess at the technical side of implementing UUIDs.

DZSEvUB.png992x1487

#34

Pretty much just /thread here. Should sticky it somewhere in discussion.

So perhaps the issue is transactional. We could rework how the vault work in akin to moving items to act like tradeable players or something. Like a transaction you control both sides of. That might help patch up any duping holes left.

#35

DECA prefer
Fix duping method if they know how it done
Than
Make duping impossible in first place

#36

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.