The State of Security in MMORPGs

Anonymous writes "Security researchers Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw poked around in World of Warcraft and other online games, finding vulnerabilities and exploiting the system using online bots and rootkit-like techniques to evade detection. Their adventures in online game security became fodder for the book, Exploiting Online Games. McGraw discussed with securityfocus the state of security in modern video games, cheating and anti-cheating systems, how the market for cheats, exploits, and digital objects is growing, what we could learn from the design of these huge systems, and how game developers react to submissions of security vulnerabilities."

Comments

My personal feelings..

[faloi]

The market for cheats and exploits is so large primarily because of the "make it a grind!" trap that most MMORPGs fall into. If you're into a MMORPG, and you "need" cash for a certain item, or to recoup your costs for the last big raid, or what have you, you seem to get one of two choices. You can grind away whatever playtime you have in order to get the cash legitimately, you can buy it from someone that is grinding away (or perhaps using exploits), or you can turn to exploits/hacks/whatever yourself.

I understand that some percentage of the playing population is going to cheat, hack, or use an exploit simply because they can. But if game design didn't make it so attractive to so many people to reap the rewards that go along with it, it would be a pretty minor problem. In my opinion, as soon as you're killing the 3,000th slightly different textured mob for his toe...or running a dungeon you could do in your sleep just to make sure a fellow guild members armor is a little bit different color so you have a shot at the next dungeon, MMORPGs start losing some of their fun. I don't know of too many people that really enjoy running things that are on "farm" status, but there's a necessity to grind it out built into the games.

I know it keeps people hooked longer, but it also keeps the temptation to play...creatively...in people's mind.

Re:My personal feelings..

[randomaxe]

Geometry Wars you grind until you beat your next high score. Guitar Hero you grind on a song until you can get 5 stars. Etc. etc.

The difference here is that this isn't "grinding", this is practice.

If you play a song over and over in Guitar Hero, you get better at it, which eventually allows you to get five stars. You, the player actually get better at the game. In most MMORPGS, however, grinding is mere repitition, doing something over and over and over for experience points (or something similar), to improve the game character. The player is no better at the game, the game character is merely powered up.

Ultimately, these things differ in that the former affects the real world and the latter only affects the game world; if I play a song enough to get five stars in Guitar Hero, I can likely go to someone else's house and five-star it there, too. If I delete my character in an MMORPG, I forever lose all of the progress that was made, and getting a new character back to my old character's level requires going through all of that grinding all over again. While I may have figured out some easy ways to gain experience, I am still no better at the game itself. And really, I don't have to do anything challenging in the course of my grinding, because there is always some simple task (easy battles, for example) that can simply be done over and over to accrue easy experience.

To this extent, Guitar Hero (and Geometry Wars, and most non-RPGs, really) is no more a "grind" than any other skill-based activity that you do in the real world. Is writing code "grinding"? What about painting? Soldering? Singing? Playing cards? Cooking? Sex?