Slashdot Mirror
World of Warcraft Duping Bug Found
Over the course of this morning several people have sent me tidbits talking about an exploit on WoW that allows duping of items. Apparently forum posts are being removed on official channels, but there are a few places where you can learn about the exploit and see
screenshot evidence. In equally exciting news, my Rogue on Azjol-nerub is probably 2 hours away from 60 and since Blizzard will undoubtedly fix this bug soon, I'll have to finance my epic mount the old fashioned way!
Let me guess... Too busy duping items?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
China's unemployment rate raised 50% this morning due to this bug.
Is this similar to the slashdot duping stories bug?
Maybe I'll find out in a couple days when this story hits again.
... and the instructions link is slashdotted. :(
Hey, everyone! I cheat at online games and wanted to share links on how you can do it too! Quick before they fix it!
What an asswipe. (included in that is the editors that decided slashdot would be an exploit source today)
Fun game while it lasted, now I fear its gone the way of Diablo II. Many servers are allready swamped with duped items. Even if they fix the bugs it would require a roll back to address the economy problems. Such a roll back would cause many players such as myself to pack up and leave (whats the point of spending weeks doing somthing when it will just be undone in the next roll back?).
Ah well, it is just a game after all.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Hmm... judging by the screenshots...
DELETE FROM user WHERE username LIKE "Gu%en";
All it will take is for Blizzard to parse their logs to look for this. I'm hoping to see some accounts banned.
Somebody should have told Leeroy Jenkins about this one.
Hell, it's probably fixed now.
Every server also went down for maintenance this morning and the web is being flooded with news of the exploit. Wonder how long it'll be before the exploit is fixed and the exploiters are banned. Good job blurring the name on the screenshot, but it won't take long for Blizzard to see who has that many epic items for sale on the auction house and put 2 and 2 together. Maybe it's just me, but when I agree to a terms of service, I tend to abide by it the same as I would any other contract. Does nobody care what they put their name to or agree to anymore?
Many online games have sufferent from duping bugs at times but most of those have been quietly fixed, seems the fix on this one was simply too slow.. or they totally dropped the ball and did not have logging for such. If the system was prperly set up, they should be able to track the thing from logs and remove/undo any such actions.
I suspect they are working on putting together a lawsuit.. Doesn't slashdot hold the patent on duping?
Starsucks
in the event that thread is closed or dead: http://www.firepacket.net/wowdupe.html BTW, what happened to that "unique id" that each item had that prevented anyone from ever having two of them?
What is the UI being used? Is the EXP/HK bar up top part of the same UI, or an add-on?
Wow, lovely little bug there. Hopefully my stuff on auction will go up alot since people will have a boat load of gold now. Noooo... we couldn't just earn the gold..... Of course if I wasn't working a real job in real life, I'd have my happy a$$ down there duping as well. Hey, maybe someone can dupe me a bunch of sour grapes for my return to Windrunner!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
For every single dupefix, three new dupes are created. Goodbye, WoW economy..
/goes back to playing Shadowbane.
In Shadowbane, the dupes didn't quite kill the game like originally thought. Instead, they reinforced the idea that 'rare' items needn't be that rare for a good pvp game. Rare items usually just mean someone spent more time to get them - and better pvp'ers don't necessarily spend more time playing the game.. So in Shadowbane, if your guild is a good experienced guild, you can completely stock your guilds' characters and many alts with the best pvp gear. Then, it all comes down to organization, experience, and how well each character is built to win in pvp.
PVE is lame. Anyone who has pvp'd in any decent pvp mmorpg knows that. Maybe if Wow's economy gets totally fucked, I'll give it a try. But, hell if I'm gonna spend hours and hours to make a perfect character with decked-out gear that doesn't involve pvp.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
This story was already posted earlier. Oh wait...
I mean, go to IGE or simular and just buy all your gold if you really want to buy your epic mount. You're a fricken millionaire right?
I mean, if you're just going to do an exploit to get your gold what's the difference? Hell, just buy an account with a couple of level 60 characters.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
They screwed up on D2, and let the guys that could have fixed it go and create ArenaNET, and now instances in this game are very, very messed up. Ok, so, whatever. If they do a rollback, they can kiss their playerbase bye. Their rep. is smeared by this a lot.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
Ultima Online had this problem... a lot.
...
... ;)
It really killed the gold market, everything was incredibly inflated because people would dupe 10 million gold checks (which are what they sound like, just a marker for 10 million gold)
It's not always trackable if you move it into items... trade it away, buy stuff from stores then resell it... it's like virtual money laundering...
Though that all depends on if/how WoW tracks gold, perhaps they've made improvements over UO (as UO is rather old)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
The reported bug:
On a heavily loaded server: You give your gold/item to a friend. You then enter an instance area. If you load, fine, no bug. If not, and it kicks you out after 1 minute (due to load), you still have your gold.
So obviously what is happening is that the "Failed to load" instance response is going back to some character checkpoint previously created, with this checkpoint being somewhat older.
The fix (which will probably be put in place by now) is to checkpoint the character when he/she attempts to enter an instance. So you aren't gonna be able to exploit this bug anymore. Sorry, 1AM3 CH3373RZ!
Also, if blizzard DID serial # all items, then it will be a pretty simple script to prune the duplicated items. But as they probably don't serial # gold, it might still have some economic disruption.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Like press the following in a sequence X Y A B 4 3 5 3 2 8 7 and then press all these together (probably with the help of your friend) Alt+Ctrl+Esc+Insert+Delete+F5
Then you will see you have unlocked all your levels but have crashed windows.
