Asian Diablo 3 Realm: Massive Rollback to Remove Dupes
Posted 11 June 2012 by FluxWe posted news yesterday about some duping methods that were working on the Asian server (but apparently not the US/EU servers). Today a Blizzard CM in Taiwan has posted an update that should be titled, “This is why you can’t have nice things.”
Here’s the google translation, and thanks to Secondii for the tip:
On June 10, our development team has found some error on the stored items in the database, these errors represent a very small part of the items can not be normal trading or selling. This error caused all less than 0.01% of the items have been copied, the majority of players and is not affected by this problem, but the database before removing these duplicated items, is unable to maintain stable. Therefore, we carried out the maintenance of the server, and perform the necessary operations to fix this problem. The development team is currently working to make the server able to resume service as soon as possible.
All original items and their reproductions will be removed from the database, follow-up, we will tell the exact time of maintenance completed, but currently estimated Server recovery services some time in the afternoon of June 11, 6 pm (Taiwan time).
We have also noted that part of the players during a short period of the game after the break and suffered back problems. This issue follow-up will be further instructions.
Best I can tell from that post, the realms are down while they’re doing some huge database rollback, during which all duped items, originals and copies, are going to be deleted. Heavy does the hammer fall.
This is causing a huge downtime for the entire Asian realm, thanks to a very few people who found a way to cheat and did so for personal gain. Hopefully their friends, who don’t get to play because of their cheating can kill them in their sleep, or something perhaps less deadly but hopefully more painful.
Sadly, long server downtimes aren’t anything new on the Asian realm. I was talking to a friend in China today, after he sent me the link to the blue post, and he joked, “Asia server has got the Achievement, “maintenance every day”?” The other common joke on the Asian server goes, “Is this Diablo III?” which refers back to the D2 days of Asia 1-4, at least two of which seemed to be offline constantly. Word from him is that the Asia Diablo 3 servers max out at 640,000 concurrent users, at which point it’s the Asian version of Error 37 for everyone else. Of that 640k, around 430k are usually Korean players.
“This is why you can’t have nice things.” they said
“This is the proof that online-only DRM is not the solution” – there you go, i fixed it for them.
You wouldnt be able to do a rollback if it was offline would you?
if we were playing offline they wouldn’t need to do a rollback
You wouldn’t really care much if it was offline
[posted to wrong thread]
You have no evidence to say that the problems of hacking and duping wouldnt be exponentially worse if D3 was offline. The only evidence we do have is D2 and we know how that went.
I think you misunderstand. Yes, cheating would be worse if people could use the same characters for both offline and online like D2. But for people (like me) who played only offline, cheating and hacking were never an issue at all. Internet down? No problem. Cheating and hacking rampant? No problem. All this suddenly became major problems for people who had no interest in online mode.
i cant even imagine this game as is being single player. with how little loots drop for me i would spend the next 8 years trying to equip 1 character
Yes – I think they’d need to have two sets of drop tables. One for online where they assume you are getting 75% + of your gear from the AH. Another for offline where you are getting 100% from drops/vendors/blacksmith.
The “cheating” might be worse in D2, but most of it is confined to the single player games (where the players mod the game as it suits them) and the open Bnet, isn’t it?
“Hopefully their friends, who don’t get to play because of their cheating can kill them in their sleep, or something perhaps less deadly but hopefully more painful.”
Don’t worry; apparently, some of them suffered back problems. Glorious. And may I say, Google Translate is working 100% perfectly.
“Heavy does the hammer fall.”
Well crafted.
WoW. I’m curious to see how this will be rationalized as anything other than a disaster.
Right choice and a sign, that Blizz will not stand outside the line and only show the things that happen.
But, i think, some ppl will found other wholes, to dupe
I love that they’re deleting the original items too. It’s quite possibly simply a technical necessity rather than a deliberate punishment, but I’m happy about it regardless of why it happened.
Dear Blizzard,
You cannot release secure games. You just cannot – perhaps noone could given the diversity of customers/machines and the amount of resources you decided to spend on security.
For this reason, you cannot enable the RMAH. Ever. All of the problems you are seeing now will be 10-100 times worse when real money is involved.
This is like driving down a street at 20 MPH, noticing the brakes aren’t really working, and then deciding to take the highway on-ramp anyway.
i agree. i would love to hear that they dropped the RMAH but we all know that it will never happen
PS: The fact that people work so hard to hack & destroy games, hack our computer & steal our money, etc. makes me sad with the human race. Thousands of years, and we are still basically at “if you can hit someone over the head with a rock and steal his stuff, it is OK to do it”
@sir_mantas
As sad as it maybe this is still the case with people.
If it was not for the law most people would take everything from someone and leave them for dead, its just human nature with most people who do not respect others rights and property. Good people who know the difference between whats right and wrong will always do whats right regardless of its legal or not and not just take what they can at the expense and missery of others.
The only thing that keeps a stable society is the law which prevents people
stealing from others for there own gains.
The thing about Asia is that the goverment is all run by the mafia, “which also control the gold and item farming market which is worth hundreads of millions a year, perhaps even more” so these people can do what they please without any legal impact on them.
The RMAH is a dream come true for all these scum bag hackers, Blizzard needs to take legal action and throw the full weight of the law at them.
This will soon stop as soon as a hacker gets jail time for stealing others virtual property which is worth real money.
Dafuq did I just read
it makes me sad people have to do this, coz they have no other perspective!
it makes me sad, when i hear idiotic statements like “The fact that people work so hard to hack & destroy games, hack our computer & steal our money, etc. makes me sad with the human race”! You did mind there are people dying on starvation while u game whole day? this should make you said! i lol hard on your statement…
Really you would like to seem them dead/in pain over a drm scheme that was purported to stop this very behavior?
Could you maybe edit this so that it makes some sense?
Please? <– hah! see what I did there
So if anybody with some translation abilities can comment: are they doing an actual server rollback (which would obviously affect the legit drops and player progress too) or are they going to identify and delete individual items?
+1 — it sounds like the duping bug is causing server instability, and to fix the problem, they are holding downtime and rolling everyone back because of that 0.1% of the server’s items.
Even if they don’t roll back honest players’ progress, though, this sounds incredibly embarrassing for them technically, if a tiny fraction of their users are causing server stability issues.
Yes, you’d think with over a decade to work on this they would have figured out:
1) A way to make the game secure from cheats & hacks (or at least tougher to crack than a month after release)
2) Server/admin tools to fix dupes, boot off scammers, etc without taking *everything* down. Hmm, two people shoplifted stuff from a store. Let’s close the entire mall for two days.
*sigh* I wasn’t trying to use this as an opportunity to complain, I was asking a question. Save the complaints for after you get an answer, because you may not have a reason to whine.
Does anybody know?