Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: CL9 pet with Armor !!!
rahbert wrote:
"The C/C++ compiler is pretty strict"
You must not use Microsoft Visual Studio
I used to use VS6, but a few months ago migrated to .net.
I meant the ANSI C/C++ spec rather than the individual compiler implementation ie an ANSI C/C++ compiler does not allow a straight conversion of Data Types like some other languages roughly based on C syntax such as PHP do.
What Zad is saying, I believe is true...however a lot of people think its a bug or an exploit to make these pets...it isn't...
These pets are not intended...Correct
These pets will be nerfed...Correct
These pets are the result of an exploit/bug...Incorrect
No one is going to get into trouble by making these, the Devs have said that, and that is important. The pets maybe unintended, but until they are balanced, it is not against the rules ie exploiting to make them, no matter how many 1* bandits dissagre for morality issues.
The fact is, the pets are unintended and will get nerfed, but there is no exploit involved in making them. The sooner we accept this the better because all this debate back and forth does us no good. We are wasting our time over something that tbh is a non-issue. I say it's a non-issue as these are scheduled for nerfing, and no one will be in trouble for making them.
Zadokk wrote:We next need to look at the severity of this problem and prioritise it.
(points at the stickied "Top BE Issues" post)
Its priority is #10
I don't believe anyone is actively advocating the crafting of these animals. We do, however, marvel that an animal so low in level can have armor. The usefulness of this animal is very suspect, being vuln to everything and having between 800 to a 1000 action and mind. It wouldn't surprise me if an overkreetle ate this animal's lunch.
Joker9125 wrote:
*snip because the bulk of the post rehashes an issue that has be diced and sliced for over a year now.
Faulting the player for creating a pet does no one a service. Another player will just come along and create it again. The fault does indeed lie in the code. It is the code that needs to be repaired. Don't kill the messenger. Without him we would not have known this was possible.
Ohh so no one should ever be faulted for exploiting a bug in the system just because someone will come along later and do it anyway? I just wish the devs shared in your logic, cause if they did I'd be up to my eyeballs in rebel commadore 2K/5K min/max damage T21s right about now.
Short answer is, no one should be faulted because there is no exploit. The developers have already come out and said this long ago. Define all you like, the developers already said no one is cheating when they craft these animals and no one will be punished for owning them. They will be rebalanced in the future. Of course, that statement was made over a year ago.
These pets are made using the current system, but did you ever consider that the current system (or at least the part that calculates the CL on the lower end of things)could be bugged?
This is exactly the point. The system that calculates critter level is wacked. Faulting the BE does not solve to problem.
This is exactly right. People are getting so hung up semantics, meanwhile in the big picture, things are really getting screwed up imo. On Bria right now there are BE's charging 2mil/ea for these pets, and selling them at that price, and what is happening is that now there is little incentive to make any other BE products when you can make this kind of money-grab. To heck with the tailors, to heck with the creature handlers, to heck with the chefs. Why would a BE make a CH level pet, or a run of tissues or a run of pet stims when they could be making an order of magnitude more cash just selling a few non-ch pets each week?
Now here comes the really bad part... the non-ch pet-making BE's areable, with their tremendous cash flow, to buy out BE's who don't make such products. This last weekend a friend of mine had his ch-pet vendor bought out by a non-ch pet making BE. Lock, stock, and barrel. It's pretty difficult to run a business and earn a reputation when you have nothing to sell. But it's pretty easy right? Go out, make two or three really nice non-ch pets, sell them for millions, then go out and buy out all the tissue makers and ch-level pet makers on your server. Very easy to do. 5 or 10 million credits will buy out most people's tissue vendors, yet that is only a few non-ch pets worth of sales. This has actually prompted me to reconsider my stance on non-ch creatures, just simply from a competitive standpoint because I will not tolerate having this happen to me.
But here comes the good news... I stongly suspect that we are forcing the developers hand here. Before long I imagine they will be forced to do something about this, whether they want to or not because things are getting out of hand in a hurry. The trouble is though, like others have said, if something is done to fix the CL calculation bug with regards to vulnerabilities and effective resists, then this will certainly affect our "technique" for making pretty much all pets between CL 1 - CL 35, which not only would hurt us, but also hurt creature handlers a lot as well. In the end though, it's us that is doing this to ourselves, not them.
