Duped Items

[Peelyon 416]

Starting to get really annoying now.

Items such as Vial of the Sands and Reins of the Crimson Deathcharger are being sold for like 25k on my server.

It was bad enough for Queens Garnets, but stuff as expensive as the mounts is starting to get really annoying.

Blizzard seem to hardly do anything about it currently and the only winners as usual are the gold sellers and those that manage to get away with keeping their dupes.

Grrr!

Edited June 18, 2012 by Peelyon

[Alierya 94]

Sadly I think people will always pay rediculous prices for such things... though when demand drops so will the price I guess!

I saw a vial for 15k the other day which seemed almost tempting if I had more than 1k in my pocket :)

I would think that its of no benefit to bliz to fix the problem so they probably won't.

[Vladamyr 169]

I guess I don't fully understand? The Vial of Sands costs a minimum of 21.6k just from the sands of time alone. TUJ has it listed at a value of 35.6k currently. Am I missing something?

[Peelyon 416]

They are managing to dupe and recreate Sands of Time which makes the price of the drake as cheap as they want

They then sell them 15-25k whatever they can and still make a huge profit and players feel like they are getting a bargain

[Vladamyr 169]

Ahh! I had never heard of that. I am amazed that isn't easily fixed and made a priority by Blizzard. Usually stuff of this nature is a bannable offense and Blizzard has a good track record of dealing with people doing illegitimate things.

[Neridae 59]

It is annoying, but they just don't seem to care at the moment.

I feel really sorry for the younger players who get conned into this or anyone who doesn't realise that the items they're buying are duped, because pets face it there will be players like this. Spending everything they have to get the item. And then potentially to have it taken away at a later date with no 'refund' is really rubbish for them. Ofc many exploit the 'low' cost items to sell on to other players but I just find it strange how unwilling Blizz are to do anything about it.

[Damien 1,514]

I first heard of this about 2 months ago and saw some threads on the official forums. I'm a bit surprised that they haven't fixed the problem yet, but things might be more complicated than they appear to outsiders like us.

I don't think Blizzard is unwilling to do anything about it. Whenever there is the slightest thing wrong with the site, you can be damn sure that I won't rest until it's fixed and I pray that it goes unnoticed. Chances are very high that whoever is in charge of the server-side code development for World of Warcraft at Blizzard is working hard so that the problem gets fixed.

A problem like this is a very serious bug. The fact that it hasn't been fixed yet probably means that a design flaw is exploited, rather than a programming mistake. I read rumors that this had to do with Void Storage and I tend to think that there is a lot of merit to that. Let me explain.

I have reasons to think that each WoW server has its own database with all the character information and that's it. When they added Void Storage, I was surprised to see that each character was only given 80 slots (am I right here?). A slot is basically an identifier on 32 bits (maybe less), so you're adding like 320 bytes of data to each character on the database, which is almost insignificant. So, I've been wondering why they didn't give us a LOT more slots.

My guess is that they didn't want to tamper with their current database structure to add Void Storage, so they decided to make a separate database server that would handle void storage for an entire region (hence why Void Storage is so limited). If you consider that there are maybe between 10,000,000 and 20,000,000 characters in a region, you get a database with a few billion entries, nothing a decent server of our age can't handle.

The problem with such a setup is that you have two databases and you need to maintain consistency across them. We're talking of virtual resources, so when you'd put an item in Void Storage, your realm server would not delete the item from your bags right away. Instead, the realm server and the Void Storage server would have a sort of protocol to talk to each other and decide when an item is added on one side and when the same item is deleted on the other side. A potential problem with that is that there'd always be a short period of time where both servers would have a copy of the item. If there a communication issue arises between the two servers, this makes sure that whoever is using Void Storage does not lose items in the process. Now, I imagine that there would be some ways to fix such a duplication by running some cleanup scripts at regular intervals, but the flaw is there and it looks as if some people found a way to abuse it.

By the way, I'd be surprised if you can exploit the flaw with just the WoW client. I think you need more than this to send the right messages at the right time to the WoW server.

[Peelyon 416]

Damien, there's something wrong with your site, the Midsummer event isn't up yet! ;) I'm waiting to clarify something with a guildy and they are doing the whole "they are right" thing.

Back on topic, I just think that they should do more on the GM / answering tickets / patrolling trade chats etc. if they can't fix the issue on the server end then make a quick check on realms to ensure there aren't any obvious dupes (like the 10 Crimson Chargers currently on my auction house) etc.

[Nyxxiana 28]

Thats ALL??Vial of the Sands Mount goes for 40-50k on my server! O.o

oooh, i gotcha, i had to re-read that..... the cheats duplicating things so that they can lower prices to bargain basement level and STILL make a profit.....we patrol cheats pretty dilligently on our server so i hope we catch them as they pop up and boot them when we see them come up...... we have a VERY old VERY strong base so im hoping we dont see this kind of thing set in..... weve been able to hold off everything else so far :( ......sad that it has to be done at ALL!

Edited June 18, 2012 by Nyxxiana

[Peelyon 416]

Saw 100x Sands of Time being sold for 50k earlier today. (Vendor price is 3k each or 300k for the 100). Reported that people where selling the items for cheap and I actually got a GM reply saying sometimes players dont always sell items at a "profit" and farm mats themselves to sell.

Talk about banging your head against a brick wall!