[Known Issue] Game breaking bug: too much gold on account

Bug Reports
1

Platform, device version and operating system:
Happens on all available platforms and devices.

Screenshot or image:
Not available, game can not be started once the bug strikes.

What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
I was expecting, that I am able to farm and save gold in my account to any amount I´d like. Apparently, it seems like this is not true. There is very strong evidence, that there is a maximum number of gold, that breaks any account which exceeds this amount. It seems, that this is related to the maximum value that can be stored in a 4-byte integer. This maximum value is 2,147,483,647. This means, that any account exceeding this amount of gold will break and becomes unplayable! This is a game breaking bug for anyone who tries to save more gold than this!!!

How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
Happens every time a player farms a lot of gold and exceeds the amount of 2,147,483,647 gold in his account.

Steps to make it happen again
Exceed the critical amount of gold in any account.

Additional remarks:
The amount might seem unrealistic at first glance, but please be aware, that there are several teams, that allow accounts with high enough VIP level to farm about 1 million gold per hour - or even more. Doing this for 10 hours a day results in 10 million per day and after approx. 210 days or 7 months this border value is within reach. So it is a huge amount of gold, but not impossible to get.

@Bramble @Kafka @Jeto @OminousGMan
If I am interpreting the available evidence correctly, there is a very serious, game breaking bug in the GoW source code! Please raise this issue to the game dev team and either:
a) confirm, that my suspicion is correct and take all actions to correct this game breaking bug, or
b) confirm, that my claim is not true and publish the maximum amount of gold a single player can save in his account (there must be a maximum value, as any variable in a program code is of finite value by definition).

18 Likes
2

This is an extremely important issue, and one most likely to affect those with the highest VIP levels (i.e. your biggest supporters.) This should be easy enough to get an answer for anyone with basic coding ability, so there is no reason you should not be able to get us a rapid and concrete answer. Thank you in advance.

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This look like a very serious bug, I hope we will get answer from dev soon.

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4

I haven’t programmed in more years than I want to admit, but I do remember this from programming: random doesn’t exist and neither does unlimited amount of anything.

Whatever resources are coded into a program will have a highest level set. This could be something by the devs (such as only showing 999+ on chests rather than the real amount or capping the life and armor and attack at 1000) or it could be something that is set by the programming language.

In either case, if there is an upper limit set, even if it seems totally unrealistic when the limit is set, it should clearly be stated. If I can only have 1000 chests in my inventory, I need to know so I can open chests more often. If the limit on souls or glory is 10K or 10M, then I need to know about it.

This seems to be a case of a programming limit that’s not controlled by the devs. While I personally don’t think I’ll ever get to 2B gold, if I ever do, I’d like to continue playing the game. A simple warning, if you don’t want to do anything else, would alert people when they are getting close to the maximum limit on any resource.

I would be happy with that. I’m not happy that something that isn’t a ban is being labeled as such to ignore a programming limit. I just want to have clear communication with the devs about limits in the game.

I hope this issue with the 2B+ gold limit can be resolved one way or another. In any case, long term players who have supported the game and want to continue to support shouldn’t be penalized for breaking a “rule” they didn’t even know about.

10 Likes
5

Say it louder for the people in the back lol

This, so much this.

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6

I propose changing the code from using an int to the unsigned long data type (ulong in C#). It allows 64-bit unsigned (greater than or equal to 0) integers. The limit would then be 2^64 - 1 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 gold.

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Unfortunately, we don’t know lots of bugs floating there in the game. We only see what we are facing or whatever on the ice berg. We need a better checks in place in the game and more checks when releasing new contents.

We also need a better and faster response from devs. to resolve issues such as this with good time spent to understand the situation to be able to solve it instead of assuming things and act on the assumption.

By the way, what happen to the recommendation to have a dedicate staff on weekends?

8

Do we have user(s) actually impacted by this limit, or is this just a PSA based on not knowing how (if) the game client (and possibly server too) potentially handles an overflow condition?

[EDIT] I wasn’t asking for any usernames (that’s for the devs to research), just a simple “yes” or “no” would do.

9

(Which has been locked after kindly being classified as “ban appeal” by our wonderful community managers despite there not being a single mention of a ban in provided information.)

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10

Before the community managers act on my thread in the same way as in the one quoted here, I want to make it as clear as possible. I do NOT care about the issues mentioned in the other thread.

I report a bug here and I think I described it very clearly. I ask a question (what is the maximum amount of gold a player can have before the variable used to save that value overflows?), that would help me understand, if I’m right on this or not. I would like to have an answer to that question, nothing more, nothing less.