What does your Credit Report look like?
http://mirrordot.org/stories/46bab61809b5dd9116621 ef0e8bf4d92/index.html
http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/46bab61809b5dd911 6621ef0e8bf4d92/index.html
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
From the FoH Boards: Apparently there is a gold dupe that happens when you zone in and out of the orange side entrance of Maraudon. I don't have the details unfortantly, so I couldn't say if its just a huge farce or the real deal. Anyone else able to confirm this? Edit: Apparently this is done with two people. Heres post I found over the issue. New edit is for the title to reflect the fact whole inventories can be duped. "Topic: I just duped 900g! Me and a friend were going to go to mauradon. He put a soulstone on me, then I zoned into the instance, but the loadbar didn't move. A minute later, It put me back outside the instance, and I no longer had a soulstone on me. Thats when I got an idea. I gave all my gold to my friend, zoned in, and when the same thing happened (no load bar, auto-zoned out), I had all my money and my friend had all the money I had given him. "
Awww, there is only one beer left and it's Barts.....
No..
I know the guy meant "rubberbanded", but it's still a great word.
rubberbanned v. To be repeatedly banned from and attempt to return to a server or IRC channel.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Make sure to say hi to the other 5 Shadowbane players for me, thanks.
Alas, Babylon.
They can still probably catch the people abusing the bug for gold. I know that less than a year after EQ came out, the GMs had available an economic report that showed them who had accumulated an unusual amount of money in a short amount of time.
;)
As their machines got faster and they got more hard drive space, they started logging a *lot* more details. I'll go out on a limb and say Blizzard is doing something similar. I don't know how long the bug was being abused, so it's hard to tell whether anyone at Blizzard actually dropped the ball or whether it was just now being abused to the point where it was easily detectable.
In any case, they certainly know about it now
No, not slashdotted. Every tuesday morning maintainence occurs. All of the world of warcraft stuff tends to go down when this happens.
If Blizzard is smart, then they'll have backups of all characters that are periodically made and saved separately. Thus all they need to do is load the backup from a few days ago, or last week or whatever. Sure, people will lose whatever they did between now and when the backup was made, but the economy will be saved, and people will bitch and moan a bit, then continue playing.
For a few days, people have been sitting in Ironforge just giving away gold. I assumed then, and now feel 99% sure, that these were people who'd used the dupes and were trying to muddy the waters - make it so that Blizzard would have to either completely screw over legitimate players who thought they were just getting a nice gift from people on "their side" etc.
So, what can be done to remove this stuff from the environment? Some are suggesting a rollback to the last maintenance spot, making people lose a week of progress (and, presumably, pissing off legitimate people/losing accounts) in order to get the duped stuff out of the economy. Does it even need to be removed?
I, personally, don't really care if it's there or not - the "economy" as it is seems pretty random anyway, and I'm not terribly bothered if some other player has things I don't.
Clearly they need to fix the actual exploit/bug, and hopefully remove the accounts of the people who actually did it (not that that will accomplish anything other than getting rid of a few suburban teens while the people who make real money off this just go buy a few more copies) but is it really that big a deal to the average player?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
That's why WoW has epic PvP rewards, FTW.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Uhhhh, there weren't any 'rare' items in Shadowbane. That was the point. You would rank vendors and they would spit out (randomly) various types of weapons and armor depending on vendor type that were for players of the rank of the vendor. Now, it did cost money to rank and maintain the vendor. However, everyone used vendor created items, i think that there was one ring or something like 8 months into the game from a GM sponsored event that was 2% better than a vendor produced item.
The reason that duping gold in SB was such a big deal was that now *everyone* could have an open tree of life/city with rank 4 walls and rank 7 weapon and armor smiths producing whatever type of weapon/armor that the players wanted. Who cares if people just break the non-protected buildings, they will just buy more npc guards with thier millions of duped gold. No more need for organization and guild dues when one person has gold enough for the next 2 years of city maintanence.
Therefore, gold in SB was waaay more important than gold in WoW.
Why not just bell curve everyones money so the people who got stupid rich off this lose and the people who are at the lower end [getting killed by the person with the +1000 sword] get a boost.
...
...
Or
or
why not just say who cares it's a video game.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
For every single dupefix, three new dupes are created. Goodbye, WoW economy..
Umm, you could have said goodbye to the in game and out of game economy a long time ago. There are reports and artciles of people in 3rd world countries who get paid to do nothing but farm gold in WoW. Don't believe me? Check out this article here.
Hagrin.com
Based on the other comments:
:)
On items, its a simple matter. For every item, put it in a hash table by serial #. Every duplicate seen, add it (and the original) to a list. Then nuke every item in the list. After all, WHICH was the duplicate?
For gold, yeah, they probably have enough logging to figure it out:
For every character which the following happened in a short time (~1 minute):
a: Gave >X gold to friend
b: Entered instance
c: Was kicked out do to failure
Well, remove all gold from character and friend, and any purchases done between the time it occured and the great server reset.
Yeah, slighly punative form (nuke ALL gold rather than just created gold, nuke ALL duped items including source of duping), but easy enough to do, effective, and FUN.
Who wants to be that Blizzard's Database servers are grinding these queries now?
Test your net with Netalyzr
The other day on the Mannoroth server someone was selling mounts at a discount.
He was selling undead mounts for 50g he said he had enough for "everyone who wanted them".
I was like, how can someone stock up on hundreds of mounts and sell them at a discount ?
Now I realize he bought one duped it to hell and sold it at a discount. A nice way to make money and a way for poeple to get their mount cheap !
Therefore, the word addiction comes to mind and you won't leave no matter how much you bitch about rollbacks.
If anyone deserves to be modded up in this thread, it's you. I can't imagine playing these games as an adult. I grew up playing D&D-style games on my Commodore 64 (Ultima 4, Bard's Tale, Pool of Radiance, etc), but I can't even imagine playing these MMORPG games.
1. I'm an adult. My serious computer game playing days should be behind me.
2. Is there an end to these things? My only saving grace that let me return to a normal eating/sleeping pattern with games of the past is that they freakin' ended at some point. I don't think I ever would've seen the light of day if I played a game that never ended. Especially if it gave me a poor facsimile of social interaction by being able to communicate with real people inside the game.
