Hey all,

Apologies for the craziness yesterday; fyi the timeline was thus:
1) Server had a power failure; sadly, the battery backups failed *last month* and I was still trying to find where I can actually buy replacement batteries without having ridiculous shipping from the US

2) The country_events table had been corrupted due to improper shutdown; this meant that anything that generated an event (like, that would show up in the list on the main window) crashed part way; where depends on the exact code path; this resulted in some things being finalized, and others not

3) I brought up the bots, and they were erroring all over the place because of this, but I assumed the errors were w/ the bots; after about 30 mins of messing around with this, it was brought to my attn that it was actually a game problem;

4) I took the game offline, repaired the table, and brought it back

----

Then:

5) It came to our attention that some kills had been made with infinite turns; and that the market was screwy

So, because this was unique, it was decided that we'd del the countries that abused "infinite turns" bug, and resurrect the countries that had been killed; because there's not actually a way to do that with any sort of tool, I did it badly, and one of them was "re-killed" while it was kindof half-undead. So I resurrected it again.

Now, today, I looked into the market transactions, and we identified 3 countries that used "infinite spend" bug to buy out the market. I believe they'll be deleted.


Now, couple clarifications...

"Infinite" turns/spend bugs: Because of the way the bug happened, basically the events that were supposed to be recorded crashed the process; these typically are finalized *before* the playing country is saved. As far as I can tell, this effectively means that countries were able to spend their money over and over again (or use their turns/attacks), without actually getting any of the changes applied to their country. So, they bought bushels, but didn't *GET* the bushels; and didn't lose any money. BUT, the countries from whom bushels were purchased GOT money, and had their bushels purchased. But they would not get a notification about it.

Similarly with attacks. Because if they had, the turn/whatever would also have been removed.



As for whether or not we should have resurrected the countries in question; as it was a result of an exploit, and it SEEMED like a clean fix (the first time), it was decided that we could do that without affecting much. The subsequent kill complicated matters, but I figured since I'd kindof botched it the first time, it would be more fair to fix it than not. Zero hour decisions are hard sometimes.

Oh, and thanks for bearing with me, it's sometimes hard for me to find all the time the game deserves...

Turns out the market abusers were all bots! Well that simplifies my life.

Thanks for taking care:)

Would still like to see resource replenished after #34 's second death if he got reinstated a second time since the game was brought up online as if 'ready to play' again

I guess we will be getting another deletion post about those 3 countries soon

I think we are still owed our resources back.

Further clarification: there was zero oil bought during the glitch period

it was quick for galleri to post the first two countries.....should be able to post the next three

They were bots (stated in another post above). They also directly benefited nothing from it.

I said they were bots yesterday.

This makes sense. Since the bots were not losing money when buying the bushels, they probably ended up in some loop buying out bushels and tech until there were no more bushels/tech.

I do find it very strange that oil was bought up though. Any theories on that?

No oil was purchased during the glitch. It was a consequence afterwards.

Bushels bought out during glitch(by a couple bots apparently, as per QZs original post):
Mar 15, 19:00 Mar 15, 20:00 $35 $110 $50.56 1,859,658,715

Oil bought out by PLAYERS after the game was back functioning normally:
Mar 15, 21:00 Mar 15, 22:00 $125 $298 $204.11 60,186,774

So all in all what happened was 1860m bushels were deleted from the market but their owners got the money for them (the bots buying them didn't get the food), same thing happened to some tech items.

Those players who sold that food/tech logged in with a lot of cash, and probably had to stock oil, so they did. I have been warring all round and I bought 2m of that oil... so imagine what a netting techer or farmer could buy at this stage.

Yeah that all makes sense. As you pointed out before, $12b in the scheme of things isn't a ton of money. And the bushels aspect of it seems to be researched and it was indeed the bots. I can appreciate the due diligence here. Well done!

I think if something good can come from this, it'd be giving server mods the ability to reinstate a country if it were killed by cheaters/exploiters. I think we've all seen the power of that now and it would help deter future cheating.

If it's a huge pain in the ass to rebuild, I get why we wouldn't. But it just seems like it could be a net positive.

Not a bad idea; but tools are complicated sometimes.

Also, if a netter does not break the nw record this set having their stock bought out at $300 during a server war, something went tragically wrong.

great assessment in supply and demand.

1.8m bushels poof and the glitch jump started the stocking phase with elevated oil and bushel prices.

Still no consequences for those who knowingly exploited the infinite turns?

I kind of assumed that, with the market and all, but I'd certainly be a happier boy with a dozen better finishes if it were the case. I've had my ass fully kicked by cheaters in this game many times and they only ever got deleted and I had to deal with my ruined wreckage for 6 weeks lol. It would be soooooo cool if that wasn't normal. Lol

As far as I can tell, there were none other than the KR

Thanks qz - we appreciate the effort and the transparency involved in all of this.

Not all netters had stock on the market at unreasonable prices at the time.

Yeah and they for sure got turned purple PP. I think alls fair to that end.

Well let this be a lesson to you to always keep bushels on the market at unreasonable prices until QZ gets new batteries. He lives in the middle of nowhere right? Power outages are likely normal :)

hah! We have pretty stable power!

I sold all my food for $36 and all my oil for $157... now I'm feeling like I missed out on a big opportunity.

That was in my post last night.

Sure.. but a one-off deletion without even for example a one-set ban basically means that they managed to kill two huge countries at the expense of losing two low net countries

You are an idiot that would rather stir up sh*t then take the time to read the facts. All killed countries were reinstated and the two killers had their balls cut off, their whole family killed, and sentenced to life in prison. Oh yeah, and their countries were deleted.

They were restored, so your statement is misleading.

Purple all those cheater bots!

Doug, KICK THEM OFF THE TOUR

As you wish!

But I’m in the middle of shipping QZ batteries via the Star Trek celebrity cruise lines ship.

One was even restored more than once, at the expense of others.

Thanks, QZ and Primeval for the thorough explanation and transparency.

What a mess of a situation, only complicated even more by a couple of people screwing around.

Also, thanks galleri for volunteering as tribute to be the cannon fodder last night trying to calm things down. While it got heated, we needed some sort of message from the mods/dev team, so thanks for that.

I remember a time when a whole alliance was deleted for the actions of one or two people - they were then set upon by the whole server for the remainder of that set and then the next - thank yourselves lucky.

Should just go ahead and mass delete us all.
Less human players and more bots with less DR to LG.
Happy ending to LaF. :)

I am surprised that LaF didn’t use Gerds Bat phone to call Slag and ask to have Mercs, SoF, SOL sanctioned and banned for griefing lol

It puts the lotion on it's skin or it gets the hose

I still think I should be given 20k acres back that I never had in the first place.

gold please