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Issues, Workarounds & Localization

 
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Contract price sorting UI issue
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Tekota
The Freighter Factory
#1 - 2012-01-05 19:29:23 UTC
Have a bug report on this, ID 124793, but never quite sure where you want these things.

Currently seen on Caldari Ballistic Control Systems, it appears possible to construct a contract that bypasses price sorting such that an auction contract with a current bid of 150m can appear in a spot suggesting it to be cheaper than one with a current bid of 105m. This behaviour seen both in Page sorting and individual page's column sorting.

As a same page example (bug report has screenies, and at the time of writing can be seen with Cal Navy BCS) consider the following list with the column heading of "Price" set to descending order:

WTS - 103.84m
WTS - 103.75m
AUC - 100m (150m)
AUC - 99m (999m)
AUC - 91m (911m)
AUC - 98m (9000m)
AUC - 150m (156m)
AUC - 150m (155m)

As best I can tell it would appear that price sorting on auctions is looking at the starting bid rather than the current bid and to the best of my knowledge this is recent behaviour.

The result being that any price sorting of auctions in contracts is of little use and combined auction/wts listings (eg by setting contract type filter to "Exclude Want To Buy" can be disrupted (or potentially gamed I suppose) by such contracts - eg by listing a large number of such contracts an entire page or so can be filled, then clients sorting pages by "Lowest First" go to page 1 expecting to see the lowest prices and therefore fail to spot cheaper items on page 2, which logically should have more expensive items when sorting pages by lowest first.
Tekota
The Freighter Factory
#2 - 2012-01-12 19:04:07 UTC
Seven days later and bug report is still showing unfiltered I'm wondering exactly where I should be reporting this.

As others have noted this is approaching the definition of exploit.
Tekota
The Freighter Factory
#3 - 2012-01-19 08:03:51 UTC
Hope you don't consider weekly bumps as being too pushy but I note that now fourteen days after reporting the bug report is still showing as unfiltered.
Tekota
The Freighter Factory
#4 - 2012-01-26 19:24:14 UTC
Three weeks later, bug report is still showing unfiltered and bug still present.

As a further example, sample pricing from today in what is purported to be descending price order:

WTS 96m
WTS 95m
AUC 95m (100m)
AUC 89m (120m)
AUC 85m (165m)
AUC 30.9m (110m)
AUC 89.1m (150m)
AUC 90.1m (150m)
AUC 115.2 (125m)

As can be seen, sorting of WTS contracts works correctly but no logic can be discerned regarding Auction contracts. The result is in any listing that contains auctions price sorting is meaningless.

Further details, as noted, remain available in the bug report submitted three weeks ago and still showing as unfiltered.
0lesya
Inglourious. Basterds.
#5 - 2012-02-02 11:18:14 UTC  |  Edited by: 0lesya
CCP: You wanted to stabilize the contract prices by removing the "sorting issue" that showed the oldest contracts first. But instead the contractors now use auctions to exploit the contract system.

The point is: Auctions are sorted by their starting bid and not by their current bid.
EDIT: And after that they are sorted by "time left".

So if you want to clean up the contract system, please do it properly.
Tekota
The Freighter Factory
#6 - 2012-02-05 09:00:59 UTC
One whole month later and bug report ID 124793 still showing unfiltered and bug still exists.

It'd be naive to expect bugs to be fixed within a month in a game of this scale but I am somewhat disappointed that one month can pass without anyone, even a first line sanity check person, taking even a look at a report.

Time and effort (and by implication, money) was spent on what is actually a fairly tidy in game bug report system; it's a shame that the output of this tool appears to go nowhere.
0lesya
Inglourious. Basterds.
#7 - 2012-02-05 20:28:00 UTC
Somehow they seem to have stopped working on bug reports. I issued several bug reports lately on different accounts and none have been filtered yet. A few months ago only a few days passed until a dev took a look at the report.
Tekota
The Freighter Factory
#8 - 2012-02-16 12:01:10 UTC
I suspect you're right; six weeks later and bug report still showing unfiltered.

Will check in again at two months, by then I fear we can assume that the bug reporting program has been abandoned.
Tekota
The Freighter Factory
#9 - 2012-03-05 18:51:59 UTC
Sad to report that bug report has now gone unfiltered for two whole months.

I'm forced to conclude that the bug reporting program has now been abandoned and the filing of bug reports is both a pointless endeavour and one no longer desired.

(oh, and of lesser concern, the bug still exists)
Tekota
The Freighter Factory
#10 - 2012-03-14 19:50:08 UTC
Pleased to note that after two months and nine days the bug report has been reviewed and "added to an existing issue in our defect tracking system".

Correlation between this progress and linking in MD within less than 90 minutes would be pure speculation.