3. How in the world could anyone with a job compete with the people that play this 24x7?
Those games are dangerous.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Seems to me that it would be far more economical to pay a small team of programmers to create a nice bot to play WoW automatically. It's not like these MMORPGs require deep thought and complex strategy.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
They've got a terrible track record with big bugs, and cleanup afterward.
Diablo 1 was probably one of the most hacked/exploited games of all time.
AFAIK all of the *craft games have had maphacks. Those caught using them in WC3 were banned - in the *thousands*.
Diablo 2 saw more dupe bugs, and thousands more bans.
I don't doubt we'll see thousands more bans in the wake of this fiasco.
Turbine, the developers of the relatively unknown "Asheron's Call" MMO had a bug policy I could deal with - They figured, 'Hey, we left the bug in, our bad. We can't hold you responsible for our mistakes'. They of course made an exception for any behavior that disrupted other players play, i.e.: crashing the server.
Rather than take responsibility and making fundemental design changes (maphacks should be impossible - the client shouldn't have full map data!) to make their games secure, Blizzard seems to prefer the 'Ban them all' solution. That's a rediculous way to treat tens of thousands of paying customers.
So obviously what is happening... The fix (which will probably be put in place by now) is...
C'mon CS boy, you should know making assumptions about code you haven't seen is dangerous. Those logic problems are usually not an issue for a top notch dev house like Blizzard, but the reality of thousands of people clicking buttons at the same time throws a wrench in things. The problem is likely a scalability issue. They may be making the required character checkpoint, but it may not be getting to the database. There may be a bottleneck executing the update, or it my crash and get lost at some point. I'm on a low pop server, and sometimes have to sit for 10-15 seconds just trying to get a mail attachment. I can't imagine the potential for disaster on a high pop server. I bet there are tons of exploits waiting to be found. Blizzard is dealing with scalability issues that most engineers/scientists will never get the, ehhhh, pleasure of dealing with.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Not really. The original dupe bug in Diablo involved dropping an item on the ground, then clicking to pick it up and just as you were picking it up dropping a potion on the ground. If you did it just right the potion actually dropped as a copy of the item.
Had nothing to do with loaded servers or changing areas.
Of course there may very well have been other dupe bugs later on that I don't know about, as I didn't really play that long. And I can't say anything for Diablo II, never played that one long enough to learn any dupe bug.
I always say: "If you can't trust yourself to keep a secret, why would you trust someone else?"
Now what am I gonna do at work?
And in other WoW related news. Blizzard Entertainment announced that they have identified a major issue with the game which they now believe was the major source of the lag which has plagued the game since beta.
In a press release, a Blizzard spokesman stated that "We have banned a number of accounts, which were in violation of the World of Warcraft AUP and TOS. The removal of these accounts, most of which originated from outside the U.S.A., should free up bandwidth and other server resources for all of our players."
WoW Fansites around the internet began to report that server stability had increased 110% and lag was barely noticeable.
-----------
Personally, I hope they do ban everyone of those idiots.
I beta tested World of Warcraft and subscribed for a period of time after that. The game has great art and creative direction but the programmers seem to have forgotten how to program proper code. It seems that for every 1 bug that Blizzard fixes, 10 new ones are introduced. I understand that this is their first MMORPG, but the game has been out in North America for almost 10 months now, they have had time to iron out these bugs. This is another example of Blizzard's complete lack of quality assurance; and I doubt that their PR response is going to be better. Let's hope they don't pull an SOE by banning everyone that has come into contact with duped items, regardless of if they were the ones that duped it.
Blizzard absolutely has something like this going on. When they first started cracking down on gold buyers, there were some instances where guild "treasurers" were mistakenly banned because they had insane amounts of gold they were holding for their guild.
People are going crazy over this, but I don't think it's the end of the world. I wonder if a rollback is even necessary. If a character is exploiting this for massive gain, it'll be pretty easy to catch them in the act; either their selling 15 copies of [UberPurpleSword] or they've gone from like 50 to 5000 gold in 6 hours. Those characters that get in under the radar or just exploit it for minimal gain aren't really going to hurt the economy that much. Fine, maybe some characters get a lot of gold or a lot of good items, but so what? The gold will eventually be spent one way or the other, and Soulbound ensures that eventually all the items will become worthless as well.
http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/425/media22851e d.jpg
http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/2071/media3024n y.jpg
It has happened in just about every MMORPG IIRC. Ultima Online ran into this issue many, many times. And that was just in one week. :P
You're missing the point.
Even setting up zombie bot machines to farm gold aren't enough in PvP worlds. When you can't account for all factors (distance, time, keystroke, monster PvM AI, etc.), accounting for player induced deaths throws a wrinkle into the equation.
Now, in games such as AC, numerous scripting tools were developed including ACTool and ACScript which logged out on death, etc. You could also strip your character down so that deaths don't adversely effect you.
However, with all PvP settings, you get your "newbie killers" that will spot these mules running back and forth and cause havok on these bots. Sure, on PvM servers (god, why would anyone play those) you could easily setup trade skill macros or gold runners without much interference, but PvM servers usually have a slightly worse ingame item to real money ratio than PvP servers, even with the higher subscriber base.
Hagrin.com
In regards to their not being "rare" items, you are right and wrong. Many of the vendor's were very rare and hard to get. Thye of course produced the very best items. For instance, I recall Dwarf Sages as being the best sages because at a high level they created the very best items sages made. (Rings, neck pieces, a few other things).
Gold in SB became worthless though. On the War server anyways there was enough duping by a certain clan (Fallen Angels!) that they would offer you outrageous gold for items like that. I was able to set up a trade and get 2 30 int rings and 30 Gold for being the middle man in a trade that involved a dwarf sage.
