Can't Retain Winnings On Community Server

[HolyTryst]

Great game so far, but kind of locked out of one of the gameplay loops due to currency not accumulating on community servers.

Reproducing:

1. Join Community Server (Top Notch Clan Server)
2. Dominate at trivia, get oodles of points/currency
3. Leave and try to decorate condo and realize there are no accumulated winnings
4. Test on official Los Angeles server
5. Dominate at trivia (by myself)
6. Accumulate 200 currency units
7. Go back to Top Notch and play variety of games, even non-trivia ones. No accumulation of units.

Going to try reinstalling, but figured I’d file the “bug report” as one of the other people on the server couldn’t retain winnings from anything other than mini golf (which I have yet to play). Only reporting this as a user, but I could probably ask questions to the server owner as well in case there’s something in administration that could be tweaked.

Thanks in advance!

[CarbonCopyCat]

Community servers don’t pay out units due to possible exploits, and are eventually going to be phased out. Just join an official server instead.

[HolyTryst]

I appreciate the answer. It doesn’t seem to be working for me specifically right now while it’s working for others, so I wanted to make sure to report it as a bug either way as it’s an inconsistent user experience.

Additionally, that’s pretty disappointing that community servers are going to be phased out. That is definitely a big part of the reason I decided to purchase a copy not only for myself, but also additional copies for other Top Notch Clan regulars. I’ve done some poking around and it looks like other posts seem to indicate that, but I was wondering if there is any official statement by the devs re: their stance on community servers and/or community servers paying out units.

[Caboose700]

For security reasons, only Lobby servers that have the Official PixelTail tag provide unit payout. You can play activities on non-official servers, but they won’t pay out units, nor will the casino be online.

We still plan on allowing people to host dedicated community servers, just not Lobby servers. We’ve detailed our reasoning in this post.

Announcing Community Condos

Hey everyone, this is hot off the presses (and is not Project 39)! There are some problems with hosting unofficial Plaza servers that we’ve been trying to solve internally for a while now and we wanted to let you know where we are on that. First off, we don’t have an effective solution for protecting the Casino economy from hacking. A server host could pull a man-in-the-middle attack on the bets and transactions to mimic or alter player participation in Casino games. The same thing goes for a…

Short version is, the new system will allow a community to build their own place, together, with each other’s items, on a dedicated condo server that a community can run.

[HolyTryst]

Thank you for the response! I’ll pass it on to the server owner.

[Richard_Barnes]

I have the server owner in question I am also a developer (20 years+) I strongly feel that disallowing credit earnings on public servers will impact your games uptake. I understand your concerns with hacking specifically protocol decryption and man in the middle.

I would suggest that if you were to break public realms and official realms into 2 separate realms with completely distinct cash and housing would minimize the risk of public servers destroying the “economy”.

Having said that have encrypted key tunnels for each user would make it impossible for a man in the middle attack to occur. Basically creating a vpn between you and each client. This could be done at the networking layer or in the code layer.

Another method would be to append a keypair each packet and decrypt on the fly this would slow down packet exchange but at < 100 players it would be insignificant.

[macdguy]

We have come up with many ways to help secure Plaza servers, as we detailed on our announcement post.

The issue isn’t clients on the server, the issue is the server itself. You cannot assume clients will report their earnings correctly, there has to be an authenticated check of gameplay events.

@macdguy

Some authentication schemes were proposed internally but would require a lot of extra development time to get working, we’d like to spend that time making new stuff for the game instead.

The other issue we’ve run up against is, we don’t have plans for Plaza customizability. The Plaza is a very complicated part of our game and we just don’t know how to open that up to players for customization.

Basically, our two main points were this:

1. Authenticating custom Plaza servers would require a lot of extra development time - and we’d rather spend it on making new stuff for the game.

2. We never set out to make the Plaza customizable. Server owners would not be able to modify or add custom scripts that could make their server unique (to attract players towards their servers). Custom scripting and modification of the Plaza map was out of the scope of project. We found that Condos (and the tools we have there) would serve as a better way for server owners to customize and attract players towards their servers. This choice also lets us enhance the Condo tools for every player - not just server owners. We also stated that we’ll also be looking into more Plaza-esque levels that you can unlock for your condos.