Zadokk wrote:
/jams 2 cents up dead horse's nose
I think these arguments are getting reduced too far and we need to look at the big picture again here people. You argue all you want about semantics, definitions or even logic but the truth remains that these pets are NOT intended to be in the game. Okay? Read the dev communication post. The code that calculates the creature level is not neccesarily buggy, instead it may require a hard cap on the level/resist ratios or fine tuning. I assume that during testing it was clear to the devs that 99% of the results from CL calculation tests were 'as intended' leaving a small margin of pets that were either over-powered (from good BEing) or under-powered (from bad BEing) and this would be the "wiggle room" from exceptional BEs to show their talents. Unfortunately for us, this wiggle room has widen to a gaping whole which now needs to be plugged.
We next need to look at the severity of this problem and prioritise it. We all know of the poor state the CH profession is and I would think that the devs are thinking about adding this to the creature handler refurbish, once the decide to bite the bullet and get down tosome serious coding. Until then, arguing about morality, ethics and business is just carting this deformed, squall like horse around with everyone throwing their pennies at it. I think that is issue will be dealt with but there is no quick 'hotfix' for it and that is why there has been no dev input on this. I think once the smugglers and CURB are out of the way, this will begin to snowball and hopefully it will get the attention it will deserve. Untilthen, comparing this problem to the overpowered armour, buffs and weapons is making a mountain out of a molehill because the CURB is far more important than this.
LloydPickering wrote:
rahbert wrote:
"The C/C++ compiler is pretty strict"
You must not use Microsoft Visual Studio
I used to use VS6, but a few months ago migrated to .net.
I meant the ANSI C/C++ spec rather than the individual compiler implementation ie an ANSI C/C++ compiler does not allow a straight conversion of Data Types like some other languages roughly based on C syntax such as PHP do.
What Zad is saying, I believe is true...however a lot of people think its a bug or an exploit to make these pets...it isn't...
These pets are not intended...Correct
These pets will be nerfed...Correct
These pets are the result of an exploit/bug...Incorrect
No one is going to get into trouble by making these, the Devs have said that, and that is important. The pets maybe unintended, but until they are balanced, it is not against the rules ie exploiting to make them, no matter how many 1* bandits dissagre for morality issues.
The fact is, the pets are unintended and will get nerfed, but there is no exploit involved in making them. The sooner we accept this the better because all this debate back and forth does us no good. We are wasting our time over something that tbh is a non-issue. I say it's a non-issue as these are scheduled for nerfing, and no one will be in trouble for making them.
ArthurDentOnBria wrote:
*hack
Now here comes the really bad part... the non-ch pet-making BE's areable, with their tremendous cash flow, to buy out BE's who don't make such products. This last weekend a friend of mine had his ch-pet vendor bought out by a non-ch pet making BE. Lock, stock, and barrel. It's pretty difficult to run a business and earn a reputation when you have nothing to sell. But it's pretty easy right? Go out, make two or three really nice non-ch pets, sell them for millions, then go out and buy out all the tissue makers and ch-level pet makers on your server. Very easy to do. 5 or 10 million credits will buy out most people's tissue vendors, yet that is only a few non-ch pets worth of sales. This has actually prompted me to reconsider my stance on non-ch creatures, just simply from a competitive standpoint because I will not tolerate having this happen to me.
*slash (don't you just love how I do that)
Aside for the non-creature handler uber pets, the statement above intrigues me the most. A BE sets up a vendor to sell product. Someone comes along and buys the product. Does it make a difference if one item is sold or the entire vendor is bought out? The BE priced the items at a level they chose to sell at.Does it matter who buys the items as long as the BE receives the money they were asking for?
I sell (I don't, but for the example play along) 4 uber non-creature handler pet for 2 mil each. These animals are super easy to make by the way. Do I really need to buy out another BE's vendor? Along comes a chef that wants to purchase tissues from me. I don't have the product but I know a BE vendor that does. I go to that vendor, buy it out lock stock and barrel because I can, and turn around and resell the product to the chef. I include a small margin for profit. The original BE still made all the money they were asking for to begin with so again, does it make any difference?
Even if you apply it to animals, does it still make a difference economically. Set aside the ethics of the uber issue for a moment. A BE crafts the "typical" BE non-creature pet. Another BE comes along and buys them all, recycles them and crafts uber pets (that's how easy it is to do). They then sell the new product, Uber Pets R-US, and makes a large profit. The original BE was still paid for their product at their asking price. Both BE's make a profit. Economically, does it make a difference that one BE bought another BE's animals? It isn't as if the uber pet maker stole the typical pets from the first BE. They were purchased.