Anyways, the PvP in SB was the best when people actually played (I haven't played in a couple years). Also, having thieves was great also.
In fact I do believe my thief holds the record for Gold stole. I once peeked a guy standing in the desert, quite a bit outside of Khar. I saw he had a boatload of items and something like 50,000,000 gold. I got pretty excited and stole like 30,000,000 gold from him using the old peek-steal-hide-trick and ran liike hell into Khar as he moved back to his friends party.
I'm sure it was duped gold and he had it on him because he was in Khar trading and forgot. That was a great moment that financed me and my friends until we stopped playing the game.
And for the record, here was how you duped in SB:
Stay up late until right before the servers go down to be reset at like 4AM. Right before this (They would announce server closings) go into a trade with someone. Trade all your Gold but only have the person trading it accept. When the server goes down and restarts you will see both parties have the gold that was involved in the trade. Do this for about a week and see how much money you hvae. In fact you could start with 1 Gold and be the richest player in the game after 3 weeks. It killed the game. I would have done it but I was rich enough and my Healer Channeler had enough power (Lightning Bolt 40!! pre-nerf with 40 stealth, mwahahaha) to kill just about anyone at will with my game play methods. Two of us even after the nerf would take out a party of 10. Ahh, the good old days.
And if anyone from the Fallen Angels is reading this, Hiroshimea and Davey owned you.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Blizzard makes great games (Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc.), but they haven't exactly be known for designing secure online games in the past. Diablo 1 for example had dozens and dozens of exploits and 3rd party programs you could use to "hack" the game. Diablo 2 wasn't quite as hackable as the first one but still numerous third party programs and exploits.
Hopefully a patch is released already/soon.
Judging by the developer's [lack of] expertise in fixing long-standing class bugs, I wouldn't be too sure it's fixed...
On the other hand, anything that benefited a player sure got fixed pronto, so I guess it's an even bet after all.
p.s. Yes, I am a bitter ex-WoW player. The Devs are lying jackasses who have changed how a class works and denied that they changed it (in the face of a howl of outrage from the now-gimped players). When faced with evidence that they did institute a change, they shift to a "that wasn't a change, it was a bug fix" position. Strangely, these "fixes" never work to a class's advantage.
# grep gu*en /tmp/logdump
It is Tuesday, A.K.A. maintenance and patch day. Can't think of a Tuesday since the game was release when it wasn't down on Tues for at least 8 hours.
You know they log this stuff.
Go ahead, try it. Then count down the minutes until you're banned.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
So far the only "proof" that the economy is ruined, as so many people are claiming, is that lame ass screen shot.
A lot of people are getting worked up over what probably amounts to nothing.
"Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...." - Abraham Simpson
I like it when people who have zero first hand experience with a topic opine on it anyway.
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
Actually, when I viewed the front page, this story was duped. Two completely identical stories, one only viewable for subscribers. After a refresh, it was gone.
I wonder if it was a glitch in the database, a humorous admin, or just the usual dupe getting caught.
Everyone has been talking about a roll-back to fix this problem; unfortunately that will hurt Blizzard more than it helps them.
The dupe exploit is not 100% repeatable; it does depend on certain conditions being present. So on any given server, only a minority of people will have used the exploit. Of these, most will make no effort to hide their tracks (i.e. posting 10 Krol Blades), and this can easily be identified.
The remaining small fraction of players will get away with their crime, but this is OK by me. What will these players use the money for? Buying more items. From who? Everyone else on the server. So yes, one or two people will have an unfair advantage, but it is a temporary one. As long as Blizzard fixes the exploit this afternoon, the system will return to equilibrium within a week, and nobody will be the worse for it.
A rollback, on the other hand, eliminates a week's worth of work, and harms everyone on the server in a serious way.
Just up the AH fees to a reasonable percentage of final item sell price. That'll slow the gold farmers and suck cash out of the economy.
--- Mark
I'm not convinced that this exploit really exists. If there is an exploit, I'm not sure I believe that the linked instructions are correct.
w ow-dungeons&T=89153&P=7
First of all, people started wondering if something was wrong when they noticed level 30 players in Maraudon, a level 45+ area.
That is suspicious.
Then, they noticed them cycling between locations repeatedly.
Again, suspicious.
But the "instructions" that this article links to say it can be done in The Deadmines, which is a level 20+ instance.
If it can be done in the deadmines, then why bother going to an area like Maraudon at level 30 where you are likely to be killed?
In addition, it is suspicious that this has to be done "early in the morning after a reset" in order for it to work. Convenient to dissuade people from testing it.
A lot of people are treating this as fact this morning, but no one can actually log in to try it for themselves because the servers are down for maintenance.
The supposed source of the exploit is http://www.gamebugs.org. Take a look at their public forums where everyone is writing "please activate my account!!!" messages. A number of messages on the official WoW forums list the gamebugs.org URL in the subject line (very convenient for them, don't you think?).
Here is a link to a more detailed thread on the official forums:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=
PVE is lame. Anyone who has pvp'd in any decent pvp mmorpg knows that.
Well that's constructive. Would you care to explain why?
In the meantime; I like PvE, thanks. I've played Planetside, and Guild Wars, and both have good PvP IMHO, but I prefer generally prefer PvE. It may not be as action packed, but maybe when I get home, and I'm tired, stressing myself out isn't what I want to do.
You're right, I'd have to spend countless hours to get the perfect character, but y'know what, I don't mind, because I don't PvP, and therefore just "pretty good" equipment is fine for me and my PvEing.
1. 7/19 - Weekly maintenance extended | 7/19/2005 10:52:00 AM PDT
f n= wow-general&t=4095298&p=1&tmp=1#post4095298)
(Tyren)
The weekly maintenance has been extended while we investigate the validity of the claims regarding a possible exploit in the game. We remind our players that discussing possible exploits on the official forums is a violation of the Code of Conduct, and such threads will be deleted without prior notice.
