Lost INF (?) for hitting 2 Billion

[CapnFreedom]

First world problem here.

 

Sold a bunch of stuff on the AH and had somewhere between 25 and 40 items sold, pending me taking the INF profits. I was not really checking my current INF total (but I was around 1.93B on my character) and pressed the collect all INF button. The odds on having sales to place me to exactly 2B is far-fetched, and the napkin-math should have probably put me over 2B. Did I lose the excess INF or does the AH add any excess sorta of 'in escrow'?

Pretty sure this has happened at least twice before, and I usually collect each sale line-by-line... but I was tired today.

 

Thanks for your attention and kind replies.

[Monty Haull]

If it didn't stop at 2bn, meaning you can still claim it on AH, then it's gone.

 

I never market with a toon even close to 2bn.  Too easy to fat finger something and lose a lot.

 

I suggest emailing some of that to another toon for safe keeping.

[Yomo Kimyata]

It’s gone, but I think the devs use it to feed refugees in Galaxy City

[UltraAlt]

On 5/4/2024 at 9:13 PM, CapnFreedom said:

Thanks for your attention and kind replies.

 

On 5/5/2024 at 9:15 AM, Monty Haull said:

I suggest emailing some of that to another toon for safe keeping.

 

Or you can just email it to yourself - your @globalname

And just keep it stored in email until you need it.

 

I store mine in email in 500mil or so chunks in email. (The 500 mil bar is basically 50 (non-Lord of Winter) card packs worth of inf)

Whenever I get to over 300 mil on a character, I look to see if I have an inf email that hasn't reached 500 mil. If not, I retrieve it, delete that email, start another email, and dump the surplus above 300 mil into the new email to myself.

 

I'm sorry that you didn't know about the cap, but at least you still have plenty of capital to work with.

 

 

 

Edited May 6 by UltraAlt

[Aeroprism]

On 5/4/2024 at 9:13 PM, CapnFreedom said:

First world problem here.

 

Sold a bunch of stuff on the AH and had somewhere between 25 and 40 items sold, pending me taking the INF profits. I was not really checking my current INF total (but I was around 1.93B on my character) and pressed the collect all INF button. The odds on having sales to place me to exactly 2B is far-fetched, and the napkin-math should have probably put me over 2B. Did I lose the excess INF or does the AH add any excess sorta of 'in escrow'?

Pretty sure this has happened at least twice before, and I usually collect each sale line-by-line... but I was tired today.

 

Thanks for your attention and kind replies.

 

Oh.  So THAT's there this Inf came from.

Thanks!

[Ukase]

On 5/4/2024 at 8:13 PM, CapnFreedom said:

First world problem here.

 

Sold a bunch of stuff on the AH and had somewhere between 25 and 40 items sold, pending me taking the INF profits. I was not really checking my current INF total (but I was around 1.93B on my character) and pressed the collect all INF button. The odds on having sales to place me to exactly 2B is far-fetched, and the napkin-math should have probably put me over 2B. Did I lose the excess INF or does the AH add any excess sorta of 'in escrow'?

Pretty sure this has happened at least twice before, and I usually collect each sale line-by-line... but I was tired today.

 

Thanks for your attention and kind replies.

Unless something changed in the past two weeks, when I wasn't paying attention and tried to collect all, I got a warning that I would go over the cap if I proceeded. 

I am going to test it just now and confirm that I didn't imagine it. 

 

Yes - verified. The game will no longer allow you to claim funds if it would push you beyond the cap. (I have lost unknown amounts because it used to let you claim it! - but you would only get up to 2B. 

[Aeroprism]

10 hours ago, Ukase said:

Unless something changed in the past two weeks, when I wasn't paying attention and tried to collect all, I got a warning that I would go over the cap if I proceeded. 

I am going to test it just now and confirm that I didn't imagine it. 

 

Yes - verified. The game will no longer allow you to claim funds if it would push you beyond the cap. (I have lost unknown amounts because it used to let you claim it! - but you would only get up to 2B. 

 

I can totally extrapolate your sales price with that info. Your state secrets are all mine.

 

/ebil

[Yomo Kimyata]

12 hours ago, Ukase said:

 

Redact!  Redact!!!

[Aeroprism]

1 hour ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

Redact!  Redact!!!

 

Or, considering how @Ukase is much more experienced than I, maybe they used that amount ON PURPOSE to throw me off.

I am humbled.

