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Topic: Virtualminer 3.0 - The Virtual mining game (Read 3707 times)

hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
March 08, 2013, 12:59:47 PM
#39
I tend to be friendly and i tend to have an open discussion to most things and especially i tend to reason when i have sort of a dispute to people... but this time i have to put it bluntly like this:

If you register on a website where it says "By registering I accept the terms and conditions" you should a) have read them b) have understood them and c) accept them.
In case one of those does not fit please dont register. A lot of people can confirm that i try to run this as transparent and friendly as possible.. but still people try to get back at me.
Today morning i woke up to a scam accusation from someone claiming 2BTC which were clearly never send to me. The dispute was settled pretty quickly.
An hour ago i received a message that someone wants a full refund on his account for loosing patience with the game etc (why not telling me that while the game was in hiatus?)..
But as i take every PM serious, i thought about ignoring this one though, but i will answer it when i am done here, i checked the whole account...

So, as to make clear how i deal with this i am ready to drag this into the public, just to show you that i dont want to obfuscate, but how silly things can end up:

So i was given the Username and the following statement:

Quote
I know you just re-opened it but I've lost patience and it is unfair to your dedicated users. I poured tons of money in, and have been regretting it deeply since.
Thank you for the refund.

My account username: ****
My bitcoin address: ****
My account email: ****

I tried to be faithful to your service for as long as possible but I've simply given up unfortunately. For the record I attempted "dismantling" a rig and it threw an error message, before the rig was gone. No funds were added back to the account.

At least i was given a username, thats always a good way to start tracking down. With the username in hand i first checked the balance of that user: Showed up with coins on multiple chains (but no BTC on the account), so the user was at least using the service in the past.
Next up was checking the Rigs: Ok, the user had several assembled rigs, a few vASICs and one dismantled rig (Dismantled means that all parts are stripped from the GPU and can be assembled with to new rigs). So maybe there was a misunderstanding there. Dismantling it doesnt mean that they are refunded(!).
Next up checking the users activity.
My ideas was to look up wether the user was active shortly before the hiatus or not in which case i might have understood the impatience... so my primary log, ranging back for 3 months (containing mostly debug messages and no
user activity whatsoever) didnt show any activity. First backup tier, going back to 7/1/12 didnt show no activity either, second backup tier came up with results!
So the last action that was recorded was in June. roughly half a year before the game went offline. So what did the logs show up? Some deposits, some parts being bought and a pool getting created.
So just for the record we are talking of 1.25 BTC here, which were spent in june 2012 where the average price of bitcoin was close to $5. Bringing that into perspective of todays price we end up with roughly 0.14BTC at todays prices.


What is the conclusion i draw here?
Given the fact that the user has accepted the terms and conditions which clearly state that i cannot be held responsible for the outcome of the game: you wouldnt ask Satoshidice for a refund if you loose, would you?
Furthermore: The user was able to use the game for more than half a year, and seemingly he did (he has rigs, he has coins so the rigs worked etc) and last but not least the sum we are talking about. Its not like we are talking about someone who put hundreds of USD into that game which vanished into nothingness.

For those reasons i refuse to pay the refund. And i would like to ask other people not to start asking me for refunds now that Bitcoin has such a high value... I generally dont do refunds except for when they are justified. Normally i try to check everything twice in order to come to the right conclusion and this should be an example of how i do this.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
Quote
It has been a long time and i am sorry for letting this whole project just slip for months but the real life was, and is, very demanding.
Nevertheless Virtualminer was now reopened and modified to work again flawlessly.
The Version 3 upgrade was very demanding on memory and cpu and therefore i had to change things on both sides, my code and the backend. So i have changed the block finding algorithm to only run every 15 seconds instead of every 5 seconds. Furthermore the exchange runs now on a different "engine" and basically everything is set to go. During the day i will modify the block finding algorithm a bit further to give pools a higher advantage over solo miners (currently pools have the same chance to find blocks, but a higher probability at the block generation..).

Last but not least i have adjusted virtualminer to the dramatic price increase of Bitcoins. The avergae price on Bitcoins is polled every minute on mtGox and used to calculate the prices of the hardware. This means that a virtual GPU is now no longer more expensive than a real GPU Wink

Have fun and welcome again!
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
The game was restarted.
A lot of effort was put into the core features of the system, especially focused on performance and usability.
Prices are tied to to the current Gox average. So the higher the Btc price the lower the parts prices and vice versa.
After the software runs smoothly for 24 hours (12hrs have already passed) i will send out a newsletter seperatly.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
January 22, 2013, 08:34:03 PM
#36
The game is offline for next few hours as i have changed the client software and got to remove some minor bugs in the BTC codes... but its 2:33am now and with every change i do now i begin to create more bugs. Sorry.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
December 06, 2012, 03:41:13 AM
#35
Did you check if your rig is assambled? Looking at the database i see that you have the parts corresponding to your two rigs in V2 but they dont seem to be assembled.
full member
Activity: 234
Merit: 114
December 04, 2012, 11:22:20 AM
#34
Hi,

was it intended for older accounts to lose the rigs they had? When i look into Rigs -> Manage Rigs no rigs are shown to me but in V2 i had 2 rigs running.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
December 04, 2012, 03:59:17 AM
#33
Quote
Hi,
I am happy to announce a certain level of stability of the game now.
As many of you have noticed a lot of details were missing or broken but  we are finally back at the point were V2 was dropped.

