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Infinite money exploit in multiplayer using shares and sending money back and forth #7691
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Another possible fix besides just removing the send money feature altogether would be to have the same two settings as we have for other large-scale actions such as clearing land and landscaping.
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I think this is ultimately a social problem, not a technical one. That's why we have things like Bafin or the SEC to watch over financial irregularities (Think of this as an example of insider trading) However, in my opinion, instead of forbidding sending cash (which might be a server setting), i think the cash/loan should simply not be included in the company value calculation. just the actual physical assets (vehicles, tracks, stations). this would also prevent the value staying at 2$ for a long time. |
It's worth keeping in mind that the default value of Apart from that I'm generally of the same opinion as Eddi that the better fix (apart from doing nothing) would be to base company value, at least for shares price calculation, solely on fixed assets value, or possibly even on some other performance metric as well. Even then it could possibly be gamed. The real proper fix would likely involve completely changing the financial model of the game to include double-entry bookkeeping for all assets, and proper shares ownership, including a general public body of investors you will need to convince to trade shares of a company with you at a given price. |
IMHO leave this as is. There's a pre-existing remedy for the problem in multiplayer by disallowing share trading on the server. |
Am I the only one who sees a problem with infinite money? Money equals power and with infinite money you can basically wreck the whole world by screwing up the land all over. This is a desaster waiting to happen. Yes, it requires these particular settings to be set, but no server owner will expect such an exploit. I am, however, unsure about a “true” solution. :( |
... nobody said that there isn't a problem. the question is how to come up with a suitable solution. |
Also trying to pretend that (O)TTD is well balanced is somewhat of a waste of time. It's very easy to make a lot of money by doing very little |
I wonder how people use shares in game? Is it mostly to be able to buy out competitors? What about these fixes:
Example: Company A buys 25% of Company B for $0 and Company B gains $0 cash. Then Company A gives $400,000 to Company B, raising Company B's value to $400,000 When Company A then sells its 25%, Company A gains $100,000, but Company B loses $100,000. You could set it so that the target company has to agree to buy/sell shares, with AI players always accepting if they have the cash. This would make more sense overall, since if you're starting a company by getting a loan, you should be retaining 100% equity, and if there were shares on the market, where is the cash you got for selling them in the first place? You could even add on the ability for shareholders to restrict the actions of a held company, based on the amount of ownership, although this would probably go beyond the scope of the design goals. But, you could do something like 'no building within a certain radius of my stations', or a points-based system where each restriction costs different amounts of points to make a menu of restrictions your owners could put on you... |
I see it as a non-issue as well. Any decent competitive server have both shares and money transfers disabled. And on non-competitive ones money means nothing so no point "exploiting". |
Thanks for this. This issue won't be addressed in vanilla OpenTTD. We try to keep the issue count low, so I'm closing this one. Thanks! |
Version of OpenTTD
1.9.2
Description
There's an exploit in multiplayer that allows you to add basically infinite amounts of cash to your company, adding 75% of your company cash each iteration out of thin air. This glitch requires an online multiplayer server and 2 companies you control.
Question: Is this now the correct place to post bugs? Is the old bugtracker dead?
Expected result
You can't generate money out of thin air in online multiplayer.
Actual result
You can generate money out of thin air in online multiplayer by abusing the company shares system in compination with the “give money to player” mechanic.
Steps to reproduce
Example
Let's assume that LocustCorp has $5,000,000 in the bank. So first you buy the FakeCorp shares for $0. Then you send $5,000,000 to FakeCorp, thus pushing the value of FakeCorp to (ca.?) $5,000,000. LocustCorp's bank is now empty. When LocustCorp now sells all shares, you win 75% of that value, so LocustCorp has now $3,750,000 in the bank. This is the money that appears out of thin air. Now FakeCorp sends all their cash back to LocustCorp, adding back you $5,000,000. LocustCorp has now $8,750,000 in cash.
Repeat forever for more cash.
Video
This glitch is being demonstrated by The Spiffing Brit in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1YlJ9J7_Jo
The core exploit (steps 5-9) starts at 27:52. Anything before is just basically setting up the core company (steps 1-4).
Analysis
The main cause of this glitch is IMO that you can send money to other companies/players. Apparently cash directly affects the company value, which makes it possible to artificially inflate the company value (and thus shares value) trivially by simply dumping massive amounts of money into a company.
Note that in the original TTD, it was (to my knowledge) not possible to donate money to the other player.
One easy fix for this would be to just remove the possibility to send money to other companies. This would remove the possibility to inflate the company value.
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