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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.
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.
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?
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?
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...
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
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
Why? Do you stop having fun once you reach a given age?
" 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."Ok, if your an obsessive compulsive type you should avoid these games. However many people such as myself are able to spend a few hours a week playing without getting the shakes.
" 3. How in the world could anyone with a job compete with the people that play this 24x7?"
You cant. So what? Does it make the game less fun for you when the no lifers have better gear or can gain levels faster?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
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.
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.
I don't see how they could be more dangeous than TV... what's the difference between sitting on your ass for hours on end watching "Must See TV" (or Baseball/Basketball/Football or whatever), and sitting on your ass for hours on end playing a video game with friends?
They way I look at it, with TV, you veg out and passively let this entertainment wash over you. With video games, there is at least some interaction - your mind must be a little more active, at least... make decisions, etc. I fall asleep within 20 minutes of sitting in front of the TV...
Is playing WoW for 3 hours with my friends on TeamSpeak worse than Poker Night at my buddies house? Monday Night Football at my brothers? 10 hour marathon D&D campaings back in Jr. High?
I could be wrong, but I don't think it is. It's different, and many people looking at it from the outside see someone sitting at their PC, alone, for hours on end. But sitting there, playing a game, talking to friends? Doesn't sound dangerous to me. I'm not saying it's better - just no worse.
I could be addicted though, and in denial. But whatever. I get to keep in contact with friends and co-workers across 4 states, and have fun doing it. TV doesn't do that for me, and I'm not driving 6 hours to lose at Poker.
The danger is not in the game, it's (as others have said) in the obsessive-compulsive nature of some people.
?
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
2. I spend more than $10 a month on coffee. Hell, I spend more than $10 a month on almost *everything*. If you read a paper with breakfast, you're probably spending about $10 a month. If you're an adult with the wife and the career and everything, $10 a month for an hour a day of entertainment is *cheap*. 3. The "winner" at any sort of game is always going to be the dedicated individual. It's true in sports, it's true in games like chess or poker or backgammon, and it's true in MMORPGs. You're going to feel like a loser if you compare yourself to those people. If the game involves directly competing with them (see online poker) you're going to feel *really* bad. You will probably compensate for your feeling of inferiority (because thats what happens when you lose) by bitching about how they must have no life and yadda yadda. The solution is to play on your own terms and define your enjoyment by your own accomplishments rather than comparing them to someone elses. This is good advice for happiness in general.
1. I'm an adult. My serious computer game playing days should be behind me.
grow the fuck up
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
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
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.
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.
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.