Credit cap exploit

[Benjamintruth]

So here's how this work. You're on a server that has catalogue enabled. You area able to get to credit cap, either through pirate loot, or factory building. Once you get to credit cap, you upload your ship called 'Chunk.'



It's a chunk of 1 million Lvl 5 Awesomeite. And it costs exactly the credit cap. You buy this chip, rip all of the Awesomeite off. You sell maybe 500 ( or if the server has Lvl 5 costs reduced, you sell 500,000, or what have you) so that you are once again at the 2.4 bill/trill credit cap. Then you buy your 'Chunk' again.

Rinse, repeat.

So I don't care how much you guys say that capital ships will eventually become obtainable by only large factions, or players who are invested in the server, with this exploit anyone can buy a Nexus or Enterprise that they downloaded from here and run around just blowing up n00bz. Even with reduced Lvl_5.



There are only 3 ways to fix this, that I can think of anyhow.

1. Credit Cap variable is increased to a very, very large number. Possibley something like a hundred trillion.

2. Changes are implimented so that a ship that costs equal to, or more than the current cap cannot be purchased.

3. Catalogue is disabled.



I suppose that there are other options, like making it so that ships that have more than 90% of one material cannot be purchased, but changes like this or other 'out there' alterations would possibly require en gine changes, but would most definatly require a lot of work and time for poor Schema. Time that he could otherwise be using to make Laser Guns, or Mech Suits. Or Robots! And horses !



Anyways, thoughts?

 

[Trafalgar]

You can also manufacture L5 ore from cheap junk using the new recipe system, so disabling the catalog won\'t necessarily help.

 

[teutoburg1]

The games in alpha, they want you to have lots of money so you can builid ridiculous game breaking ships that help them find bugs. Later on the entire economy system will be fixed so exploits like this are impossible.

Though considering you need to hit the credit cap before doing anything its kind of a bad exploit. Just plop down a build block and strip mine a planet if you really want credits

 

[Harry Pearce]

To be fair, ships that cost around a billion already lag the server so much, that the game becomes unplayable. I think there should be a configurable limit for ship mass (if there isn\'t already), and show the ship\'s mass and/or block count directly in the catalogue.

The credit cap is not an arbitrary number though. It\'s value is 2^31-1. That is because it is stored in a 32 bit signed integer (the number can be negative). One way to increase that is to change it to unsigned (the number can be only positive, which makes sense with numbers like credits, or counts.), or change it to a 64 bit integer (2^63/64-1). Altough, realistically, you would not need that much credits for anything, since usability limit on the ship is somwhere around half billion (so that it will not lag out the server).

Your suggestions are very restrictive of the gameplay. If any restrictions are to be implemented, they need to be configurable. Already there are servers that restrict catalogue usage to 0 ships or limit the ship\'s mass (don\'t know how they do that)

 

[Nootau]

You call buying and selling lv 5 ore to act as hard currency rather than credits an exploit? How is this an exploit? Maybe I am missing something here..

 

[Morhe]

What you\'re missing is the fact that the game allows you to buy a ship who\'s total cost is greater than the maximum currency if you currently have the maximum currency (a bandaid fix for capitol ships that could not be purchased otherwise). You can exploit this by making a ship that is effectively just a core block with a few trillion credits worth of L5 ore. Save it, and then buy that ship for ~2 billion, and you have effectively given yourself infinite credits.

It\'s not really that big of a deal considering how easy it is to get currency in this game already, but it is something that will need to be fixed when the economy starts being polished.

 

[Nootau]

I thought you were meaning buying a ship worth millions of credits made of lv5s.. I didn\'t realize you mean millions of lv5s...

 

[Moph]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. You are the first person I\'ve seen who has understood this about the credits and it being alpha.

And your second point was exactly what was running through my head while reading the post as well.

\"Hey guys, I know an easy way to get max credits. First, get max credits, buy some stuff, then sell it back and you should be at more or less full credits again!\"

 

[Morhe]

You just need to have enough to make the ship cost more than the credit cap (more than ~2k, depending on shop prices). Though, as many have pointed out already, by the time you have over double the credit cap in credits and ore, you don\'t really need this exploit.

 

[Trafalgar]

Considering that right now you can just buy a ship of ore (or anything else) from the catalog, disassemble it, and then sell it to a shop for 3x what it cost you? You don\'t need to hit the credit cap first, just go somewhere which is offering 3 times the catalog value (or more) for your ore, or even 2 times if you don\'t mind not making as much profit.

 

[dez]

if the first step is \"get 2.17 billion credits\" i would say this exploit isnt much of an exploit and getting that many credits at will is the problem

 

[33Cav]

obtaining the credit cap is not exactly hard, especially on servers without a modified economy or modified loot (from pirate stations and overheating hostile cores). All you have to do is \'exploit\' (not actially an exploit as such) by buying a bunch of items at low cost and selling high. Using weapons computers as a commodity i managed to get 300mil in half an hour on a MODIFIED ECONOMY server