Bah, whatever. Fine. Thought a prominent new MMO release would have some awareness already.
Okay, Neverwinter is the latest big release from Perfect World Entertainment and Cryptic Studios. The big thing about Neverwinter has been the player economy they're trying to build, and this is based around multiple currencies and systems. You've got Gold, which you get for killing things and selling items to vendors, and which you use to buy things from most vendors. It's a gameplay maintenance currency - healing items, common bits for crafting, etc. You've got Zen, the cash shop currency. $1 gets you 100 Zen, items and mounts and services cost varying amounts of Zen.
And you've got Astral Diamonds, the bridge between the two. In standard Perfect World style, you get Astral Diamonds from doing lots of little things - profession missions, dailies, etc - and there's a Zen Exchange, where you can turn Astral Diamonds into Zen and vice versa by buying and selling from other players. This is limited on both ends, bottoming out at 50 AD per Zen, and topping out at 500 AD per Zen. Exact same systems as Champions Online and Star Trek Online. This is part of the various Preorder "Founder" packages, getting a big pile of free Astral Diamonds, so there's enough out there in the wild to jumpstart the economy from the start.
However, what's unique about it is that Astral Diamonds are
also the currency used in the Auction House. This is what you get when you sell items to other players through the player market, this is the currency in which all player interactions occur. You can list things for a buyout and a minimum bid, or just the minimum bid, and players can buy for the buyout or place a bid. So, if you do endgame content and get spare drops - because nothing's Bind On Pickup - or high-level crafting or whatever, you can turn the products into Astral Diamonds, which you can then turn into Zen, and thus access the cash shop without spending dollars. The corollary, of course, is that players can dump a lot of dollars into Zen, sell them for Astral Diamonds, and use those to buy raid gear.
There's also the Gateway. This is a website where players can log in to manage auctions, mail, crafting, and such without having to fire up the game itself. You can buy and sell things on the auction house from your phone browser!
We good? Good. Okay. That's the way in which Neverwinter strives to be unique, at least in the American market. Now here's how they fucked it all up. This has been a bug since closed beta, tickets for which were just closed as resolved despite the issue being reproducible, but now that the game is launched, it's been an exploit in constant use, and as of last night, common knowledge. To the point where the auction house and the zen exchange and eventually the entire game had to be shut down while they tried to figure out what if anything they can salvage out of the mess.
See, the inputs for the auction house in-game, those are checked, but on the gateway? Not sanitized. You can place a negative bid. Normally, let's say you have 10,000 ADs, and type in a bid for 5000 on an item. You then have 5000 in your inventory, and the item has a 5000 bid on it. But simply by typing "-5000" there, you can place the bid, the item will have a -5000 bid on it - no idea what happens if that wins - and then you have 15,000 ADs in your inventory.
Or, as people have been doing, type in several negative billions of Astral Diamonds. And use those to buy out everything on the Auction House, and pass the items out randomly to players in the zone. Or turn them into Zen, and cash out whatever you like from the cash shop. Accounts are free, so you can create entire mule accounts just to hold your spare Diamonds, or spare Zen, or spare items. This isn't speculation - this happened. This shut the game down.
Now, this is fixable, right? It's been wild since launch, but that was only three weeks ago. So, you have to wipe - delete all characters, erase all currencies, set the game back to its initial state, and re-issue all purchased Zen or preordered Astral Diamonds. At the very least, this only became a catastrophic thing in the last 48 hours, so rollback to Friday morning and hope nobody set up a mule account with a few hundred billion Diamonds worth of things before then. Fixable, right?
These are off the table. They're considering specific character rollbacks, and have banned some accounts they've identified as placing a bunch of negative bids, but they have no way to filter these exploited Diamonds out of the economy. People are reporting their experiment accounts being banned, but their side accounts that took the diamonds being intact. The value of Diamonds has ground into the dirt from hyperinflation, and the Zen Exchange is permanently ruined - there's no point in turning $20 of Zen into a million Diamonds if everything costs tens of millions.
Shit's fucked. Discuss.
