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MMORPG Cheating For Profit
1up has a piece on cheating for profit in Massively Multiplayer games. From the article, entitled MMOsploitation: "A universe is a great big tricky thing to make. Designers usually have more than seven days to put one together, but there are still a lot of cracks left in the world that they don't even know about until some player stumbles across them. When you have millions of people romping through your creation they're going to do all kinds of crazy, unanticipated things, many of which can allow them to become tiny gods if left unchecked."
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I don't see how this deffers from the real world in which we live in. People will undoubtably exploit whatever there is for them to exploit.
PtPete
TFA is not about cheating for profit, per se. It is about abusive behavior in MMOs for whatever reason.
To sum up:
There are lots of reasons people don't play by the rules in MMOs. Here's some examples of what people did in the past. Oh, there are a few major categories -- Duping, Pathfinding, Powerleveling, Griefing, Scripting/AFK, Hacking. And sometimes, some of these activities may even be condoned by a game.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
That's pretty much why a lot of exploits go on. People want the highest levels but getting there is often times no fun at all. Instead of 100hrs of filler content why not try making the journey more fun? Of course then there's the people doing it for profit and that's another issue all together.
God made a minor revision to the inventory control system that accidentally allowed for duping certain large swords when the player equipped them and dropped them at the same time. This will be patched in Earth version 1.0.25
Yep, just like God.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
MMOs are built around an idea that any player can work his way up the ranks to become a god among his peers. After months and months of dedication, the developers will hit said player over the head with a nerf bat. Instead of quitting and throwing away hard earned status, he becomes a super-nerd and vows to return to glory by re-rolling a shadow priest. After many more months of farming for epics the developers then release a new dungeon with even better gear.
The once god-like player then downloads a bot and starts selling gold on ebay until his account is banned.
"When you have millions of people romping through your creation they're going to do all kinds of crazy, unanticipated things, many of which can allow them to become tiny gods if left unchecked."
I'm sure god has contemplated the same thing when man split the atom at the Trinity site.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
but the article seems to never get to that point. Perhaps a better title would be "Cheating for advancement". Pretty common in MMORPGs. The big problem with some cheats is what isn't a cheat today could be one tomorrow. That occurs fairly often in the early days of a new MMORPG. Players find something that works wonders only to get slapped down when a GM/Developer/Whatnot decide its wrong.
As for making a profit from cheating. Asheron's Call has had combat macroing for years and it was condoned in writing by a developer on their own boards. All provided its attended. That last part didn't mean much and with the system of passing a percentage of earned experience up to monarchs above you macros could push characters to very high levels to where the account was worth something on the open market. Those days are long gone for that game, but similar strategies work in other games.
Now many of the cheats and exploits of days gone by are harder to pull off long term as logging has gotten much better. DB transactions can be audited as games move to true DB systems. Duping is probably the most controllable form of cheating now. Macroing still is harder to detect but in this day and age popular games have resellers of Chinese labor to level characters with thereby providing a "human" contact should the character be challenged for doing something for hours on end.
Still I look at it this way, people are going to cheat and people will get caught. It doesn't matter unless that game owner doesn't act on it. If they let the inmates take over the asylum (very close to what happened in AC1) then it becomes a real issue. It not only hurts the company which permitted the cheating/exploiting/etc but damages other companies as the people who do this take their attitudes with them.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why does the author talk about power leveling when he himself says that power leveling is not cheating. Nor is it hacking. Nor is it griefing. Power leveling is nothing more than leveling as quickly as possible. This can be done by playing non-stop, acquiring the best equipment possible, knowing the best spots to hunt, receiving help from other players.
The methods people employ to powerlevel CAN include things that are against the rules, but these fall under macroing, botting, and hacking, which the author aslo talks about, and which are not exclusive to power leveling.
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
They mention a mentoring system in the article that does not exist in World of Warcraft. They were thinking of EverQuestII.
I don't think taking advantage of pathfinding bugs should be considered cheating. Sounds like creative play to me.
