Bugged Coal: Global Quality Reduction

[jorb]

I think it speaks to the beauty of our quality system, that I've enjoyed thoroughly ever since we implemented it, that one piece of coal, once it enters the production chain, can come to affect the quality of almost every other type of object and item in existence. Sadly, this has its drawbacks.

Earlier tonight I shut down the server because some people, unhappy with a decision I'd made regarding their characters, went on a bit of a killing spree. The decision I had taken was to reduce the stats on their characters, because they had earned insane amounts of learning points, and gained insande amounts of FEP, by exploiting one piece of bugged coal.

The coal was bugged because the quality variable was assigned from memory space that had already been freed and, thus, had a chance of becoming overwritten. How can this one piece of coal be exploited?

1) Use the oven bug to make more coal. This coal will have insane quality.

2) Use the oven bug, and the second generation of crazy coal, to burn bricks. You now have insane bricks.

3) Use insane bricks to build insane smelters. You now have insane metal.

4) Use an insane metal saw, and you'll soon have insane boards.

5) Use insane boards to build an insane herbalist table, and you'll soon be planting insane trees.

6) Enjoy.

To get food? Just use the insane metal to build an insane meatgrinder, and you'll soon be bathing in insane sausages.

What we have done tonight is to load all maps, all worlds and all characters, and reduced quality across the entire game world. It is sadly unavoidable that some legitimate data will also be lost this way.

All items and objects with quality 100+ have been set to quality 10.

All trees with quality 70+ have been set to quality 10.

I do not expect to become popular by this decision, bu I do ask that you have some sympathy for the fact that it was not an easy one to make. Hopefully this will not happen again. A lot of stuff made from bears will have been nerfed. We're sorry about that.

Also, characters 57th@Damned@, Hermedicus and Xybb will have their character statistics reduced by 50%. Characters burgingham and L0ckeDerBoSs will have theirs reduced by 70%.

Accounts Andrelion, jenn, shengii, 21383013543330 and HamburgerBL will have characters revived.

That is all.

[kimya]

okay, but the coal in the beginnig had a q of some million right? how could something be like q100 in the end? 100 is something lots of ppl have achieved by fair work... wouldnt 1000 have been enough? just curious...

[RawrMistress]

Yeah, so around when is the server gonna be up? And this does sound reasonable, I mean now people won't be killed or cheated by them, and heck, nobody complained when we got the new map (I think) 'cept you kept your lps, still not much of a difference.

[jorb]

@ kimya: Because quality will obviously be reduced quite a lot by each successive generation in the production scheme. By the time the herbalist table had produced trees, those trees were only at about quality 100+. Some plants that had higher qualites were bugged anyway due to turbo beehives but, as I said, a lot of legitimate data will be lost. It's a shame, but there is not much else I can do.

[kimya]

@ kimya: Because quality will obviously be reduced quite a lot by each successive generation in the production scheme. By the time the herbalist table had produced trees, those trees were only at about quality 100+. Some plants that had higher qualites were bugged anyway due to turbo beehives but, as I said, a lot of legitimate data will be lost. It's a shame, but there is not much else I can do.

fair enough. now go to bed and sleep

[LegendaryPancake]

I think it was the right decision to make. This could be because all of my stuff doesn't rise above Q30 but still, cheaters should be punished.

[Drakxii]

Maybe you should put in some type hard (no items over x Q) or soft Q cap (where if your over like 80 q there is a chance that new items will be lower Q) on items?

[RawrMistress]

Hmm... 2 hearthlings online.... I'm not one of them *sniff*

[Blackhawk432]

im trying to be one of them lol

[Blaze]

Drat, I lost my q173 saw and q105 bear necklace.