[Ukase]

So, I have never made a mystery about how I do things. I do, however, have a number of accounts - some of which are what I would call "hedgers', in that I have them do different things in a different way, just not at scale. More to help me see what's going on in areas of the market I wouldn't ordinarily dabble in. 

[Aeroprism]

2 minutes ago, Ukase said:

So, I have never made a mystery about how I do things. I do, however, have a number of accounts - some of which are what I would call "hedgers', in that I have them do different things in a different way, just not at scale. More to help me see what's going on in areas of the market I wouldn't ordinarily dabble in. 

 

As I said, way above my paygrade 😄

 

I just buy and sell things and pretend I know what I'm doing.

 

Slowly burning through all my 200Mil inf Emails too, making too many alts and being too generous with all the people I help spec. 

[Ukase]

20 minutes ago, Aeroprism said:

Slowly burning through all my 200Mil inf Emails too, making too many alts and being too generous with all the people I help spec. 

Hey, that's never a bad thing. When I team, I give away too much stuff too. My issue is most of the time when I play, I'm not really connected to the content - tabbed in, out for work and such. I'll be halfway through exploring, have to stop, come back, hit the hospital or rez and continue. Until evening time, then I can team up a bit. 

Otherwise, I'd probably have a lot less inf. 
Most of my inf is just generated from sheer repetition. Nothing brilliant about it. 

I do recall feeling pretty bright when I discovered with salvage costs being lower at lower levels, and the unique way in which HC buckets the IO and recipes...it made sense to craft at the lowest level possible. I feel like I was the only one who knew for a long time, lol. 

Edited May 9 by Ukase

[Excraft]

I'm not sure how feasible it is to implement this here - STO had this same problem until recently.  The patch Cryptic did for this was if the character goes above the cap by earning EC (eg. inf) from market sales or vendoring, it will send and in-game email with the excess funds to the character.  It can be claimed at a later time once they were below the 2 billion EC cap.  This way, players don't accidentally lose out on the funds and don't need to keep rolling alts to hold onto excess funds. 

[CapnFreedom]

On 5/8/2024 at 8:31 PM, Ukase said:

Unless something changed in the past two weeks, when I wasn't paying attention and tried to collect all, I got a warning that I would go over the cap if I proceeded. 

I am going to test it just now and confirm that I didn't imagine it. 

 

Yes - verified. The game will no longer allow you to claim funds if it would push you beyond the cap. (I have lost unknown amounts because it used to let you claim it! - but you would only get up to 2B. 

I've gotten that pop-up window message before in the past as well. But it did not pop-up for me on the times when I would collect INF on a large batch, where the total INF cash-out would place me over the 2B mark but a partial batch would not.

Simple fix is to just pay better attention when I am reaching the 2B mark. But I wonder if it is something that the Devs can look into: putting in some sort of script to determine the total INF cash-out and having a check to the character's current INF total... then aborting/denying the cash-out en masse.

Thanks again for your replies all.

[Ukase]

6 hours ago, CapnFreedom said:

But it did not pop-up for me on the times when I would collect INF on a large batch, where the total INF cash-out would place me over the 2B mark but a partial batch would not.

So, if I'm understanding you, in my example above, it's just one transaction which gave me the warning message. But if it were multiple transactions, it may not (or wouldn't/didn't in your experience)? 

Is that what you're saying? The "partial batch" term has me a bit confused and just want to make sure. 
Heh, for multiple transactions testing, I'd better go to Brainstorm. Wouldn't want to risk THAT much, lol. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

It is my understanding that the GET ALL INF button can lead to inf over the cap disappearing, whereas the individual GET INF. buttons halt the claim.

 

I also dislike the hang that you get when you claim more than a certain number of items and you get locked out of the /AH for many seconds.  In practical terms, I usually claim all only when I have 25 or fewer items and that seems to be low enough to keep the system from hanging.  I don't believe there is a strict number of items, but it depends on the overall burden on the hamsters in the wheel of the /AH at the time of your request.

[Monty Haull]

1 hour ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

I don't believe there is a strict number of items, but it depends on the overall burden on the hamsters in the wheel of the /AH at the time of your request.

I tested awhile back.  You can grab up to 32 items before getting paused.

[Yomo Kimyata]

15 minutes ago, Monty Haull said:

I tested awhile back.  You can grab up to 32 items before getting paused.

 

I may be remembering wrong, but there were times it would process 30 without hanging, and there were times it would hang on 30.  My takeaway was that it depended on the number of other transactions being processed at the same time by other players, which seems like a reasonable guess.  I've never had it hang on 25, so that's what I go with now!

[Troo]

12 hours ago, CapnFreedom said:

But it did not pop-up for me on the times when I would collect INF on a large batch,

 

Yep

 

Claiming one item going over 2B will get a warning. Claiming lots of sales will not trigger the warning.

[lemming]

8 hours ago, Troo said:

Yep

 

Claiming one item going over 2B will get a warning. Claiming lots of sales will not trigger the warning.

Theory: Checks to see if any sale would bump over 2B, but not on the total sale, so if you claim 20, and any 2 will push you over, you'll lose the 18 others

[Yomo Kimyata]

I really hate the way the /AH interface shuts down when you claim all with too many items.  I figure I can click 50-100 times in that amount of time, and I assume that it is a database problem more than anything else.  Also, and I can't promise this is going to happen frequently, over the years I've been the recipient of many fat finger trades, many of which I would have lost a good portion if I had been blindly claiming all...

[lemming]

3 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

I really hate the way the /AH interface shuts down when you claim all with too many items.  I figure I can click 50-100 times in that amount of time, and I assume that it is a database problem more than anything else.  Also, and I can't promise this is going to happen frequently, over the years I've been the recipient of many fat finger trades, many of which I would have lost a good portion if I had been blindly claiming all...

I have never lost inf because of it, but I sometimes just dump all my salvage onto the AH and have hit claim all which hits that limit, and then it has to tell you about how many more times it is already at the limit on every single chat tab.  AH was definitely not built with scaling up in mind. (well, quite a few things)

[Andreah]

On 5/11/2024 at 8:53 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

I figure I can click 50-100 times in that amount of time, and I assume that it is a database problem more than anything else. 

Honest to god, if your back end database choked on a few hundred transactions in a second, it's a trash bottom of the barrel, amateur home-brew database. (And sadly, it might be). No serious database should have that problem, ever.

 

Iirc, the auction "database" is a home-brew, but the data storage core of it should still be able to manage this. However, I could speculate it's storing auction data in trees of some sort, and it may be that every 32 transactions triggers a rebalance operation. In this case, the original coder might have thought a time-out was needed to give the database a tine window to complete the operation and refresh back to the user.

 

That's a little suspect to me, since another player can usually keep going with transactions, and your 32 isn't the entire current context. So, if that what was done, it didn't solve the issue anyway. More likely, having that in there just seemed like good defensively programming at the time to break up big operations into several smaller ones. In my mind, the most transaction anyone could do at a time is 200 anyway, and 200 and 32 should be be about zero effort for a real database to handle, so I would not have bothered.

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

17 minutes ago, Andreah said:

No serious database should have that problem, ever.

 

I'm not a programmer (but I play one on tv), so that's just idle speculation on my part.  My thought process is based on how the character items claim (or super pack opening) used to periodically hang for reasons that seemed unrelated to my gameplay or timing.  Eventually the workaround was a timing governor in order to slow down the system requests. 

 

When they fixed the display bug (and I apologize, I don't remember which dev did this, but I will look it up shortly because they definitely deserve a name drop), the dev mentioned that the current activity in the /AH was a factor.  Since I have seen hangs at various numbers of "claim all" including below 32 (and it is inconsistent), I've been assuming that there is some correlation with the number of other /AH requests in the system other than me.  Dunno.

 

I still think that a freshly created /AH would not be a bad idea, but I also understand the sheer fear of screwing something up and losing all the data currently in there.  However the /AH was designed, it was certainly not for up to 200 market slots per character, up to 5000 characters per account.  I also am guessing that the seeding of salvage and brainstorms and hero/winter packs were done by the shortcut of offering a million blocks of 10 somehow, possibly through dummy characters.

 

EDIT:  thank you again @Number Six!

 

 

Edited May 13 by Yomo Kimyata

[lemming]

So, played around a bit on beta.   Claiming a string of items will usually result in wasting inf if you are not careful.

 

So if you have a bunch of items where none will bump you over, but there is an item that by itself would push you over, it will stop on that item.

 

Say you have 1,998,000,000 inf and you have a bunch of items that sold for 1m first in the queue, but there's a set of 3 items that sold for 1m each in that further down the queue.

 

It will process all the single 1m on the way tossing the extra inf away, but will pop up the overflow error when it hits the 3 item bit since 3m would push you over the limit in the first place.

 

Definitely shows one shouldn't mess around when you know you're near the edge.