as those who had spent the fraudulent funds could be liable for a ban
Yeah, I’m sure that’ll endear the playerbase to you guys.
Why wouldn’t you be using a type of system with rollbacks? WoW used to have rollbacks (return the server state to an earlier state) for when shit went absolutely insane. They didn’t happen often but it was a lot better than having a few people’s ill gotten gains ruining the economy.
You can’t just roll back the database, you have to also replay any legitimate transactions between the last snapshot and now, and that’s a whole other can of worms which I don’t expect a game server would be prepared to handle out of the box
I don’t expect a game server would be prepared to handle out of the box
Which is why I was wondering why they don’t use a system like that. WoW was having rollbacks in 2006 so not to have them in another game developed 2 decades later? That seems idiotic to me.
Wow didn’t have the same problem. In 2006 you didn’t have instant microtransactions, which in turn unlock in game currency, which then can be spent.
This is a chain of events which would normally be handled by an event database if it were to be made easy to roll back. You can imagine it working much like a ctrl+z undo, it’s a stack of events which is deterministic and can be played back, forward or from a specific time. In theory you would identify the malicious transactions, roll back the actual database and then replay without them.
Why they don’t do it? This is an incredible amount of overhead engineering with no value to be sold to the VPs of the company/project leads. It’s basically insurance for an edge case. It would also cost them much more money/server resources in addition to the traditional database they also have to run in parallel for all other functionality. It’s such a hard sell for a company who’s only interest is the bottom line.
That’s not how you’d do it. You can refund anyone who made purchases during the time frame you want to roll back since I highly doubt the game state database is the same as the microtransactions database. Then you revert the server to its previous state. Everyone loses everything they did during the rollback period but the server is stable as it was at the earlier time and in the original state.
Also wow added microtransactions in 2010 and they definitely had rollbacks after they added the microtransaction because it happened to my character once in Mist of Pandaria.
I’ve rebuilt databases from logs and snapshots several times.
It should be pretty easy (and by easy I mean labour intensive and exhaustingly detailed) to pick a snapshot, identify real money in, then undo all skin/item purchases and revert all money to the original amounts.
That’s kind of best case scenario to the user base. Nobody gets screwed.
It’s also possible the hackers didn’t just modify the tables so there’s an audit trail, or they have change data capture enabled, or can replay the database transactions out of the box.
Yes, this is the obvious workaround. I was trying to explain why ‘they can’t just roll back’ and why i don’t believe they have the setup to do it automatically
Yeah, I’m sure that’ll endear the playerbase to you guys.
Why wouldn’t you be using a type of system with rollbacks? WoW used to have rollbacks (return the server state to an earlier state) for when shit went absolutely insane. They didn’t happen often but it was a lot better than having a few people’s ill gotten gains ruining the economy.
You can’t just roll back the database, you have to also replay any legitimate transactions between the last snapshot and now, and that’s a whole other can of worms which I don’t expect a game server would be prepared to handle out of the box
So screw it and do the roll back and just lose some transactions. You’re gonna have people pissed off at you no matter what.
Yea, roll back from everyone having free shit and some people paid for stuff to people have nothing even if paid for.
They should just accept that shit’s fucked and let everyone keep everything. It’s fucking bytes and pixels.
Yeah. Give them that amount back in game credit so they can make the purchase again.
Which is why I was wondering why they don’t use a system like that. WoW was having rollbacks in 2006 so not to have them in another game developed 2 decades later? That seems idiotic to me.
Wow didn’t have the same problem. In 2006 you didn’t have instant microtransactions, which in turn unlock in game currency, which then can be spent.
This is a chain of events which would normally be handled by an event database if it were to be made easy to roll back. You can imagine it working much like a ctrl+z undo, it’s a stack of events which is deterministic and can be played back, forward or from a specific time. In theory you would identify the malicious transactions, roll back the actual database and then replay without them.
Why they don’t do it? This is an incredible amount of overhead engineering with no value to be sold to the VPs of the company/project leads. It’s basically insurance for an edge case. It would also cost them much more money/server resources in addition to the traditional database they also have to run in parallel for all other functionality. It’s such a hard sell for a company who’s only interest is the bottom line.
That’s not how you’d do it. You can refund anyone who made purchases during the time frame you want to roll back since I highly doubt the game state database is the same as the microtransactions database. Then you revert the server to its previous state. Everyone loses everything they did during the rollback period but the server is stable as it was at the earlier time and in the original state.
Also wow added microtransactions in 2010 and they definitely had rollbacks after they added the microtransaction because it happened to my character once in Mist of Pandaria.
I’ve rebuilt databases from logs and snapshots several times.
It should be pretty easy (and by easy I mean labour intensive and exhaustingly detailed) to pick a snapshot, identify real money in, then undo all skin/item purchases and revert all money to the original amounts.
That’s kind of best case scenario to the user base. Nobody gets screwed.
It’s also possible the hackers didn’t just modify the tables so there’s an audit trail, or they have change data capture enabled, or can replay the database transactions out of the box.
This is all very stack dependent.
Yes, this is the obvious workaround. I was trying to explain why ‘they can’t just roll back’ and why i don’t believe they have the setup to do it automatically