(http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?
I couldn't care less about more items or gold in the game. The only thing worth buying are the spells. The rest doesn't matter a bit. If they make the mounts questable then the whole idea of having gold is irrelevant.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
I can't wait for Blizzard to release World of Warcraft. They're going to do the MMOG right, unlike Mythic, Sony, Origin, Turbine, and EA! Just you watch!
So, what's the yet-to-be-released game that everyone is saying is going to perfect and supplant all of those existing MMOGs where the incompetent developers hate the players?
I take off my robe and wizard hat...
As a discussion of MMOGs grows longer, the probability of somebody making a comparison to Shadowbane approaches certainty. Just as with UseNet threads that make comparisons to Nazis, its a fairly good indication that the MMOG discussion has outlived its usefulness.
For a significant downtime across all realms, yes, Blizzard will give a free day credit for the time (not necessarily a refund). I'm pretty sure they've already done things like this, especially in the early days of the game.
As for rollback, thankfully today is the weekly maintenance day, and conveniently they were already in maint when it hit Slashdot. There may be some dupes, but the joy of the WoW economy is that it can self-stabilize fairly quickly due to the NPC vendors and soulbinding - it'd probably just be better to search down and ban the most extreme cases, and for anyone who bought their items at auction, well, hey, Merry Christmas.
Farming costs less than $1/h per person, a small programmer team would cost well over $10/h. The bot's development would most likely take many weeks (more likely months without prior knowledge of the game's inner workings for tapping) and game updates might add extra checks to detect cheating devices.
In any case, I do not play multiplayer games so I should be safe from such exploits, real life does not (unfortunately?) have rollbacks.
OMG you have just explained this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So ... who wants to take bets on how long until the WoW servers will come back up?
... what is going to be done about all of the gold and items duped already before they took down the servers?
They won't leave it down for long... Time is money regardless of people cheating.
And will they refund their customers for the days of server outages?
No.
Also
All you can do is delete obvious dup items. Nothing you can do with the gold. Sure, alot of players will have gotten away with cheating. But its in Blizzards best intererst to have had players cheat than to piss off and lose loyal paying customers
There's no place like ~/
The linked screenshot is plainly edited to show multiple copies of the same item: the texturing behind each Krol Blade item line is identical and there is a cut line horizontally between each one, whereas normally the item line is transparent and the auction window texture should be seamless & varied behind the items.
This doesn't confirm the existence of the bug either way.
Additionally, Blizzard has extended their normal Tuesday maintenance to investigate the duping claims.
Live simply, that others may simply live. -Gandhi
If you look carefully at the dupe screenshot, you can see that the items are spaced unevenly in the vertical direction. This is obviously a sign of a photoshop job...
Am I the only one who read this as a "Doping Bug" at first, and figured that someone managed to create some in-game steroids which they were passing out to all the elite players?
Dupe for old Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Catch something in a bottle. Just as you are swinging, pause and switch an item you don't want for the bottle. That item will be turned into a bottle.
Why haven't people got rid of these bugs after years of similar?
Later ones involved lagging the shit out of the game, to induce a rollback. Sell to vendor, lag, rollback, buy your item back, now you've got two.
What worries me about this is that I legitimately got a Krol Blade to drop and sold it to an individual for a few hundred gold. Hopefully they'll look at more detail - as my level 60 character is in the top raiding guild on the server doesn't even have much of a use for gold in game (repairs mainly, epic mount once - which i'm hoping to get soon from that sale, and the occasional enchant which my guild doesn't have all the mats for stored up).
Dupe post! /. ban him!
I haven't seen any official statement on the rumors of a rollback yet, and im still pretty confused as to what a rollback would do, from what I have read a rollback would:
*Get rid of any items players have received from any source
*Get rid of any gold players have accumulated
*Lower the player's levels
Anything in these categories that was received in the last 2-3 days (the days this supposed "dupe" bug was being exploited) will be lost, that's what I got from my information, I could be wrong.
But if in fact this is what Blizzard is planning on doing it will be a major setback for hardcore players and just a "hassle" for casual players like me (I use the term "hassle" lightly).
This is where most of the anger/cancellations of subscriptions will come from, the hardcore gamers. Someone who spends 3 days in a row grinding, and doing dungeon runs accumulating massive gold and items and experience (legitimately) will more then be angered at loosing it all.
Not to say that there won't be any casual gamers angry either. Rollback or no Rollback it's a loose/loose situation or blizzard.
How's this for spelling out what my post meant: It is unethical to post threads that not only reveal exploits/cheating methods, but also post links to details on how to perform the exploit and actively promote the use of that exploit in the story itself. That such a story passed the slashdot editors and was chosen for a front page position effectively makes Slashdot an exploit source. Though I've never regarded Slashdot as much more then a tabloid for nerds, this certainly lowers my estimation quite a bit.
I guess I gave certain mods too much credit when I assumed the above was implicit in my tart summary of:
What an asswipe! (which I would like to reiterate)
...Is your job hiring?
Am I the only one who thinks its absolutely retarded that a link was included with instructions on how to perform the dupe?
Way to go Slashdot. Its always nice to see (semi) mainstream news sites helping people cheat at the online games they play.
If only we could find the duping bug on Slashdot.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
(nt)
Yeah, I was wondering why some of the text was blurred out. I thought perhaps it could have been a cool new "feature" brought to us by the boys at blizzard.
eh, calm down...losing a few mod points isn't the end of the world. They probably though it was flamebaitish because the attitude you took and cursing the guy out. You could have just pointed out (politely) that you didn't appreciate that Slashdot posted links on how to do the hacks. But really, you have to understand...slashdotters are a lot of engineers...we like to break things down and see how they work. If there is a way to mod something, a way to hack something, we want to understand how it works, even if we don't play the game you take too seriously. In any case, the servers are down, this will be fixed...there really isn't a reason to freak out so much. Free yourself...stop caring about mod points, they are meaningless anyways.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
As far as slashdot being a community of engineers, there is nothing about the methodology of this exploit that an engineer would find remotely intresting above and beyond someone pointing out a blind spot in a security camera's view. (yes, they sometimes have blind spots, they shoudl be tested for and sometimes they are missed.) It's not like a discussion of testing methodology to prevent this particular bug exploit from occurring. It's a blatant promotion of cheating.