On a broader point of view, if the intent of the uber pet maker is to limit the market to only themselves they are relegated to constantly buying out all the other BE vendors. Those BE's, in a real sense, share in the profits of the uber pet maker. A great, real life example of this paradigm is Walmart. They buy product with the sole intent to resell. They don't directly craft anything themselves. Their profit comes from the work of subcontractors. Regardless, both parties share economically.
Let me ask you this, say you saw a +25 food experimentation CA on someone's vendor for 25k (1k per level). Who here would not buy that and try to resell it for more than 10m? Apply that to GDK scales, binary liquid, et al. Is there anyone who can honestly say they wouldn't give the person the price they were asking for and try to resell it?
Those of you who said you would (and those who lied and said you wouldn't
j/k ) how is this any different?
That logic doesn't work Halthron. Suppose I got a customer that says to me "Arthur, I want a CL 70 pet, the best that you can make", and I want to supply him with that pet. Ok, so what are my options? I know that I can make a uber non-ch pet in 1 hr, and that is worth 2mil. And I know that I could make a CL 70 pet in 5 hours, but I also know that the market for CL 70 pets prices them at 200k. So what are my options? Seems to me the best option would be to go make a non-ch pet, sell it for 2 mil, then buy a pet for 200k from a competitor, and sell that to my customer "at cost". That way I've satisfied my customer, and also madean insane amount ofcash, and the really beautiful thing is it's saved me much of that 5 hours that I would have spent making that other pet. That same technique could be applied to anything that BE's sell. Tissues, stims, or anything.
So what is the defense against that? Is the problem that the guy selling the CL 70 pet is underpricing? Is that he's pricing it to be a wholeseller? Not at all. The guy selling the CL 70 pet on his vendor could charge enough that would discourage me from doing that. He could price it based on the value of his time at 10 million credits and true, I'd never resell him at that price, because at that price it would be worth my time to go make the CL 70 pet myself. Only problem is, he'd also never sell it to a customer at that price either. I'd imagine that eventually he'd just quit making those products and quit BE, or he too would throw in the towel and just start making non-ch pets.
Oh course it begs the question: when a customer comes to you and wants anything other than a non-ch pet, why don't I laugh in his face and tell him that it's not worthy of my time, now that my time is worth 2 million/hr? The answer to that of course is that many of us get satisfaction from supplying things to others. When someone comes to your store and says "great store, I love coming here,you always have just what I need, and I'll tell all my friends about you" THAT is why we do it, and of course that is exactly what you do not get, when competitors buy you out.
Halthron wrote:
I think that if someone prices themselves as a wholesaler, they shouldn't be suprised when someone treats them as a wholesaler. Some people think that if they charge less that they are doing the people on the server a favor by not contributing to an inflating economy. The only problem is when someone comes along, recognizes the difference between selling price and demand price and decides to make a profit. It takes a lot of effort to swing an economy and I don't think any one player has the time to do it.
Let me ask you this, say you saw a +25 food experimentation CA on someone's vendor for 25k (1k per level). Who here would not buy that and try to resell it for more than 10m? Apply that to GDK scales, binary liquid, et al. Is there anyone who can honestly say they wouldn't give the person the price they were asking for and try to resell it?
Those of you who said you would (and those who lied and said you wouldn't
Message Edited by ArthurDentOnBria on 03-15-2005 11:38 AM
Halthron wrote:
Joker9125 wrote:
These pets are made using the current system, but did you ever consider that the current system (or at least the part that calculates the CL on the lower end of things) could be bugged?
Did you ever consider that it's a complex formula that a programmer threw together and didn't fully test? There is no exploit here anymore than killing krayts to get pearls is an exploit (a very specific set of conditions). The problem is with over 800 creatures, some new since release, no one could forsee all the ramifications of 800 critters, half a dozen DNA quality levels and a random range of stats in each one.
Yesthis is exactly the case.
Ok maybe I should better explain what i meant by that. I said ONE of the ways to tell if something is an exploit is if it requires a specific set of conditions to reproduce. The term one implies that it is one of many where as a phrase such as "the way" would imply that it is the only one..............see the difference. I also said that because everything is a specific set of conditions for the BE craftins process (even more so than normal crafting professions) that this is tough to apply to the system. If that partpart of the text was to difficult to read you will find that Imade that point much clearer a few posts up and if that is still to difficule to read I will gladly e-mail that portion in much larger text to anyone whose vision prevents them from reading it. So could you please stop taking little snippits of my posts and quoteing them as if it was my entire point? Thank you.
