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."

Comments

Time Bandits

[sesshomaru]

Randall: You see, to be quite frank, Kevin, the fabric of the universe is far from perfect. It was a bit of botched job, you see. We only had seven days to make it. And that's where this comes in. This is the only map of all the holes. Well, why repair them? Why not use them to get stinking rich? -- Time Bandits

Dull and boring mmos

[Fiz Ocelot]

"MMOs can be pretty famously tedious"

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.

and on the 137th day . . .

[rev_sanchez]

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.

I'm sure...

[vertinox]

"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.

Urban Legend

[Mr_Blank]

I had heard rumors of this Lord British stuff. But now that I read it on the internet I know this funny story must be true! From TFA

Probably the most infamous griefing ever happened to Ultima creator Richard Garrott, when his character, Lord British, was murdered while addressing the people of his kingdom near the end of the Ultima Online beta. Rainz, a thief, pinched a fire field scroll from another player in attendance, then roasted LB on the spot. It's something that shouldn't have been possible, but either through negligence or a glitch Garrott's character wasn't flagged as invincible. In the chaos that followed demons were summoned in retaliation, which then over zealously killed a whole mess of innocent bystanders. In the end LB was resurrected and Rainz was killed before being banned from every Origin game forever and ever, Amen. In later statements Origin and Garrott himself claimed that the player was only banned from the UO beta, and wasn't actually banned for killing Lord British, but instead got the boot for previously exploiting and failing to report bugs. "We had actually been looking for him in order to ban him before this," they said, which to be nice, sounds a little disingenuous. To be less nice, it reeks of bullshit. Of course, all this happened nearly a decade ago, which is like, three centuries in Internet years. The only part that really matters is that Ultima's creator got killed in his own game, while in the middle of bragging about his invincibility, and it was freaking awesome.

I would play more MMOs if I could watch griefers have deamons trained on them by GMs. That sounds like good entertainment compared to real life crime fighting.