Slashdot Mirror
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.
There is something neat about having a deserted city. It would be even cooler if the whole thing had been incorporated entirely as an in-game event, with some sort of deity punishing the violators. I kinda hope they turn the city in some sort of haunted grounds, with the lost souls of the guild terrorizing lost wanderers.
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
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.