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By now I presume most people are aware of the details of the mistakes made by Eyedentity's patch, emergency maintenance, and the following banwave.
There have been plenty of discussions as to why banning people instead of actually fixing the problem is a (excuse me) retarded decision but why it is perfectly logical to ban everyone who exploited this including myself (still doesn't solve sh**). I personally think it's self-explanatory and doesn't merit additional comments.
However, we should now consider what will happen to Dragon Nest and start to think about what we may expect from this game’s future. Feel free to comment your opinions.
1) There will be no rollback:
First off, I see a lot of players hoping and praying that Eyedentity will do a server rollback. I consider this unlikely for two simple reasons: (1) if they could, they would’ve done it. They’re not monkeys and would have anticipated the pain of community outlash of having done what they did. Many, including me, speculate that Eyedentity does not have a saved state of the server backed up. (2) They have placed a 7-day minimum ban on 421 people and two days have passed since the maintenance. No way in hell are they looking to compensate the rest of the players with 48+dragon eggs each and 100k crystal/slayer points for rolling back, with each hour passed making it even less likely.
Expecting a rollback from Eyedentity is a joke at this point imo. But jokes aside, let’s get a lil more serious.
2) Eyedentity's gold tracking:
It's obvious by this point that Eyedentity could not, or couldn't be bothered to, track the gold transfer between accounts, even though it was their one and only goal: to remove the unfairly distributed gold. In other words, if people transferred gold to another account before the maintenance, Eyedentity did not have the means or the will to track down the transfers and extend the ban and gold removal to the recipient account. I'm inclined to believe that they don't have the means and here's why:
Eyedentity has made a statement in the gold abusers banwave (henceforth "GAB") a month ago, "gold abusing bringer/assassin accounts by receiving mails or 1:1 gold exchange activity has been found", meaning gold transfer between accounts can be tracked, whether you sent the gold by mail or by trade request w/ another person (or yourself, through VM).
However, this contradicts with how they handled the patch errors with the Maintenance yesterday.
The important line to pay attention to is this: "If there is a difference between acquired gold from abusing and remaining gold on the abuser account, we will give more sanction to the account regarding to the balance" and I’m sure everyone asked the same question: Why?
Why can't they just track down the gold like they did for the gold abusers? Did they lie in order to intimidate and discourage gold abusers? In my opinion, it should have been an even easier task considering this was a less-than-24-hours incident vs tracing gold over span of months as they did for the GAB; a much shorter time frame to investigate. Some may argue that the GAB only involved 90 people and this one involves 421. But the bans are automated. Please don't argue that Eyedentity doesn't have the manpower nor the infrastructure for couple hundred players. We're not talking about 4 teenagers working in a garage with two computers.
Considering how seriously and promptly they addressed the issue, it contradicts how they took such a half-baked response: ‘we will hunt down every single account that played BHT more than twice and confiscate all gold/rarestone and BAN THEM ALL.... but nah not what they did with the gold, or where they transferred it (even though in GAB we said we could track this), we don't wanna touch those’. Or maybe we can speculate that perhaps... they can't.
I personally find it hard to believe that they cannot track gold transfers, but it is what the recent turn of events seem to suggest. I don’t think they lacked the passion to retrieve the gold that they flooded the game with (again, they took very quick action on this issue).
If we can cautiously, delicately conclude from this that Eyedentity cannot track transferred gold, it begins to imply several things. First, the gold abusers may now have a reasonable way to purchase gold with real life money. Second, bots and illegal gold farming tools can be freely used. Third, this may apply to transfers of items, not simply gold (imagine what account buyers can do to scam with this knowledge. Time to strip).
3) The inflation and the player base:
With the emergency maintenance kicking in, a lot of players’ expectation was that a saved state of the server before the patch will be restored (rollback) and it would be like having traveled back in time. That being the case (kappa), we now come to realize that the community is still flooded with gold.
Now be honest with me, you’re lying if you say you’d rather not be banned for couple of months on your account to get free 1 million gold. Isn’t it more appealing to think “I’m going to take a break from DN and when I come back, 1 million gold will be waiting for me, just in time for GDN”?
Then what will it imply for people who haven’t had the time or the brain to stash away the gold they exploited? Or people who didn’t exploit at all? The reality is they have drawn the short end of the stick. Would you rather play DN for a week or two on an empty server or would you rather take a break from DN and come back enjoying the game more than ever w/ the gold? Eyedentity has effectively told the community that when an opportunity comes, no matter how illegitimate it is, just go for it.
An estimate of how many people have profited from this incident and exactly to what extent is impossible to make; we simply don’t have the numbers. Only the degree of inflation in MP during the following months will give us an idea. For instance, Crude Dragon Gem Core was trading at 12.5k to 15k five minutes before maintenance. That’s roughly a 5x increase. But that’s the point: there will be an inflation. A massive inflation. Materials and items will be much harder to acquire even for those who exploited due to skyrocketing prices (and of course especially impossible for those who didn’t). Everything from Rune HC sell runs to Gladiator Brutal Plate will rise in price, simply because there’s more gold to be had.