Now lets see if I can explain what a bug is. In programming terms a bug is when a program you write dosent work as you intended it to or just dosent work at all. These can be caused by a variety of reasons ranging from not putting a ; at the end of a line of code, declaring a variable as the wrong type such a "bool" intstead of "double", trying to make an int varible act like a double, andthese can even be cause by unforseen input or unforseen combinations of input that cause the code to "bug". What we have here as you yourself have stated (or at least implied)is a system in which certain types combinations of input (DNA) cause results that are not intended. So is there a bug? Absolutely.
Now lets define explot.
An exploit knowingly abusing a known bug in the system to do things that were not intended.
Sounds alot like an exploit to me.
However since the devs have stated that these "bugged" pets will be rebalanced sometimein the future no one is going to be punished for using them. It seems to me that people are taking the lack of punishment to mean that its perfectly ok.
Message Edited by Joker9125 on 03-15-2005 12:38 AM
Kelderek wrote:
So if the system that calculates the CL for lower end pets is bugged are you saying no BE should make low level pets at all because that would be an exploit? How do you draw a line there? The method we use to make a CL 10 pet is the same method we use to make a CL23 pet for triplets and the same for making CL35 for twins. Are those exploits too? The tricks we are using are tried and true for lowering a pet's CL so you can get the stats you want for the level you want. I don't see how you can arbitrarily draw a line and say some pets are using an exploit and others are not -- we use the same method to create any pet so either all pets are an exploit or none of them are.
The whole "certain set of circumstances" bit is a weak argument. What we're really doing is finding the best resources to craft with. Can you fault a doctor for finding a certain flora that works great for making stimpacks or buffpacks? Can you fault a weaponsmith for using krayt loot in their weapons because they come out more powerful? We're doing the exact same thing here, we are finding DNA that works better than the average DNA to get the results we want.
Is it an exploit to use DNA from certain creatures? Or do you feel that we're using an exploit in how we choose to insert DNA into the template? Or is it in how we assign experimentation points? All those steps we do for EVERY pet regardless of the outcome, where is the exploit? I can't see it.
supersparc wrote:As has many have said, SWG is written in C/C++. The latter being object oriented. I good object oriented programmer always pays attention to code re-use....maybe they throw a scaling factor in but the equation can be re-used.
just my 2 cents.
OO may seem like a good idea from a modular resuability, easy design POV, but an architecture that is easy for humans to understand usually involves high levels of abstraction. This abstraction means high latency among the server clusters (Theres no way each 'server'/'cluster' runs on 1 physical server
). This latency would be so high for a system this complex and abstract, that even on a LAN, it's likely no one could play it.On this bases, I suspect that a lot of the server side isn't OO. this makes it a pain to update, and test for that matter, but pure OO coding for complex server based systems, like SWG, is a pipe dream until we get the technology to get the latency down to a copable amount.
Just going back a bit to the talk over compilers and IDEs...I *would* recommend .NET over 6. It may take a bit of getting used to but the interface is more clean, and accessible for me. Also, I hated the problems in 6, ie when u used an accessor like -> or the . operator it would not always register whether is was a correct identifier, meaning you had to make extra sure your identifier was right. Problems like this are now gone in .NET so it keeps me happy
. At first I was concerned about the .NET architecture linking automatically into everything I build, but it doesn't seem to auto link which is pretty cool. Now if only Apple had followed Microsofts example when they made Quicktime and ITunes a non-seperable bundle...Oh the irony.This is a bit off topic, so I apologise for the Hi-Jack, but it is a little bit relevant in that we are discussing the coding issues behind the results we are getting, even if a lot of it is pure speculation as to the actual implementation of the system.
LloydPickering wrote:
OO may seem like a good idea from a modular resuability, easy design POV, but an architecture that is easy for humans to understand usually involves high levels of abstraction. This abstraction means high latency among the server clusters (Theres no way each 'server'/'cluster' runs on 1 physical server
On this bases, I suspect that a lot of the server side isn't OO. this makes it a pain to update, and test for that matter, but pure OO coding for complex server based systems, like SWG, is a pipe dream until we get the technology to get the latency down to a copable amount.
I completely disagree. I spent time writing the core redenering routines for one of the biggest Manufacturing simulation applications in the world. It was all written in C++. The key is having good compiler optimization. C and C++ are both compiled languages. After being compiled, OO doesnt really mean anything. Not sure why you mention multiple physical servers because OO can be done on one server or 100, depending on your resources. I do agree that you would want to keep RPC calls to a minimum but, thats easily achievable.