[NA] Quadrillions of Silver from Nodes (Bug)

[KAMIKADzE]

Basically the subj:

As far as I understand, some of the Nodes netted quadrillions of silver in taxes to node owning guilds, which then got collected by guilds or a part of those (people got kicked from the guilds to yield more Silver for the minority of the chosen ones).
Obviously all of that silver was used to buy top tier gear from the marketplace, while GMs were catching up to this issue.
Few hours later marketplace was shut down and exploiting accounts temporarily banned for investigation.
Later marketplace was reopened. Whether all accounts related to the withdrawn silver were locked or not remain unclear as of now. Punishment measures, if there will be any, were not announced as of now.

You can stay up to date on this issue by visiting the official NA thread OVER THERE.

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Maintenance was announced that should (don't quote me on that, it's not my claim) resolve this issue.
Along with that a bit of clarification was posted regarding the issue:

• Issue was caused by packets manipulation. All accounts associated with those manipulations will be permanently banned, and rightfully so. On that note - the possibility of client-side manipulation of node taxation is kinda stupid, can't think of a better word.
• All other guild members will have their silver withdrawn. The exact details on "how?" were not provided (what will they do with items bought using this silver? if they'll just put a negative number in those users' marketplace warehouse - that clearly will not solve the issue completely). All of the affected guilds members will be under further investigation (as far as I understand this means that GMs don't plan to ban all of them, which is good IMO, but some might get banana if they were involved somehow, albeit I have no idea how they plan to investigate that, interrogation?).
• All Valencia nodes taxes will be reset to 0 during maintenance.

[Margo]

Is this only NA issue? What do you think will be the punishment?

[KAMIKADzE]

Is this only NA issue? What do you think will be the punishment?

As far as I'm aware - only NA affected. That said - since we don't know exactly what caused this issue, there is a possibility that it was at some point present on other server(s) and was exploited silently by some guilds. Since this issue directly affects PA's income, they will definitely investigate it on the other servers as well (just in case), and if there was such of an issue or is currently present, then we will be informed about it within like 2 weeks or smth. I don't think that JP was affected at any point, as I would probably notice some unusual movements on the marketplace, but people might also store silver for few months to "calm the water", so who knows.

As for the punishment - IDK. Most likely it will be not what I'd do on their place (rollback all accounts that were a part of affected guilds to the state before the bug was introduced; return items purchased with that silver to their owners, while removing profited silver, if the profits were not used by those players, otherwise leave as is). Situation is kinda bad, to say the least, so most likely fair players will be affected by the chosen measures (imagine full server rollback rolling back your new V Deboreka or smth , or finding out negative amount of silver on your marketplace and your currently sold V Ogre back , etc. etc.). The best way would be 1on1 case reviewed by GMs, but that is a lot of work and a possibility to miss few affected players (like for example someone storing a lot of Gold bullions on a donkey in some node's stable ), so most likely there will be some sort of a rollback or negative market silver involved, but we'll have to wait and see. Hopefully they won't go banning all of the affected guilds members for their own fup.

[Margo]

So what are they trying to tell? Are they saying that multiple guilds had hacked the server at the same time?

[KAMIKADzE]

So what are they trying to tell? Are they saying that multiple guilds had hacked the server at the same time?

No idea TBH. While they've mentioned the packets manipulation they haven't provided exact details on how and what happened, which in itself is a good decision IMO (there might be the same hole for other things), but at the same time there were no clear answers given as to why they're banning multiple accounts for involvement in manipulation. Basically we don't know, we even don't know if it's actually a hack or someone was playing with the client (intentionally crashing it at some point, etc.) and somehow ended up with this. It's probably more of a way to move anger away from the company, solely on the players involved. As I've mentioned in my main post update - such possibility is kinda stupid (that is if we're being told the truth regarding packets manipulation) and should not be possible in the first place. Some bad or wrong packets will arrive to the server even without manipulations all the time, that's just the nature of how internet works, some info can be lost, client can crash while sending data, mutual connection can get lost, etc. etc. Server has to drop/ignore all of the "wrong" (it could be anything, from half-broken packet to post-client number adjustment without server double checking it, most likely we will never know) packets and adjust if needed, that's just the basic stuff. PA has so much money and manpower that there are no excuses for this, don't get me wrong "haxors" should be punished and are bad here, what I'm trying to say is that wrong packets can arrive not only from hackers but also from usual traffic and should be expected. Now that it has happened there is no perfect way to solve it, so no wonder that NA players are angry.