Now we just need to find the one in the slashcode...
They should implement inflation into the game. That would take care of the duping (call it forging money) instead of harming everyone. Now all the prices go up once in a while and your gold treasures loses it's value. Control the amount of inflation as a function of how much there is money per player in the game. This won't fix everything instantly but it will slowly converge.
?SYNTAX ERROR
Secondly, news spreading faster will guarantee a more timely fix. Blizzard has demonstrated numerous times that they'll allow bugs that hinder players to sit around for long periods of time without being addressed, while bugs that are exploitable to help players get hotfixed as quickly as possible.
Similarly, obscure exploitable bugs tend to stay around a lot longer than highly visible common knowledge exploitable bugs.
Fake screenshot. I can't speak about the alleged bug itself, though.
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
I'm as nerdy as the next guy here and have played my share of MMORPGs, but puh-lease..!
...that anyone getting that worked up over this has bigger issues than what to do after a rollback of 3 days. It's a game. Games are supposed to be a temporary respite from real life. The problem comes in when people spend multiple hours in a MMORPG...every day! The percent of the world population that plays MMORPG's is relatively small. Great, so you're forming a bond with this itty bitty niche market. What about accumulating experiences that allow you to relate to the world around you? No, I'm not just talking about bars. No, I'm not just talking about ballgames. I'm talking about going out and playing frisbee with friends. I'm talking about driving around until you find a restaurant that you've never been to before. I'm talking about white water rafting. I'm talking about renting a bad movie and heckling it with a bunch of friends. I'm talking about reading a book.
You people that play MMORPG's for multiple hours every day are pretty boring people. You have no life. You exist within fantasy world because that's the only place where you can stroke your ego and pretend that you're powerful. You can't relate to 90% of the other people you interact with on a daily basis because you live in the machine. You have the social skills of most 13 year old boys and that's not a compliment.
Anyone who {can't handle, has no interest in} reality is damaged goods. Please don't procreate. I don't want your spawn in my reality.
They should've put some Neo-aka-the-one-exception handling like the Architect did. Now they'll have to reload it.
The fact that the dupe exist is news. The instructions to do the dupe isn't news, its explainations on how to cheat in an online game.
First off, having a different number of pixels by 1 between boxes is nothing. Graphics are not rendered by spacing things in units of pixels, that would be completely retarded! Think of what would happen if someone changed resolutions... Would they only be able to see ~1/4 of the game in 640x480 as compared to someone running at 1280x1024?
I can tell you from my experience that i see pretty much the same amount of information when switching between those 2 resolutions and the only thing different is the clarity of the image.
So being off by one pixel is just a rounding artifact.
Honestly though, the whole basis for your ranting is overblown. Duping isn't a problem, it won't be a problem, and what little of a problem there is will be fixed soon.
Even if it's just a hoax... who cares?
I say get on with your life and just treat this article as a humorous event, and a little bit of entertainment in your quest to become the most ill-informed anal retentive human on the planet.
A quick flame is flamebait regardless of what it says. And the best way to get anything fixed is to post it on the front page.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You obviously haven't been following WoW since the begining. When they had a 36 hour down time on all servers we were credited that day on our accounts. If there is a problem that needs to be fixed, Blizzard typically doesn't care if they have to take things down for 36-48 hours.
This is something that could seriously affect the game world. If it's not fixed properly people will equate WoW to Shadowbane(Paging Godwin!)
"Well that's constructive. Would you care to explain why?"
You are killing brain dead NPCs by the hundreds of thousands for thousands of hours of your life so that you can watch you stats go up. Your satisfaction could be mimmed with a chat program and a spreadsheet that occasionally up some arbitrary numbers. MMORPGs are for addicts and no one else. Someone give me a call when an MMORPG finds the time to make some gameplay.
OH NOES teh economy is rooined!!!11
Seriously people--what game are you playing? There is no economy in WoW once a server reaches even just adolescence.
Epics go for hundreds of gold while their similar rare counterparts sell for 20%. Medium or heavy leather doesn't even sell. The market is totally saturated.
Just enjoy the game and don't worry about this kind of crap. Blizzard isn't going to roll anything back--they know from previous MMORPGs that controlling an economy is a feeble effort at best. You can't create a fair environment when the players aren't on level ground, and they're not trying to make it fair. They're just trying to make it fun for both casual and hardcore gamers. A rollback is not going to help that purpose and it's not in their best interest.
I threw it into PS and adjusted the levels real quick to see for myself and its clearly a cut and past job. Here are my results side by side with a screenshot I took... Enjoy! http://homepage.mac.com/murdockscott/otherimages/d upeFake.jpg
Doc.
Those guys think they are entitled to prevent people from reverse engineering their protocols and shut down open-source projects that implement those protocols. Unfortunately, according to the law, they may be right.
It still doesn't mean we shouldn't boycott them for using the DMCA to shut down the bnetd Free Software project.
Boycott Blizzard, they are a copyright-abusing company.
I think the unique IDs are created when the object first enters the world as loot from a kill or chest, or from a vendor. When trading to another player, the item should keep the ID I believe. What caused the lag when looting corpses and the getting stuck in the crouching position shortly after launch was the large influx into the newbie areas and the strain on the ID creation from all the quick and easy kills.