@Bramble @Kafka @Jeto @OminousGMan I’m not responsible for other users linking closed threads here. I kindly ask you to strictly focus on the OP and clarify my doubts. Thanks in advance.

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11

Just lower the gold value for the player that can no longer enter the game, for now.

@Kafka
How is this acceptable Cannot login to the game with error: 5320368524 - #2 by Taransworld ? He has too much gold and you banned him!!!??

1 Like
12

This whole issue reveals a much greater frustration. If we report a general issue, we are told “Sorry, we don’t deal in hypotheticals.” If we report an issue reported to a specific account we get shut down with a “Sorry, we can’t discuss specific accounts.” This may seem like an abstract issue, but it reflects a lack of understanding as to how your game is actually played. Some guilds save up all year to do a dump at Christmas. Some guilds save up even longer to break the all-tme weekly record on the Taran board, for example. You need goals and milestones when you are an end-gamer in a game that at the end of the day is mostly a grind. I’m a moderate spender, and things like this really piss me off. I can only imagine what a VIP 19/20 would be thinking, when the game can just break, the community does the back-end troubleshooting and presents the dev’s with the likely answer on a platter, and all we get is a shrug and a “Well, keep spending mate.”

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Why would gold value field be ever signed, tho… I’d expected 4kkk instead

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No, the account isn’t banned, some of the more technically savvy players around here have already looked into it. Support incorrectly claims the account is banned and refuses to look into this and related issues at all, because they don’t support banned players. It’s a bit like the Krinklemas situation, except that this one only hits the most active players. You get an error popup instead of a ban message when trying to log in.

Edit: Added a screenshot of the error, code varies each time. It’s the client attempting to parse the gold amount in the profile JSON sent by the server and failing with an overflow.

image

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15

Same issue happened when a player reached a level cap past 2000 and was locked (not banned) out of the game for Week.

No fear of me breeching the Gold or level ceiling. But if I have too many keys then will I eventually lock myself out of the game for a week? Better planning and better adapting needs to be a done for a game that they clearly didn’t think would be around this long.

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The main problem this time is that the issue can’t be addressed AT ALL. Attempting to report it IN ANY WAY results in it getting treated as “discussing bans”. Tickets get closed, forum threads get locked, nothing happens. If Sirrian would ever see this he’d die of embarrassment.

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17

Closing the bug thread and disregarding it as a “ban” was a (frustrating) mistake by a single moderator, who I still regard as relatively green at the job. Bramble is more eager to interact with users than the rest of the forum team (and I hope, he/she stays this way for a while longer), but misunderstands topics from time to time.

I just hope, this thread here will make matters more clear.

[Edit] The experience shared by johnoe a bit below drasticly changes my view on the situation. The moderation action appears to be an intentional step ordered by development, who are unwilling to fix or even aknowledge a known issue for months and keep locking top players.
I retract what I wrote about Bramble.

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In the past I had to scold the devs for “speed reading” support tickets. So I’m not shocked by this. It’s just unfortunate that they chose to do it publicly this time. There’s definitely incentive to get through as many support related issues as fast as possible.

19

A GM from another guild, in no way related to our family, reached out and stated one of their players had the exact same issue this summer when they crossed 2.1 billion. After about a month of appeals, the situation was reversed for the account in question. To me, this escalates the situation significantly. It means: 1) They are aware of the issue, and have some way of reversing it, at least on a case by case basis if it suits them. 2) In the 3-4 months since, they have neither fixed the problem nor warned other elite players to steer clear of it, and 3) They are now either feigning ignorance or, most charitably, one hand simply doesn’t know what the other hand is doing/has done in the past. Once again, I am only a middling VIP, but I have spent many multiples of what a game like Baldur’s Gate would have cost me. Others have spent many thousands of dollars over the years. You have not seen me on here in the past raising a stink about every little bug or inconvenience, but this is a travesty. To say we deserve better would be quite the understatement at this point. I patiently await your response…

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[sarcasm mode:] New shop item in version 7.5: Gold extender - Allows you to own more than 2,1 milliard gold. Only 4,99 per month.

I bet, if any moderator even bothers to step into this thread, they will tell us that we should be thankful, that this ban script only applies to gold currently earned and not lifetime earnings (so far), and that without cheating it is not even possible to reach such numbers.

Thanks a lot to johnoe for pointing out, that this problem is neither new, nor unknown (which really makes me hate this game and the people behind it once again).
Can anyone imagine the troubles we will get into, if souls ever should cross that mark? Those are a lot harder to burn away for players.

3 Likes