Europeans Find Trouble In Camelot

Thanks to GamesRadar for their investigation into trouble with the European version of Dark Ages Of Camelot, following an earlier 'hacking incident' on the PC MMORPG. The piece discovers that: "Customers say access to their subscription accounts and ability to contact GOA.com (who hosts servers for the Mythic Entertainment game in the UK, France and Germany) was disabled without notice by the company, who later went on to disable all game passwords as well. Subsequent statements about time frames for services to return to normal have not been met." GOA's comments on the lack of notice: "...we were unable to communicate that this was a hack in order to prevent further attacks or damage."

Comments

theories anyone?

[gl4ss]

my theory is that they're unwilling to bring it back online because they know how vulnurable the system is(and as such, can't or wont bring it back online before they know where the attacker got in or get a proper fix to it from the actual developers).

mythic on the other hand might not care and so seems to be providing 'better' service(hey, you get to play, who cares if your cc information might be compromised).

I'm not surprised

[markh1967]

I bought DAOC about one week after it was released in Europe. I went through the registration process and waited for the email with my password to arrive. When it hadn't arrived after a couple of hours I tried to register again only to get an error message stating that my account had already been opened and I should login with the email they had already sent me.
Next morning I still had no password, so I tried to contact them. Their website and documentation only give one email address for technical support, so I sent a polite request asking for this to be sorted out but got no reply. Over the next week I sent an email every day, getting more blunt and less polite each day. I never received a reply to any of these emails.
One week, and seven unanswered emails, later I returned the game for a refund - the only game I've ever returned. MMORPGs live or die on the quality of their support - DAOC Europe didn't have any support at all when I tried to use it.

Mythic lied to their customers about the hack...

[I am Kobayashi]

From: http://www.camelotherald.com/more/1021.shtml dated August 22nd, 2003

"Q: I heard rumors about DAOC's servers and possible security problems. Is there any truth to this kind of rumor?
A: No.
But let me explain how I can be so definite. (Sorry if this is an overly simplified explanation - remember, I have to print my answers for both the technical and the non-technical people out there.) A game like ours has two kinds of code, client side (the part that happens on your computer at home) and server side (the code on... you guessed it... our servers).
Dark Age of Camelot servers have never been hacked. The tools that allow creation of monsters and other world items on live servers are internal development tools. (Here at Mythic HQ, access to these things means you work here in our office and are closely supervised.) These tools are mainly used for two purposes - on Pendragon during encounter testing, and on live servers by our customer service people who are replacing lost quest items and other such things. There has never been a misuse of these tools on any of our live servers.
Our password server has also not been hacked. Every case of "account hacking" has been people not keeping their passwords secure. If you share your password with others, if you email your password to strangers, and if you say, boot up a third party program and then type your password, your password is not secure. We feel bad for people who get taken advantage of, but we can't restore their accounts or their treasures. So never give out your password, and change it frequently.
There are, as many of you know, some client hacks out there. While they cannot create gold or monsters, or provide you with any actual gameplay skill, they can affect things that your client controls, such as your run speed.
We ban people using these every day. Because we do not want to ban innocent players, our investigation process is painstaking and a little slow. But we get the cheaters eventually. It's unfortunate, but a fact of life - you get a lot of people together, and the odds are good that a very few of them will be... special people... who can't compete without cheating. So, we get copies of all the cheat programs, learn how to find their users, and make frequent and daily use of the ban stick.
But I digress. The short answer is that DAOC servers have not been hacked.

From this article:

Wanadoo communications manager Tiphaine Locqueneux confirmed: "On 18 August our game logs revealed that GameMaster commands were used by someone external to the company. We began an immediate investigation, closed the incriminating accounts and worked to identify the hacker and how he had managed to intrude.
"Three days later the hacker used GM commands on one of the UK servers which gave us more information. At this stage players were still able to access the game but we needed to ensure the hacking would not escalate and close off his access. We closed down the subscription pages and RightNow, our customer support pages, in order to close off all external access to these services while we were adding new layers of security.
"At this stage we were unable to communicate that this was a hack in order to prevent further attacks or damage. Players could still play but new subscribers were prevented from joining the game."

The Camelot Herald article was August 22nd.... So they knew that an external hacker had used the supposed "internal" GM tools... But they still decided to say otherwise. I don't have a problem with them not admitting a hack ocurred (if it is for legitimate security reasons). But to outright lie about it is not legal (much less ethical) behavior here in the U.S.

Re:Modding Simoniker down?

[RobotWisdom]

I think this is a very interesting news article

Okay, let's analyse how interested the Slashdot community is in Simoniker's links. If you click on older stuff from a games.slashdot.org page, you get a summary of how many followups there were to each of his postings over the last five days:

September 23rd (2 so far): 9, 19
Sept22 (7): 19, 172, 133, 27, 27, 77, 43
Sept21 (5): 360, 111, 14, 26, 67
Sept20 (5): 17, 32, 20, 23, 29
Sept19 (6): 12, 37, 125, 44, 40, 9
Sept18 (5): 11, 23, 36, 237, 256

So out of 30 stories, HALF got under 30 comments.