Most good items are Bind-On-Pickup, so you can't dupe them, and even if you could you can't sell them or trade them.
You can dupe a billion gold but what are you going to do with it? Buy the very best of the marginal items, since all the good items are BOP? I don't know about other classes, but the mage epic item is made from BOP components, so no duping or buying of those.
Anyway, once i hit lvl 60 in the game it went from addictive to boring in about 5 minutes.
This just further convinces me that someone out there needs to make a game with an actual closed economy, instead of this faucet/drain BS that has to be jiggly-poked every time a group of players finds a way to abuse it (not always through exploits, sometimes just by being more clever than the designers).
Make it a closed economy where the mobs also collect raw materials to build their own weapons/armour/etc. If an area gets deforested or overmined, no more production there... move somewhere else. Put a cap on the number of players that can be a server and open new servers before the cap gets reached.
When stuff breaks and gets discarded, it goes back into the raw material pool. Items start out being valuable due to rarity, then materials become more valuable as they get used up, and eventually high-end items are even more valuable since they are both hard to make AND hard to gather materials for.
If you did it that way, you'd always be able to have checks on every transaction. There would be an amount of "stuff" in the world, and an amount of stuff on each player. If the player somehow duped an item, he'd have more stuff than was accounted for... both on the running total of his stuff, and in the discrepency against the amount that should be in the world.
I remember Diablo. It looked like a pretty lame (but graphical) knockoff of Angband, but I figured that I'd give the demo a try, wanted to see what all the hullabuloo was about. The gameplay pretty much sucked, as I expected. I wandered around and got whacked in town by some invisible player using some kind of hack. I looked around on the Web, discovered that Blizzard had a pretty poor reputation for security, tried opening a debugger and increasing the amount of gold in a pile, discovered that it worked in single player, tried in on whatever demo server I was playing on, discovered (and was rather appalled by the fact that it worked). I was walking around with every possible slot filled with gold, got whacked by another invisible character in town, exploded in about eight million chunks of gold, and decided that maybe Diablo wasn't just a bad game, but a badly designed game. I returned to the good old standby of an occasional game of Angband for entertainment.
As a complete aside, I can't help but observe that a large number of people on Slashdot really hate TCPA and Palladium/NGSCB, since they're worried that it will force them to pay for their latest gaming fix...yet those are also the only mechanisms that stand much chance at completely eliminating cheating in all genres.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Oh no! Not an online game! What's next, how to cheat at checkers? They wouldn't! They can't! They shouldn't!
Slashdot, please stop! Checkers is my life!
(he exclaimed.)
i have heard countless times online of how people hate cheating/cheaters, hacks, exploits in online gaming.
yet the majority of the posts here are made by people not only condoning it but advocating and joining in themselves.
and thus you get what you earn.
now in my opinion, the only course of action blizzard should take is to ban the cd keys of everyone caught duplicating items (exploiting code against the TOS in a way that screws up the game for everyone).
but i can tell you with 100% certainty that it won't happen. blizzard is about one of the most lax on the issue of cheating/hacking/what have you. all of their online games are absolutely FULL of cheaters. they do this by design, since once they have your money they do the absolute minimum required to maintain their servers and games.
online gaming is THE future of gaming... or so the industry is betting. and this is just about the biggest problem online currently. the only one that's bigger is the number of "kiddies", immature people playing. (you know what i mean, i'm sure).
continue to be lax and screw the vast majority of people who don't cheat and want to play fairly. the fact that these a**holes profit monetarily from selling these unearned items really gets my goat. criminals by definition.
whatever. i stopped playing online games just about entirely , though on occassion i will play a few mins here and there. this problem will only get worse as we go forward. more and more of the population will have to endure this kind of absurdity and most do not have the patience or willpower to put up with it. nor should they.
unfortunetly... the answer to this WILL be treacherous computing with its "remote attestation" function. it probably will help a great deal with eliminating cheating but it will also be just about the worst thing that could happen to the internet in general. it will eventually be required by law (if it isn't already) to get access to the net.
well you can read about the specific issues of that in other resources.
anyway, i guess i'm done.. for now.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Could somebody mod the parent as funny ? It would have saved my a lot of time while i wrote out a 15 page reply to what i thought was a troll.
Lima India November Uniform X-ray
basically you enjoy a 15 dollar a month FPS/deathmatch with lousy graphics?
does that about sum it up?
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Look at the bright side--if you do it the old fashioned way, you'll get to keep playing. They keep logs, and will probably be able to retroactively figure out from the logs who used this exploit, and ban their accounts.
? Explain to me, please.
The latest update from Blizzard is that all US WoW servers will be down for 5 days while their database engineers sift through event logs to undo dupe actions.
Stay tuned for more info; this time may extend to as long as 3 weeks.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Actually, the most convincing evidence is that if you log into the game and crank up the gamma, and then crank the gamma on the linked image, you can see that in-game, the background pattern doesn't repeat (at least, not seven or eight times in the window vertically), and the long boxes for each item don't overwrite what's there before - instead, they tint it darker, so even the background inside each item box should be different.
It's clearly not that way in the linked image, so it's decidedly a fake.
That doesn't mean that the problem does or doesn't exist, though.
Did you see my linked comparison above? Essentially it illustrates what you are saying. Doc.
"Slashdot Article Duping Bug Found"
We can only wish...
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
You said... "And this is different from PvP... how?"
Lets go point by point what I said.
"You are killing brain dead NPCs..."
Granted, there are stupid people out there, but rarely are they as stupid as NPCs. Even the most elegantly scripted NPCs in the MMORPG world today are brain dead. Further more, most of the time the toughest of NPCs are beaten through exploitation of the stupidity of the NPC, and by toughest I should clarify that I mean the ones with the most jacked up stats, not the ones with any grand strategy. Put a human in charge and they would recognize tactics being used, and instead of mindlessly continuing to employ loosing tactics try and change.