If a player CAN do something, they will. Whether it is against the rules or not, if an exploit is detected, folks will run through it like mad for as long as they can.
Game companies hate this, because those players that actually want to play the game as it was intended, freak out. Of course, those same players are happy to "twink" they new characters to the maximum the ruleset will allow, instead of really playing it from scratch, too.
My father did programming for several major government projects just as computers came into use, inclulding programming on the oringal AWACs. The other programmers would write code, and then when someone broke it, would freak out.
"Well, this is just BS. The instructions clearly show that the user is to press ENTER to continue. They pressed the letter K, instead, and it caused the program to crash! What a bunch of idiot users!"
The problem is that, you have to attempt to anticipate EVERY single possible action the user COULD do, not is supposed to do. And therein lies the problem. In a simple user interface and application, this can be done. MMOs are so complicated, between their terrain layouts, to their handing out of rewards/experience/money, to their mob AI, that things will slip through the cracks.
Players will find the dead zones in a mob's AI, or use the terrain to their advantage with a dead zone. They will go to places the developers didn't intend for players to get to yet or ever? Can you said Gnomish airport in WoW? And those bans for players accessing parts of the world that weren't finished yet at release? When they fixed the gnomish airport, several mages had camped out there the day before the patch, so they could port people to it. Dunno if it worked. I stopped playing WoW months ago.
Look at all the hacks that were done early in WoW. Teleport hacks that allowed folks to teleport RIGHT to a chest, loot it, then move to the next one. They had patterns down. Folks also had bots to fish, and even fight, with detailed instructions of where it worked best.
In EQ, there was showEQ, which gave you a detailed terrain map and mob placements, levels, and even some equipment if they were using it and it would drop as loot. It was such a pain to Sony/Verant that in the Plane of Hate, there were some invisible and non-attacking mobs that had names of "ShowEQ Users Suck". Only someone who either used it or knew someone that used it, was familiar with it. Sony changed it's encryption from 8-bit to 64-bit or 128-bit (I forget which) that changed with each patch, and it was hacked in LESS THAN 24 HOURS! For a glorified freakin map!
In the DDO beta, there was a quest that players could use invisibility potions/spells on, and bypass all of the tough mobs, and then loot something at the end for easy and big XP. There was another dungeon with massive loot for almost no risk; having to beat only one boss mob (that was just buffed up bigtime) and a few easier mobs. It's a freaking beta, and this was only reported by a handful of players, but exploited by hundreds. For characters that get wiped in a month and a half. Turbine had to close one of them, it was being abused so much.
And then there is the fun that griefers have with exploits to kill other players. Summonings that killed everyone in the bazaar in WoW. Summonings in the DDO beta, where the greater elementals would be summoned in the newbie inn, and when the summoner leaves, the elementals kill everyone in there, as they are too powerful for the toons in the inn to touch. Anyone remember the legacy of Fansy the Bard from EQ? (Wholesale rules changed for bards in PvP due to his exploits, which were hilarious.)
What MMO players will do when they think they aren't being observed is scary. EQ GMs and WoW GMs would sometimes hide invis and WATCH the exploit in process, then ban everyone involved. And the player base would rally to the cheaters as being unfairly persecuted. "But, Player Bob just happend to be going through the zone! And you
I've been an admin of a mud for well over a decade now, and I can tell you that no method of discipline will backfire faster or harder than this.
"Griefers" are mostly people who've gotten bored by the real game, and are trying to make their own game to entertain themselves. Usually that's trying to make themselves as annoying as possible, and creating as much misery and unhappiness as they can.
But note that this new game isn't about winning, or accomplishing anything in the context of the original game. Like any other troll, they just want attention, and attention from an admin is the best kind. So sure, an admin can easily make sure they they can't progress in the real game, but as long as the admin is involved and annoyed, the griefer is still winning his new game.
The only way around this seems to be to make the consequences for misbehaviour as impersonal, anonymous, and automated as possible. Only hobbling the griefer _without_ giving him the attention of a human can make it feel like not winning.