Uncertain Changes: Locked-Down Items

[Dreoth]

Hi everyone, I was reading through the Era Accuracy on the wiki and came across this under the Uncertain Changes, and had a sudden flashback to a 48 hour ban I earned for myself...

Locked-Down Items - The May 11, 2000 patch notes state: "It is no longer possible to lock down items on the steps of other players' houses." This is evidence for the notion that it may have been possible to lock items down on the steps of other players' houses prior to this patch.

I can tell you exactly how this worked and why it got the attention of a patch. I had discovered this on Great Lakes, not sure if anyone else came across it though.

The bug was introduced when they changed the "lock down" rules so that items dropped into a container were also locked down, and counted against your lockdown limit.

Step 1: Fill a "lock down" container in a house you own to its weight and/or item limit.
Step 2: Grab a table, and place it in a house you do not own.
Step 3: Pick up the table with your mouse (DO NOT LET GO!), and run back to your house, use your open door macro to open the door without "dropping" the item, and drop it into the maxed container from step 1.

This is where the magic happened.

For anyone that's tried to relocate items to a place where it couldn't fit, you know that it "rubber bands" back to the original location.

The table that you dropped into the chest would pass the "lock down" check (happened before checking if placement was valid), resulting in it being flagged with "locked down" but it would fail the placement check and warp back to where you picked it up. The combination of this resulted in it warping back while still locked down.

So, the table is now locked down in someone else's house, but by you. The owner of the other house was still able to unlock it down, sadly (but it adjusted your home's counts). This also worked in the open, but it would decay and the lock down counts wouldn't be fixed until the server restarted.

In the end, I was able to place tables on every open space in someone's house, even the doorway and all three steps (it was small vendor house). I then waited outside with my PK character and assassinated the owner when he was automatically ejected from his own home due to no valid tiles. He couldn't even get on his doorsteps to run the "I wish to release this" command. An added bonus was that this happened when the house-item loading feature was implemented, so he couldn't even see the tables on his steps.

It took a GM to fix everything, and I woke up the next morning with a 48 hour ban. Not long after that, it was patched.

In retrospect it was mean, but it was still totally worth it.

[Kaivan]

Thanks for the detailed explanation on this. We've had some documented evidence showing that this was possible at the time. It's noteworthy to point out that this bug was related directly to the new housing system introduced towards the end of T2A.

[MatronDeWinter]

keys locked down on porches should be usable by anyone, not just friends of the house. We all know you could use locked dye tubs, eat rare herbs, and so on, from houses you aren't friends with. Why are somehow keys magically different?

[tekai]

Thats likely checkable on the demo i would think?

I can't say I enjoy the fact that everyone on the server has keys outside their house. No one carries keys on them anymore, so i'm sure there are a lot less house lootings since that little trick came to light.

[Kaivan]

keys locked down on porches should be usable by anyone, not just friends of the house. We all know you could use locked dye tubs, eat rare herbs, and so on, from houses you aren't friends with. Why are somehow keys magically different?

This is a somewhat unrelated issue, but it's something that we've known about for some time. The issue with locking down keyrings is that players are able to stack them so that they sit inside the wall of the house, just above the door. This is a failure of the code to make sure that there is no collision with the wall when someone places an item in that location. In addition to that, certain checks need to be made in order to limit the height of a stack, and to limit how high above the z axis of a house that an item can be, yet still be inside the house (i.e. a foot stool floating 50 z above the top of the ledge of a castle shouldn't be "inside" that castle anymore). Also, there should be few limits on who can use an item that's locked down. This issue was discussed quite some time ago when Mens Rea brought up the issue of keyrings, and I provided some in-era information from the newsgroups talking directly about certain items being usable while locked down that are currently unusable. So, this is another issue that needs to be considered as well.

These issues, among others, are all related to housing, and I've wanted a housing patch that is similar to the one where we changed the decay times, where players are alerted to changes on the horizon when they attempt to refresh a house, and we can go through and correct all of the problems that we have with the housing system.

Thats likely checkable on the demo i would think?

Unfortunately, the issue with keyrings cannot be checked on the demo beyond a rudimentary check on how it operates when it's not in your bag (key rings can be used when they aren't in your backpack, but not keys). The reason for this is that the housing system that existed for most of T2A wasn't introduced until December 98, about 5 - 6 months after the stand alone server that the demo utilizes was created.

[tekai]

Bump on this?

The keyring trick is not era accurate and every day I see more people using this exploit to make housing safer then it should be.

please fix!

[Pirul]

Sure! Fix it!

Just lock down a secure bag in the door and put your key inside! Problem solved.

[tekai]

Do we know if the 3 table + 2 item to get above the Z access to avoid the "no locking down in front of door or on steps" is accurate? I doubt it.

That trick will probably only work on Towers due to the larger porch.