For the next update i plan to introduce the fleamarket where you can buy and sell your parts to and from other users.
Also i am going to re-introduce the Share system. ETA for the update is "Before Christmas".

Last words:
I have re-introduced the old referral system. When you tell someone to add your Nickname to the registration form or let someone register via http://www.virtualminer.eu/index.php?p=register&refid=YOURNICK you are entitled to 10% of all the BTC the user leaves at the Shop to buy parts.

So much for now
Have fun and a nice day!
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
November 26, 2012, 03:24:35 PM
#32
Alright so I rebuilt all my rigs... I did not check into the game all weekend but now it seems as though I didn't mine a single coin all weekend? Also, all my coins mined before your most recent reset disappeared as well? (expected?)

Program solved. Yeah.. your account was also reset while i reconverted the old data. But luckily the amount of blocks solved is saved and i could trace back how much you "lost" and restored it.
sr. member
Activity: 462
Merit: 250
November 26, 2012, 11:57:50 AM
#31
Alright so I rebuilt all my rigs... I did not check into the game all weekend but now it seems as though I didn't mine a single coin all weekend? Also, all my coins mined before your most recent reset disappeared as well? (expected?)
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
November 24, 2012, 07:11:42 AM
#30
Quote
Hi,
Sorry for yet another newsletter but i have to sum up the previous days.
For once i have rerererestarted the game today - i have converted the old database into the new format and readded all parts bought since the launch of V3.
This was unfortunately neccessary since the old converter had some bugs that were discussed in the bitcointalk.org forum.

So basically everything seems to be now back in a running state and therefore i would declare the game 'open' now (again..).
      

Cheers,
Nachtwind
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
November 24, 2012, 05:07:32 AM
#29
Since the restart all my mining equipment seems to have disappeared. I was not a member prior to V 3.0 so the change should not have effected me?

Yes and no... you Rigs were reset but your parts are there. So unfortunately you have to reassamble your rigs.
sr. member
Activity: 462
Merit: 250
November 24, 2012, 02:59:18 AM
#28
Since the restart all my mining equipment seems to have disappeared. I was not a member prior to V 3.0 so the change should not have effected me?
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
November 23, 2012, 04:38:07 PM
#27
Ok, site is back up. I have replaced some functions and restored all parts and the coins. If you find still something missing dont hesitate to tell me!

Sorry again, but i have rewritten the game 90% from scratch and shit happens if you do that :/

hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
November 23, 2012, 03:30:25 PM
#26
Alright... back on the conversion..

vASICs: I have found yet another bug in the converter concearning the vASICs. I will also restore the parts data for every user and add the parts bought before the reset manually of course.

Coins:
What i expected. It was a simple yet very problematic error:

I have to deal with three numbers here. The "old" one taken straight from the old Database, the "New"ly converted number and the value that finally comes into the database.
One example would be the following:

Old: 21911.209524
New: 21,911.20952400
DB: 21.0000000 

As you can see the Mysql only saved the 21 from 21911.. i have now removed the ',' from the decimal numbers and this seems to be the better result now.

I am running the converter now.. and hope to repoen the game tonight.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
November 22, 2012, 04:29:12 PM
#25
Yeah, some other people have already noticed that...
i still try to figure out how that could happen but it seems that this problem hit sporadically when a nnn,mmmmmm.lllll number was converted into a decimal and truncated to "nnn"..

I will now close down the game for tonight and will re-run the conversion with a fixed converter and will restore the current status then. This WILL take till tomorrow since i am not in the state of mind anymore to correct it anymore today (had a long day). So i will just start.. but thats it.

Question to you guys back: Has anyone ever had experienced such conversion problems in PHP?
sr. member
Activity: 276
Merit: 251
November 22, 2012, 04:17:23 PM
#24
I have far fewer virtual coins than I used to.

Ditto.
legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1077
November 22, 2012, 03:49:06 PM
#23
Hello,

Were we supposed to lose our coins? I have far fewer virtual coins than I used to.
sr. member
Activity: 462
Merit: 250
November 21, 2012, 02:23:53 PM
#22
Alright, seems I am able to post buys and sells now, but it does not seem to be matching the buys/sells and performing any trades at the moment.

EDIT - also strange behaviour noted, when you post lets say a bid, to purchase VLC with TTC, it looks like that bid also shows in the exchanges for other coins??  Huh

Removing all my bids until this is sorted.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 507
November 21, 2012, 01:08:01 PM
#21
Is the exchange in a disabled state?

I am getting this error when trying to post a sale offer, seems to not matter which coins I am trying to use..

Code:
Notice: Undefined index: action in /home/virtualminer/public_html/posts.php on line 33 Notice: Undefined index: is_ajax in /home/virtualminer/public_html/addOrder.php on line 6

Will work on it later tonight.
Sorry for these bugs.. i hate going from local dev machine to live..

*edit*
Quick and dirty fix.. that should do it. Will work on it later though.
sr. member
Activity: 462
Merit: 250
November 21, 2012, 12:44:36 PM
#20
Is the exchange in a disabled state?

I am getting this error when trying to post a sale offer, seems to not matter which coins I am trying to use..

Code:
Notice: Undefined index: action in /home/virtualminer/public_html/posts.php on line 33 Notice: Undefined index: is_ajax in /home/virtualminer/public_html/addOrder.php on line 6
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