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!

Comments

Noone posting?

[KDR_11k]

Let me guess... Too busy duping items?

Re:Noone posting?

[anaesthetica]

I hear the editors have been exploiting this bug for years on Slashdot...

Re:Noone posting?

[Barromind]

I hear the editors have been exploiting this bug for years on Slashdot....

In Other News

[superpulpsicle]

China's unemployment rate raised 50% this morning due to this bug.

Fun game while it lasted.

[Kenja]

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.

Re:Fun game while it lasted.

[hagrin]

Fact is, you won't leave.

MMORPGs such as Asheron's Call and EQ and UO have had rollbacks of up to 3 days worth of gameplay at great frustration to the user.

The consequences? Elimination of "most" of the bug's after effects and basically no drop is subscribers logged on. Most gamers of games such as MMORPGs aren't casual gamers due to the amount of time necessary to level, obtain items, complete quests and acquire the necessary in-game knowledge to actually enjoy these games. Therefore, the word addiction comes to mind and you won't leave no matter how much you bitch about rollbacks.

Re:Fun game while it lasted.

[Kumagoro]

Keep in mind that our economy is completely virtual too. Money is just a promise from the government that this particular peice of paper or hunk of metal is worth something useful. Our "real world" isn't as "real" as many people choose to believe.

Doubt it..

[ShaniaTwain]

I suspect they are working on putting together a lawsuit.. Doesn't slashdot hold the patent on duping?

MIRROR HERE

[firepacket]

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?

Duping in MMORPGs

[mister_llah]

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) ... ;)

Re:Explanation of bug: Ah, a race condition issue.

[Dachannien]

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 ;)

Re:Addiction is right.

[JakusMinimus]

1. I'm an adult. My serious computer game playing days should be behind me.

grow the fuck up