Changelog/2022/September 10

Hey Everyone.

Today, for the health of SkyBlock, we've had to make a very difficult decision.

For the past few months, we have been looking to fix dupes and exploits leading to duplications of perfect gemstones, one of the most desirable items on the market. Sadly, the duplication of those items has gone too far and we have been forced tonight to make a very drastic change.

The first thing you guys need to know is that Perfect and Flawless Gemstones can no longer be stacked. This allows us to more accurately track where they are and how they are handled by players which also allows us better control over exploits related to them.

The second thing that will impact a lot of you is this - to annihilate a lot of contraband, we had to apply this change live. All existing stacks of Perfect and Flawless Gemstones have been turned into one single gemstone per stack.

Please note that this will not affect any Perfect or Flawless Gemstones that are applied to items, still in your forge, already in a stack of one, or that you can currently purchase from the Bazaar. As well, this will not affect stacks of Fine, Flawed, or Rough Gemstones of any type.

While this may sound drastic as it will effect many legitimate players, the amount of contraband that we have just deleted was a massive amount - an amount that we felt ultimately outweighed the amount effected from legitimate players. This will be good for the health of the gemstone economy and will probably lead to an increase of their value. However, we're definitely aware that some legitimate players will be affected by this.

We will be working this week to figure out the best way to handle said legitimate players, but please understand that we may be limited in how we compensate for the losses. Unless major losses are incurred, we may not be able to compensate everyone.

We would like to apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

EDIT: Make sure you read this reply too!

Hey Guys I thought I'd pop in and answer some frequently asked questions in this thread.

This sucks I lost X and Y and I didn't read the part where you said there would be compensation

We have logs of every single piece of gemstone that were removed and we are planning on slowly returning a certain amount of them - potentially a limit per player. The goal of this was to remove the substantial amount of contraband that was circulating around, to hit hard the players who duped insane amounts of gemstones. A normal player would only have a small amount of gemstones. By doing it this way, the vast majority of players (especially legitimate players) will get most of what they lost back. How we're going to give those back and when is not something I can answer yet, but please understand that we'll do our best to get it done as soon as we can.

Why not just move them to stash when you removed them

The way we had to fix this was only going to happen in one way - any gemstones anyone has of any number stacked together becomes 1. Due to the urgency of the release, this was the most efficient way of making it happen fast before anyone caught wind of us reacting.

Because of this, a large amount of gemstones were removed extremely fast. If we had moved some of those to stash at the same time, the database would have collapsed unto itself. Obviously, no one wants that. The solution is to send lost gemstones through the stash in a slow manner - over the course of a few days. We will be beginning this process as soon as we can.

Why didn't you do anything sooner

Dupes are a plague within SkyBlock, and this much we can all agree. Running this big of a game on a modded interface within a game not designed for it (Minecraft) makes this an incredibly difficult task. Gemstones aren't the cause of the dupe, they are just what was used to dupe - this was not intended to be a fix to a dupe, just a fix to the damages dupes have caused over the last few months.

By making the change we've made, we've vastly reduced the speed at which someone can ruin the economy while duping, but we were sincerely trying to avoid it as much as we can. Especially within minecraft - we're all used to things stacking with each others, and we wanted to keep it that way. Obviously, this turned out to be a bad call, and last night was the last straw that forced our hand.

Hopefully this should shed some light on what's next.

EDIT #2 - We have completed the process of refunding the previously lost gemstones. In some cases more gemstones may have potentially been refunded than original lost, however this was the best option we had at the end of the day. The overall health of the economy and the game itself will be much better off now than had we not removed the large amounts of duped gemstones. We appreciate your patience during this event.