"...by the hundreds of thousands for thousands of hours of your life so that you can watch you stats go up."
I am not sure what PvP games you are playing, but I have seen very few where the point of PvP is to watch your stats go up. At worst, PvP some times keeps track of some statistics in terms of how you perform, and the removal of these statistics would not spell doom for that game. Remove the ranking and the stats from Battlefield 2 and no one is going to stop playing.
"Your satisfaction could be mimed with a chat program and a spreadsheet that occasionally up some arbitrary numbers."
Again, spread sheet watching your numbers go up, verses competition against humans.
"MMORPGs are for addicts and no one else."
The 'fun' of an MMORPG is the addiction that is developed around it. When you are doing things that could not be considered fun by any definition of the word simply to achieve some minor goal, you have likely developed an addition. Hell, the words that MMORPG players use scream of nothing but a mindless addiction. "Grinding"? "Camping"? "Farming"? Are you joking me? They very language used is pretty explicit about the 'fun' of the game.
"Someone give me a call when an MMORPG finds the time to make some gameplay."
MMORPGs are games practically devoid of content. They replace content with time consuming activities and rely on addiction to keep players. I have nothing against the concept of a Massive Multiplayer Online World. I would be giddy to play a game, even a fantasy game, set in a changing and dynamic world with deep content. Let me give you a word of advice though; if the entire game revolves around whacking NPCs for l00t and exp, it isn't a dynamic game with deep content. You will know MMORPGs have managed to come up with something golden when they can offer up a game, strip it of stats, levels, and exp, and people would still play it. Strip any MMORPG right now of the ability to level or collect progressively stronger equipment and they would be empty in a week. The day that isn't true is the day I pick up an MMORPG again and merrily shell out my monthly subscription.
There are other problems, too. Inactive players removing items from circulation, population imbalances (too many players = everyone gets more poor), pure hell on earth when the hardcore element reduces the average wealth of the casual gamer to barely enough to physically play the game, etc.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
If I want'ed real pvp challenge I'd go play a real mans game, by booting up quake.
Since the screenshot is fake and the text describes getting gold by hopping in and out of a loadable area (the bugs description would mean a very basic, 1st grade programming error) this is nothing but someone trying to DDOS Blizzards gameservers by getting lots of people hopping back and forth over loading barriers.
Move along and spread the word in the forums.
When I'm playing tonight, I don't want the server brought down by a bunch of sheep hopping in and out of load-instances.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"You are killing brain dead NPCs by the hundreds of thousands for thousands of hours of your life so that you can watch you stats go up." If he is talking about Guild Wars, you are completely wrong. It doesn't take hundred's of hours to hit max lvl, let alone thousands.
I'm willing to wager the fiscal incentive of a monthly subscription allows for better funded dilligence in this than, say, the advertisements on top of Battle.Net did in Diablo 2. Also, remember that Blizzard has, historically, never done small hits. They wait a month, two months, three months collecting information, and then... wham. In a single go, 300,000 accounts closed. The effect is more dramatic as taint spreads, so laundering of items takes four months instead of two weeks (it doesn't seem like a very patient industry, since EACH PATCH can result in a major shift in valuation - can you say kingsblood at 6g a stack?)
After months of playing the game, this week I have experienced disconnects, one rollback and one return to bind point.
In the Gadgetstan zone, we tried to enter the Zul'Whatever instance, it said we were in the wrong instance and 90 seconds later we were all sent back to our bind points which unfortunately scattered the party across different continents and that was the end of that.
Alternatively, I've been having disconnects, in particular when you first pick up an item that is used in a new quest there seems to be about a 10% chance that you get instantly disconnected.
On one of these occasions I suffered a short-term rollback, putting my number of kills back by a few minutes and porting me back to my bind point. Since XP and quest progress was sent back in time I assume my inventory could have been too.
Unfortunately blizzard seem incapable of admitting that they wrote buggy code, their technical fix is to blame the network card(!!).
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
the teleporting hack
They have code that detects teleport hackers now, a guy in our guild got busted.
The current tax system in world of warcraft would accurately improve our tax system in the US.
A pretty good explanation, but item transfers (including looting, dropping stuff...) should really be atomic operations, with immediate database update. That should be a blanket solution against other dupe exploits too.
Use the checkpoints for stuff like position and health. Not for items.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I tend to agree. I have been playing WOW for as long as it has been out and I have never been kicked out of an instance as described in the "instructions". You think it would have happened to me at least once... : ) It MAY be true but I also think it could be the hacker sites pulling a dirty trick in frustration for not being able to create real hacks. Or it could even be a way for them to create server instability in order to take advantage of it in some other way. Hard to know the real story, but I don't see any reason to trust the motivations of hacker communities. Hell, it could just be someone's idea of a funny practical joke.
with that kind of simple logic, I will assume you like PvE..
basically, you enjoy a 15 dollar a month fancy graphical suite where you get to run errands for computer characters all day while occasionally an actual social interaction with a real person results in death..
does that about sum it up?
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Bear in mind, in the page you linked, they mentioned "three seconds"... Well, yeah... Ever paid close attention to a microwave? You push start, and after about three seconds or so, you hear this crackling hiss kind of like static inside the thing. This is because the microwave emission unit is not started the instant you press the button, it gets revved up a moment later, thus making that static-like hiss. The frying of any electronic item of sufficient size to get fried occurs almost immeidtaely thereafter.
Regardless, with a $20 bill, it is entirely possible that the quantity and concentration of iron-impregnated ink across the face of the portrait creates sufficient size and conductivity to catch microwaves and convert them into electricity. This arcs (Just like on a CD) and thus burns. And Poof! Burnt bill, with or without RFID.
Now, please bear in mind that I am not looking at a bill when I write this, so there may be other factors involved. But somebody might want to look into this with this new information under consideration.
@Whee