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Shadowbane Hacking Redux - Guild Bannings
Thanks to Shacknews for pointing to a report on Gamerifts.com tracking the results of the investigation into the Shadowbane MMORPG hacking. According to a post on the official Ubisoft forums reprinted there, "..all of the members from the Guild Invictus were banned from Shadowbane for using teleport exploits, many of which culminated during the events of May 27th and 28th. As all members where banned, all money has been removed from their buildings and their Tree of Life, and the city will be left to die." There's no news on whether criminal charges may be filed, as threatened when the original exploit took place.
A person (or guild) cheating in the game should be punished IN the game. Instead of bringing legal action against the warrior who cheated his way to a +25 Vorpal Sword of Absolute Killing the character should be stripped of his items and banned. Hopefully any characters "harmed" in the exploits will be returned to full status and given a few experience points, or what-not, for having survived the temporal disturbance (or whatever else they are going to call it).
... Except cheating in Counterstrike doesn't really have any effect except pissing people off. It doesn't cost anything to boot somebody from a Counterstrike server. These kids actually disrupted a server which people were paying to use, and employees who are being paid to work had to spend extra hours fixing it.
Straight outta Ye Olde Compton?
Have you ever written a large-scale game? Or for that matter, any sort of large software program with many many users? Probably not, though I see your subspace zone- after the fall of VIE, I always preferred Trench Wars. :)
Sure, they coded the bug in, so of course it's their fault, right? And you, on the other hand, are perfect? You never make errors? I'll help you a bit- it's not "looses", it's "loses". You made a grammatical error in 6-sentence comment. They made an error in what is probably a 500K+ line program.
I am by no means defending the declining quality of newly-released games, but at the same time I am willing to cut them slack- I know what it's like. Tight deadlines do not do good things for code quality. At the same time, MMORPGs are pretty close to a worst-case game scenario. Millions of users, very large world, and a dev team nowhere near the size of the user base. Cheating results in very real advantages over other players- instead of a good record (ie, cheating in CS), cheating MMORPG players can even go as far as selling their ill-gotten gains for real money.
As for the benefits of the mass banning- think on this. Some people do not cheat. How do you think they feel when they see people cheat? Pretty bad, I'd think. That's the sort of situation that one would not pay to be in. So you lose some non-cheaters due to cheaters. So, you lose the kind of people you'd like to play with due to the people who have no respect for those around them. Does that sound good to you?
To smash a single atom, all mankind was intent / Now any day the atom may return the compliment
Half the point of any MMO game is community... Is sharing a game... Is a bajillion people sat on a server sharing an experience - either competitively or as part of a team.
So, it's okay to foul in football while nobody's looking? Okay to cut corners in a race when you're not being watched? I think not.
Whatever the bug was, as part of the MMO community the players involved had a moral duty to report the bug to the devs - and help to fix the game they are supposed to be a part of. Abusing an exploit to the detriment of other players is no different to using an aimbot in *insert FPS here*. Do you condone aimbots too?
The fact that the exploit was there is moot - bugs will happen in that size program regardless of testing. Any programmer worth his salt knows that - and also knows that the exact manifestation of those bugs could be anything. It might just be that a tree appears blue instead of green; in this case it was more serious.
All I see are selfish, cheating people who thought they could get away with it. If this exploit gave them advantage over other players, I doubt those other players have much sympathy. Why should the game admins be any different?
The attitude of the parent post ("players who exploited the bug were well within their right to do so") is exactly what leads to the kind of degenerative community that's becoming prevalent in online games - cheat because you can; complain when you get your dues.
I'm unfamilar with this game and set up, but presumably people paid for these accounts. Are all the members of this Guild Invicitus guilty of abusing such features? I can imagine that various members are innocents that thought they were just joining a powerful team.
If there's no reasonable evidence that all of that guild are guilty, it seems harsh (no comeback?) (Perhaps they are and I'm just ignorant - I can't tell.)
Anyway, the servers were not attacked. "UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that the Shadowbane servers were not compromised in any way. The "hack" was only client side, our fears regarding the security issues for our Credit Cards and accounts have been put at ease." states the updated report. Good greif, is this another game depending on client security? (Design flaw - the client will be hacked by somebody in this kind of game and your game should be designed to cope.)
I *hope* for the players of this game that there was a bug in the server side validation of what the clients were sending, rather than a blatent design flaw.
Cool - a real virtual wrath of God ghost town. I Like it. Can you still go there in the game and see it now that it's all dead and stuff? They should put up some signs there to warn people why it's a bad idea to cheat. Maybe they could even turn it into a folk tale or urban ledgend in the game that mothers tell their children to keep them from cheating. Maybe even build a ghost-town spook story quest around it.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie