StarGateWars Forums

I was upgrading my MS (spare naq to burn). That request was going slowly and I had to run, so I opened my other browser and banked my naq. As I was doing that, the first browser came back and said it had built a bunch of MS weapons. But ... my naq balance was -7T (!!!). I guess one browser banked at the same time the other one spent? Sounds like a database transaction bug on the server ... that shouldn't be possible.

Oh ... and then it banned me for cheating. That seemed kinda lame. I didn't cheat, I tripped over a bug in the game.

I got autobanned today (posting in the "You got banned?" thread), and the page has a link to "THE GAME ADMIN SECTION" on the "You are auto-banned" page.

But ... the link doesn't work. If click on it, I just get:

The requested URL /\'http://herebegames.com/StarGateWars/viewforum.php was not found on this server.

I think the \' at the beginning is the problem.

Sorry ... I thought the busted link was a bug.

The "problem" with the database, is that it can not lock a record. Reason being, how long should the record be locked when a update is done, before another can be done? And if it was locked, you can just write a script, to say bank 1 naq/second to block everyone else attacking. All you need is 86,400 naq out once a day, and your protected.

As it stands, it can not be locked, which would prevent this. Thus this happens, thus you get banned (since you essentially dealing with naq you don't have).

Thanks to whom it concerns for unbanning me.

I don't buy the "can't lock" argument. Companies like ebay and paypal live off of high transaction rates and reliable databases that don't get corrupted just because two people are trying to pay you at once.

In a database, you can specify a couple actions as a transaction (start transaction, read naq, add 7T, write naq, end transaction). Some databases do this with locks, others do this with watches. In the case of a watch, if the data you had read (naq) has been changed by someone else before you do any writes, then the write fails and the entire transaction needs to be repeated.

I do suspect, though, that it might be difficult to change the code to be transactional now that it has been written without transactions in mind.