Topic: Virtualminer 3.0 - The Virtual mining game (Read 3712 times)

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:


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?)

Yes and no... you Rigs were reset but your parts are there. So unfortunately you have to reassamble your rigs.

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?

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 :/

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.

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?

Ditto.

Hello,

Were we supposed to lose our coins? I have far fewer virtual coins than I used to.

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?? 

Removing all my bids until this is sorted.

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.

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..

yes.

Just registered and took a look. Idk if I'm going to play it at all, but for most sure I'll give it a try.

First question before starting:
The costs fo the rig parts are BTC based?

Added a (small) page for managing the user's profile. At the moment all you can do is changing your password though.

Good idea, going to add that today.


I have no idea why but the cronjob stopped running. I have just resumed it (and your BTC have arrived). Since i want to get away from cron anyway this is no big deal - i am changing the deposit-scrypt now anyway.

Is your deposit system broken? Just past 6 confirmations and it's still not showing up in my game balance sheet.

Can you put a change password function?

Added a function to reset the password in case you lost it.
Tomorrow morning i will put the final touches on the game and consider it "stable" if nothing happens throughout the night. Prepare for yet another newsletter (sorry)

Oh, I know what you mean.  I do that sometimes.

Well, call it copy&paste errors.
I have the bad habit of calling a lot of variables more or less the same:

(e.g)
rig id = rid
part id = pid
rig array = rig

And i have some functions to check ownership of parts, rigs etc (so noone can create a rig of an other users parts) and then copy paste it arround but leave the variable names as they are

Seem to be making a lot of typos

Ok.. the Rig code is ok now.
Just a typo in a last minute code snippet in various functions that have to do with rig managment.

Now thats what i call a shakedown ><
There are some more things broken on the new server.. gonna fix a few things.

Also, I figured out I had an account already.  When I try and assign a rig to a chain (I put a single in it), it says I don't own that part.

Typo in the registration function. Sorry.

It's fixed now.

Doesn't let me register.  Gives a fatal error.

Upgrade and Database conversion ran smooth.. doing a shakedown now.
The game should be playable. So - just come in and try it.

Hi,
Some things just need their time and so did Version 3 of Virtualminer. To be honest - it took far longer than i wanted it to. I restarted the whole thing four times, each time starting from scratch. There are a lot of changes and i want to go into detail a bit more in this newsletter.

- Rigs
Since all of you have been familiar with the original system i need to give some introduction into the newest version. As of now you only were allowed to upgrade some Rig with a few upgrades. No turning back, no real.. variability. Most of the users just added 1000mh upgrades to each slot and thats it. Looking at the database i saw a lot of rigs looking equal. This was to be expected but well.. it wasnt realistic. Not all of use the same rig at home - so why should we do this in virtualminer? The new system aims at some more realism. As of now there are multiple Mainboards (with various slots for rigs). I had to make a tradeoff between realism and compatibility here. So dont be suprised to find mainboards with 9 card slots
So rigs have to consist of a mainboard and a virtual GPU - one of a dozen now available vGPUs that try to mimic the ones you find in real life. I have just taken the information from the bitcoin hardware comparision wiki page and translated it into game values.
To counter the possibility that everyone just buys the fastest possible VMD vGPU those GPUs in the 'Shop' have limited supply... but you can use that to add yet another way of earning real BTC through this game: Users can now sell their equipment! And rare hashing devices can therefore be seen as some new commodety..
Converted Rigs and GPUs from previous versions will be 10x slower now (so a 5000vMH is now a 500vMH) - but since this affects every rig the 'loss' happens to everyone and is just an adjustment i had to make for the transition into the new system.

- Chains
Chains didnt change at all except that chain owners can now choose wether their chain is vASIC compatible or not. Therefore i'd like to ask Chaincreators of existing chains wether they allow vASICs or not.

- Exchange
The exchange is all new and all shiny.. it is based on Virtualminer's sister project altcoinexchange.com (which is in hibernation at the moment). You will now be able to trade every coin into any other - or into BTC. Whatever you want.

- GUI
The 'ingame GUI' is gone (as of now) but it will eventually be implemented again. It didnt serve any purpose anymore but since it was just nice to have it, it will come again.. someday when i dont have higher priority features to add.

- Shares
Since the old System was faulty i have completely removed it and consider it a feature to be added in the near future. Most probably the shares will be traded through the normal Exchange like any other coin. But until then i gonna test a few things.

- DOWNTIME
Yes.. there will be a downtime. After this E-mail is sent i will take down Version II and start to convert users, chains, coins.. everything into the new system. SInce you can imagine that this is not a simple copy&paste-procedure.. A lot of stuff has to be converted and rewritten - and that will take time. Once the conversion process is done i will take a snapshop of the database and let the game run for a few hours in production state. If by then nothing happened i will start reopen the game for the public (followed by another newsletter..).


So much for the V3 update. See you when the game is back up again.

Cheers,
Nachtwind

[reserved]

What is it about?

„Virtual Mining“ is a game unlike any other currently found in the BTC community. In contrast to most other games VM is neither a gambling site, nor a Ponzi scheme to give most money to only a handful of people. In VM every user has the chance to make the same amount of money, no pyramid anywhere.
So in just a few words – what is VM?
As the name says: Virtual Mining is virtual mining.
It seemed to become sort of a trend to spawn new forks for fast pump and dump. This lead to some serious opportunities to make money but It always had an impact on the BTC network since it had drawn computing power away from the real network. Also most of the chains were rather short lived. So this game is meant to put this on a different level. In VM you are meant to create virtual rigs and point them on virtual forks, here called “chains” (short for Blockchains). As of now there will be up to 5 parallel chains around and everyone can mine with as many virtual rigs on those.
As in real BitCoin you earn coins from mining which can be traded for Bitcoins on the site’s exchange. Therefore this game is basically a virtual *Coin network.

So what are the rules?
Currently the game is running in a testing phase – therefore all of the rules are negotiable, except the one about cheating

-   Every user may “Buy” as many mainboard, virtual asics and other hardware components as he wants.
  o   A mainboard has a fixed number of card slots
  o   A virtual ASIC cannot be upgraded with vGPUs nor does it need a mainboard to be attached to
  o   vGPUs and vASICs speeds are taken from real life values where possible
  o   The amount of Devices available is limited depending on the devices real life availability (a 6990 is less available than a 6850)
  o   Users are able to sell their devices on the "flea market"
  
-   Users can create new Chains
  o   There can be a maximum 20 parallel active chains
    x   A chain is flagged inactive after 24 hrs. if no one is mining it anymore
    x   A chain is deactivated (unminable, 48hrs after flagging inactive)
    x   Every new chain costs 0.125BTC for every Chain already in existence. The first one is free, the 2nd costs 0.125, the third 0.25 and so on..

-   Users can create Pools
  o As of now pools are unlimited in size
  o A pools founder can set any fee he wants as long as it is less than 25% (to prevent cheating).
  o The chain a pool is mining can be set at any time.
  o Pools always pay proportional
  o Users NOT on a pool mine SOLO

-   Deposits are handled with a unique address every time.
  o A deposit is “valid” and added to the account after 4 confirmations.
  o There is a small fee of 0.01BTC on withdrawal. This is to keep the server alive and cover transfer costs.

-   “Cheating”
  o   “In theory, as the service operator, I could keep the bitcoins for myself. I'm not going to do this, but I completely accept that people do not trust the service operator. It is their freedom of choice, and Bitcoin is about freedom.” (slush)


Website: http://www.virtualminer.eu

Screenshots: