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.

Comments

Re:Retarded

[novas007]

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?