Anyone can see that eventually, it’ll make people leave the game. What kind of people? People who don’t have much to lose by leaving the game. A full, end-gear player is much less likely to leave the game due to this incident than a new player with his first character on his neris gears. Again, only time will tell how many will leave the game and how much it will impact the DN community.
4) Solutions:
Despite all these, I’m hoping that Eyedentity is trying to come up with a short and long-term solution to this issue. Presuming that we cannot roll back the server (which I don’t believe they have the intention of doing anyway), let’s brainstorm as a community what may be viable solutions for the future of DN.
Simple economic theory suggests that during inflation, contractionary policies such as high Federal Reserve rate and low bond prices must be used. But this is DN, where the economy is simple and rudimentary. In order to reduce the gold supply, Eyedentity must make gold prices higher where it does not circulate to another player: namely the NPC and the fees. Fees players pay for repair, purchase, trade, etc are gold that evaporates and a source for Eyedentity to suck out gold from the game. Increasing or attaching gold prices on NPC items and fees may provide a simple solution. Conversely, reduce/eliminate the gold rewards from pouches, dungeon/nest clears, etc. The problem? Again, the innocents who can’t afford the gold reduction. Just like in real life, contractionary policy comes with an increased unemployment rate. In this case, increased quitting rate; innocent players who don’t have a gold bank may not have the gold to even repair their gear with increased prices, much less farm anything. However, it may be a necessary sacrifice to fix an error as fatal to the game as this.
Another possibility is for Eyedentity to make a bold move and gradually abandon the gold system entirely. There are already plenty of items in the game acquirable through other means, aka the Points. The new Crystal Shop is just another example of essential materials that can be acquired by rewarding people who play the game more than those who don’t. By either more heavily relying on tradeable points that can be farmed (bitcoin-ish concept) or introducing a new currency that can start becoming applicable on NPCs, Eyedentity could make the whole gold imbalance moot with a “new start”. This in my opinion is a very risky attempt with no chance of reversal. But if it works, may prove to be the cleanest and effective solution.
5) Compensation:
On a side note, let’s talk about compensation for those innocent souls who followed the ToS and received the privilege of playing on an empty server for 7 days. 6 dragon eggs (which is given to everyone, banned or not), 10k Crystal/Slayer points, x10 Spaera Pouches, x10 High grade cubes.
Congratulations! You received for your integrity and honesty, 10k Crystal points (not enough to buy one gem core), three slayer boxes (which are not for your class anyway), and 100~1k spaeras (because even compensations have to be RNG), and 4 Time Cubes, 2 Harmony Cube, 3 Light Cubes, and 1 Fusion Cube. Wow.
Thanks for reading… See you on the Rift, Summoners.
There have been plenty of discussions as to why banning people instead of actually fixing the problem is a (excuse me) retarded decision but why it is perfectly logical to ban everyone who exploited this including myself (still doesn't solve sh**). I personally think it's self-explanatory and doesn't merit additional comments.
However, we should now consider what will happen to Dragon Nest and start to think about what we may expect from this game’s future. Feel free to comment your opinions.
1) There will be no rollback:
First off, I see a lot of players hoping and praying that Eyedentity will do a server rollback. I consider this unlikely for two simple reasons: (1) if they could, they would’ve done it. They’re not monkeys and would have anticipated the pain of community outlash of having done what they did. Many, including me, speculate that Eyedentity does not have a saved state of the server backed up. (2) They have placed a 7-day minimum ban on 421 people and two days have passed since the maintenance. No way in hell are they looking to compensate the rest of the players with 48+dragon eggs each and 100k crystal/slayer points for rolling back, with each hour passed making it even less likely.
Expecting a rollback from Eyedentity is a joke at this point imo. But jokes aside, let’s get a lil more serious.
2) Eyedentity's gold tracking:
It's obvious by this point that Eyedentity could not, or couldn't be bothered to, track the gold transfer between accounts, even though it was their one and only goal: to remove the unfairly distributed gold. In other words, if people transferred gold to another account before the maintenance, Eyedentity did not have the means or the will to track down the transfers and extend the ban and gold removal to the recipient account. I'm inclined to believe that they don't have the means and here's why:
Eyedentity has made a statement in the gold abusers banwave (henceforth "GAB") a month ago, "gold abusing bringer/assassin accounts by receiving mails or 1:1 gold exchange activity has been found", meaning gold transfer between accounts can be tracked, whether you sent the gold by mail or by trade request w/ another person (or yourself, through VM).
However, this contradicts with how they handled the patch errors with the Maintenance yesterday.
The important line to pay attention to is this: "If there is a difference between acquired gold from abusing and remaining gold on the abuser account, we will give more sanction to the account regarding to the balance" and I’m sure everyone asked the same question: Why?
Why can't they just track down the gold like they did for the gold abusers? Did they lie in order to intimidate and discourage gold abusers? In my opinion, it should have been an even easier task considering this was a less-than-24-hours incident vs tracing gold over span of months as they did for the GAB; a much shorter time frame to investigate. Some may argue that the GAB only involved 90 people and this one involves 421. But the bans are automated. Please don't argue that Eyedentity doesn't have the manpower nor the infrastructure for couple hundred players. We're not talking about 4 teenagers working in a garage with two computers.
Considering how seriously and promptly they addressed the issue, it contradicts how they took such a half-baked response: ‘we will hunt down every single account that played BHT more than twice and confiscate all gold/rarestone and BAN THEM ALL.... but nah not what they did with the gold, or where they transferred it (even though in GAB we said we could track this), we don't wanna touch those’. Or maybe we can speculate that perhaps... they can't.
I personally find it hard to believe that they cannot track gold transfers, but it is what the recent turn of events seem to suggest. I don’t think they lacked the passion to retrieve the gold that they flooded the game with (again, they took very quick action on this issue).
If we can cautiously, delicately conclude from this that Eyedentity cannot track transferred gold, it begins to imply several things. First, the gold abusers may now have a reasonable way to purchase gold with real life money. Second, bots and illegal gold farming tools can be freely used. Third, this may apply to transfers of items, not simply gold (imagine what account buyers can do to scam with this knowledge. Time to strip).
3) The inflation and the player base:
With the emergency maintenance kicking in, a lot of players’ expectation was that a saved state of the server before the patch will be restored (rollback) and it would be like having traveled back in time. That being the case (kappa), we now come to realize that the community is still flooded with gold.
Now be honest with me, you’re lying if you say you’d rather not be banned for couple of months on your account to get free 1 million gold. Isn’t it more appealing to think “I’m going to take a break from DN and when I come back, 1 million gold will be waiting for me, just in time for GDN”?
Then what will it imply for people who haven’t had the time or the brain to stash away the gold they exploited? Or people who didn’t exploit at all? The reality is they have drawn the short end of the stick. Would you rather play DN for a week or two on an empty server or would you rather take a break from DN and come back enjoying the game more than ever w/ the gold? Eyedentity has effectively told the community that when an opportunity comes, no matter how illegitimate it is, just go for it.
An estimate of how many people have profited from this incident and exactly to what extent is impossible to make; we simply don’t have the numbers. Only the degree of inflation in MP during the following months will give us an idea. For instance, Crude Dragon Gem Core was trading at 12.5k to 15k five minutes before maintenance. That’s roughly a 5x increase. But that’s the point: there will be an inflation. A massive inflation. Materials and items will be much harder to acquire even for those who exploited due to skyrocketing prices (and of course especially impossible for those who didn’t). Everything from Rune HC sell runs to Gladiator Brutal Plate will rise in price, simply because there’s more gold to be had.
Anyone can see that eventually, it’ll make people leave the game. What kind of people? People who don’t have much to lose by leaving the game. A full, end-gear player is much less likely to leave the game due to this incident than a new player with his first character on his neris gears. Again, only time will tell how many will leave the game and how much it will impact the DN community.
4) Solutions:
Despite all these, I’m hoping that Eyedentity is trying to come up with a short and long-term solution to this issue. Presuming that we cannot roll back the server (which I don’t believe they have the intention of doing anyway), let’s brainstorm as a community what may be viable solutions for the future of DN.
Simple economic theory suggests that during inflation, contractionary policies such as high Federal Reserve rate and low bond prices must be used. But this is DN, where the economy is simple and rudimentary. In order to reduce the gold supply, Eyedentity must make gold prices higher where it does not circulate to another player: namely the NPC and the fees. Fees players pay for repair, purchase, trade, etc are gold that evaporates and a source for Eyedentity to suck out gold from the game. Increasing or attaching gold prices on NPC items and fees may provide a simple solution. Conversely, reduce/eliminate the gold rewards from pouches, dungeon/nest clears, etc. The problem? Again, the innocents who can’t afford the gold reduction. Just like in real life, contractionary policy comes with an increased unemployment rate. In this case, increased quitting rate; innocent players who don’t have a gold bank may not have the gold to even repair their gear with increased prices, much less farm anything. However, it may be a necessary sacrifice to fix an error as fatal to the game as this.
Another possibility is for Eyedentity to make a bold move and gradually abandon the gold system entirely. There are already plenty of items in the game acquirable through other means, aka the Points. The new Crystal Shop is just another example of essential materials that can be acquired by rewarding people who play the game more than those who don’t. By either more heavily relying on tradeable points that can be farmed (bitcoin-ish concept) or introducing a new currency that can start becoming applicable on NPCs, Eyedentity could make the whole gold imbalance moot with a “new start”. This in my opinion is a very risky attempt with no chance of reversal. But if it works, may prove to be the cleanest and effective solution.
5) Compensation:
On a side note, let’s talk about compensation for those innocent souls who followed the ToS and received the privilege of playing on an empty server for 7 days. 6 dragon eggs (which is given to everyone, banned or not), 10k Crystal/Slayer points, x10 Spaera Pouches, x10 High grade cubes.
Congratulations! You received for your integrity and honesty, 10k Crystal points (not enough to buy one gem core), three slayer boxes (which are not for your class anyway), and 100~1k spaeras (because even compensations have to be RNG), and 4 Time Cubes, 2 Harmony Cube, 3 Light Cubes, and 1 Fusion Cube. Wow.
Thanks for reading… See you on the Rift, Summoners.
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